Korrogly hustled after her, clutching the lacquered box to his chest, glancing back once to try and make out their pursuers; he could have sworn he saw dark hooded figures as he went around a bend. It took them less than a minute to reach the gate, another few seconds for Janice to unlatch it, and then they were slogging through the soft sand atop the bluff, heading away from Ayler Point; the moonstruck waves below were flowing sideways, obeying the drag of the outgoing tide. Korrogly was relieved to have left the temple behind, and he was more confused than afraid; he thought that Janice might have been mistaken about hearing someone, that he had not really seen the hooded figures. He ran easily, feeling amazingly sound. It was as if something about the temple had occluded his faculties, diminished his strength. He soon began to outpace Janice, and when he slowed to let her catch up, she gestured for him to keep going; her face was drawn tight with fear, and seeing this, he redoubled his efforts. Just as he came to the slope that led down from the bluff onto the beach, a path of white sand winding through tall grasses, he heard an agonized cry behind him, and turning, he had a glimpse of Janice, her shawl blown by the wind into a pennant, her dark hair loose, teetering on the edge of the bluff, clutching at her breast, at the handle of a dagger that sprouted bloody between her hands. Her eyes rolled up, she toppled over the edge and was gone.
It had happened so suddenly that Korrogly stopped running, scarcely able to believe what he had seen, but after a split-second, hearing a shout above the wind, he set out in a mad dash along the path. Three-quarters of the way down, he lost his footing and went tumbling head over heels the rest of the way. At the bottom of the slope, he groped for the box, found it, and bright with fear, made for the dunes which rose pale as salt above the narrow strip of mucky sand. By the time he had reached the top of the dunes, he was nearly out of breath, and he stood gasping, looking out over a rumpled moonlit terrain of grasses and hillocks, the folds between them holding bays of shadow. He set out running again, stumbling, dropping to his knees in a depression, tripping over exposed roots, and finally, his stamina exhausted, he dove into a cleft beneath a little rise and covered himself as best he could with sand and loose grass.
For awhile he heard nothing except the wind and the muffled crunch of the surf. Clouds began to pass across the moon, their edges catching silver fire, and he stared at them, praying that they would close and draw a curtain of darkness across the land. After about ten minutes he heard a shout, and it was followed a moment later by another shout. He could not make out any words, but the outcries had, he thought, the quality of angry desperation. He tucked his head down and made promises to God, swearing to uphold every sacred tenet, to do good works, if only he would be permitted to survive the night.
At long last the shouts ceased, but Korrogly remained where he was, afraid even to lift his head. He gazed at the clouds; the wind had lessened, and they were coasting past the moon like huge ragged blue galleons, like continents, like anything he wanted to make of their indefinite shapes. A dragon, for instance. An immense cloudy bulk with a vicious head and one globed, glaring silver eye, coiled throughout the heavens, the edges of its scales glinting like stars on its blue-dark hide, spying him out, watching over him, or else merely watching him, merely keeping track of its frightened pawn. He watched it take wing and fly in soaring arcs, diving and looping, making a pattern that drew him in, that trapped him like a devil within a pentagram and, eventually, hypnotized him into a dream-ridden sleep.
