despaired, he did grasp the grisly text's tale. The curtain was fully descended now, and he saw that it contained no human mummy.
"Revered A'Rak," he trumpeted, feeling his words ring now, his voice commensurate with his high office. "I behold here your studious care to disburden us, your partners in the Covenant, of the weight of your divine appetite. How tenderly sparing you are of the sustenance we are plighted to yield you—this is what I see here manifested!"
His heart hammered, harder and harder as still the prickly whelm of spiderthought failed to flood him. Though the tension was torment, he had ceased to fear death here, tonight. At some point not many moments past, he had realized his present safety. This shroud had been wrought to awe and terrify him. He was needed for something.
It comforts me, Priest, to find you so wise in my worship . Here was the unearthly thought-flux tuned somehow to a solemn sadness! The silence before had denoted the deity's pain, then. I have felt, Priest—alas, unmistakably—the foretremors of a dire Befalling, of a monster's advent to blameless Hagia's green and pleasant vales. I have kept my Covenant to stand Hagia's bulwark and battlement for her flourishing generations, and I shall keep covenant against this scourge to come, whose malevolence mocks your race's scope to grasp. The tragic consequence, priest, the ineluctable necessity, is that I must feed to battle strength, that I must nourish my might for the coming encounter.
In the silence that followed, a breeze set the shroud to rippling, and the mummied beasts scritch-scratched against the bronze, their jutting bones softly gonging here and there. The tapestry seemed a naked death-writ now, one specimen page from the epic of Hagia's decimation. And was Pandagon here, the priest, to preside then over the hecatomb? Officiate the feast? He stared, numb and chill to the bone, at the eyeless grins, the crooked-shrunk paws and limbs in their dangling dance.
We grieve alike now, priest. We both stand mutely mourning—how not? But scant time remains, and now we must set to work. You must make altered provision for the Choosing. The grim gist of the matter is, five times the number we are wont to choose must be chosen on Shortest Night next.
When he'd taken it in, Pandagon swayed on his feet slightly, such was his relief. Perhaps a hundred, a hundred and twenty chosen! Grievous, to be sure, but compared to the abyss of slaughter he had just contemplated. . . .
The god now commenced an exact numeration of supplementary security measures. The ceremonial sequence of the Choosing was designed to contain and muffle any riotous impulse among the doomed. The Three Thousand convoked to the Choosing all drew their runes from the urn, and the priest then began bidding now the holders of this rune, and now the holders of that, to retire to the tiers and resume their lives. When the identity of the one or two death runes became clear, the damned stood alone on the sand, environed by the saved—all of them motivated to enforce the rite's result. In this situation, some dozen-score Bailiffs and Reeves sufficed to maintain order.
But now, clearly the traditional cohort of bailiffs must be augmented, for with five times the number of doomed, there would be five times the number of their kin or friends among the saved, and the situation could grow volatile. The god murmured numbers of actives, numbers of auxiliaries, the means of their mustering discreetly, the details of posting them handy while yet unobserved by the Three Thousand as they entered the arena.
These calibrations and reckonings trickled up Pandagon's spine, the god counting his congregation like coin: thus much slaughter, thus much panic, equalled thus many surplus of knout-and-net men for containment. And the priest, as he harkened to this unearthly murmur, became conscious of the degree to which the god had calibrated his own emotions, seeing that the mummy shroud was
"Revered A'Rak," he trumpeted, feeling his words ring now, his voice commensurate with his high office. "I behold here your studious care to disburden us, your partners in the Covenant, of the weight of your divine appetite. How tenderly sparing you are of the sustenance we are plighted to yield you—this is what I see here manifested!"
His heart hammered, harder and harder as still the prickly whelm of spiderthought failed to flood him. Though the tension was torment, he had ceased to fear death here, tonight. At some point not many moments past, he had realized his present safety. This shroud had been wrought to awe and terrify him. He was needed for something.
It comforts me, Priest, to find you so wise in my worship . Here was the unearthly thought-flux tuned somehow to a solemn sadness! The silence before had denoted the deity's pain, then. I have felt, Priest—alas, unmistakably—the foretremors of a dire Befalling, of a monster's advent to blameless Hagia's green and pleasant vales. I have kept my Covenant to stand Hagia's bulwark and battlement for her flourishing generations, and I shall keep covenant against this scourge to come, whose malevolence mocks your race's scope to grasp. The tragic consequence, priest, the ineluctable necessity, is that I must feed to battle strength, that I must nourish my might for the coming encounter.
In the silence that followed, a breeze set the shroud to rippling, and the mummied beasts scritch-scratched against the bronze, their jutting bones softly gonging here and there. The tapestry seemed a naked death-writ now, one specimen page from the epic of Hagia's decimation. And was Pandagon here, the priest, to preside then over the hecatomb? Officiate the feast? He stared, numb and chill to the bone, at the eyeless grins, the crooked-shrunk paws and limbs in their dangling dance.
We grieve alike now, priest. We both stand mutely mourning—how not? But scant time remains, and now we must set to work. You must make altered provision for the Choosing. The grim gist of the matter is, five times the number we are wont to choose must be chosen on Shortest Night next.
When he'd taken it in, Pandagon swayed on his feet slightly, such was his relief. Perhaps a hundred, a hundred and twenty chosen! Grievous, to be sure, but compared to the abyss of slaughter he had just contemplated. . . .
The god now commenced an exact numeration of supplementary security measures. The ceremonial sequence of the Choosing was designed to contain and muffle any riotous impulse among the doomed. The Three Thousand convoked to the Choosing all drew their runes from the urn, and the priest then began bidding now the holders of this rune, and now the holders of that, to retire to the tiers and resume their lives. When the identity of the one or two death runes became clear, the damned stood alone on the sand, environed by the saved—all of them motivated to enforce the rite's result. In this situation, some dozen-score Bailiffs and Reeves sufficed to maintain order.
But now, clearly the traditional cohort of bailiffs must be augmented, for with five times the number of doomed, there would be five times the number of their kin or friends among the saved, and the situation could grow volatile. The god murmured numbers of actives, numbers of auxiliaries, the means of their mustering discreetly, the details of posting them handy while yet unobserved by the Three Thousand as they entered the arena.
These calibrations and reckonings trickled up Pandagon's spine, the god counting his congregation like coin: thus much slaughter, thus much panic, equalled thus many surplus of knout-and-net men for containment. And the priest, as he harkened to this unearthly murmur, became conscious of the degree to which the god had calibrated his own emotions, seeing that the mummy shroud was
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