She paused by the stone and ran gentle fingers along it. A dog's howl went wavering up into the cloudy night. Ischade looked up and smiled.
"You're prompt," she said. "It's well. Haught, bring me what you carry. Stilcho, fasten them here."
Standing by the altar, Mriga and Siveni looked around them-Mriga with interest, Siveni with wry distaste, for she was after all a maiden goddess. Ischade put her hood back and gazed at the goddesses with her beautiful oblique eyes full of silent laughter as the frightened Stilcho tethered the ram and ewe by the altar. Haught held out one of his silken bundles. Ischade put the wrappings aside and drew forth a long curved knife of bronze, half sword and half sickle, with an edge that even in the little, dim light from the torches of the Governor's Palace still glittered wickedly keen. The flat of the blade was stained dark.
"Blood sacrifice, then," Siveni said.
"There's always sacrifice where the ones below are concerned." Ischade reached absently down to caress the ram's head. It held still in terror. "But first other business. Stilcho, I will need your service tonight, and Razku-li's. I go on a journey."
"Mistress-"
"To hell. You are going to lend me your death, and Razkuli will lend his to this warrior-lady, and this poor creature-" she reached out to touch the wrapped bundle on the shying donkey "-as soon as I fetch him back, will lend his to the lady who limps. But you understand that while we're using those parts of your life-or death, rather-you will have to be elsewhere."
Mriga bit her lip and turned away from the sight of a dead man going pale. "Souls need containers ... so I'll provide some till dawn; we'll be back then, and you'll find yourselves back to normal. Haught and Mor-am will stand guard till then." She stepped away from the altar, gliding past Haught and throwing him a cool look.
"Mistress-"
"Guard them well, Haught," Ischade said, not looking back at him. "I will take a dim view of any 'accidents.' I'm not done with them yet." She paced away, turning after a few seconds and beginning to walk a circle, setting wards. There was no outward sign, no fire, no sound. But Mriga felt the air grow tight, and when Ischade came about at last and gestured the circle closed, the mortals in it looked at each other in still terror, like beasts in a new-snapped trap.
"No god or man will cross that line," she said. "Goddesses, your last word. Will you do this?"
"Get on with it," Siveni said. Her spear sizzled.
Mriga nodded and looked down at Tyr. The dog put her head up and howled again, softly, an eager sound.
"Very well," Ischade said, and paused by the altar, and looked over her shoulder at the donkey. There was a wheeze, the terrible sound a corpse makes when it's rolled over and the last breath leaves its lungs-only this breath went in. The tethered donkey plunged and screamed as its burden abruptly began to move, a slow underwater struggling. Ischade reached out leisurely and stripped the covering from around the body. It crumpled toward the ground, collapsing to its knees, then slowly, slowly stood. It was a young woman, terribly wounded about the breast and neck; her tunic and flounced skirts were blood-blackened and her head had a tendency to slew to one side, trying to come undone from the half severed neck.
"Well, well," Ischade said, calm-voiced, "not 'he,' but 'she.' Some poor nightwalker caught in the Stepsons' barracks, where she shouldn't have been. Pity. Haught, uncover the lantern."
The Nisi lifted up a lantern from the ground and unshuttered it. There seemed no light in it at all; yet when Mriga looked from it to Ischade and the corpse, and the altar, they all were throwing shadows that showed impossibly blacker against the ground than the midnight they all stood in. "This won't hurt, child," said Ischade. She lifted up the sickle, and swung it at the ground. A scream followed that Mriga thought would have frozen any mortal's brain. She was irrationally satisfied to glance sideways and see Siveni's knuckles going white on the haft of her spear as the corpse fell down again.
"Well, maybe it will hurt," Ischade said, not sounding particularly moved. She straightened, holding in her free hand what looked like a wavering, silken scrap of night. It was the shadow she had cut loose. Delicately, with one hand, she crumpled it till nothing of it showed but a fistful of darkness. Ischade held out her hand to Mriga. "Take it," she said. Mriga did. "When I tell you, swallow it. Now, then ..."
She moved to Razkuli, who stood leaning on the ghost of a sword, and watched her without eyes, and without a face, looking taut and afraid. "That one is nothing to me," said Ischade. "Her soul can go where it pleases. But yours might have some use. So ... something alive ..." She looked around her. "That tree will do nicely. Hold still, Razkuli."
The second scream was harder, not easier, to bear. Ischade straightened, shook the severed shadow out, eyed it clinically, and sliced it neatly about midway down its writhing length. One of the halves she stuffed into the rotting bole of a nearby willow, and even as she turned away toward Siveni, the willow's long bare branches put out numberless leaves of thin, trembling darkness. "Here," Ischade said. Siveni put out her hand and took the crumpled half-shadow as if she were being handed a scorpion.
"Stilcho," Ischade said.
Stilcho backed away a pace. Behind him, with a small, terrible smile on his face, Haught held up the lantern. The third scream was the worst of all.
"Maybe you have been suffering too much in my service," Ischade said, as she sliced his soul-shadow too and draped half of it over the branches of a shrub hard by the altar. "Maybe I should let you go back to being quite dead ..." The shrub came out in leaves and little round berries of blackness, trembling.
"We'll talk about it when I come back," said Ischade. She tucked the crumpled shadow into her dark robes. "Mor-am, Haught, guard this spot until an hour before dawn. We won't be coming back this way. Look for us at the house, by the back gate. And don't forget Stilcho's body." She glided over to the altar, lifting the dark-stained sickle again. "Be ready, goddesses."
"What about Tyr?" said Siveni.
"She'll ride this soul," said Ischade. Her hand had fallen on the ram's head again. It looked up at her, and up, and helplessly, up; and Ischade swung the sickle. In the unlight of the dark lantern, the ram's eyes blazed horribly, then emptied, and the black blood gushed out on the altar's white stone. "Now," said Ischade, a slow warm smile in her voice, and reached out to the ewe.
Mriga swallowed the little struggling darkness, in horror, and felt it go down fighting like something itself horrified and helpless. Its darkness rose behind her eyes for a moment and roared in her ears. The ewe cried out and bubbled into silence. When her vision cleared, she found herself looking at an Ischade truly dressed in shadows and grinning like one of the terrible gods who avenge for the joy of it, and at a Siveni robed and helmed in dark, only the spearhead bright. Even Tyr had gone black-furred, but her eyes burned as a beast's will when a sudden light in darkness finds them. Tyr threw back her head and howled in good earnest. The earth beneath their feet buckled and heaved like a disturbed thing, as if in answer, and then shrugged away its paving and split.
"Call up your courage," said Ischade softly, "for now you'll need it." And she walked down into the great crack in the earth, into the fuming, sulfur-smelling dark.
Tyr dashed after her, barking; other howls echoed hers, above the earth and below it. Mriga and Siveni looked at each other and followed.
Groaning, the earth closed behind them.
Mor-am and Haught looked at each other and swallowed.