A couple of temple guards came up to take charge of the wagon and the chariot in which Gerin and his companions had approached the shrine of the farseeing god. Lamissio led Gerin and Selatre, Van and Duren, and Geroge and Tharma inside the gleaming white wall delimiting the temple precinct.
No hideous blight fell on the two monsters. Gerin breathed a silent sigh of relief at that. Selatre breathed something, too: “All the same. It’s all the same.” Unlike Gerin ana Van, she had no memory of its ever being different.
Like them, and like Duren, too, she had seen the treasures displayed outside the temple. Past a glance to make sure they were the same, too, she concentrated on the business at hand. To Geroge and Tharma, though, the statues of painted marble and of gold and ivory, the bronze pots on golden tripods, the stacked ingots of gold, were all new and marvelous.
“Pretty,” Tharma said in a voice halfway between a growl and a croon. For the first time, a couple of the temple guards smiled at her.
Having talked Lamissio into letting the monsters into the temple precinct, Gerin hoped for further success. “The sooner we can go down under the shrine, the sooner well be able to start driving the Gradi and their gods out of the northlands,” he said, a sentence with enough unexamined assumptions in it to give a Sithonian logician a bad case of dyspepsia.
It made Lamissio dyspeptic, too. “This cannot be,” he declared. “I said as much before; were you not listening? We do not allow visitors below the shrine, save on their journey to the Sibyl, and we most of all do not allow the wards holding the monsters at bay to be tampered with, lest those monsters flood out into the world at large, as they did a decade ago.”
“Aye, that’s a risk,” Van rumbled, “but the cursed Gradi are already loose in the world at large. They may not have sharp teeth like Geroge and Tharma here, but I don’t want ’em for neighbors.”
“I know nothing of the Gradi, and care to learn nothing,” the priest replied. “I know the monsters required Biton’s personal intervention to be bundled back into their caves once more. And I know the destruction they worked here and in the town and all through this valley, and I will not see its like repeated.” As far as he was concerned, the temple, the town of Ikos, and the valley in which they lay might have been the whole world. If they stayed safe, he cared nothing for what happened in the rest of the northlands.
Duren saw that as plainly as Gerin. “Think past the valley!” he told Lamissio. A glance at the eunuch’s face told Gerin the plea was in vain. Lamissio’s mental horizon had no stretch in it.
What to do, then? The Fox couldn’t take Lamissio aside and try to bribe him into cooperation, though he had planned to do just that. The temple guardsmen were obviously as leery as the priest about loosing the monsters once more. And, for all Gerin knew, their fear was liable to be justified. He was far from sure of his own course, despite Barkers’ urging. All he knew for certain was that, so long as he could find a blow to strike against the Gradi and Voldar, he would try with everything in him to strike it, and would worry later about what came afterwards.
But he could not storm the temple, not if Biton did not care to permit it. If Lamissio remained inflexible, he was thwarted. And Lamissio could have been no more inflexible had he been carved from basalt like Biton’s ancient image in the temple.
Dejected, the Fox turned to go, to try to figure out what other ploys he could find against the Gradi. “Wait,” Selatre said suddenly, in a voice not quite her own. Gerin turned toward her. Her eyes were wide and staring, and looked straight through him. When she spoke again, it was in the powerful baritone Gerin had heard before, the voice Biton used in speaking through his Sibyls:
“Let the travelers go below
That they may learn what powers show.
The land is wide, the powers deep—
Shall they now a bargain keep?
Through Sibyl past I speak out now
To say to learn this I allow.”
X
When the god abandoned possession of Selatre, she staggered as if stunned. Gerin put an arm around her, steadying her and keeping her from falling. She looked around in surprise. “Did I say something?” she asked “What did I say?”
“That was the farseeing god,” one of the temple guardsmen said, his voice clotted with awe. “No one else—the lord Biton.”
