you might consider them in some small measure your responsibility.'
'Lord, I beg you to look about,' Selatre added, 'and see the destruction and disorder these monsters spread wherever they go.'
As Mavrix had, Biton looked. Sometimes Gerin saw his head revolve on his neck in a manner impossible for mere flesh and blood, while at other instants what he perceived was a basalt stele spinning. In either case, though, Biton unquestionably had eyes-or at least an eyein the back of his head.
When his image settled, he said, 'This is most distressing. It seems the sort of chaos this foreign mountebank might favor.' With an arm or with that phallus, he pointed at Mavrix.
'I?' Mavrix twisted in indignation, so that his leopardskin cape swirled gracefully about him. Gerin could not imagine him doing anything ungraceful. But he'd seen in previous encounters with Mavrix that the god had a temper. Mavrix's smooth voice turned into an angry screech: 'Mountebank, is it? I'd think these monsters more your stylebarbarous creatures they, fit only for a barbarous land. And after all, they haunted the caverns under your shrine. If you despise them so, why didn't you get rid of them? I suppose you lacked the power.' He sneered dismissively.
Biton suddenly seemed wholly human to Gerin; perhaps the stone pillar that was his other guise could not properly express his wrath. 'They are not my creatures!' he bellowed in a voice that reverberated through Gerin's head like the deep tolling of a great bronze bell. 'My temple blocked them from coming forth and inflicting themselves on the upper world. In the caverns, they were part of nature, not a blight upon it. But when I saw the shrine would fall-'
'Farseeing one indeed,' Mavrix interrupted, sneering still. 'If it took you so long to notice that, you aren't much of a god.'
'At least my senses aren't blinded by drunkenness, adultery, and incest,' Biton retorted primly. 'Half the time, you don't even know what you see; the rest of the time, you don't care.'
Both gods started screaming. Gerin clapped his hands to his head, but it did no good. He was hearing Mavrix and Biton with his mind, not his ears, and they kept on dinning just as loud as before.
'Father Dyaus protect us,' Rihwin mouthed silently.
'Don't invite him, too,' Gerin exclaimed. 'Aren't two squabbling gods enough to satisfy you?' He wanted to run, but he didn't think that would do any good, either. If Biton and Mavrix went at it with everything they had, the whole of the northlands might not be big enough to hold a safe haven. He'd hoped evoking both of them at once would help keep them under control. Instead, it seemed to be inflaming them.
'I thought this scheme mad from the outset.' Rihwin moved his lips exaggeratedly and eked out his words with gestures, so Gerin could not mistake what he meant. 'You are sorcerer enough to evoke the gods, but not enough to make them do your bidding once here. Better you should never have tried!' He clapped a hand to his forehead.
At that moment, Gerin would have been hard-pressed to argue with him. Mavrix thrust his ivory-tipped wand at Biton. Faster than thought, the farseeing god was stone again, and knocked the wand aside with his phallus. Mavrix howled in pain. Biton, anthropomorphic once more, laughed in his face. Mavrix stuck out a tongue longer and pinker than a human could have had.
Some philosophers called the gods men writ large. Gerin was reminded of nothing so much as small, squabbling boys writ large-but these small boys had superhuman strength and power.
'I should have listened to Aragis and waited,' Gerin groaned.
'You should have listened to someone,' Rihwin mouthed. With Mavrix distracted, he was faintly audible. 'You're always so splendid at deducing what everyone else should do, but when anyone makes a suggestion to you, do you heed it? Ha!' In case his fellow Fox hadn't caught that, he repeated himself: 'Ha!'
That held enough truth to sting. Gerin had always relied on his own judgment because he'd found none consistently better. More often than not, his judgment had served him well. But when he made a mistake, he did not commonly content himself with a small one.
'Oh, shut up,' he growled nonetheless. 'As if you've proved yourself worth listening to over the years.' Rihwin gave back a gesture much used by street urchins in the City of Elabon.
