He whipped out his sword and hacked at the metal; the weapon had served him well but suffered in consequence, and this was too much. It broke, leaving him clutching a hilt and a half-foot of blade, and sending slivers of steel in a dozen directions. The gates remained firm, though the top of the GH rune was scratched and battered out of shape.
Once again, he heard laughter; something was flung over the wall, to fall heavily on the pavement at his feet. It was the old man's corpse, hacked messily in two, as it would have been had he used his sword to open the gate as the priest of Aghad suggested.
Speechless, Garth stood staring at the bloody remains for a long moment, then turned and left, as that final hysterical laugh trailed after him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The moon was still well above the horizon; Garth estimated he had three hours or more until dawn. Although ordinarily he might have called it a night and returned to the Inn of the Seven Stars, the events in the temple of Aghad had enraged him, and he was too full of fury and adrenaline to go quietly back to the inn. Instead, he swung the sack of gold over his shoulder and marched down the avenue toward the overlord's palace, and toward the temple that stood nearest it. He was aware, with part of his mind, that he was being slightly reckless, since he no longer had a sword and was encumbered by the Aghadite gold; he was, however, too mad to care. He would have preferred to devote himself to destroying the temple of Aghad, and hunting out and killing the owner of that taunting voice, but knew that he wouldn't have a chance of succeeding; the priests would undoubtedly be expecting an attack. Instead he would take out his anger on whoever might be guarding this other temple. Even armed only with a dagger and a broken hilt, he knew he could handle any two humans. He regretted that he had left his battle-axe in Koros' stall with his other supplies, as an inappropriate item to be carrying about the city streets.
This next temple, he saw, was the most bizarre he had yet approached; where the others had been built of black basalt or marble or similar stones, this one was constructed of gleaming obsidian, arranged with sharp, broken edges projecting wherever possible. It was a high, narrow building, surmounted by a pointed dome, and fronted with a small forecourt. The court was perhaps twenty feet square, with obsidian walls eight or nine feet high around it, and a pair of large openwork steel gates at the front.
Garth wondered where, even in this volcanic country, they had found so, much obsidian. Further, how had they constructed a building from it? Obsidian was not suited for construction purposes. It must be a facade, he decided, covering up a more ordinary structure.
The gates did not spell out the name of the deity here, nor was it carved in the walls. Instead, the gates were made of twisted, jagged spikes welded together into portals resembling a wall of thorns. There were no handles, and from each of the large spikes projected dozens of needlelike smaller spikes. Where there was no room for these, the metal had sawtoothed edges.
Even in his anger, these gates gave Garth pause; there was nowhere that he could touch them without risking injury. The points appeared razor-sharp. Appropriate, he thought, for the god of sharpness, should there be one. He wondered what sort of insane cult would build such a thing.
He ran the broken stump of his sword through one of the gaps in the glittering tangle of sharpened steel, and pulled; to his surprise, the gate opened readily. He had expected it to be locked for the night.
He stepped through, and noticed for the first time that the courtyard was paved, or perhaps lined, with obsidian, arranged with all possible points and sharp edges projecting upwards, and left thoroughly uneven. Walking on it was difficult, and even through the thick soles of his boots he could feel the knife-edged volcanic glass cutting into his feet.
He made his way gingerly across the broken expanse to the door of the temple building; it, like the gates, was a web of steel spikes. He shoved at it with the broken sword; a long needle-pointed projection caught his finger and gashed it painfully, but the door swung open. It, like the gate, was unlocked. As it began to move, Garth suddenly realized that the night was not silent; somewhere, several voices were wailing, as if in great pain or abject despair. As the door opened wider, he knew it was coming from inside this temple; it swept out over him.
Light also assaulted him, a sharp white light totally unlike the yellow of torchlight or the red of a fire. This glare was tinged with blue, like the flash of lightning. He ignored it. He was in no mood for caution. When the door stopped swinging, he stepped through.
He was at the bottom of a set of uneven steps, steep even for an overman, and all crooked; he clambered up them into the temple proper.
It was a single vast room, twenty feet wide, a hundred long, and at least fifty feet high, not counting the interior of the dome. The walls were jagged, rough stone, and seemed to lean inward; Garth was not sure if this were some illusion, or whether the room actually narrowed toward the top. The floor was broken, uneven flagstones, but far more negotiable than the obsidian courtyard. The light came from dozens of flares that blazed on one wall, burning with a vivid, painfully bright light and casting sharp-edged black shadows of the score or so of worshippers who knelt before the altar. The shadows did not move; the flares had none of the comforting flicker of more ordinary flames.
The altar itself was a single chunk of granite; behind it stood three black-robed priests, faces hidden by hoods, and on it lay a naked young woman-perhaps only a girl. Garth was a poor judge of human age or maturity.
The central priest held a long narrow-bladed dirk clutched in his fist; the man to his right held a coiled whip, and the third priest held a loop of ordinary rope.
The wailing came from the worshippers; the priests and the girl on the altar were making no sound that Garth could detect.
Behind the priests, carved on the end wall of the temple, Garth glimpsed the image of a smiling naked woman, hands outstretched toward the altar; the shadows of the priests made it hard to distinguish details. Although the image he had seen in the marketplace had been robed and held weapons, he recognized the face and evil smile of the idol; this was Sai, goddess of pain and suffering.
No one was paying any attention to him. He put down his sack of bloodstained Aghadite gold, and strode forward across the shattered floor. As he drew nearer, he saw that the priest's dirk had blood upon its tip, and that the naked girl's body was laced with narrow, shallow cuts. He wondered whether the ceremony was to have ended with her death as a human sacrifice, or whether she would merely have been tortured and released; it was clear from her face that she was not a willing participant. He grinned at the prospect of frustrating these sadists. It would be almost as satisfying as killing Aghadites. Still, he hoped he could avoid killing any, not only because he disliked causing unnecessary deaths, but because he did not want the Aghadites to have the satisfaction.
He was even with the back of the small crowd of worshippers, now; he bellowed as the priest lowered the dagger for another cut. He did not want the girl injured further. After all, she was what he had found upon the altar, and therefore what he was to take back to the Forgotten King. He wondered what the old man would make of her.
Startled, the priest stopped his motion; the crowd's wailing wavered.
"Drop that knife or die, priest!" He kicked aside a kneeling figure that blocked his path and stepped up to the altar; his broken sword was still in his hand and, although scarcely the weapon it once was, it could still cut. It should, he thought, be adequate for dealing with this bunch.
The priest backed away, but the dirk remained in his hand.