It was indeed, Shaa realized with only the barest surprise (being long accustomed to similar entrances by his friends), Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable. Max, apparently still in the same motion, was letting the momentum of the sword throw him into a twirling leap over the falling guards, when a giant ball of orange flame materialized in the hole in the wall near the ceiling. The ball roiled, the skeletal beams around it bursting into flame, and then a pair of glowering eyes and a snarling mouth began to appear in red outlines against the licking glare of orange and yellow. The mouth opened. Max, still in mid-air, started to curl into a ball, hiding his head, when the mouth spoke. A pressure wave of superheated air shot through with slashes of driven flame slammed across the temple. The floor collapsed. All the furnishings in the room, the dead or injured guards, the wall hangings, and the airborne Max blew down with the floor and were gone. Giant stones and flaming timbers flew. The walls splintered and crashed out. The scene spun, and then Shaa discovered himself sprawled in a pile of smoldering rubble, with his wrists scraped raw and his shoulders half-pulled from their sockets. But the manacles on his wrists now ended in loose dangling ends of chain.
The hovering creature outlined by the flames gathered itself, rearing back, beginning a dive toward the gaping hole in the floor, the shockwaves of its unleashed power pulsing through the air like ripples in a pond. The time for reflection was past. Shaa staggered to one knee and raised his arms.
16. THE DEN OF OSKIN YAHLEI
“It is I, Gashanatantra,” I said. The eye behind the viewing panel in the gate of Oskin Yahlei’s complex blinked, screwed itself shut, then wobbled slightly as it opened and fixed itself on me again.
“Ah, who was that?” the lackey said.
“Gashanatantra,” I said, affecting a note of testiness.
“Just a moment.” The panel slid shut with a rasp. I glanced up the street and then down the street in the other direction. Still no Gash, and the trickle of information in the back of my brain was silent, At the moment it looked like I was on my own.
The gate clanked from the other side and swung away from me. “This way,” the lackey said. He was wearing the same insignia I’d seen before, the twisty purple rope braid against a background of flames. I followed him across a small courtyard, through the open door in the front of the stone building I’d examined from the street, and through yet another open door at the other side of an enclosed entry hall. More guys with the purple badge on their clothes closed the doors after us. On my right was a large open room, the main worship-center of the original temple no doubt. A bunch of Oskin Yahlei’s troops and a squad of regular guard spread out around the place were eyeing me with a collective look of surprise. The regular Guardsmen were holding the two chained prisoners I’d seen them bring into the building awhile before. Maybe the fact that the two guys were still alive and in apparently good shape meant that Oskin Yahlei had shaken off the bloodthirsty mood I’d seen earlier in the evening at Carl’s, when he’d sucked that magician down to a mummy. If he had, I wouldn’t complain. The lackey was pointing to the wall on my left, where another set of double doors were standing open. I strolled up to them and went through, and the doors were closed behind me.
A fire burned at the far wall, roaring its way out of a massive walk-in grate. Hardwood panels lined the walls and wood of a slightly lighter grain ran in pegs and grooves on the floor. At my left in the corner of the room, a circular staircase wound upward. Several leather-bound chairs with high backs and fluted armrests were grouped around an area rug in front of the fire. Standing in the midst of the chairs with his back to the fire and his arms crossed on his chest was Oskin Yahlei.
“Gashanatantra,” he said. His voice had the same chilling boom, but he wasn’t trying that trick with the black aura, not yet anyway.
“Oskin Yahlei,” I said. I stared at him for a beat, then lifted one eyebrow and moved toward the chairs. He fell back one footstep as I approached, watched me sink into the most comfortable-looking chair, his mouth slightly open, and then reached behind him to lower himself into another chair across the rug from me. I sat the iron-shod tip of the walking stick on the floor between my feet and rested my hands on the handle, the fingers interlaced. Oskin Yahlei and I scrutinized each other.
“At last we meet,” he said.
“Indeed,” I said.
“Your aura is an aura of power, yet you have not chosen a very inspiring aspect, if I may be allowed the boldness.”
“You may,” I said, “for the time being. Later on we shall see.”
I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself - Oskin Yahlei swallowed nervously. Oskin Yahlei. Maybe my instincts hadn’t been totally bonkers after all; maybe Gashanatantra really was bigger fry than him. And he thought I was Gashanatantra. One of my early mentors had once told me, “When you can’t think of anything else to try, go for the most audacious thing in sight. Then don’t give up. You wouldn’t believe some of the things you can get away as long as you keep on the move.”
In fact, I’d already made it past one of my biggest fears. It had occurred to me that I might walk through the door and find Gash himself sitting there, having a pleasant conversation with Oskin Yahlei.
“So,” I continued. “You are trying to set up a little operation for yourself.”
“It is as you see. We must all have our little operations.”
“So they say,” I said. “Yet an operation can be a delicate thing, with many factors to consider. For one thing, there is the question of turf, of setting up one’s operation in territory that belongs to another.”
“I need no lesson in etiquette from you, “ Oskin Yahlei said. He was trying to project a note of bravado, but frankly I thought it sounded a bit hollow.
“Perhaps you do,” I said, “judging by your situation.” For myself, I was trying to make my speech patterns match what I thought Gash’s might be like in the present situation. It was turning out not to be as hard as I’d expected. and that worried me. I had a suspicion that the metabolic link thing might be warping my personality, too, by contaminating it with Gash’s own. “One must be wary of irritating others,” I went on, “unless one is particularly looking for a confrontation.”
“This city is free ground. I have irritated no one.”
“Have you not? Your ambition is vast, your plots spreading, yet your coverage of details remains faulty and weak. You have no idea who you have antagonized. You,” I said, going with my hunch, “you are improvising, without the slightest idea of what you are really doing.”
“I owe you no explanations.”
“Success is its own best explanation. Unfortunately, even that is not an option in your case. Your position here is becoming very shaky. Jackals gather at your feet - do you not hear them?”
Now the gray of his face went two shades paler. It looked like I was hitting home, but I wasn’t even sure what I was talking about. “There is still an explanation,” Oskin Yahlei said, “the incompetence of Kaar notwithstanding. A god must have a power base.”
“A god.”
“Yes. A god. You, Gashanatantra, are certainly a god, but I, Oskin Yahlei, am equally so a god.”
I thought the way he put that was pretty interesting, like perhaps he’d only recently stepped up to being a god himself. That was right along the lines of the theory I had been starting to develop. It was time for another part hunch and two parts bluff.
“Indeed,” I said. “Yet it is interesting that you should set up your headquarters in such a place, a temple once devoted to another god. It is interesting. Indeed, no, disquieting may be a better word. To appropriate the fruits of the labors of one of your betters in such a fashion hints of poor taste. Especially so -” (here it came, my next big salvo) “- when done by one such as yourself, one so new to the brotherhood.”