Even the stodgiest, however, had souse 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.
Enraged, 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.