“I am a Rapa.” The surprise was genuine.
“It makes no difference to her. You’re a man, aren’t you?”
The Rapa courts of women are notorious. I had once gone chasing madly through Zenicce at the mere threat. The guards changed their positions casually, leaning on their spears. I watched them through the wooden bars. The Khibil was likely to be the most dangerous. When he moved in, half-interested in what was being said about the amatory adventures of the Princess of Vallia, his alert fox-like face bright with all the intelligence of his race, I fancied my time had come.
With a surging shoulder charge I burst through the wooden bars, shattering three of them in a welter of flying splinters. The hands and arms they thought so securely bound whipped up from behind my back and two throats clamped into my grasp. Two savage shakes, and then two clouting blows, and the four guards lay stretched senseless upon the packed-dirt floor. The Rapa, the Fristle, the Khibil and the apim slumbered. I had killed not a one of them.
The cramphs had not fed me, and I found a crust and an onion in a scrip and wolfed them down. I took a clanxer, a dagger and a spear, and set off.
The dawn would soon be here in a washing radiance of jade and ruby light — and with the dawn, Dayra.
Pretty soon the hunt was up. But I sat tight in a space under the roof of the house where the conspirators met, and I, Dray Prescot, chuckled as they searched for me in vain.
Again it was a question of waiting. But to this house they would come to plan the final schemes, and to this house would come my daughter Dayra, to be duped and betrayed by them. I was wrong. Wrong — completely wrong.
The day wore on. The heat began to build up in that tiny cramped space under the roof. And the house below me remained ominously still and silent. Outside, the sounds of many people moving convinced me the time for the ceremony grew near.
What form that ceremony would take I had no idea. This dark wizard of the trylon’s, this San Uzhiro, would officiate. After all the mumbo jumbo, the poor swods of the army and the irregulars would believe they were invincible. This is a trick that has been tried on armies before, and, oft-times, it boomerangs. So I sweated and waited and then, as the murs ran away through the glass eye of time, I jerked up as though in that confined stinking sweaty-hot place someone had flung a bucket of ice water over me. Fool!
Of course — the house was empty. Dayra was flying in to attend the ceremony. That was where I would find her — not here.
Chagrined at my own stupidity — more than chagrined — raging with a vicious intemperate self-scorn, I swung down from the roof and dropped into the street The town was practically deserted. Everyone had gone to mass in the wide space surrounding the temple. In that temple, that blasphemous Temple of Hockwafernes, that was where I should be.
A passing Och halted as I called to him. His six limbs trembled under the weight of a sack, and he wore the gray breechclout.
“What time does the ceremony begin, slave?”
“Master — a bur after mid-”
I jerked a thumb and he staggered off. My face must have scared him clean through. Time, then, for an errand. .
That errand took me over the town wall contemptuous of the guards. One saw me and shouted, and I bellowed back a rigmarole about a message for Jiktar Haslam, and blast your eyes, you rast, and so ran fleetly across the dirt toward the leather tents. The quietness everywhere lay a strangeness over the camp. Not all the army by any means had been invited to attend the ceremony, even to stand outside the temple, for that would have been an impossibility given the numbers; but enough had gone to leave the rest feeling lackluster and out of it. They would partake of the good news to be bought by occult means, and so did not complain more than soldiers ordinarily do. Which is to say they grumbled and cursed most fearsomely.
Nalgre and Dolan were not at their tent. The camp slave cringed back as I ripped out my gear. It was all there. I strapped on my weapons. I did not have a rapier and main gauche; all the rest I had and intended to use if need be. Then I hared off back to the town, having to dodge down a side avenue of tents as a search party ran past, no doubt alerted by the sentry on the walls I had shouted at. Gigantic gong notes began to reverberate from the temple.
I had to hurry.
The cape I swathed about myself attracted no attention, being similar to a thousand worn by the swods, and the cased bowstave easily passed for a spear. The crowds outside the temple moved like a cornfield in the breeze. The suns shone. A wind blew the dust. The noise susurrated like waves on pebbles. I pushed through, gently, gradually working my way toward the front. If this Opaz-forsaken temple was like most there would be a side way in. It would be guarded, of course. There was a small side door, and there was a guard.
The door opened easily enough after the guard lay scattered about, and the door slammed harshly in the faces of the shocked men who had witnessed the fury of sudden destruction that had fallen on the guard detail.
As I sprang four at a time up the spiral tower steps it occurred to me, wryly, that all my careful planning might as well have never taken place. So much for the good San Blarnoi. The stairs led onto a balcony and I peered between carved stones onto the scene below. This was not planned at all.
The vibrant gong strokes rang still in the air. But the gong hung silent. Men moved below on the dais, men in garish costumes. I checked them all, swiftly, judging them to be priests or sorcerers engaged about their diabolical pastime, and raked my eyes over the gathered mass of people. Where was Dayra?
Then, the destructive thought hit me, would I, could I, recognize her? A girl I’d never seen? Born when I was four hundred light years away from Kregen? I cursed the Star Lords then, and went on looking intently at the gathered people.
The temple was, truly, a marvel of architecture. The people filled it tightly, so that not a speck of floor was visible. The dais stood high at the center, and incense rose, stinking. Grotesque carvings entwined obscene forms. A crystal ovoid lifted at the center of the dais, draped in black and purple hangings, with golden tassels. Bells were ringing now, bells twirling and clanging in the hands of girls, half naked, dancing and twirling around the catafalque.
Like Bacchantes, with swirling hair and naked rosy limbs they danced and pranced, gyrating, ringing their bells, arousing everyone to a feverish anticipation.
Trylon Udo stepped forward. His costume was a sumptuous blaze of jewels. He lifted his arms high into the air and the bells ceased their clanging and the nymphs ceased their gyrations, although as they stood they swayed rhythmically like fronds of seaweed.
He began to speak in a high chanting voice.
Someone would be doing something about the guard detail now; the locked door would be forced, more guards would pile up the spiral stairs. Other guards would block all the exits. I moved around the high balcony, and found half a dozen more sentries who died quickly and cleanly. Now I could see down onto the catafalque more clearly. Beside the trylon stood the Hawkwa necromancer, San Uzhiro. Clad all in purple with golden tassels, he presented a grave, chilling picture of absolute dedication to the occult forces beyond the bounds of normal human knowledge.
Udo’s words formed merely the prelude, in which he promised much and, chiefly, that his army would be invincible.
Then San Uzhiro stepped forward upon the dais below the catafalque. With shocked gasps of surprise from the congregation, abrupt and brilliant bursts of flame and colored smoke shot up from the crystal ovoid. It glowed with an uncanny inner light, like torches seen through rain-spattered windows.
“Behold!” thundered Uzhiro. Every word rang and vaulted in echoing clarity around the wide temple.
“Behold the corpse of San Guiskwain! San Guiskwain the Witherer, San Guiskwain na Stackwamor. Behold and marvel. Behold and tremble.”
The people trembled in all truth. This Guiskwain, a most highly remarked sorcerer of Vallia, had lived and died no man knew how long ago, but it was certainly more than two and a half thousand seasons. And here he was, perfectly preserved in his crystal ovoid, his form and features showing clear and clearer as the lights spurted up. Here was sorcery at its most dire.
