Frima shuddered and looked away. Koros ignored it completely. Garth gave it a look, then dismissed it as unimportant. It had undoubtedly been a victim of the White Death.
Of course, the presence of an unburied skeleton was a sign that the city was nowhere near recovery. Dûsarra was not wholly dead, since the cult of Aghad still remained alive and active, but any town where the dead were allowed to lie in the streets indefinitely was far from healthy.
They saw more skeletons as they proceeded into the city, but fewer burned buildings; the fire had not spread more than a few blocks to the northwest of the market. Most of the houses and shops were intact, but looked deserted. Some doors stood open; a few had been broken in. Fallen roofing tiles lay in the street here and there, and scraps of rotting cloth could be found in places, as well as scattered bones. There were no people to be seen anywhere; the resulting silence in the center of the city was eerie and unsettling.
Eventually they reached what Frima proclaimed to be the Street of the Fallen Stars and found her father’s little shop. The door was closed and the windows intact, but Garth was not very optimistic about finding anyone alive within. The stone doorstep was dusty; no one had gone in or out recently, he was sure. Besides, they had seen no one alive since leaving the marketplace, and Garth thought it very unlikely that, in this dying, abandoned city, they would find the handful of people they sought still living in their old home as if nothing had happened.
Frima did not bother to think logically about such things. She hurried to dismount and ran eagerly up to the door, ignoring the dust on the stoop and windows. She knocked loudly; no one answered. She tried the latch. It clicked, and the door swung open. She stepped in, Garth right behind her.
The shop’s interior was dim, and dust lay everywhere; human and overman both left clear footprints. To either side stood wooden display racks, from which hung pots, kettles, ladles, and tin vessels of every description. On shelves behind them were arrayed plates and tankards of pewter, copper bowls, and other implements. The tin and pewter were gray and dusty; the copper was dull and beginning to show flecks of green corrosion.
At the back of the shop stood the tinker’s worktable, four feet across and ten feet long, a few tools laid out in a row near one corner, other tools hanging on the wall behind. Scraps of metal lay scattered about.
Sprawled across the center of the table were the bones of a man’s arms, his skull grinning between them, his other bones in a heap on the floor behind the table.
Frima was horrified; she froze, stared, and stifled a scream.
Garth waited, ready to lend any help he could, but his assistance was not needed. The girl closed her eyes and fought down her trembling, forcing herself under control.
The overman decided not to ask if she could be sure it was her father. He was sure that it was; who but the tinker would be found at the tinker’s bench? He saw no point in raising false hopes. Instead, he said, “We should look upstairs.”
Frima nodded, took a few steps toward the curtain that closed off the back of the building from the public part of the shop, and then stopped. “You look,” she said. “I can’t.”
Garth nodded. He had lived long enough among humans to understand how strongly they became attached to their homes, and to realize that Frima could not bear the thought of finding more dead in what should have been her sanctuary. He had no idea how large a family she came from; perhaps she was afraid of finding the remains of her mother or stepmother or siblings.
He moved cautiously through the curtain into the back room, and from there up the narrow staircase to the upper floor. Everywhere lay a thick carpet of dust. Cobwebs adorned the corners of each of the three small beds he found upstairs. A metal bowl on a small bedside table, now dry as the dust, had obviously been left full long ago; the bottom had corroded and sprung a leak, and the table had rotted where the water had dripped.
There were no more bones, no corpses, no sign of any other inhabitants.
When he had satisfied himself that no unpleasant surprises lurked in wardrobes or under the beds, he returned to the shop to find Frima standing over the table, studying her father’s skull.
“Are there any others?” she asked.
“No,” Garth replied.
“Good.”
“Did you have any other family?”
“Two sisters and a brother.”
“Perhaps they escaped, then, and are still alive somewhere.”
“Do you really think so?”
Garth hesitated, then lied. “Yes, of course.”
Frima stared at the skull. “Are you sure this is my father’s?”
“No,” Garth said. “How could I be sure? I never met him, after all.”
“I know, but can’t you tell? I’ve been looking at it, and I can’t be sure. It doesn’t look like him. There’s no hair, no eyes; it could be anybody’s.”
“I know no more than you,” Garth answered. “But who else could it be? Who else would be sitting here at your father’s table?”
Frima shuddered and turned away. “Get it out of here,” she said.
Garth obeyed, gathering up the skull and several bones and carrying them out into the street.
He returned to find Frima huddled in a corner, weeping. Quietly, he gathered up and removed the remaining bones, placing them in a corner out of the wind, where they were unlikely to be disturbed, between the shop and the house beside it.
When he had finished he went upstairs, cleared away the dust and cobwebs from one of the beds, tested it, and found it marginally usable. Then he returned to the shop, led the girl upstairs, and put her in the bed.
She went willingly and quickly fell asleep.
Garth watched over her briefly, then went downstairs again, found a water pump in the back, and filled one of the larger vessels with water for Koros. That taken care of, he settled himself on the floor of the shop and slept.
Outside, Koros stood guard, dozing occasionally, but always alert enough to warn away with a growl any Dûsarrans who ventured near.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Garth was awakened by the roar of a warbeast. Startled, he sprang to his feet and hurried to the door of the shop. There he paused, waiting, the Sword of Bheleu in his hand.
