As always, the ell was guarded. Beyond it no bulb burned. The only light encroached from the main corridor.
Barefoot as usual in his nocturnal trips, Macurdy slipped past the sentry, wondering if the Voitar had an alarm system. It seemed to him they did; he could feel an energy. In the dimness three meters past the ell, he perceived a faint rose field, like barely visible pink cellophane blocking the corridor. He might well have missed it, had he not been looking for something like it.
Stopping, he examined it, and as he looked, it became more visible, emanating from what seemed to be a gray line in the ceiling, as vague as the screen itself.
How to get past? How might the sorcerers do it? On an impulse, he told it mentally to move aside-and it retreated upward into the gray line! Tentatively he walked through, then stopped and looked back. The screen was in place again, faint as before. The sentry, who faced away, had noticed nothing.
Macurdy went on, pausing to listen at doors; there was no sound. Nor any light beneath them, except for the door at the end of the hall, which seemed to be an exit. Cautiously he turned its heavy handle and pushed. It opened soundlessly into the cylindrical tower that rose above the building’s roof, with a helical stairwell lit only by a weak bulb at each landing.
Something raised chill bumps again-an energy like that from the security screen in the corridor, intensifying as he proceeded downward. The stairwell continued below the firstfloor landing and its weak bulb, and so did he.
At the bottom was a final door, of heavy oak, and carefully he opened it, enough to peer inside. Opening it had doubled the energy he felt, making his skin crawl, his hair stand on end. Inside was a small, thickly shadowed mezzanine, stonepaved and with no parapet, overlooking a stone-walled pit. Firelight danced on walls, as if from flames below, and the place smelled of charcoal smoke. There seemed to be no other light. On his belly, Macurdy crawled to the edge and looked down.
The cellar floor was perhaps four meters lower, the flames in a large brazier near one end. In the center was a stone altar, with a naked, long-limbed blond woman lying on it, clearly the aristocrat the guardsmen had told of. She was not physically restrained, but motionless, as if waiting, hands folded on her abdomen. Her eyes were open, her limbs and features composed as if for burial. Her aura suggested a hypnotic trance, her torso and head resting on what seemed to be a silver tray. Kurgosz stood at the head of the altar. To one side were seven tall Voitar, not robed now, but wearing blood-red breeches and tunics, blood-red slippers.
Though the altar was centered in the room, the focus of the ritual was an intricately wrought tripod of what appeared to be black iron, topped with a shallow bowl, the seven Voitar forming a circle around it. The bowl held a round gem the size of an egg, surrounded by a soft pure glow that seemed more than light.
It gripped his attention, and with an effort, Macurdy pulled his gaze from it. A feeling of suffocation alarmed him; he’d been holding his breath. Cautiously he inhaled.
Kurgosz held a slender knife in one hand, and in the other a silver shield, which he positioned over the woman’s head and chest. Reflexively Macurdy closed his eyes. After a long blurred minute, the energy swelled, then surged powerfully. Macurdy’s eyes sprang wide, and he lost consciousness.
When he awoke and looked down again, the sorcerers had left and the flames had burned out, the coals sullen red. The woman was slack, throat cut, torso bloody, with only the residual body aura of a corpse. The stand and jewel were gone. These things registered on his mind without conscious thought. Groggily he stood and backed away from the edge, failing to hearth e bolt turn behind him. The door opened, almost hitting him, leaving him partly shielded by it. Someone, seemingly Tsulgax, stepped inside, leaving it open. Too groggy to wonder if his cloak had survived his unconsciousness, Macurdy watched broad shoulders and erect head disappear down stairs he hadn’t noticed before. Only in hindsight would he wonder what the half-Votau had arrived to do: clean up perhaps, and carry off the corpse.