Now Rankans killed his brothers, other Rankans turned him out with apologies, and he was here, fallen on his knees back at his beginnings, his ribs hurting, his face one mass of agony, his elbows bruised on the stone like his knees when he had hit the pavings in the massacre. He wept, and snuffled and wiped his nose and his eyes, trying to catch his breath.
Revenge, something whispered to him. He lifted his head and drew in a hoarse breath, hearing a murmuring and a rumbling in the earth. Something was there, in the dark just across the altar, facing him, a horripilating conviction of presence and a voice in his throbbing skull.
He blinked again. Two red slits appeared in that dark, and the same glow limned the flare of humanish nostrils and the seam of a humanish mouth, as if there were fire inside an utterly dark face. It smiled at him.
My worshiper, it said.
And whispered other things, about power, and how it had been shut in hell until it gained its freedom. The pain ebbed down. But not the cold.
“I’m going,” he told it. “I got to get to my people, I got to tell them-“
Tell them they have a god. What would you give-for Ilsig to rise again? You paid lives. You’d pay yours. But it’s worship I want. None of this business about souls. I want a temple. That’s all. Whatever kind of a temple you want to make over there on the Avenue. That’s where we can begin. Small. Till we have things in hand.
Zip wiped his nose and wiped it a second time. He ought to be running, except that he had no strength left. Except that this thing was real, and in a world where magery and power ruled, it was talking about Ilsig, and power of a sort