6
Liane leaned back against the wall, coughing to clear her throat. She was already hoarse, and the cloying odor of candle smoke turned her stomach. Across the circle, Tenoctris took up the litany in a low voice: "Phanoibikux petriade kratarnade..."
The blue plane of the portal hung in the air between them. They'd run through the spell three times, each speaking it individually to give the other a chance to get her voice back and chew her tongue to encourage the flow of saliva. Tenoctris was starting her fourth reading; then it would be Liane's turn again.
"Arthu lailam semisilam..."
They should have brought food or at least something to drink into the tomb with them before they opened the portal...but Tenoctris said haste was important, Garric was ready to go, and Liane had been in the most hurry of all in order finish the task and have Garric back safe.
If anything happened to Garric, it was Liane's fault for bringing him into this danger.
"Bachuch bachaxichuch menebaichuch..."
It had grown dark outside. They'd left the door of the tomb slightly ajar, but light no longer seeped past the edges to supplement the candle burning beside the coffin of Liane's mother. The portal was light but gave no light.
Liane and Tenoctris would remain here repeating the spell until Garric returned or they fainted from effort. If the sequence of words lapsed for more than a minute or two, the portal would close and trap Garric forever in the plane to which he'd gone because of Liane and Liane's father....
"Raracharara anaxarnaxa achara..."
The door of the tomb swung open.
Liane looked up, thinking it was a groundskeeper or one of the owners of the house. She was on her own property and there was gold in her girdle to ease matters if the City Patrols were called in. The spell had to be chanted!
"Belias belioas—"
The man who stepped into the tomb had empty eyes. Liane screamed and snatched up the bronze stylus she kept within the hinges of her writing tablet. The intruder caught her by the wrist.
Time stopped. There was no longer sequence, only a plane on which all things existed at once.
Liane sprawled over the intruder's shoulder. He was a heavy man, not so much wearing a sheet as merely wrapped in it. He struck Tenoctris, knocking her against a rack of coffins. The bottommost, the oldest, crumbled with the force of the impact.
The portal faded. The intruder walked around the blue glow, placing his feet with the weight and caution of a draft horse on ice. Tenoctris lay where she had fallen.
Mazzona's bronze casket weighed at least five hundred pounds, perhaps a thousand. The intruder lifted it with one arm and turned. The ends of the metal container crushed the wooden caskets it touched.
The intruder walked out into the night, carrying both Liane and the casket of her mother. A blue glare popped and rippled about him even as the portal vanished forever.