Sacrifice
“What have you done?” Isabel gasps.
In an instant, the sky full of eyes turns to her, stretching the loose flesh of each socket. Though the eyes are bright and alert, the skin is gray and soft with advanced decay. Rot has settled in to the wall of books, as well, and the pages swell and blacken as white mold creeps over the covers. Isabel can only guess what happens once they disintegrate entirely. A cold, damp wind whistles between the moldering bookcases and across the office floor, tugging at stacks of wet, sticky paper and the lines of the ritual circle.
She takes one cautious step into the room and weighs a quick escape over the impending panic that will surge through the temple if the people there can see what’s happened. She closes the door and turns the lock.
The diagram on the floor is one she doesn’t recognize. Three concentric circles enclose the office from the line of books to a foot before the door; the outermost circle is solid and thick, while the inner two are thinner, with deliberate gaps of thirty degrees or so that don’t overlap. In each gap is a sigil. Isabel can recognize Ondir’s, Alcos’s, and the symbol for protection. Inside the innermost ring is the sigil for sacrifice. In front of it sits Father Pereth.
He kneels on the floor, his brow pressed to the stone. His arms lie flat before him, palms up in familiar supplication. His sleeves are torn, and his arms are wrapped tightly in black cloth from elbow to wrist. The improvised bandages shine dull and wet in the red light seeping over the broken wall.
Isabel steps into the circle. From what she can see, which admittedly isn’t much, the substance on the floor is a mix of soot and water, painted with a flat hand. The sigils were applied with a single finger. She approaches Father Pereth, careful not to disturb the diagram. She doesn’t want to find out what would happen if she were to break the circles.
She touches Pereth’s shoulder. He stirs, his head rolling to one side, and looks at her with one unfocused eye. His face is white as fresh snow. Despite the bandages, he’s lost a lot of blood.
“Wake up,” she says. “Stay with me.” She grips the tattered end of his right sleeve in both hands and tears off another piece. His skin is ice-cold where it touches her knuckles, and the bandages are soaked through and sticky. She ties the cloth below his elbow and knots it tightly.
Pereth blinks, turning his head to look at her with both eyes. “You again,” he murmurs.
“What happened here?” Isabel asks. She reaches for his left arm to tie another bandage around it. It’s limp and heavy, slipping out of her grasp.
“Sacrifice,” Pereth says. “To appease the gods.”
The other priests kneel around the inside of the circle, bent with bandaged arms outstretched, just like Pereth. The two closest to Isabel are still breathing, but she can’t see the others well enough to tell. There are six novices among them, boys no older than fourteen. “You didn’t,” Isabel whispers.
She gets to her feet and stumbles across the center of the circle. A sharp whistle, almost too high-pitched to hear, scrapes at her ears from somewhere behind the mass of eyes. Avoiding Ondir’s sigil, she drops to her knees in front of the first boy and shakes him by the shoulders.
He looks up. She remembers him—maybe twelve years old, dark-haired, afraid of ghosts. His eyes are bright despite the exhaustion lining his young face. “What?” he asks, bleary as if roused from sleep.
Isabel takes his hands and holds up his arms. His sleeves fall away, showing two skinny forearms with no cuts and no bandages. Thank the gods.
The novice, now more awake, snatches his hands back. “You’re back,” he says. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.”
“What happened? What did Father Pereth do?” Isabel asks.
He rubs at his eyes with one wrist and blinks at the room. “He said he was going to call the gods.”
“With blood?” Isabel asks. Her voice is high-pitched and panicky, and it seems like it’s coming from outside her body. She shivers, a sure sign that she’s still in the real world, such as it is.
The novice nods. He’s not looking her in the eye. “It’s the old way.”
Before he can elaborate, he sees the sky. His face turns gray, and his mouth drops open, a tiny, frightened whimper escaping from his throat. The eyes shake in their loose sockets, and tendrils grasp at the stack of books. Mold blooms over them in a cloud of white.
Isabel takes him by the shoulders and rotates him toward the door. “Take the others,” she says. “Anyone who can walk. Take them back out to the dome and stay there.”
He shoves her off and gets to his feet. While he rouses the other novices, Isabel crawls over to the priests, positioned in a half-circle across from Pereth. They’re bandaged as well, strips of blood-soaked black cloth covering their arms, but they’re clear-eyed and awake. She can grant Pereth this much: if there was a sacrifice to be made, he made it himself.
“Get under the dome,” she tells them. “I’ll take care of the high priest.”
The sky shudders with a sound like thunder. Isabel drags one of Father Pereth’s arms over her shoulders and tries to stand. He’s heavier than he looks, and his legs fold and buckle as soon as they’re underneath him. She’s not strong enough to carry him, especially not now when she’s running on a couple of hours of sleep and maybe one meal in the past day. “Come on, wake up,” she says. The smell of mold is overpowering—the books aren’t going to hold much longer.
“They’ll come,” Pereth mumbles into her shoulder. “I’ve summoned them with blood and fire. They cannot refuse me.”
Isabel considers leaving him. He made his choice, even after she tried to tell him and tried to show him that it was all in vain and he should be focused on saving people rather than contacting the dead gods. He didn’t even add any more books to the wall.
She bends her knees and lifts again, but he’s limp as a fresh corpse. Only the slow, ragged breathing in her ear tells her he’s still alive.
She lowers him to the ground. She’s wasting precious time while the books dissolve into wet pulp and disembodied hands with too many fingers skitter back and forth behind them, waiting for an opening.
But she can’t leave him. Call it old habits, indoctrination, or human feeling—or maybe the hope that if he lives, he’ll finally understand that everything he’s done in the past forty-eight hours has been foolishness. She puts her hands under his arms, grabbing two fistfuls of his tattered cassock, and drags him around until their backs are to the door.