“Biton?” Selatre’s eyes opened very wide. “Did the lord Biton speak through me?” She seemed to be taking mental stock. “It might be so. I feel the way I did when—after—” She stopped in confusion. “But he couldn’t have.”
“He did,” Gerin said. He let his hand tighten for a moment. “We all heard it.” His companions and the guards nodded. He repeated the verses that had come from her mouth, adding, “Not much doubt about what they mean, either.”
He was looking straight at Lamissio. Of all those present when the mantic fit hit Selatre, only Biton’s priest doubted it was genuine. “How could the farseeing god speak through a vessel he himself discarded?” Lamissio said. “How could he speak through a woman not a maiden?”
But the guard who had first acknowledged that Biton was speaking through Selatre answered. “Gods make rules, and gods break rules, too. That’s what makes them gods. And the prince of the north has the right of it here, too. No way to mistake the meaning of the oracular response.”
Not all the response was clear. Gerin saw that, even if no one else did. Biton had given him leave to go down under the shrine and bargain with whatever powers were associated with the monsters. He had not said those powers would keep any bargain once made.
Van took a step toward Lamissio, plainly intending to force his cooperation if he could get it no other way. Gerin started to step away from Selatre to block the outlander. Before he could, Duren did. Their eyes met for a moment. The Fox knew he and his son were seeing the same thing: that if even the guardsmen recognized that Biton had, rules or no rules, filled Selatre for a moment, the priest could not help but give way.
And so it proved. Muttering something ungracious under his breath, Lamissio said, “Very well, it shall be as you say—and pray the farseeing god will permit no disasters to spring from it” Then his dour front tottered and collapsed, as the temple behind him had during the earthquake a decade before. “The god has expanded my notion of the possible,” he murmured, which struck Gerin as far from the worst way to phrase it.
Van had let Duren hold him away from Lamissio, but he hadn’t been happy about it. Now he growled, “You expand my notion of time wasting. Take us down there, and quit dawdling about it.”
“It shall be as you say,” Lamissio answered. “In the face of the words of the god I serve, how could it be otherwise? But there shall be one more brief delay.” Van growled again, this time dangerously. Lamissio held up a plump hand. “The Sibyl has already taken her place in the chamber below the shrine. I shall send one of my colleagues down there to bring her forth. Should the worst befall and the monsters break loose once more, would you have her trapped in that chamber, with them between her and safety?”
That left Van with nothing to say. His gesture might have meant, Get on with it. The priest went into the shrine. Gerin, meanwhile, turned to the temple guardsmen. “You’d better be ready at the mouth of the underground opening. If we don’t come up and the monsters do, your best bet is to try to hold them below ground. If they spread over the land again—” He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on.
Time seemed to crawl by very slowly. How long did a priest need to go down to the Sibyl and come back with her? At last, after what seemed much too long a time, a eunuch came out with the maid who have given Gerin and Duren the oracular response earlier in the year.
She and Selatre stared at each other. Gerin saw the shock of recognition run through both of them as each knew the other for what she was. The Sibyl nodded to Selatre, then let the eunuch lead her away. Lamissio came out of Biton’s shrine and beckoned the Fox and his companions forward.
As she walked up to the temple, Sel
atre said, more to herself than to anyone else, “I never dreamt I would come here. And oh!—I never dreamt the god would speak to me, speak through me, again. Amazing.” Her face glowed, as if a lamp had been lighted inside her.
Walking along with her, Gerin quietly worried. She had forsaken the god for him, but now that Biton had returned to her, would she still care about the merely human? The only way to find out was to wait and see. That would not be easy. Any other choice, though, looked worse.
Geroge and Tharma exclaimed in wonder at the magnificent ornamentation within Biton’s shrine. Lamissio stood waiting near the black basalt cult statue with the jutting phallus, and near the rift in the ground through which supplicants descended to the Sibyl’s cave—or, as now, to a journey and a fate apt to be blacker than any found there.
