She turned back to the messenger. “Does the overman still have the Baroness of Skelleth with him?”
“Yes, mistress.”
“He treats her well?”
“Uh ... I am not certain, mistress.”
“He seems to care for her, doesn’t he? And she’s not protected by the magic sword. And the strange old man is no longer with them to protect her. We’ll have to make use of what we have. She won’t be as good a hostage as Garth’s wives would be, but she may serve, at least for a time.” She paused and was about to speak again when another messenger entered the room and prostrated himself before her.
“Your pardon, O priestess, chosen of Aghad...” he began.
“Speak, messenger,” she ordered impatiently.
“The overman is on his way to the temple, with his sword blazing and the warbeast beside him.”
“You’re certain?”
“Oh, yes, mistress.”
“P’hul!” the high priestess spat. “Tell everyone. We can’t face him yet.”
“What?” one of the older priests protested. “You can’t mean to abandon the temple?”
“You are free to stay here and die if you choose, Sherrend, but I, and anyone else with any wits, will be hiding in the tunnels. Nothing can stand against that sword of his. I saw in the scrying glass what it did, and our surviving scouts have told all of you. You heard what it did to our temple in Ur-Dormulk. Only a fool would stay here to face it.” She ignored the priest’s sputtering objections as she climbed down from her cathedra and announced, “Gather everything of value and make sure everyone is armed; we leave immediately. And I still want people sent after those overwomen, and after that woman he has with him.”
The messengers and the wizard’s apprentice bowed obediently; the priests squabbled among themselves, some bowing and hastening to obey, others staying to voice protests that the priestess ignored.
Even the stodgiest, however, had some sense of self-preservation, and within minutes the room was empty as the Aghadites prepared to evacuate their stronghold.
Garth was completely unaware of this activity. He reached the Street of the Temples as the sun was sinking behind the western mountains, washing the shrines in shadow. The topmost edge of the silvery gate of Aghad’s fane caught a stray beam and glinted brightly as the overman drew near.
Garth smiled, and the Sword of Bheleu blazed up whitely, chasing away the shadows and drenching the metal gate in its own sickly glow.
The valves of the gate were worked into ten-foot-high runes, two to each panel, spelling out AGHAD; the top of the GH rune was still dented where Garth had struck at it three years before. The walls of the temple were built of blocks of stone, each block carved into those same four runes, a myriad reminders of his enemy’s name.
When last he had been here, he reminded himself, he had been unable to deal with the trickery of the Aghadites. His sword had broken against these gates. Now, though, he carried the Sword of Bheleu. He swung the blade up and brought it crashing down against the top of the gleaming metal valves.
The blade sheared through the metal as if it were paper; it could just as easily, Garth knew, have exploded the gates into shards. That was not what he wanted; he wanted to destroy this place slowly, at his leisure, and enjoy each step of the process.
He slashed again, cutting away a triangular slice of the second A rune. Another blow removed the top of the GH, and another cut apart the D.
Half a dozen blows reduced the gleaming gates to scrap, and Garth stepped through into the courtyard beyond, leaving Koros and Frima waiting in the street.
The colonnade that ran around three sides of the court was dark, the torches mounted on its columns unlit; the fading sunlight did not penetrate its gloom. The fountain in the courtyard’s center gurgled, but Garth could not see the spray; it was hidden behind a barrier of rotting severed heads, stacked up like bricks around the fountain’s rim, five deep. None were of recent origin, that was obvious; the bottommost tier was comprised mostly of almost-bare skulls, and those in the top rows were sufficiently decayed for the worst of the stink to have passed.
Although the majority were human, of both sexes, the skull that faced him most directly on the lowest level was that of an overman.
Revolted, Garth swung the sword up and sent a bolt of crimson flame at the grisly pile. The heads scorched, blackened, and crumbled to ash, revealing the bubbling spout of the fountain.
When Garth had first visited this place the fountain had pumped clear, clean water, liberally laced with poison; now, the fluid that pumped forth was thick and red. He did not care to investigate further, but simply reinforced the sword’s power and reduced the stone and metal of the fountain to powder, boiling away whatever liquid it had held.
He paused and considered his next step. It occurred to him that no one had, as yet, opposed him; no voice had addressed him from the shadows. In fact, there was no sign that anyone was in the temple at all. That worried him; was it possible that the Aghadites had seen him coming and had fled, giving up their sanctuary?
Wasting no more time, he began blasting away at the temple itself, slicing the columns that supported its porches, breaking down the walls beyond. Masonry fell roaring, and the temple crumbled about him. He marched forward into the rubble, continuing to blast at the walls that still stood.
In the street that fronted the shrine, Koros and Frima waited, alert for an attack. Frima was eager to spot and kill any Aghadite who might flee from the destruction; Koros, as always, was not concerned with the reasons for its master’s orders, but was ready to obey them and slaughter anyone who came near.
No one came. Walls tottered and fell, sections of roof caved in spectacularly, stones shattered, but no one emerged from the temple of Aghad.
