10 – Aftermath by Asprin, Robert

For he’d heard a sound that stiffened him as if he were turned to stone as unyielding as the blocks over which he labored: the click of a horse’s hoof against a pebble, the scrape of an iron shoe on cobble.

Holding his breath, he heard more: the swish of a long tail, the creak of leather, the jingle of harness. Frog, I’m porked for good and all.

Obviously, he told himself, this was the god’s wrath come upon him. He was going to open his eyes, turn around, and there would be some palace hotshot, some regular army mover, some Beysib lady fighter, wait- ing to take him off to the Hall of Justice for screwing around on the grounds of the Storm God’s temple. Not even his commission as watch officer could save him now. Not from the penalty for desecrating holy ground when that ground was holy to Rankans.

He opened his eyes and looked straight ahead, at the jumble of altar stones. Well, he’d tried. He wondered what was going to happen to the altar stones, to the god’s home, and to the god himself. Would it magi- cally get itself and its stones back to the river where it was safe? And if it couldn’t, what would then befall poor Zip, who’d managed to pork up a god’s life as well as his own?

He bit his tip and then, decided, turned from the waist to face his fate. There, behind him, was a single horseman. The horse loomed in the gloom, its great dark chest seeming to stare at Zip with a panther’s eyes, a panther’s gaping, toothsome jaws.

Zip blinked, and realized that what faced him was no creature half cat, half horse, but a warhorse wearing a pantherskin shabraque. And the panther who had given its skin to blanket this horse had been large, with glowing eyes, and so magnificent that its head had been not merely skinned, but stuffed so that glassy eyes stared at Zip as angrily as living eyes might have.