“I think our usual rituals no longer apply,” the eunuch priest said. “We are not going into the depths of the earth to see the Sibyl, nor even to treat with the farseeing god in any way. All we can pray for now is our own safety.”
“You don’t have to come with us, Lamissio,” Gerin said. “You’re liable to be safer if you don’t, in fact.”
But the priest shook his head. “I am in my place. The god has permitted this. I leave my fate with him.”
Gerin bowed, honoring his courage. “Come, then,” he said.
As he strode toward the rift in the ground opening onto the hidden ways that ran deep underground, he glanced at the cult statue of Biton. For a moment, the eyes scratched into the living rock came alive: the god, he thought, was looking out at him. Then, as they had before on other visits to the shrine, Biton’s eyes faded back into the hard, black stone.
Or they faced into the stone for him, at any rate. Selatre murmured, “Thank you, farseeing one,” as she drew near the image, and seemed to speak more intimately than she would have to basalt alone.
Lamissio picked up a torch and lighted it at one of those near the entrance to the caves. Then, long robe flapping about his ankles, he walked down the stone steps that led into the cavern. Gerin took a deep breath and followed.
Sunlight vanished quickly, at the first turn of the path. After that, the torch Lamissio carried and those stuck in sconces set into the wall gave the only light. Geroge and Tharma whooped with glee at the way their shadows swooped and fluttered in the moving, flickering light.
“Keep an eye on them,” Van muttered to Gerin.
“I am,” the Fox answered, also under his breath. Caves and the underground were the monsters’ native haunts, or at least the haunts of their kind. If their blood called to them, this was where they were liable to revert to the bloodthirsty ways of which the aboveground world had seen all too much eleven years before. For now, they showed no sign of any such reversion, only fascination with a place whose like they’d never seen.
Some passages in the tunnel that led to the Sibyl’s cave were walled off because they held more treasures than Biton’s priests displayed outside the shrine. Some were walled off because they held the monsters at bay. Magical wards set before them reinforced brick and mortar.
One of those walls was made of bricks in the shape of loaves of bread, a marker of very ancient brickwork indeed. Actually, the Fox reminded himself, the wall was no older than any other part of the shrine and underground caverns, having been restored by Biton after the earthquake. But, so far as he could tell, the farseeing god’s restoration had been as perfect here as elsewhere, so the wall might as well have been—in effect, was—as ancient as it looked.
“Wait,” he called to Lamissio, who had gone a few steps down toward the Sibyl’s chamber. His voice echoed oddly along the winding corridor. The priest came back. The torch he carried gave the only light, as those in the brackets ahead of the wall and beyond it had burned out. With a deep breath like the one he had drawn when he entered the caverns, Gerin said, “I think this is the place.”
“Very well: this is the place,” Lamissio said. His round, pale face was far and away the brightest thing visible. ‘What now?”
“I don’t quite know,” Gerin answered. Some of the magical wards lay on the stone floor in front of the wall. Others hung from cords or lengths of sinew set into the rock above it. Methodically, the Fox kicked away the ones on the floor and knocked down those hanging in front of the wall.
The wall itself remained, solid and strong despite the oddly shaped bricks. “What now?” Van asked, as Lamissio had. He hefted his spear. The bronze-shod butt would make a fair prybar, but was not really the right tool with which to go knocking down a wall. “Shall we shout up to the guardsmen for some picks?”
“I don’t know,” Gerin said again.
“I, don’t think we’ll need to do that,” Selatre said in a small, strained voice.
Lamissio gasped. The torchlight showed his face even paler than it had been. All at once, Gerin realized they would not have to break down the wall. What waited on the other side knew the wards were down, and was coming to see what had happened, and what it could make of what had happened.
The torch Lamissio held flared and then went out, plunging the corridor into perfect darkness.
Because he was effectively blinded, Gerin was never sure afterwards how much of what followed took place down below Biton’s shrine and how much in the peculiar space the gods could travel but mortals most often could not. Wherever the place was, it didn’t strike him as pleasant.
