The cold mud at the bottom of Ashaun’s roll-call broke the seamless pull of the chorus.
For the first time since the temple escort had twisted the brass key, Pip could feel where its own six-legged body ended and where the thirty-foot golden phantom above it began. The gratitude of the miller’s wife and the shepherd brothers was real, and the forty-two drowned ditch-diggers in the canal were real too; both belonged to the dead god in the stone, and neither one gave the stone the right to lock Pip into an old mold before it had finished choosing its own life.
Pip tried to bark a refusal at the looming crown of light, and a sharp stab of pain tore through its blistered, silent tongue. Dark blood welled against its mineral tooth plates without a sound.
It did not need a voice to answer a machine.
Lowering its head against the blinding glare, Pip hooked its front claws into the frost-cracked mortar seam between two granite slabs and dragged itself one heavy pace out of the exact center of the circle, then a second, then a third. Every inch felt like wading upstream through setting plaster. Above its back, the seven converging beams of green-gold light stretched and whined like over-tightened iron winch cables as the creature pulled its own body away from their focal point toward the inner iron track.
