distract the overman, to harry him, to do whatever could be done to keep him busy until defenses could be prepared.
With that in mind, Haggat signaled for his advisers and assassins to attend him. Obediently, a dozen red-robed figures clustered around him.
While the Aghadites were gathering about their master, Garth sat astride his warbeast, roaring with anger and swinging the Sword of Bheleu in circles over his head. Streaks of shimmering white fire hung like smoke, emitting waves of intense heat. Thunder rumbled in the distance, drawn by the sword's power.
The human had to be somewhere, Garth told himself. The red mist was merely a transporting spell, nothing more. It did not create people out of thin air, nor snatch them into nothingness. The Aghadite was still alive somewhere, perhaps nearby, perhaps laughing at his escape.
Wherever he was, Garth would find him; he would find him and cut him apart, watch his blood pour out, watch him suffer and die. He promised himself that, ignoring the tiny inner voice that protested this open bloodlust.
Koros had slowed and stopped when its prey vanished; now, at the urging of its rider, it turned back toward the inhabited portion of Skelleth. As it passed by each of the headless corpses, Garth thrust the sword out casually and set both afire with the weapon's supernatural flame.
That done, he rode on, considering his next move.
His first thought was to return to the marketplace and begin searching for the escaped Aghadite there, but that, he decided, would be a mistake. The man was almost certainly hiding somewhere in the ruins, where no stray villagers would wonder at mysterious colored smoke or strange noises. Garth had lived in Skelleth for almost three years and had not seen anyone wearing the distinctive red robes between the time of his giving up the Sword of Bheleu and his finding of Kyrith's body-yet now these three had turned up suddenly. None of the faces was familiar; he could not recollect having seen any of them in other garb. Therefore, he guessed that they had only recently arrived in Skelleth-and since newcomers, other than caravans, were rare enough to excite a great deal of comment, Garth thought he would have heard of them if they were living openly in the inhabited part of the town.
Therefore, he concluded, they had been living in concealment somewhere in the ruins, and it was in the ruins that he must search for the survivor, and any others who might have taken part in Kyrith's murder.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembered the behemoth destroying Ur-Donmulk, but somehow it seemed far less important than dealing immediately with the cult of Aghad.
Besides, he told himself, surely he couldn't object to destroying ruins, and that would keep the sword busy and Bheleu happy.
That thought troubled him somehow; something seemed wrong with it, and perhaps with his other decisions as well. Something appeared to be clouding his thoughts.
The idea refused to come clear, so he dismissed it. He had an enemy to hunt down and destroy; that was what mattered. He turned Koros off the road leading into the market and set out instead into the ring of ruins that encircled Skelleth's inhabited core.
The town had been built as a border fortress, and its houses were constructed mostly of stone as a result, so that they would not burn readily. After three hundred years of neglect, many houses and buildings had lost roofs and floors, and some walls had fallen, but many still stood, making the streets a maze, with some routes blocked by rubble, others still open, and all divided by crumbling buildings.
Garth, armed with the Sword of Bheleu, did not bother to find his way through this labyrinth; instead, he dismounted and marched in a straight line, Koros trailing behind. Whenever he found his way blocked by a standing wall or a pile of debris, he blasted it apart with the Sword of Bheleu-only open pits were sufficient to turn him aside. When he came across those, he would pause and send a wave of flame down into them, to incinerate any Aghadites who might be lurking therein.
The use of the sword's power, he found, came very easily, almost without any thought or effort at all; the god's long restraint had not affected the increase in power that accompanied the establishment of the Fourteenth Age. Garth discovered quickly that all that vast resource was at his command, ready and eager to be applied.
When he had held the sword before, the Age of Bheleu had been just beginning. The god's power had been erratic, sometimes manifesting itself unbidden, other times appearing only after great mental effort. That was no longer the case. Now, Garth had almost infinite energy literally at his fingertips.
He had been cutting a swath through the ruins for an hour or so, enjoying the exhilaration of battering down the empty houses until he had almost forgotten what he was looking for, when a red-clad figure appeared, perched precariously atop a wall off to his right.
Garth did not notice the human's presence at first; he was basking in the delight of shattering a foot-thick stone pillar with a single blow of his sword and therefore did not see whether the man had arrived magically or had simply climbed up the other side of the wall.
'Ho, Garth!' the human called.
Startled, Garth lowered the Sword of Bheleu and turned toward the source of the voice.
'You'll never find us that way!' the Aghadite said.
With a growl, Garth swung the sword about, pointing it toward the human. After an hour of practicing with the sword's power, he had no intention of wasting time in unnecessary pursuit. He had learned better.
'We've got a surprise for you in town,' the man began; then the sword spat flame toward him, blazing across the intervening distance in an instant. Immediately, red mist gathered about him, but Garth listened with satisfaction to the Aghadite's screams as the sword's fire reached him first. The spell would deliver a burned corpse.
It did exactly that; Haggat stared in dismay at the smoldering remains. He had been using up transporting crystals far faster than he liked, and to little effect. He had lost another good agent. He had not expected the overman to react so quickly.
At least, however, Garth was still searching Skelleth and was not on his way to Dыsarra. The cult would have time to devise an effective strategy.
That assumed, of course, that any strategy could be effective against the Sword of Bheleu. Haggat was not sure that was the case. He began to wonder whether the cult might have done better to have forgotten permanently about its vengeance against Garth.
It was too late now, though.
Perhaps the overman would think that he had succeeded in killing all his wife's assassins, as in fact he had, and would abandon his retaliation,
Somehow, though, Haggat doubted that, in light of both Garth's oath to destroy the cult's temple and what awaited him in Skelleth's marketplace. The high priest wondered if committing another atrocity might have been a mistake.
He looked down at the blackened, crumbling heap in the pentagram and hoped very much that Garth would be satisfied by the three cultists he had killed.
Garth was satisfied, but only for a very brief moment, as he thought of the transporting spell dumping a flaming ruin before Aghadites expecting a living man.
That very thought, however, gave him pause. If he had killed the man, who had completed the spell? Somebody had, apparently, because the red smoke had gathered, thickened, and then vanished, taking the burning Aghadite with it. By the time he disappeared, the man was almost certainly already dead.
Had the human set up the spell in advance so that he would not need to complete it, but only to set it in motion? Garth wished he knew more of the exact mechanism involved.
And whether the man had worked the spell himself or not, could Garth be sure that there were not still more Aghadites lurking in Skelleth? He had, as far as he knew, encountered only the three he had slain, but that did not mean that there were no others.
That corpse had gone somewhere, he was certain of that.
Had he killed all those directly involved in his wife's death, the desecration of her corpse, and the murder
