Baptiste did not even wait for the first man to die before he chose a second sacrifice. This time it was a woman, plump and pink-cheeked, who looked as though she spent her time weeding her vegetable patch or milking her cow. When Baptiste pointed to her, she went white and them exploded into screaming hysteria. She had to be carried to the gallows, and the foot soldiers had trouble getting her to stand on the stool. Her legs seemed incapable of holding her up. The soldiers were about to dispense with the stool and haul her up bodily when a voice came from the top of the ziggurat.
'Stop this madness!'
A single figure had come out of the bronze doors. Baptiste waved to the men who were still trying to string up the choking, shrieking townswoman. 'Wait. Let her down. This looks like our elusive priest.'
The figure was male. It was hard to estimate his age. A fitted bodysuit, spotlessly white, showed that he had a well-developed muscular body, but his face was lined and venerable. A full head of straight white hair that fell to his shoulders was held in place by a thin gold chaplet. Reave suspected that somewhere back up the line the man must have had a longlife treatment. As he walked up to Baptiste and his henchmen, the contrast was scarcely believable. Beside the dirt and scars and stragglingbeards of the raiders, he was dazzling. A couple of soldiers actually took a step back as he came close.
Menlo leaned close to Reave. 'That's what you call an aura.'
Baptiste waited with his hands on his hips. 'So you're the priest of this wretched little town?'
The man in white regarded him calmly. 'I'm not a priest.'
'So what are you?'
'My name is Anaheim, and I'm a metaphysician.'
Baptiste sneered. 'You'll not metaphysic your way out of this, priest.'
'I've already told you that I'm not a priest.'
Baptiste stabbed an angry finger at the ziggurat. 'And what's that thing? Your house? It's a damned temple. You can't lie your way out of that,'
'The structure is an integral part of my work.'
It did not help that Anaheim was over a foot taller than Baptiste. The chief of the raiders puffed out his chest and did everything but stand on tiptoe to be intimidating.
'You've come face to face with Vlad Baptiste, whatever you are. Men call me the Torch, and I am death to all stinking priests.'
Even with the now-still body already hanging on the gallows, Anaheim did not seem at all afraid of Baptiste. All he did was nod, acknowledging what Baptiste had said.
'I can't say that I'm pleased to meet you, Vlad Baptiste. You must be massively insecure to have the need to create such destruction. I can only tell you again that I am not a priest. If anything, I'm a scientist.'
Baptiste's voice was a snake hiss. 'I also hang scientists.'
Metaphysician Anaheim shook his head. 'No, you can't hang me.'
He was not pleading for his life. It was a simple statement of fact. The silence that followed was eerie. Baptiste clearly could not believe what he was hearing.
'I. . can't hang you? I can do anything I like to you. The only limit to what I can do to you is my own imagination!'
Again Anaheim shook his head. 'All you can do to me is force me to do something now that I was planning to leave until later.'
'And what's that?'
'This.' Metaphysician Anaheim closed his eyes.
Baptiste lost patience. He turned to the Old Metal Monster. 'Hang him! I've had enough of this charade. Hang him slowly, then cut him down and burn him!'
Hard hands reached to seize Anaheim. The metaphysician suddenly crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. At first everyone assumed that he had fainted from fear. Baptiste kicked him hard in the ribs, his boot leaving a dirty mark on the previously spotless white bodysuit. The body moved, but only as though it were dead weight. There was no sign of life.
'Revive him! Wake him up and kill him!'
The Old Metal Monster bent over Anaheim. He put a hand inside the top of the metaphysician's bodysuit. 'He's dead.'
'Dead?'
'A former metaphysician.'
'What did he do? Die of fright?'
The Old Metal Monster straightened up. 'Sure didn't look like it to me.'
It sure did not look like that to Reave, either. He had seen a man die of fright. It had involved choking, shaking, and turning green in the face. This was something totally different. It was as though Anaheim had just vacated his body and was not planning to come back. It was a little like the act of discorporation, except that those who had mastered the technique invariably left their mortal bodies on hold, waiting for their eventual return. Anaheim appeared to have gone for good. Most of those who had witnessed the incident seemed to be thinking the same way as Reave. Later there would be stories of how, in the fraction of a second before he had collapsed, a tiny bright thing had left Anaheim's mouth and flown up into the air. Reave had not seen anything of the sort, and he was convinced that it was simply a decoration of the tale, but the fact that the story was born at all gave strong indication of how the encounter with Anaheim was looked upon by the rank and file.
A black rage descended on Baptiste. He ordered Anaheim's body hung up on the gallows and mutilated. If the metaphysician did decide to return, he would not have much of a physical body to come back to. The Old Metal Monster wanted to know what to do with the woman.
'What woman?'
'The one we were trying to hang before he came out of wherever he was hiding.'
Baptiste made an angry, impatient gesture. 'So hang her. Hang the whole lot of them if you've got a mind to.'
It proved to be a long hot afternoon of smoke, yellow dust, screams, and drunken fighting. In addition to the brewery, the raiders had also smashed their way into what turned out to be the local distillery and discovered over two hundred bottles of a fiercely potent single malt. With whiskey fire in their bellies, the army of Vlad Baptiste became really creative. A group of riders dragged some of the remaining townspeople out to the edge of town, to a spot some fifty yards from the stone wall. One by one the prisoners were turned loose with orders to try to escape over the wall. Then, betting among themselves on how far each one would get before he or she was gunned down, the drunken raiders started blasting away with howls of drunken laughter. Even the promise that anyone who actually made it all the way over the wall would be spared was a cruel deception. The two who did were rounded up again and forced to face some fresh horror.
Baptiste had his large battle tent set up beside the gallows, on the square in front of the ziggurat. He took no part in the slaughter but sat all through the long afternoon in his tent, still and brooding. The strange nondeath of Anaheim seemed to have had a profound effect on him. It probably did not bode well for someone. Those black moods usually ended by escalating into a towering rage and plans for bloodlettings that were bigger and more spectacular than any that had gone before.
The pseudosun went down in a searing, bloodred sunset; Reave did not know if the effect was caused by the smoke from the burning buildings or if the sun was controlled by some kind of human mood sensor. Bodies swayed on the gallows in a brisk evening breeze that had come with the sunset. By the end of the afternoon there was more than one scaffold in the small town, heavy with its strange fruit. Extended multiple rapes were being conducted in the lengthening shadows. Not only boys and young women but even some of the older women were staked out on the ground for the leering lines of riders.
Sunset found Reave walking slowly down the main street, trying to ignore as much of what was going on as possible. He had had enough. There was no doubt in his mind that he had tofind a way out quickly. As he drew near the ziggurat and Baptiste's tent, he wondered how the Torch would react if he once again climbed the steps and took a second, longer, and more searching look at what was inside the stone structure. Such a move might well push their leader over the edge, and Reave could well imagine that he could find himself a candidate for the gallows. On the other hand, there was a streak of curiosity in his personality that would dearly love to go inside the ziggurat and see what Anaheim had been up to. While he was standing and debating with himself, he heard