The roar was not repeated; instead, he heard an unfamiliar voice calling his name.
“Garth! Garth of Ordunin! We would speak with you!”
Puzzled, and without opening the door, he bellowed back, “Who are you?”
“I am Uyrim, a priest of Aghad; I have been sent to seek a truce!”
Garth considered that. His immediate suspicion was that it was some kind of trick, an attempt to lure him into a trap, but after further thought he decided that the offer might be genuine. After all, although he had suffered at the hands of the cultists, losing his chief wife and his best human friend, they had suffered worse in return. Perhaps they had had their fill of sending assassins to be fried by the sword; perhaps they did not want to see their temple reduced to ash, as the remnants of Weideth had been.
He lifted the latch and swung the door an inch or so inward, so that conversation would be more convenient, but he did not emerge, nor present any part of his body as a target. “I am listening,” he called.
“Haggat, who set assassins upon you, who had your wife killed, who had the Baron of Skelleth slain, who sent the Council of the Most High against you, is dead, and his killer is the new high priestess of our sect. We wish to start anew. We are willing to forgo our rightful vengeance for the killing of Haggat’s predecessor if you, in turn, will consider your own vengeance accomplished in the deaths you have already brought upon us. You have slain eighteen trained assassins and our fourteen magicians and cost us almost all our magical arsenal. You have destroyed our temple in Ur-Dormulk and eliminated our influence in Skelleth. Leave those of us who yet survive in peace, and we
will, in turn, leave you and yours in peace. Swear that you will accept this offer, and we will swear in return, and you may leave Dûsarra unmolested. Refuse us, and we will strike against you in whatever way we can. We know now that we cannot kill you while you bear the Sword of Bheleu, but we can kill those you care for. For every member of our sect you slay from this moment on, a member of your family in Ordunin will die. Those, O Garth, are our terms.”
“They’re lying,” Frima said close behind him. Garth started; he had been so attentive to the Aghadite’s words that he had not heard her approach. The warbeast’s roar of warning had awakened her as it had the overman, and she had made her way carefully down the stairs in time to hear most of what the priest had said.
“How can you know that?” Garth asked.
“They always lie,” she said.
“They lie when it serves their purposes and tell the truth when that would serve better. Perhaps this is such a time,” Garth said.
“They aren’t going to give up their revenge. Aghad is the god of hatred, remember? And besides,” she added, her expression turning hard and fierce and a hand going to the crudely bandaged wound on her arm, “I’m not going to give up my revenge.”
Garth considered that and quickly agreed that the Aghadites could not be trusted. Still, the offer of peace might be genuine; he had, he knew, cost the cult heavily.
That did not necessarily mean that he should accept the offer. After all, if the cult could thus change direction once, it could do so again, when next its leaders felt they had the upper hand. The fact that they were offering a truce now implied that Garth currently had the advantage—and the essence of tactics was to pursue every advantage. If he were to attack now, he suspected that he could destroy the entire sect; if he accepted their truce and thereby allowed them time to rebuild, they might find some way of attacking him successfully while he was off-guard. Quite aside from his desire for revenge, the cult, by its nature, was a menace not just to himself, but to anyone else who encountered it, for so long as it existed.
By the priest’s own admission, Garth had destroyed the cult’s influence in Skelleth, and he could not believe that they had ever been strong in the Northern Waste—after all, he had seen no Aghadite overmen, save the high priest he had killed in Dûsarra’s market three years before, who had almost certainly been Yprian; and had they not had to lure Kyrith south before they could kill her? Therefore, if he were to wipe them out now, they would be unable to carry out their threat to destroy his family and friends, whereas if he were to wait they might well manage some retaliation.
There was no question in his mind as to whether or not they deserved to die; these people were, by their own boast, dedicated to hatred and treachery. They had butchered Kyrith and Saram. They had insulted and reviled him, attacking him repeatedly. They deserved to perish, and he deserved the pleasure of dispatching them.
The thought of spilling Aghadite blood was warm and comforting; a pleasant reddish glow seemed to suffuse his thoughts. He did not notice the literal, physical existence of that glow, emanating from the gem in the sword’s pommel.
Frima noticed it but, knowing it to be directed against the followers of Aghad, chose not to point it out.
“Who are you, to offer me terms?” Garth called through the crack in the door. “You are a priest of Aghad, you say, and you speak of a high priestess, and of someone named Haggat. I know nothing of any of you. You say that it was the dead Haggat who sought to harm me; why should I believe that? Your cult has acted against me, not as individuals, but on behalf of your god. I do not defy you, or your high priestess, or your dead Haggat, whoever he may have been if he truly existed at all. I defy your god himself. I spit upon your deity. I denounce Aghad as the filth he is. He has defied his brother and superior, Bheleu, god of destruction, and must pay for that affront.” An inspiration came to him, and he called to Koros the command that meant, “Attack!”
The warbeast roared in response. An instant later Garth heard the sound of something being crunched, followed by human screams. He swung the door wide and stepped out, the Sword of Bheleu ready in his hand, glowing white and dripping hissing white flame.
