In a respectful universe, crowd, parishioners, sacrifice, and guards would have all kept still, but of course they didn’t. The faithful cried out. Temoc stepped toward her, but he was a less immediate concern than Chel, who tackled Elayne to the ground.
Elayne hit hard, taking the fall with shoulders and arm, but she kept her Craft locked around Temoc. Chel pinned her arms and grabbed her throat. Chel’s teeth flashed white, and in the trembling of her whole body Elayne read shock and shame and anger. Mostly anger.
“Chel,” Elayne croaked. “Stop.”
A circle of faces formed above and around them, staring down. Breath came slow and thin.
“Let her go,” Temoc said from somewhere far away. The circle broke into a U, though Elayne could not see the man himself.
Chel looked up, confused.
“I am not in danger. Elayne is an old friend. She does not understand our work.”
He entered her field of view. Dawn broke through the mist and scissored his silhouette from the sky: a chthonic figure, a cave painting strong enough to burst free of the wall. Temoc Almotil, last of the Eagle Knights, priest of the old gods, looked better than she remembered. Green light from his scars cast the faces of his gathered faithful a weird pale jade. Chel released Elayne, sat back on her thighs, and stood. “Sir.” That word held devotion, awe, curiosity, a little reproach.
Elayne examined Temoc’s face.
Planes and angles composed him, like always, like she remembered when they’d first met under flag of truce when she was seventeen and he was twenty—and not long after, when he’d almost bled out in a Sansilva backstreet, impaled by a spear of ice, as a war raged overhead. Eyes of the deepest, roundest black, and a mouth an Ebon Sea sculptor might have immortalized in marble as the one honest detail in an otherwise flattering portrait: too broad, too sharp, like the rest of him. Muscular didn’t begin to cover it. A man built on a different scale from other men.
Built, then scarred. He moved slowly, laboring against her bonds. He hadn’t tried to break them; then again, she hadn’t tried to break him, either.
He offered her the hand that didn’t hold the knife. Mindful of the crowd and of her mission, she accepted, and used him as an anchor with which to pull herself upright. His arm did not twitch when he took her weight.
The sacrifice sat upon the altar, loose ropes trailing from his wrists, perplexed. Most of the faithful remained in their rows. The watching U retreated from Temoc, from them both.
“A long time,” he repeated.
She nodded to the knife. “I thought you didn’t kill these days.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You have a knife, and there’s a man on that altar. What do I not understand?”
“We’ve changed the sacrament.” He gestured toward the altar with his blade. “The ceremony must be done at sunrise. Will you join me?”
“I won’t let you kill him,” she said.
“I pledge that this man will be alive, as you recognize it, at the rite’s end. My blade will not pierce his flesh.”
“Your specificity does not inspire confidence.”
“Trust me.” That smile had not changed. Neither had his teeth. “See how we remake ourselves.” His voice brimmed with clerical assurance, a priest speaking for the groundlings. Not so different from the voice Elayne herself adopted at court. A priest was a man who made his face a mask.
Her presence by his side would confer legitimacy, which he knew as well as she did. But she’d come to parlay, at least ostensibly, and by his side she would be in a better position to stop him if he needed stopping.
She shot her cuffs, and swept the dust from her suit with a quick web of Craft. A small tear in her jacket rewove itself. Wasteful parlor tricks, dry cleaners and tailors being more efficient on the whole than sorcery. But there was value in impressing the locals. “I’m glad,” she said, “you stepped in when you did.”
“Chel wouldn’t have hurt you.” Temoc walked between his faithful toward the altar, under the pressure of their gathered gazes. His scars glowed, and shadows slicked his skin. His people did not see this side of him often, she expected.
She kept pace. “I was not concerned for my own safety.” This, too, pitched to be overheard.
What Temoc said next, wasn’t. “Would you mind letting me go? Your heathen magics sting.”
“But you look so impressive lit up like a solstice tree.” She smirked, and canceled her bonds upon him. The light dimmed first, the shadows after.
The erstwhile sacrifice spread-eagled again on the altar, which was not stone at all but a squat, sturdy table propped with four stone panels. Makeshift, make-believe.
Temoc raised his knife. Its black glass blade caught the sunlight. The audience sat in a rustle of grass mats. Chel watched from beyond the mats, and others watched with her, their numbers swelled by the commotion.
Worshippers fell silent. Gathered faith crystallized the air, arrested light in its passage, riveted this moment to a million others stretching back through eternity, that were not a million separate moments at all but a million reflections of the same moment in time, or its facets, revolving.
She was the only person here, she wagered, who understood the Craftwork that underpinned the scene: the faithful giving pieces of their soul to the performance, to the priest, to the sacrifice transfixed in the ecstasy of his role, eyes open as he saw the faces of god. She was the only one here who could describe, in six pages perhaps with three figures and a few mathematical sidebars, the mechanics of Temoc’s worship.
And she was the only one outside it all. So she watched.
Sun glinted off a raised blade. She tensed, remembering torchlight reflected in hunters’ eyes. The knife fell.
Its pommel struck the sacrifice’s chest with a rich echo like a knuckle’s knock against the sound box of a guitar. The man twitched once. A small sigh escaped him.
Elayne closed her eyes to watch the sacrifice as a Craftswoman. Small distortions stitched through the lightning-lit spider world beyond her eyelids, like darting fish in seaweed: tiny gods. With eyes opened, she saw green ghosts rise from the altar to lick the sacrifice’s skin. The spirits lingered where the wound in the man’s chest would have been, if this was a sacrifice in truth as well as name. Spectral tongues lingered at the hole Temoc would have carved to draw his heart.
As the godlings drank their fill, their joy pulsed through the web of faith Temoc wove, to quicken his congregation’s hearts and touch them with eternity—a sliver of bygone days and glories, a lingering aftertaste of ancient bloody history. The blood sacrifice was no more. The old gods were dead.
All as it should be.
But still, the crowd rejoiced.
The moment passed and the godlings faded back into ether. Temoc lowered his knife and spoke in High Quechal to the sacrifice, who nodded, unable to answer through his tears. Temoc addressed the faithful in High Quechal first, then Low. Said, at last, in Kathic, “the Miracle is Accomplished,” so that Elayne heard the capitals.
And they repeated it to him, the hundreds here, words rippling through the gathered crowd and those beyond still waking.
Temoc slipped the ropes from the sacrifice’s wrists and ankles. The man stumbled into his embrace and wept.
I am an outsider, Elayne repeated to herself.
She did not know why she felt the need.
A winged shape crossed the sky, heavy subsonic bass to complement the cheers: a Warden come on Couatl-back to watch the outlaws below.
To watch, like her. And wonder.