Garth’s rage grew steadily as he broke into chamber after chamber without finding a living foe. Clouds gathered in the sky above him, lightning flashed, and the earth shook beneath his feet, breaking open the extensive temple basements.
He continued to wreak destruction, working his way down beneath street level into the catacombs under the shrine. He found corpses, some of them fresh, some ancient, but none wearing the dark red robes of the cult, none that were still warm. He found animals—bats, serpents, great cats, and others—and slew them, but he found no humans. He saw machinery and smashed it, but saw no one operating it.
At last, as he had done in Ur-Dormulk, he found himself standing in a great pit where the temple had been, a pit that was as empty and lifeless as the one in Ur-Dormulk. His foes had escaped him. He had destroyed their stronghold, but they had escaped.
He bellowed with rage, the sword swinging in circles above his head; thunder rumbled, and lightning flickered through the clouds, as if reflecting the streak of fire the blade left hanging in the air.
He lashed out in frustration, blackening the smoking rubble and cutting a groove in the stone that surrounded him. The ground trembled below him.
A pile of debris tumbled aside, revealing an opening into the black, volcanic bedrock; the flame from the sword sliced through a stone slab, uncovering another. Alerted, Garth hacked away at the walls of the pit and found several such openings, thirteen in all, ranging from broad passageways skillfully concealed behind camouflaged stone doors to narrow crawlways, too small for an overman to enter, that had been hidden by the heaped rubble.
Here, then, were the means by which his enemies had fled. He could pursue them, overtake them, destroy them; he needed only to learn which of the passages they had taken.
He growled in frustration; there was no way he could know which routes they had chosen. He pointed the sword at the nearest and sent a gout of flame into it, illuminating the dark stone with an orange glare, but he could see no sign that would tell him whether the tunnel had been used or not. No dust lay on its floor; no footprints showed.
Enrag
ed, he sent the flame winding on into the depths, out of his own sight, a writhing serpent of living fire.
A moment later he heard an immense explosion, and shards of stone and wood spattered across the rubble from somewhere well beyond the edge of the pit, hidden from his view. Gobbets of flame flickered across the night sky, and he knew that his fiery messenger had reached the end of the tunnel.
He also knew that it had not found any Aghadites.
“Garth?” Frima’s voice called from the edge of the pit, at the spot where the silvery gates had once stood.
He growled a wordless response.
“What happened? A house up the street burst apart; did you do that?”
“Yes,” he said. He struggled to think, to plan; the raging fury in his head made it difficult to do so. “Did you see anyone leave that house?” he called.
“I don’t know; I might have,” Frima answered. “There were some people on the street just after we got here.”
Garth growled. “Those were Aghadites,” he said. “I’m sure of it. They had a dozen escape routes here. They could be anywhere in the city by now.” He realized, as he spoke, that they might even have left the city. A party might well be on its way to Ordunin, to carry out the god’s vengeance against Garth’s family. Quite aside from his desire for revenge, the cultists were an ongoing threat to innocent people everywhere, and Garth was more determined than ever to destroy them all.
“Oh,” Frima said.
“We will hunt them down, wherever they hide,” the overman said as he turned the sword’s flame against one side of the pit to carve himself a way out.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The logical place for someone to hide, Garth and Frima agreed, would be in one of the temples. Each one had its secret entrances and hidden chambers, or so the legends said, and each was suitable for fortification.
They resolved to explore the nearest first; that was the temple of Sai, goddess of pain, Aghad’s twin sister.
Garth blasted open the spike-steel gate with the Sword of Bheleu and, remembering what had happened to his boots when last he had entered this shrine, he melted smooth the jagged, broken obsidian courtyard. That done, he marched on into the temple, Frima at his heels, Koros waiting outside.
They found no one in the sanctuary. Garth was ready to give up and go, but Frima, recalling her own uncompleted sacrifice, pointed out the secret doorway through which she had been brought up from the vaults below.
Garth agreed that the vaults were worth exploring—a decision he found himself regretting a few hours later, when an extensive search had turned up no Aghadites, but an impressive array of dungeons and torture devices, as well as a handful of half-starved, desperate worshippers of Sai who had taken shelter there when the plague began, three years earlier. Despite a surge of bloodlust, Garth did not kill these people, but instead drove them out into the streets. They promptly headed toward the market, obviously intent on leaving the city.
By the time he and Frima had investigated all the corridors and rooms beneath the temple of Sai and radiating out from it under the surrounding buildings, it was almost dawn, and Garth was tired. He had used up a great deal of the sword’s energy in blasting the temple of Aghad, and the expenditure was telling upon him.
Neither Garth nor Frima saw any point in returning to Frima’s old home; instead, they broke in the door of a convenient house and made themselves comfortable there. Frima found a store of preserves in the kitchen, and dried salt beef that had not yet spoiled; the wine cupboard included several bottles that had not yet turned to vinegar, though Garth was not impressed with any that he sampled.
At last, when they had both eaten their fill, the girl and the overman found beds and went to sleep.
Garth did not sleep very well; the bed was far too small for him. Around noon he gave up and moved to the floor, which served him better.