He felt himself weighed, measured, tested in the silent black. After what might have been a moment and might have been some much longer time, the monsters’ powers—he got the idea more than one of them was communicating with him—inserted a question into his mind. It was a simple question, one he himself might have asked under the same circumstances: “What are you doing here?”
“Seeking aid against the gods of the Gradr,” he answered.
Another pause followed. “What are the Gradi? Who are their gods?”
Marshaling his thoughts in the midst of this blackness was hard. It was as if he had trouble remembering what vision meant, how it was used. As best he could, though, he pictured everything he knew not only about the Gradi but also about Voldar and the rest of their gods.
“They are only another band of you dirt-walking things,” some of the powers that dwelt in darkness said scornfully. But now the Fox heard other voices, too, these saying, “For dirtwalkers, they seem strong and fierce.”
“They are warlike,” Gerin said. “They will even kill themselves to keep from being captured.”
“Captured? What is captured?” The monsters’ powers did not understand that. The monsters did not fight for booty or for slaves. What they were after was prey. When the Fox mentally explained as best he could, they seemed partly amused, partly horrified. The voices in the dark spoke all together now: “These Gradi are right. You kill or you are killed. Otherwise, you do not fight.”
“Not everyone up on the surface would agree with you,” Gerin said. “Like everything else, enmity has degrees.”
“No!” The voices of the unseen powers dinned in his head, shrieking out their denial. They must have dinned in everyone else’s head, too, for with his ears rather than his mind he heard Lamissio whimpering in fright. Frightened as he was himself, he could hardly blame Biton’s servant.
But he kept up a bold front, saying, “I speak the truth. If I did not speak the truth, I would have slain Geroge and Tharma here when they came into my hands, for their kind was and had been the enemy of my people.”
That made the voices divide again. Some of them said, “You should have slain them,” while others said, “Good you left them alive.” After that division, the voices snarled at one another. Gerin could not understand all or even much of that; he got the idea they were disagreeing among themselves. He hoped they were. Getting help from even some of them would be better than nothing.
Some of the voices seemed to fall silent after a while. Others said, in ragged chorus, “This he and she you have with you, they are a strangeness, not all
of our land, not all of yours. Yes, a strangeness.”
“Proving we don’t have to be foes, your land and mine,” Gerin said. He didn’t know if it proved any such thing. Raising Geroge and Tharma, he’d had every possible advantage on his side. He’d got them as infants; they were clever as monsters went, which let them perform more like human beings than many of their fellows could have done; and there had been no other monsters around to distract them and perhaps lead them away from mankind.
“Why should we join you and your god of dirt-plants against the Gradi things?” the voices demanded.
The answer Gerin had braced himself to give—to keep yourselves from being overrun—did not seem good enough to offer here. He stood silent for a dangerously long time, trying to come up with a response that might satisfy these ferocious powers. He felt them gathering around him, ready to snuff out his life as they had snuffed out Lamissio’s torch.
And then Van said, “Why? I’ll tell you why, you bloodthirsty things! The Gradi and their gods are just about as nasty as you are, that’s why. That’s what the Fox has been telling you all along, if only you’d listen. Where else are you going to find such good fighting?”
A spell of silence followed. Gerin wondered whether Van should have kept quiet. If the monsters’ powers joined forces with the Gradi gods, they could easily wrest control of the northlands from the Elabonians and Trokmoi and their deities. He’d never thought he would reckon the Trokmoi as standing on the side of civilization, but he had new standards of comparison these days.
At last, the voices spoke again: “This is so. Foes worth fighting are a boon worth having. We will bargain for the chance to measure ourselves against them, for the chance to meet them with teeth and claws.”
“A bargain,” Duren murmured. Gerin was pleased, too, but less than he might have been. It was a bargain, aye, but one Biton had not promised these subterranean powers would keep. The monsters loosed on the northlands once more would be a problem as bad as the Gradi.
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