The rhythm increased in tempo. The cultists began to spin and turn, pulling Keph with them. His guts lurched.
'Oh, dark!' he gasped helplessly. 'Stop! Stop!'
No one ordered him to silence. Maybe no one heard him. Certainly no one listened to him. His head started to pound in time with the rhythm of the dance. He could feel cold sweat erupt on his skin, trickling over his eyelids and sliding down his back.
And they were no longer dancing in a circle. The shifting ring had become a procession that swayed through the darkness. The cultist carrying the candle led the way. Keph could just make her out at the head of the line. He was somewhere in the middle, the cultists around him holding him up. Candlelight shone on descending stairs. He stumbled. The cultists caught him and thrust him forward. When the stairs ended, his legs kept trying to go down but the cultists caught him again, holding him up.
Keph turned and saw the instrument that kept the clash of the beat: a large metal ring being tapped, beaten, and stroked with a metal rod. There were two of them. No, three, all pounding into his spinning head. Keph clutched his ears and staggered against a wall. His stomach heaved once and a stream of vomit splashed across a floor of rough stone.
The cultists grabbed him and pulled him away before he could even stop gagging. He kept heaving as he stumbled. The cultists barely seemed to notice. They rushed him along, pulling at his arms and hands, at his shirt and sleeves. Fabric torehis right arm was bare. Someone laughed hoarsely. Hands seized his arms and dragged him painfully onward. Keph staggered to his feet before the cold, raw stone of the floor could shred his trousers and the skin beneath.
'Stop!' he gasped again. 'Please st'
The candle went out. The clashing music stopped. A heartbeat later, the hands that held him vanished, and Keph was left to stand on his own in the darkness. The air was cold on his sweat-slicked skin. The panting of his breath came back to him in soft echoes.
'Where moonlight and sunlight have never fallen, we give praise to Shar.'
Bolan's voice! Keph turned, trying to face its source, but echoes and a slow chant of response from the hidden cultists made it impossible.
'Mistress of the Night,' Bolan prayed, 'we fear your beauty. Forgive us the need to shield ourselves from it.'
There was a clink of metal and the dim light of an uncovered brazier shone out. In the darkness, it was like a brilliant star. More braziers followed, uncovered by cultists, a magnificent constellation. Even so, they struggled against the darkness and as Keph's eyes adjusted to the light, he realized that the braziers only made the shadows deeper by contrast. Wherever the cult had brought him, it was vast. He couldn't see any walls or a ceiling. Beyond the light of the braziers, there was simply nothing. He choked and fell to his knees, driven down by the overwhelming power of the total, primal darkness.
Between two braziers and before an altar draped in black velvet stood Bolan. Something had changed in the strange, stunted man. His porcelain smooth face seemed to glow in the dim light, while robes of black trimmed with purple hid his bulky body. An aura of faith suffused him, lending him just a little of Shar's glory.
At his side, however, stood a woman of Calimshan who didn't borrow Shar's glory so much as radiate a dark power of her own. Black hair flowed loosely against dusky pale skin and black clothes embroidered in shimmering, deep purple thread.
'Her name is Variance,' Jarull had said. 'Power flows off her like a shadow. I trust her more than Bolan.'
Variance was watching him. Keph tore his gaze away from her.
Bolan didn't seem to notice anything. The priest spread his arms wide and said, 'A man comes before Shar. He has drunk the Elixir of the Void from the Cup of Night. Can we accept him?'
'Shar welcomes all into her embrace,' murmured the cultists.
Keph stared at them. Maybe it was just the echoes, but there seemed to be far more people standing in the shadows than just those who had led him in.
'Let all be welcome,' said Bolan, 'if they grieve or mourn or hate. Let all be welcome if they desire vengeance or know bitterness.'
'Shar welcomes all.'
Bolan held out his hands to Keph. 'Shar welcomes you into her embrace. Do you embrace Shar and welcome her?'
Keph nodded slowlythen emphatically.
'The Lady of Loss gives you voice,' Bolan said kindly. 'Speak.'
'I embrace Shar,' Keph croaked.
He could taste vomit and wine and whatever bitter substance had been mixed with the wine. The numbness on his lips had spread up his face and across his scalp.
'Stand and approach her altar.'
Keph pushed himself to his feet and staggered toward Bolan, Variance, and the velvet-draped altar. The distance was misleading. What looked like it should have taken only a few steps to cross seemed to take many. Bolan and Variance swam in the shadows. Keph stumbled on until finally Bolan's hands grasped his. Even though Keph knew that he was taller than the alchemist-priest, Bolan appeared to tower over him. Keph squeezed his eyes shut, then looked again. Bolan was his proper height once more, though he looked up at him with eyes that were as deep as the night sky.
'Shar is a simple goddess,' Bolan said. 'The Mistress of the Night is direct. Other deities require followers to pledge themselves in long trials and tests. Service to Shar requires only one simple act.'
Bolan released Keph's hands and turned around to seize the black velvet that covered the altar. He pulled it off with a flourish.
A young girl dressed in a pretty white nightgown lay on the altar, arms at her side and eyes closed in sleep. Keph stared in shock.
It was Adrey.
Bolan put a heavy-bladed knife into Keph's hand. 'Kill her,' he said.
The hilt of the knife was cold in Keph's hand. He couldn't move. He couldn't take his eyes off his niece, just as he hadn't been able to take his eyes off Roderio's injured body after the accident. It wasn't right. Could Bolan really want him to kill Adrey? The only member of his cursed family he couldn't bring himself to hate?
'Kill her,' Bolan said again. 'Prove your devotion to Shar.'
'Hail to the Mistress of the Night,' chanted the cultists. Keph raised the knife slowly.
It couldn't be right. How could Adrey be here? When he'd set out for Wedge Street, she'd been safe within Fourstaves House. Anywhere else and he might have thought that the Sharrans had kidnapped herbut not from Fourstaves House. The wards that Strasus had woven and re-woven around the house made that virtually impossible. Additional wards cast around Adrey's room by her parents and grandparents made it more secure than any other chamber save Strasus's own study. Keph gritted his teeth, trying to force back the muddling effects of the Elixir of the Void. There had to be another explanation for Adrey's presence. If Adrey was actually there.
He looked at her sleeping form again; so still, so perfect. Too perfect. He tried to recall what shape the black velvet had concealed on the altar before Bolan had whisked it away. Had there been any shape at all?
No. There hadn't. Keph clenched his teeth. That wasn't Adrey on the altar. It wasn't anyone or anything at all.
Dagnalla had soothed and entertained all of her children with magical illusions. Ironically, Artless Keph had been the one to see through the apparitions at the youngest age. The girl on Shar's altar was no more real than Dagnalla's flights of whimsy, he realized. It was just an illusion.
And yet she looked so much like Adrey. The knife trembled in Keph's hand. 'Shar awaits,' Bolan hissed.
Keph looked down. It's only an illusion, he thought. It's all part of Shar's test. You're not really doing anything wrong. Nobody even realizes you've figured it out! He glanced up into the darkness.
Do it, he told himself.
'Hail to the Mistress of the Night!' he shouted and plunged the knife down.
The only resistance it met was the altar itself. Steel hit stone and skittered across it with a horrid shriek. The girl wavered and vanished. The knife fell out of Keph's fingers and he staggered backthe shock he felt might as well have been real. Inside his chest, his heart was thundering like a smith's hammer.
