Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

Run for it, the Stepson escort had told him, when they had brought him near the bridge, at twilight. He expected an arrow in the back, but he had no third choice: Walegrin had said they would let him go. So he ran for his life when they gave him the chance, raking through the undergrowth and tearing his lacerated face on thorns and brambles and branches. He had run until he slipped and sprawled on the slick bank, and run again, till his side hurt too much and he took to walking in the dark.

Man, something said to him, just that word, over and over, and direction which was the same as the direction he went, so that he hardly needed keep his good eye open, only to fend the branches away with his hands and to go toward that voice that led him. Revenge, it said then; and that was, in his delirium and his pain and his blindness, even better.

He did not know where he was until he had found the tumbled stones of an ancient altar. He did not know it at first sight, but stood there snuffling and tasting the thin constant seep of his own blood in his mouth, blinking at the haze and trying to focus; but it was his personal place, it was the altar where he had laid offerings to vengeance, because he was Ilsigi and the old gods the Rankans let exist among the temples were quislings all. Ilsig had had a wargod once. A god of vengeance. And if all of them were dead and the statues only statues, he had still had a feeling about this old place that no Rankan had ever touched it, no force but earthquake ever tumbled these old stones, no Rankan ever knew its name to defile it. So he worshiped it, and gave it human flesh: that was the way he was in those days. It never answered him. But in those days it was all he had had, till he had ruled a quarter of Sanctuary.