Next to the way the gods were behaving, the argument between the two men seemed downright sedate. Mavrix used the same gesture Rihwin had, and stuck out his tongue again to boot. Still in human guise, Biton lifted his robe and waggled the phallus whose stone version had parried the fertility god's wand.
Mavrix laughed scornfully. 'I've seen mice with more than that.'
'For one thing, you're a liar. For another, who cares what you've seen?' Biton retorted. 'I'd sooner look at things of consequence than the private parts of mice.'
'I'd sooner look at things of consequence than your private parts,' the lord of the sweet grape said. With another nasty laugh, he went on, 'Some seeker after consequences you are, too, if you couldn't even tell your own chief temple was about to be overthrown.'
'What is the blink of an eye against the great sweep of time?' Biton said. 'The temple at Ikos stands for centuries yet to come; am I to be condemned for failing to notice the brief interval in which it is downfallen?'
Under less harrowing circumstances, Gerin might have found that interesting, or even hopeful. If Biton's temple at Ikos was to be rebuilt, that argued some sort of civilization would survive in the northlands. His own survival, however, seemed too problematic at the moment for him to take the long view he usually favored.
'Now that you mention it, yes,' Mavrix answered. 'Perhaps your true image should have a patch over that third eye-and one of the other two, as well.'
'I'd almost welcome such,' Biton snapped, 'if it meant I did not have to see all the hideous things your monsters are working and shall work in this land.'
'They're not my monsters!' Mavrix screeched. 'Are you deaf as well as blind? They're not my monsters! Not! Not! They're hideous and ugly and revolting, and what they do is enough to make anyone with a dram of feeling puke right onto his shoes, thus.' What Mavrix spewed forth had a bouquet richer than that of any wine Gerin had ever knownanother area where gods enjoyed an advantage over men.
Not long before, Mavrix hadn't cared what the monsters were doing in-and to-the northlands. Gerin, though, hadn't blamed the god for them. Now that Biton had blamed him, he resented that more than he enjoyed making Gerin squirm. And if Gerin could bend Mavrix's course, even a little…
'Lord Mavrix, if you despise the monsters so, you could easily show lord Biton they have nothing to do with you by driving them out of the northlands,' he said.
'Be quiet, little man,' Mavrix said absently, and Gerin was quiet, as Rihwin had been before him. He had no choice in the matter. He exchanged a look of despair and alarm with Selatre. It had been worth a try, but not all tried succeeded.
Biton said, 'Ah, lord of the sweet vomitus, so you do claim the creatures for your own.'
'I do not!' Mavrix screamed in a voice that should have knocked Fox Keep flat. 'Here, I shall prove it to you.' He sucked in a theatrically deep breath, puffed out his cheeks, and turned purpler than any man could: Gerin thought of a divine frog with skin the color of wine. After that tremendous effort, the god exhaled hard enough to make Gerin stagger. 'There! They're gone. Look all over the northlands, unseeing one, and you shall find not a single one of the disgusting creatures.'
'Coming from you, drunken fool, any assertion requires proof,' Biton growled. As it had before, his head began to spin independently of his body-or, alternatively, the stone pillar that was his body turned round and round. Suddenly he stopped and stared contemptuously at Mavrix. 'You're as slovenly a workman as I might have guessed. Look there.'
Something glinted for a moment in Mavrix's fathomless eyes. 'Well, so I missed a couple of them. What of it?' He gestured. 'Now they are here no more. Do you see? They are not mine!'
Biton continued his surveillance. His whirling head abruptly halted once more. 'And again! You must in truth be the god of drunkenness, for you're sloppy as a drunkard. Look over yonder now.'
Gerin wondered what sense Biton used to find the monsters, how he indicated to Mavrix where 'over yonder' was, and how Mavrix turned his own senses in that direction, whatever it was. He also wondered just how Mavrix was getting rid of the monsters, and where they were going. Were he a god, he supposed he would know. As a man, he had to go on wondering.
'All right, those are gone, too.' Mavrix stuck out his froggy tongue at Biton again. 'Now do you see any more, lord with the eye in the back of your bum?'
