“I know even better than you, Priestess,” he said, his voice deepening. “Look again!” He turned his head so she must see the four terrible marks across his cheek.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, and her voice shook.
“Priestess,” he said gently, “you are not very old; you can’t have served the Dark Ones very long.”
“But I have. Very long! I am the First Priestess, the Reborn. I have served my masters for a thousand years and a thousand years before that. I am their servant and their voice and their hands. And I am their vengeance on those who defile the Tombs and look upon what is not to be seen! Stop your lying and your boasting, can’t you see that if I say one word my guard will come and cut your head off your shoulders? Or if I go away and lock this door, then nobody will come, ever, and you’ll die here in the dark, and those I serve will eat your flesh and eat your soul and leave your bones here in the dust?”
Quietly, he nodded.
She stammered, and finding no more to say, swept out of the room and bolted the door behind her with a clang. Let him think she wasn’t coming back! Let him sweat, there in the dark, let him curse and shiver and try to work his foul, useless spells!
But in her mind’s eye she saw him stretching out to sleep, as she had seen him do by the iron door, serene as a sheep in a sunny meadow.
She spat at the bolted door, and made the sign to avert defilement, and went almost at a run towards the Undertomb.
While she skirted its wall on the way to the trapdoor in the Hall, her fingers brushed along the fine planes and traceries of rock, like frozen lace. A longing swept over her to light her lantern, to see once more, just for a moment, the time-carven stone, the lovely glitter of the walls. She shut her eyes tight and hurried on.
The Great Treasure
Never had the rites and duties of the day seemed so many, or so petty, or so long. The little girls with their pale faces and furtive ways, the restless novices, the priestesses whose looks were stern and cool but whose lives were all a secret brangle of jealousies and miseries and small ambitions and wasted passions- all these women, among whom she had always lived and who made up the human world to her, now appeared to her as both pitiable and boring.
But she who served great powers, she the priestess of grim Night, was free of that pettiness. She did not have to care about the grinding meanness of their common life, the days whose one delight was likely to be getting a bigger slop of lamb fat over your lentils than your neighbor got… She was free of the days altogether. Underground, there were no days. There was always and only night.
And in that unending night, the prisoner: the dark man, practicer of dark arts, bound in iron and locked in stone, waiting for her to come or not to come, to bring him water and bread and life, or a knife and a butcher’s bowl and death, just as the whim took her.
She had told no one but Kossil about the man, and Kossil had not told anyone else. He had been in the Painted Room three nights and days now, and still she had not asked Arha about him. Perhaps she assumed that he was dead, and that Arha had had Manan carry the body to the Room of Bones. It was not like Kossil to take anything for granted; but Arha told herself that there was nothing strange about Kossil’s silence. Kossil wanted everything kept secret, and hated to have to ask questions. And besides, Arha had told her not to meddle in her business. Kossil was simply obeying.
However, if the man was supposed to be dead, Arha could not ask for food for him. So, aside from stealing some apples and dried onions from the cellars of the Big House, she did without food. She had her morning and evening meals sent to the Small House, pretending she wished to eat alone, and each night took the food down to the Painted Room in the Labyrinth, all but the soups. She was used to fasting for a day on up to four days at a time, and thought nothing about it. The fellow in the Labyrinth ate up her meager portions of bread and cheese and beans as a toad eats a fly: snap! it’s gone. Clearly he could have done so five or six times over; but he thanked her soberly, as if he were her guest and she his hostess at a table such as she had heard of in tales of feasts at the palace of the Godking, all set with roast meats and buttered loaves and wine in crystal. He was very strange.