He awoke again well after dark to find Frima hacking off strips of beef for their breakfast.
They debated what should be done next. Garth suggested the temple of P’hul as their next target; Frima objected that no Aghadite would venture into that disease-ridden pesthole. That, after all, was where the White Death had come from in the first place.
Garth had to concede the truth of her argument.
He then considered the temple of Bheleu, but dismissed that immediately; it was a ruin, with no roof and an earthen floor. Where could anyone hide in there?
The last temple on the Street of the Temples was the temple of Death. That, Frima insisted, would be the very surest place. Any Dûsarran would consider himself safe from pursuit there, as no one would dare to enter it looking for him.
Garth doubted this hypothesis. Would not the Aghadites, he asked, be at least as frightened by The God Whose Name Is Not Spoken as by their pursuers? After all, the cultists knew that Garth had entered the temple once before and emerged alive, the first person not a devotee of the Final God to do so.
Frima agreed with this reasoning finally. That left the two temples located in other parts of the city—those dedicated to Tema and to Andhur Regvos. Accordingly, the little party headed for the temple of Andhur Regvos, god of darkness.
Here Garth did not waste time in exploring every nook and cranny; instead, he simply used the Sword of Bheleu to blast the domed pyramid into rubble, as he had done to the temple of Aghad.
As with the temple of Aghad, however, he found no trace of any Aghadites in the wreckage. The sanctuary held the desiccated remains of a dozen people, all dead for quite some time; Garth guessed them to be the blind priests of the god, slain by the plague three years before. Nowhere else in the maze of chambers and tunnels did he find anything that might have been alive recently.
That left the temple of Tema. Garth proposed to treat it much as he had the shrines of Aghad and Andhur Regvos, but Frima protested violently. After some argument, the overman gave in. The followers of Tema had not done him any real harm, unlike the Aghadites.
He did not like the delay, which would allow the surviving Aghadites that much more time to devise new schemes and for their emissaries to travel toward Ordunin, but he decided that he could live with it.
It was well after midnight when he and Koros, with Frima on the warbeast’s back, reached the steps leading to the temple’s entrance. He helped the girl off the beast and then led the way to the door, up between the serpent-carved balustrades.
To his surprise, the door swung open as he approached.
He entered the antechamber and stopped. Frima proceeded on past him toward the concealed inner door, but before she reached it, a voice said, “Please wait, girl.”
Startled, Frima stopped.
A blue-robed, white-haired priest emerged from the darkness into the sword’s light, blinking in the vivid glare. “Your pardon, but we have grown cautious in these unhappy days. We cannot admit you to the sanctuary until you give an account of yourselves, and swear that you do not carry the White Death.”
“We do not carry the plague,” Garth said, “and I will swear that however you like. We have come seeking the Aghadites who fled the destruction of their temple.”
“There are no Aghadites here,” the priest said patiently. “This is the temple of Tema, goddess of night.”
“You will forgive me if I insist upon investigating for myself,” Garth replied.
The priest hesitated, and the overman held up the glowing sword; it dripped streamers of white flame. “You will, I think, see that I have the means of enforcing my wishes. I intend to search this temple without delay, and if you or anyone else should oppose me, I am afraid that I will feel it necessary not only to kill you, but also to destroy this entire building, lest my enemies escape me.”
The priest stepped back and said reluctantly, “As you wish.” The inner door swung open, and Garth stepped through it into the great domed sanctuary.
This chamber was the first place he had seen since returning to Dûsarra that could be called crowded; fifty or sixty ragged people had made themselves at home here, sleeping or sitting on beds made of bunched rags, each with a few meager possessions clustered about. Many of them glanced up at the new arrivals, then stared at the strange, fiery sword the overman carried.
Garth looked at the motley collection of humans and demanded, “How long have these people been here? Did any arrive within the last two days?”
The priest at Garth’s elbow shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “You are the first newcomers in half a year.”
The overman swung the sword around and held it at the man’s throat. “Will you swear to that, by your goddess and all the other gods?”
“Oh, yes, my lord,” the man said, not nodding for fear of cutting or burning his throat on the sword’s point if he moved his head. “I swear it, by Tema and by all the gods! These people have been here for months.”
Garth decided that he could trust the human. He lowered the sword, ignoring Frima’s loud protests regarding his treatment of a holy man.
Again he looked over the great hall, noticing that in the sword’s light the stone idol was rather less impressive than he recalled. It stood against the far side of the chamber, the goddess’ cloak stretching up to cover most of the dome. It was still a fine piece of sculpture, beautiful and comforting, but he could see the marks of the carvers upon it, which he had not seen in the dark; its ethereal quality was gone.
He spotted dark stains on the wall near the door, but did not inquire after their origin. He was afraid that they might be from his own previous visit, when he had killed a priest very near to the spot where he now stood.
Escorted by the priest, with Frima trailing along behind, Garth made his way around the room, investigating every place that looked as if it might conceal a doorway or niche. From the sanctuary he moved on into the vestry, and from there to the refectory and the dormitory, and finally into the crypts below.
The Book of Silence Page 32