Isabel regrets looking, but she can’t help herself. Several of the eyes blink, stretching wrinkled skin taut over swollen eyeballs. When they open, they’re mouths, filled with rows and rows of flat, chipped teeth that clack together in a rattling cacophony. The other eyes lose focus and roll upward, as if in pleasure—or terrible, unbearable pain.
Something’s about to happen. She ducks her head and drags Pereth across the floor by his armpits, heedless of the ritual circle. The hard soles of his shoes catch on the seams between flagstones, and wet soot scratches like sand under Isabel’s feet. His clothing leaves a black smear across the diagram.
Just as she reaches the edge of the desk, four steps from the door, the room goes silent.
Her ears pop, pressure knifing into both sides of her head. Pereth slips out of her hands. She drops again to her knees and catches him by the collar before the back of his head hits the floor. The horrible chattering of teeth is gone, as is the sound of Isabel’s filthy boots scraping against the floor as she struggles to stand. There’s only the roar of her own blood in her ears, throbbing in a rhythm of pain, pain, pain.
A white light blooms from the center of the smeared diagram. It pushes out the red and chases the shadows from the corners of the room, unfurling like a flower, iridescent and shimmering. Soon, it’s a pillar of light reaching through the floor and the ceiling, soft and undulating as if seen through water. It sheds layers like petals, amorphous white shapes that dissipate as they fall to the ground.
The pillar shifts and bulges. Oval shapes press outward from the center, opening eyes and mouths and stretching until they become almost human faces, fragmented and distorted like the ghosts that the thing beyond the rotting barrier has touched. They move their indistinct lips in a soundless exhortation, their huge, featureless eyes turned upward. They’re beautiful, in a way, like the remains of marble statues, unearthed from centuries of dirt and refuse and shining clean again, though they’ve been shattered and cannot be made whole.
Isabel can’t look away. Her eyes ache, and the pressure in the room feels like a hot poker in both of her ears.
Father Pereth’s head lolls backward, and he looks up at her with dull, unfocused eyes. His mouth moves. She can’t hear him, but she can read his lips clearly: I told you they would come.
Isabel looks into the light, squinting against the brightness. It’s hard to tell, with how fragmented the shapes are, but she can count seven faces in the writhing mass.
She grabs Father Pereth and drags him out the door.
With one hand, she keeps his head clear of the flagstones while she slams the door shut with the other. “Help,” she says, her voice hoarse and strangled. She tries again. “Help!”
The first to arrive are Herard and Marner. They take the high priest’s arms and suspend him between them, lifting him easily where Isabel had struggled.
“What happened to this one?” asks Marner.
Isabel can only shake her head. In doing so, the pressure releases from her ears with a pop so loud she’s surprised the men can’t hear it. The pain disappears, leaving behind only a soft, high-pitched ringing.
Herard gives her a soft frown. “Are you all right?”
She nods, takes a breath, and brushes soot from her hands. She must have breathed some of it in, because her nose is stopped up and her throat feels thick. Her hand goes to her face, rubbing at her eyes, and comes away wet.
Have I been crying? All she feels is numb, like her body is far away from the world, almost like she’s in the nether. The sight of the gods, in the old stories where they appear to their prophets in person, is supposed to bring one to tears. But Isabel isn’t a prophet, and this isn’t that kind of story—the kind that line the walls of the temple, keeping chaos away for another minute, another hour.
“We need more books,” she says. It comes out as a hoarse gasp. She clears her throat and tries again. “Close off this hallway. Hurry.”
Marner and Herard take the high priest down the hallway to the waiting, bandaged arms of the other priests, just inside the dome. Isabel had never done a head count, but it looks more crowded than when last she saw it. No one lies down on the floor anymore; a few are standing, exhaustion pulling down on their shoulders. The man with the bags is wedged in beside his wife and children at the edge of the foyer, without his bags but with a bundle of something awkwardly shoved under one arm.
Marner is piling up books, taking one off of each stack by the door, while Herard moves the stack he brought away from the corridor walls. It’s not exactly what Isabel had in mind—she’d hoped to expand into the hallway, to give the people a little more breathing room—but maybe it’s for the best that there’s some distance between the barrier and whatever might or might not be in Father Pereth’s office.
“Sentinel!”
Jemmy’s high-pitched cry cuts through the unintelligible din of worried conversation. He waves an arm at her in a rapid arc over his head—all she can see of him over the press of bodies.
Isabel wipes her face, probably leaving streaks of soot under her eyes, but that’s the least of her problems now. She shoulders her way through the crowd, mumbling apologies. She receives a few in return, but it’s mostly dirty looks from tired faces. No one is resting well.
When she finally gets to the door, Jemmy is bouncing his heels up and down, bare feet squeaking on the dusty floor. He doesn’t look it, but he’s exhausted, too, his eyes too wide and his movements erratic. He should have a quiet room to calm down in, and a soft bed to receive him after that, but Isabel can’t provide him with either. She can’t even feed him. She suspects she won’t have to worry about provisions much longer.
“Someone wants to see you, Sentinel,” Jemmy declares.
She goes to the door, expecting another petty nobleman with a suitcase full of silver to pick an argument with her. Instead, she finds Berend, wearing a bloodstained coat and a look halfway between a smile and a grimace that says he’s had an even worse time of it than Isabel has, this day that might be the last one anyone ever sees.
Without thinking, she steps over the threshold and throws her arms around him.
Forward to Chapter Twenty-Three
I just finished rewriting this chapter today! I think this is the first time that my rewrite and the posting schedule coincided. Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
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