This Red Sky

Chapter Twenty

They took her back to the slums, where the rain trickled among the trash in the streets and the walls of the buildings were lined with sleeping bodies.   The few awake citizens disappeared through doors or into alleys as the Faithful passed.

Sonia pulled her arm from the cultist' grip, rubbing the bruises his fingers left behind, and looked up at the wall she'd once called home. The hole above the temple had been bricked up.

The rain grew heavy. Back in Blackhost, Elna would have her setting out buckets to collect it, and children would run laughing to splash in the muddy puddles of the street. Sonia's hair stuck to her forehead. Her clothes were weighed heavily with the water they absorbed.

The cultist steered her up the steps of the temple of Lady Sin. Sonia blinked, looking around. A lot had changed in the month she'd been locked away. The wide chamber, held up by pillars covered in graffiti, was deserted. Broken bottles and pipes littered the floor, their owners nowhere in sight. The altar, previously used as a card table, was smashed. In black charcoal, someone had marked the thieves' symbol for "danger" on the floor.

"Where is everyone?" Sonia asked as they quickly crossed over the cracked marble. She received no answer from the cultists, just a grunt as they pushed her towards the stairs behind the altar. They extended down underground, to where torchlight was glowing. Sonia could hear a slow drumbeat, and a murmur of voices.

Sonia looked down the stone steps, her breath catching in her chest. She felt one of the cultists give her a shove between her shoulder blades, and she stumbled down the first three steps, catching herself on the wall. Steadying herself, she hurried down to the temple's basement, looking around.

They were in a single long room, cruder than the marble structure upstairs, with a dirt floor and ceiling held up by wooden rafters. Even as the city slept, the Faithful were awake. Dozens of them crowded the walls, sharpening their heavy weapons, smoking and drinking, with the torchlight reflecting off their eyes as Sonia passed. One man pushed by her, and her nose filled with the smell of sweat, meat and blood. The drumbeat was louder now, coming from the other end of the crowded room, and the cultists made their way towards it, Sonia sandwiched between them.

Her eyes flickered about. A broken cart shoved against the wall was full of weapons. Two thin women were present, trickling blood into a ram's skull full of runestones. The older of them pulled one stone out, her fingers stained red.

The cultists at the other end of the room gathered around a raised wooden chair, high-backed and throne-like. They parted as Sonia and their four comrades approached.

Sonia's heart dropped as she slowed to a stop, ten feet away from the makeshift throne, rooted to the spot. This was the reason she'd escaped the convent, but now she wanted nothing more than to flee as the sounds of roaring fires and the smells of burning flesh filled her mind.

Syralth reclined casually in the wooden throne, a leg slung over one arm, her hand resting on the pommel of the cruel bone sword. The torchlight illuminated her familiar black hair and set her dark skin afire, just as Sonia remembered. She spoke in the tongue of the Faithful to a burly man who stood to the side of the throne, not noticing the group that approached.

Sonia opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it. The room spun.

The cultists seemed to have no intention of interrupting their unlikely god, but more and more took an interest in the young woman who'd appeared in their hideout as midnight passed over the city. Sonia barely noticed the crowd forming behind her. Her eyes did not leave the woman in the throne. Her nails were digging into her palms.

Syralth was still talking with the cultist beside the throne. Her eyes narrowed and her voice rose, the cult's language sounding all wrong in the voice Sonia once craved. The man backed off, warily glancing to the sword of the woman he dwarfed, as if it might implant itself in his chest at a moment's notice.