on to the reins of his charger along with those of Menlo and another man while they joined in the house-to-house combing for booty and victims. Reave was beginning to feel sickened. As he wrestled with the lizards, which still had their wattles up and were ready to go, Baptiste's armored car rolled to a stop beside him. The driver, Gord, a squat sociopath with hulking shoulders and a blankly brutal frog face, swung down from the armored car and was pulling on the backtanks of a flamethrower. Soon he would be hosing liquid phosphorus into any building that took his fancy.
Although there were regular outbursts of gunfire, the intent was not an immediate, wholesale massacre of the population. Baptiste liked to have a few prisoners to play with. A makeshift pen was set up on the square, and title townspeople who had been unfortunate enough to have been taken alive were forced to squat on the ground, guarded by a dozen foot soldiers. There were raucous shouts from back down the street. Someone had discovered the town brewery.
Up to that point no raider had attempted to enter the ziggurat. Anything that had a connection to metaphysics was reserved for Baptiste himself. He had an intense and all-encompassing hatred of anything to do with the spiritual, an attitude that Reave considered a little incongruous in a man who was so fascinated by death. Baptiste stepped down from the armored car and stood staring at the ziggurat. Reave had to admit that the guy had style. He was short but compensated for it by constant nervous aggression. He was the classic little dictator, and his stance as he looked at the ziggurat was typical. His boots were planted in the dirt in a manner that indicated to the world that he was ready for anything it cared to throw at him. He looked tough and weather- beaten. His long leather coat was dusty and stained. The perennial goggles had left permanent marks on both sides of his jutting nose. With Napoleonic understatement, his only concession to any kind of battlefield dandyism was the flowing aviator scarf and a collection of small gold trinkets on a chain around his neck. He wore a second short flight jacket under the long coat. His hands were clasped determinedly behind his back, but the solid certainty of the stance was betrayed by fingers that were in constant motion.
Baptiste nodded to himself as though he had made some sort of decision. Looking neither left nor right, he started walking toward the ziggurat. He seemed transfixed. A number of men fell in behind him. Reave decided that he would go, too. He wanted to see the inside of the thing on the square. The lizards had calmed down, and he handed the reins to a foot soldier. With his pistols stuck in his belt, he strode after Baptiste.
Only five men actually mounted the steps to the ziggurat: Baptiste himself; Reave; a horseman called Yar Gracka; the Old Metal Monster, one of the originals in Baptiste's army; and I-shiire, who kept his face veiled in the manner of the Nulites. The remainder of Baptiste's followers hung back. Despite their absolute callousness in most things, the nomad raiders had a certain reserve when confronted by the metaphysical. It was not a matter of belief or even fear. In the Damaged World, belief was wholly relative. Metaphysics was something that most of the army did not understand and thus did not care to mess with. They left it to the fanatics like Baptiste and I-shiire the Nulite or to the inquisitive like Reave and the Old Metal Monster.
The flight of stone steps ran straight and very steep almost a third of the way up the structure. The pseudosun was well into the sky, and the day was getting warm. The Old Metal Monster, who weighed some four hundred pounds, was panting and red-faced, sweating into his steel armor. Reave wondered what they would discover at the end of the climb. One could never tell with religion. The shrine might hold some inexplicable piece of technology or a sacrificial altar crusted with the blood of centuries.
The first thing they found was a set of imposing bronze doors, ten feet high and looking as though they weighed several tons each. They were ornamented with coiling serpents and the double helix symbol enclosed by a seven-pointed star. Baptiste pushed back his goggles and pulled off his gauntlets. Without a word, he handed the gloves to Yar Gracka and placed his bare hands flat on the metal, as though he were trying to sense some kind of vibration. It seemed to Reave that Baptiste's behavior was getting stranger and stranger. After a few moments he flexed his arms as though trying to push the doors open. They refused to yield. The other men joined him, applying their shoulders, but still the doors would not move. Baptiste stepped back. He motioned to I-shiire. The Nulite reached under his burnoose and produced a tiny shaped limpet change. Nulites attached great significance to the act of blowing things up. According to their violently relentless faith, any explosion was a symbol of the Primal Birth. The explosion was not to be, however. Just as I-shiire was placing the charge on the hairline division between the two doors, they made a noise like a deep sigh and slowly swung back.
It was dark inside the ziggurat, and for the first few steps the raiders were quite blind. Reave pulled out his pistols. The other men also had weapons in their hands. Gradually their eyes became accustomed to the gloom. There seemed to be a soft radiance coming from above them. It was the first time Reave could remember seeing Baptiste look hesitant. They were in a large square room. A shaft of sunlight came in behind them, as much of an intruder as they were. As far as Reave could tell, the room was a perfect cube. That was the first problem: The room was too big. There was no way the place could be accommodated by the outside dimensions of the structure. It was a physical impossibility. If anything, it should have come to a point that corresponded with the pyramid peak of the ziggurat.
Yar Gracka scanned the room for any lurking threat, 'Shift-space?'
The Old Metal Monster scowled. 'It's a damned reality twist. I hate religions. They always pull shit like this.'
The second problem was the large stone cube that floated in the exact center of the space with no visible means of support. Baptiste slowly paced around it, gazing up with his hands clasped behind his back. In the half- light he had the face of an angry hawk. Hard, crazy eyes were bright above the curved, jutting nose, and thick sensual lips were curled in an expression of total contempt.
'Is this supposed to impress me? Do they think I'm some ignorant native who can be intimidated by party tricks?'
He seemed to take everything about the ziggurat very personally. Reave noticed, though, that Baptiste refrained from actually walking under the floating block of stone. Instead, he shouted furiously into the echoing space.
'So where are you, priests, or whatever you call yourselves?'
He stood and waited, but there was no response of any kind. He interlaced his fingers and flexed his wrists.
'So, priests, you want to play hide-and-seek, do you? I have a much better idea. I'm going outside, and I'm going to hang what's left of your parish, one at a time, until you decide to show yourselves. How do you like that, priests?' He looked at the Old Metal Monster. 'Build a gallows for me, Monster.'
The Old Metal Monster nodded. His expression was grim, but his small pig eyes gleamed at the prospect of a multiple hanging. 'Right away, chief.'
As he turned to walk back through the bronze doors, the burnished surface of his armor was suddenly alive with dancing flashes of purple energy like a plasma discharge or sudden isolated static. Although the flashes did not appear to be causing him any harm, the Old Metal Monster started frantically to try to brush them off as though they were crawling insects.
'Damn this, I'm getting out of here.'
As he stumbled back into the outside light, the flashes vanished as abruptly as they had appeared. The others gathered around him on the steps outside the door.
'Are you all right?'
The Old Metal Monster nodded uncertainly. He looked plenty shaken. 'I guess so.'
'What was that stuff?'
'Some filthy priest trick?'
Baptiste's eyes were hard. 'You all heard what I said in there, so let's get to it.'
A makeshift gallows was hastily erected, and Baptiste personally looked over the prisoners to select the first victim. He picked a thickset man with graying hair who looked to be some kind of town dignitary. As three foot soldiers dragged him out of the depressed mass of surviving townspeople, the man struggled and shouted, begging to be told what he and the other people had ever done to deserve the treatment they were receiving. No answer was forthcoming, and once they had him standing on the tall four-legged stool with the noose around his neck, he seemed to go limp, as though he had resigned himself to death. Baptiste walked forward and, without a word, kicked away the stool. The man dropped less than two feet, and the rope failed to break his neck. He hung twisting and choking with his feet barely inches off the ground. His face slowly turned blue, and a distended tongue protruded from lips that had puffed up to a dark purple.