The screaming stopped, and he saw Koros standing in the alley across the street, gnawing on the bloody remains of a red-garbed dead man, while another broken corpse lay sprawled nearby. A sling was draped across one limp hand, and half a dozen darts were scattered in the black dust of the street.
Something moved, and Garth swung the sword, spraying flame, only to find that he had roasted a plump rat, drawn by the scent of blood.
It seemed unlikely that the party sent to negotiate a truce had been only two men; Garth looked warily about for more, but saw none. If there had been others, they had slipped away unseen.
Frima emerged from the shop to stand behind the overman; her father’s sword, taken from its place behind the curtain, was naked in her hand. Here, in her home city, however changed it might be, she was no longer content merely to watch Garth kill her foes for her. She was determined to kill a few herself, and her father’s sword seemed an appropriate weapon. She wished she had thought to bring Saram’s blade; that would have been still more fitting.
She knew, however, that she was no swordswoman, and the sling in the corpse’s hand caught her eye. She picked it up, gathered up the darts, and tucked them into the pouch she wore on her belt in imitation of Garth and defiance of Dûsarran custom.
That done, she looked about and saw no enemies to attack, only the warbeast devouring its prey and the overman standing warily nearby.
“Now what do we do?” she asked.
“We attack,” Garth replied without thinking.
“Attack the temple?”
Garth glanced at her, his red eyes ablaze in the afternoon sun. “Yes,” he said.
“Good,” Frima said. “Let’s go.”
Garth turned, looked about, then reluctantly turned back to the girl and asked, “Which way?” He was almost totally unfamiliar with this part of Dûsarra.
Frima suppressed a giggle at the helplessness of the god-overman who needed to ask directions of a tinker’s daughter. “This way,” she said, pointing.
Garth nodded, signaled Koros to accompany him, and followed as Frima led the way through the maze of the city toward the Street of the Temples and the temple of Aghad.
In a red-draped room beneath the temple, the new high priestess was arguing with some of her congregation who considered her sudden self-proclaimed elevation and subsequent policy to be faulty. The discussion had been going nowhere; Haggat’s former acolyte had an irrefutable claim to her new position by virtue of being the only surviving person who knew all the cult’s secrets, and she was utterly unyielding in her determination to abandon any attempt to kill the troublesome overman.
The objectors were equally adamant in their insistence upon following more traditional rules of succession and in pursuing the cult’s ancient policy of unrelenting vengeance. There was nothing unorthodox in moving up through assassination, and they agreed that Haggat had deserved removal for his bungling, but the post of high priest was not to be taken by a mere acolyte with no grounding in theology. They argued that the high priestess should immediately begin training a proper priest in the inner mysteries of the cult’s workings and return to her own rightful position as first among acolytes—though they were willing to guarantee her accession to the priesthood shortly after that return.
She knew just what such promises from priests of Aghad were worth. After coming into her post as Haggat’s acolyte she had maneuvered for three years to obtain power, and was not about to relinquish it now to please a bunch of doddering traditionalists. She was saying as much, thickly laced with invective, when a messenger arrived, gasping from his long run.
“Your pardon, O priestess, chosen of Aghad, blessed of the darkness, mistress of treachery, but I bear urgent news,” he said.<
br />
“Speak, then,” she commanded.
“Garth refused the offer of truce and sent his warbeast against us. Uyrim and Hezren were slain; the rest of us escaped.”
“Aghad devour you!” the priestess shouted. “Why? What went wrong?”
“I don’t know, O mistress. Uyrim spoke well, I thought, yet the overman refused to parley. He said that his quarrel was not with Haggat, but with Aghad himself.”
“That’s idiocy! It was not Aghad who slew his wife, it was men, men acting on Haggat’s orders. Haggat was a fool, attacking the overman openly; the essence of Aghad’s power is deceit and coercion, not magic or brute force.”
“Yes, mistress,” the messenger agreed; the gathered priests remained silent, but many wore expressions approving the priestess’ words.
“Did Uyrim warn him of reprisals?”
“Yes, mistress.”
“He must know how weak we are in the east, that he does not fear such a threat. We’ll have to show him that we are not so weak as he believes. He has two more wives; I want them brought here as quickly as possible, alive and intact.” She turned to the closest thing the cult still had to a wizard, an apprentice who had been given charge of the few remaining magical devices. “Do we have any means of teleporting them?”
“No, mistress,” the girl replied. “The last were used in Weideth.”
“Oh, gods, may Haggat’s soul be Sai’s plaything forever! Do we know where more such magic may be found?”
“No, mistress—at least, I do not.”
“Then we must do it the hard way and hope that we can hold out until the overwomen are brought here. That could be a month.” The high priestess had a tendency to think out loud, now that she was free of her master. Haggat had been unable to speak, having had his tongue cut out in punishment for killing his own master long ago, before he had joined the cult, and in consequence had been resentful of those who spoke freely around him. His acolyte, who had always been near him, had learned quickly to keep her mouth shut. Since killing him, she had taken much pleasure in being able to speak as often as she wanted and for as long as she chose.
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