Lawrence Watt-Evans - Book of Silence

The King said nothing, but nodded once.

Reassured, his anger driving away any lingering doubts, Garth marched up to the entrance and swung the sword against it.

The heavy wooden door burst outward in a shower of splinters and dust, with a sound like sudden thunder.

Garth stepped through into a small, bare anteroom and looked about in the unlit gloom. Three other doors led further into the depths of the building; he chose one at random and smashed it down with the sword, sending shards rattling against the walls on all sides.

Beyond lay a small room hung in dark red and richly carpeted in soft gray; near the far wall stood a metal altar, and upon the altar lay a woman's corpse, partially disemboweled. Garth stepped closer.

A curtain plummeted down before him; with a growl, Garth hacked it apart in time to see the altar sink into the floor, taking the corpse with it.

This sort of mechanical trickery was similar, indeed almost identical, to what he had encountered in Dыsarra. Any further doubts he might have had were dispelled by his final glimpse of the dead body.

Runes had been carved into the woman's chest, four runes, spelling out AGHAD.

Satisfied that he had found the right place, Garth lashed out with the sword and blasted apart the sliding stone that moved into place to hide the sunken altar and its grisly burden. Without bothering to consider that the victim might deserve better, he then sent a burst of white flame that utterly consumed the corpse, leaving a thin layer of ash. That done, he set about serious destruction, shattering the ceiling and the roof beyond and working his way down the walls.

When at last he was satisfied that the job was done, he stood at the bottom of a great pit, amid a heap of rubble, where no stone larger than a man's body remained and no stone stood intact upon another. He had found and destroyed hundreds of concealed machines and mechanisms, a dozen or so hidden bodies, a handful of dangerous beasts, and a vast armory equipped with everything from siege engines to endless shelves of varied poisons. The single floor aboveground had stood atop three levels of cellars and dungeons that extended out beneath the buildings on both sides and across the street into the house opposite.

Half a dozen doors led from the cellars into the crypts, but he did not bother to investigate those after blowing the doors themselves apart. He knew, even in his rage, that there was no point in destroying the entire system of crypts, and that to do so would mean destroying the entire city he had slain Dhazh to save. He drew the line at the point where the architecture and the texture of the stone changed, revealing the difference between the ancient buried tunnels and the far newer temple built to take advantage of them.

Nowhere in the entire structure were there any living humans.

In Dыsarra, Haggat watched, worried, as the temple in Ur-Dormulk crumbled. He was unable to focus his scrying glass on the overman or the sword and could not watch the destruction directly as a result, but he was able to see the remains. It distressed him to see so powerful an outpost of the cult, second only to its heart in Dыsarra, reduced so quickly to worthless rubble, but he knew he could do nothing to stop the demolition.

He could, however, save the cultists who had used the shrine. The overman's next step, obviously, would be to pick the Aghadites out of the crowd that waited outside the city gates and kill them; Haggat did not want that to happen. He abandoned the scrying glass for the moment, to order his disciples to send a message of warning.

When Garth climbed out of the hole he had made, he found the Forgotten King waiting, motionless, in the street.

"Are there any Aghadites in the city?" the overman demanded.

"No," the old man replied.

Garth was glad of that; he had not relished the thought of hunting them down in their hiding places, one by one. Far easier and more satisfying to blast the lot of them at once! He would divide them out from the crowd as the citizens were readmitted to the city, standing at the gate and stopping them as they passed. He did not consider how he would recognize them; he was sure he would manage it. The old man was apparently in a cooperative mood, having led him to the temple and now having answered his question directly; perhaps he would be willing to point them out.

There would be time for that later. His next step was to return to the gate and arrange with the authorities for permission to dispose of the Aghadites. It seemed a very minor demand to make in exchange for slaying the monster that had done so much damage to their city.

The sun was down, and Garth lighted the way back to the gate with the glow from the Sword of Bheleu. Fires still flickered in the distance, but in a city so largely built of stone, most were rapidly dying out.

Frima and Koros still waited atop the stairs at the gate, just as Garth had left them, save that Koros was now asleep and Frima awake. As a result of her rest, awkward as it had been to sleep in the saddle, she was alert and eager to pursue her vengeance against the worshippers of Aghad.

She had awakened feeling ill shortly before; after she had vomited, she had felt somewhat better and had noticed that Garth was missing. She had not been seriously concerned by his absence; she knew he would return for Koros, if for nothing else, and she had correctly concluded that he had gone in search of their common foe.

"Are there Aghadites in this city?" she asked as Garth and the Forgotten King climbed the last few steps.

"No," the overman replied. "But there are many, I am sure, in the crowd outside the gates. I have just destroyed their temple here; now we must search them out from the other humans."

"No," the old man said unexpectedly. "They have fled."

"What?" Garth demanded. Frima stared silently.

"They are gone."

"They can't be," Garth insisted. "I have to kill them."

"They were warned magically and have fled."

"Are you sure?" Frima asked.

The King nodded.

"They're really gone? You swear it?" she persisted.

The King nodded again.

"Where did they go?" Garth asked.

The old man shrugged.

"To Dыsarra, perhaps?" Garth guessed.

The old man shrugged again.

"To Dыsarra, then," Garth said. Frima nodded agreement.

The conversation had awakened the warbeast; now, at the overman's urging, it turned and followed its master out the city gate and into the torchlit night beyond, where the people of Ur-Dormulk waited to reclaim their city.

Garth and his companions stayed the night on the hillside by the gate, ignoring a thin drizzle that began around midnight. They kept a careful watch on the line of men, women, and children moving slowly back into the city, while guards stood nearby. A few reports came in of people who had vanished around sunset, wandering off in one direction or another, confirming the Forgotten King's claim that the Aghadites had been warned of their danger. The soldiers had generally not tried to prevent these people from crossing the perimeter; that was not what they had been posted for. Their orders were to keep dangers out, not to keep their own people in, and if a score or perhaps two dozen had chosen to depart for destinations unknown, it was no part of a soldier's duty to stop them. Garth, angry as he was at the escape of the Aghadites, had to admit that that was reasonable.

He and Frima, as well as large numbers of guardsmen, observed the whole re-entry operation, and nowhere did Garth see the dark red robes of the worshippers of Aghad. He knew, of course, that the cultists might well be disguised and that he had no reliable means of spotting them in the horde of muddy, bedraggled citizens who wound their way up the hill and through the gates. Still, he was sure that most, if not all, of those people reported missing had been the god's followers in Ur-Dormulk.