Sweat was washing streaks in the blood-flecks on the captive's face. 'Sweet goddess, don't do that,' he begged. 'Not tied, not -that. You haven't been here when ... others were here. You-' the injured man wiped his lips with his tongue. He closed his eyes. 'Kill me yourself, if you must,' he said so softly it was almost a matter for lip-reading to understand him. 'Don't leave me here.'
Samlor stood. His left hand was clenched, his right holding the dagger pointed down at a slight angle. 'Stand up,' he ordered. Regli's man obeyed, wide-eyed. He braced his back against the wall, holding his left hand at shoulder height but refusing to look at its ruin. The severed arteries had pinched off. Movement had dislodged some of the scabs, but the blood only oozed instead of spurting as it had initially. 'Tell Regli that I'm mending my family's honour in my way, as my sister seems to have done in hers,' Samlor said. 'But don't tell him where you found me - or how. If you want to leave here now, you'll swear that.' 'I swear!' the other babbled. 'By anything you please!' The caravan-master's smile flickered again. 'Did you ever kill anyone, boy?' he asked conversationally.
'I was a coachman,' the other said with a nervous frown. 'I - I mean ... no.'
'Once I pulled a man apart with hot pincers,' Samlor continued quietly. 'He was headman of a tribe that had taken our toll payment but still tried to cut out a couple of horses from the back of our train. I slipped into the village that night, jerked the chief out of his bed, and brought him back to the laager. In the morning I fixed him as a display for the rest.' The Cirdonian reached forwards and wiped his dagger clean on the sleeve of the other man's tunic. 'Don't go back on your word to me, friend,' he said.
Regli's man edged to the helical staircase. As he mounted each of the first dozen steps, he looked back over his shoulder at the Cirdonian. When the pursuit or thrown knife did not come as he had feared or expected, the retainer ran up the next twenty steps without pausing. He looked down from that elevation and said, 'One thing, master.' .
'Say it,' responded Samlor.
'They opened the Lady Samlane to give the child separate burial.'
'Yes?'
'And it didn't look to be demon spawn, as you say,' Regli's man called. 'It was a perfect little boy. Except that your knife was through its skull.'
Samlor began to climb the steps, ignoring the scrabbling slippers of the man above him on the twisting staircase. The door at the top thudded, leaving nothing of the hapless ambusher but splotches of his blood on the railing. Should have stuck to his horses, Samlor thought. He laughed aloud, well aware that the epitaph probably applied to himself as well. Still, he had a better notion than that poor fool of a coachman of what he was getting into ... though the gods all knew how slight were his chances of getting out of it alive. If the fellow he was looking for was a real magician, rather than someone like Samlor himself who had learned a few spells while knocking around the world, it was over for sure.
The door at the top of the stairs pivoted outward. Samlor tested it with a fingertip, then paused to steady his heart and breathing. As he stood there, his left hand sought the toad-faced medallion.
The dagger in his right hand pointed down, threatening nothing at the moment but - ready.
He pushed the door open.
On the other side, the secret opening was only a wall panel. Its frescoes were geometric and in no way different from those of the rest of the temple hallway. To the left, the hall led to an outside door heavily banded with iron. From his livery and the mutilation of his outflung left hand, the coachman could be recognized where he lay. The rest of the retainer appeared to have been razored into gobbets of flesh and bone, no other one of them as large as what remained of the left hand. Under the circumstances, Samlor had no sympathy to waste on the corpse.
The Cirdonian sighed and turned to the right, stepping through the hangings of brass beads into the sanctuary of Heqt. The figure he expected was waiting for him.
Soft, grey dawnlight crept through hidden slits in the dome. Mirrors had been designed to light the grinning, gilded toad-face of Heqt at the top of the dome beneath the spire. Instead, the light was directed downwards onto the figure on the floral mosaic in the centre of the great room. The hair of the waiting man glowed like burning wire. 'Did the night keep you well, friend?' Samlor called as he stepped forwards.
'Well,' agreed the other with a nod. There was no sign of the regular priests and acolytes of Heqt. The room brightened as if the light fed on the beauty of the waiting man. 'As I see she kept you, Champion of Heqt.' -
'No champion,' Samlor said, taking another step as casual as the long knife dangling from his right hand. 'Just a man looking for the demon who caused his sister's death. I didn't have to look any farther than the bench across the street last night, did I?'
The other's voice was a rich tenor. It had a vibrancy that had been missing when he and Samlor had talked of Heqt and Dyareela the night before. 'Heqt keeps sending her champions, and I ... I deal with them. You met the first of them, the priest?'
'I came looking for a demon,' the Cirdonian said, walking very slowly, 'and all it was was a poor madman who had convinced himself that he was a god.'
'I am Dyareela.'
'You're a man who saw an old carving down below that looked like him,' Samlor said. 'That worked on your mind, and you worked on other people's minds. ... My sister, now, she was convinced her child would look like a man but be a demon. She killed it in her womb. The only way that she'd have been able to kill it, because they'd never have let her near it, Regli's heir, and her having tried abortion. But such a waste, because it was just a child, only a madman's child.'
The sun-crowned man gripped the throat of his white tunic and ripped downwards with unexpected strength. 'I am Dyareela,' it said. Its right breast was pendulous, noticeably larger than the left. The male genitals were of normal size, flaccid, hiding the vulva that must lie behind them. 'The one there,' it said, gesturing towards the wall beyond which the coachman lay, 'came to my fane to shed blood without my leave.' The naked figure giggled. 'Perhaps I'll have you wash in his blood. Champion,' it said. 'Perhaps that will be the start of your penance.'
'A mad little hermaphrodite who knows a spell or two,' Samlor said. 'But there'll be no penance for any again from you, little one. You're fey, and I know a spell for your sort. She wasn't much, but I'll have your heart for what you led my sister to.'
'Will you conjure me by Heqt, then. Champion?' asked the other with its arms spread in welcome and laughter in its liquid voice. 'Her temple is my temple, her servants are my servants ... the blood other champions is mine for a sacrifice!'
Samlor was twenty feet away, a full turn and half a turn. He clutched his medallion left-handed, hoping it would give him enough time to complete his spell. 'Do I look like a priest to talk about gods?' he said. 'Watch my dagger, madman.'
The other smiled, waiting as Samlor cocked the heavy blade. It caught a stray beam of sunlight. The double edge flashed black dawn.
'By the Earth that bore this,'
Samlor cried,
'and the Mind that gave it shape; By the rown of this hilt and the silver wire that laps it; By the cold iron of this blade and by the white-hot flames it flowed from; By the blood it has drunk and the souls it has eaten - know thy hour'