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.
For Uzhiro waved his arms, sweating, chanting cadences of power, sprinkling dust, sending ripples of fear through the throng. We all knew what he was doing. The guards chasing me would have left off doing that; they would be transfixed by the awful powers being unleashed in this place. Everyone craned to see, barely breathing, as Uzhiro chanted on and the corpse within the crystal coffin upon the catafalque grew in clarity and all might see the thunderous expression on that lowering face. That was a mystery, how plainly the face was visible, even to me, high on the balcony. At that distance the other people’s faces were mere blurs. But the ancient sorcerer’s face glowed with supernatural tyranny.
The foul stench of the incense puffed high into the interior of the temple. The dome opened, it seemed, onto infinity itself, although common sense said that the myriad specks of light were merely painted spots of mineral-glittering pigments. The long low moaning chants of the acolytes, the rooted swaying rhythms of the temple maidens, the cloying stinks of incense, all were calculated to tear away the senses from the brain, to impose false images, to induce a phantasmagoria of hallucinations. Did San Guiskwain the Witherer really open his eyes? Did he reach out a skeletal hand? Did a man dead two thousand five hundred seasons really return to life?
San Uzhiro chanted and he had no doubts. His commands imposed themselves on the multitude, so that they saw with his eyes and heard with his ears.
Guiskwain, dead yet alive, sat up in the crystal coffin and looked about, that skeletal arm raised admonishingly.
No one fainted, no one passed out. All were transfixed, held scarcely breathing by the sheer occult power. And a sense of darkness gathered and coalesced under the dome. A brooding sense of power beyond the grave, of a stubborn life that two and half millennia could not quench, of perverse defiance of the natural order of life and death pervaded the temple and puffed upward in the rotting miasma of swamps and the fetid air of tombs sealed against the light.
“He lives!” screamed Uzhiro. “San Guiskwain lives!”
The cry was taken up in a tumultuous swelling cacophony of voices raised in rapture.
“He lives!”
Here was the miracle. Here the proof of the necromancer’s power.
“Through Guiskwain the Witherer shall the army become invincible!” screeched Uzhiro, flailing his arms.
“Through the greatest sorcerer dead yet living shall the Hawkwas gain all! Guiskwain lives!”
The long moment of triumph hung fire. The darkest pits of a Kregan hell had been opened. Now all, everyone present, turned to gaze with rapt adoration upon the lowering, vindictive, ashen face of Guiskwain the Witherer.
Transcendental, sublime, blasphemous — call it what you will. It was certain sure that all gathered here and held in this hallucinated trance believed with all their hearts. But — was this hallucination? Was this trickery? Or was a long-dead necromancer really revived, brought back to life, dragged once again into the light so as to destroy all I cared for in Vallia? Could the trick be no trick at all?