“If I know the jade at all, she is”” Phagon snorted. “And not only near. She’s seen everything and heard everything;
knows more about everything than either of us, or both of us together. Why? Thinkst she’d make a good priestess?”
“The best. Much more so, methinks, than the Lady Rhoann. Younger. More . . . umm … more priestess-like, say?”
“Perhaps.” Phagon was very evidently skeptical, but looked around the temple, anyway. “Trycie!” he yelled. “Yes,
father?” a soft voice answered-right behind them!
The king’s second daughter was very like his first in size and shape, but her eyes were a cerulean blue and her hair,
as long and as thick as Rhoann’s own, had the color of ripe wheat.
“Aye, daughter. Wouldst like to be Priestess of Llosir?” “Oh, yes!” she squealed; but sobered quickly. “On second
thought . . . perhaps not . . . no. If so be it sacrifice is done I intend to marry, some day, and have six or eight
children. But . . . perhaps . . . could I take it now, and resign later, think you?”
“‘Twould not be necessary, sire and Lady Trycie,” Tedric put in” while Phagon was still thinking the matter over.
“Llosir is not at all like Sarpedion. Llosir wants abundance and fertility and happiness, not poverty and sterility and
misery. Llosir’s priestess marries as she pleases and has as many children as she wants.”
“Your priestess I, then, sirs! I go to have cloth-of-gold robes made at once!” The last words came floating back over
her shoulder as Trycie raced away.
“Lord Tedric, sir.” Unobserved, Sciro bad been waiting for a chance to speak to his superior officer.
“Yes, captain?”
“‘ Tis the men . . . the cleaning . . . They . . . We, I mean . . .” Sciro of Old Lomarr would not pass the buck. “The
bodies-the priests, you know, and so on-were easy enough; and we did manage to handle most of the pieces of the
.god. But the . . . the heart, and so on, you know . . . we know not where you want them taken … and besides, we fear
. . . wilt stand by and ward, Lord Tedric, while I pick them up?”
“‘Tis my business, Captain Sciro; mine alone. I crave pardon for not attending to it sooner. Hast a bag?” “Yea.” The
highly relieved officer held out a duffle-bag of fine, soft leather.
Tedric took it, strode across to the place where Sarpedion’s image had stood, and-not without a few qualms of his
own, now that the frenzy of battle had evaporated picked up Sarpedion’s heart, liver, and brain and deposited them,
neither too carefully not too carelessly, in the sack. Then, swinging the burden up over his shoulder “I go to fetch
the others,” he explained to his king. “Then we hold sacrifice to end all human sacrifice.” “Hold, Tedric!” Phagon
ordered. “One thing-or two or three, methinks. ‘Tis not seemly to conduct a thing so; lacking order and organization
and plan. Where dolt propose to hold such an affair? Not in your ironworks, surely?” “Certainly not, sire.” Tedric
halted, almost in midstride. Be hadn’t got around yet to thinking about the operation as a whole, but he began to do
so then. “And certainly not on this temple or Sarpedion’s own. Lord Llosir is clean: all our temples are foul in every
stone and timber . . .” He paused. Then, suddenly: “I have it, sire-the amphitheater!”
“The amphitheater? ‘Tis well. ‘Tis of little enough use, and a shrine will not interfere with what little use it has.”
“Wilt give orders to build . . . ?”
“The Lord of the Marches issues his own orders. Hola, Schillan, to me!” the monarch shouted, and the Chamberlain
of the Realm came on the run. “Lord Tedric speaks with my voice.”
“I hear, sire. Lord Tedric, I listen.”
“Have built, at speed, midway along the front of the amphitheater, on the very edge of the cliff, a table of clean,
new-quarried stone; ten feet square and three feet high. On it mount Lord Llosir so firmly that he will stand upright
forever against whatever may come of wind or storm.”
The chamberlain hurried away. So did Tedric, with his bag of spoils. First to his shop, where his armor was re-
moved and where he scratched himself vigorously and delightfully as it came off. Thence to the Temple of Sar-
pedion, where he collected the other, somewhat-lesser hallowed trio of the Great One’s vital organs. Then, and
belatedly, to home and to bed.
A little later, while the new-made Lord of the Marches was sleeping soundly, the king’s messengers rode furiously
abroad, spreading the word that ten days hence, at the fourth period after noon, in Lompoar’s Amphitheater, Great
Sarpedion would be sacrificed to Llosir, Lomarr’s new and Ultra-powerful god.
The city of Lompoar, Lomarr’s capital, lying on the south bank of the Lotar some fifty miles inland from the delta,
nestled against the rugged breast of the Coast Range. Just outside the town’s limit and some hundreds of feet above
its principal streets there was a gigantic half-bowl, carved out of the solid rock by an eddy of some bye-gone age.
This was the Amphitheater, and on the very lip of the stupendous cliff descending vertically to the river so far
below, Llosir stood proudly on his platform of smooth, clean granite.
“‘Tis not enough like a god, methinks.” King Phagon, dressed now in cloth-of-gold, eyed the gleaming copper statue
very dubiously. “‘Tis too much like a man, by far.”
“‘Tis exactly as I saw him, sire”” Tedric replied, firmly. Nor was he, consciously, lying: by this time he believed the
lie himself. “Llosir is a man-god, remember, not a beast god, and ’tis better so. But the time I set is here. With your
permission, sire” I begin.”
Both men looked around the great bowl. Near by, but not too near” stood the priestess and half a dozen white-clad
fifteen-year-old girls; one of whom carried a beaten-gold pitcher full of perfumed oil, another a flaring open lamp
wrought of the same material. Slightly to one side were Rhoann-looking, if the truth must be told, as though she did
not particularly enjoy her present position on the sidelines-her mother the queen, the rest of the royal family” and
ranks of courtiers. And finally, much farther back, at a very respectful distance from their strange new god, ar-
ranged in dozens of more or less concentric, roughly hemispherical rows, stood everybody who had had time to get
there. More were arriving constantly, of course, but the flood had become a trickle; the narrow way, worming up-
ward from the city along the cliffs stark side, was almost bare of traffic.
“Begin, Lord Tedric,” said the king.
Tedric bent over, heaved the heavy iron pan containing the offerings up onto the platform, and turned. “The oil”
Priestess Lady Trycie, and the flame.”
The acolyte handed the pitcher to Trycie, who handed it to Tedric, who poured its contents over the twin hearts”
twin livers, and twin brains. Then the lamp; and as the yard-high flames leaped upward the armored pseudo-priest
stepped backward and raised his eyes boldly to the impassive face of the image of his god. Then he spoke not
softly, but in parade-ground tones audible to everyone present.
“Take, Lord Llosir, all the strength and all the power and all the force that Sarpedion ever had. Use them, we beg,
for good and not for ill.”
He picked up the blazing pan and strode toward the lip of the precipice; high-mounting, smokey flames curling
backward around his armored figure. “And now, in token of Sarpedion’s utter and complete extinction, I consign
these, the last vestiges of his being, to the rushing depths of oblivion.” He hurled the pan and its fiercely flaming
contents out over the terrific brink.
This act, according to Tedric’s plan” was to end the program-but it didn’t. Long before the fiery mass struck water
his attention was seized by a long, low-pitched, moaning gasp from a multitude of throats; a sound the like of which
he had never before even imagined.
He whirled-and saw, shimmering in a cage-like structure of shimmering bars, a form of seeming flesh so exactly
like the copper image in every detail of shape that it might well have come from the same mould!
“Lord Llosir-in the flesh!” Tedric exclaimed, and went to one knee.
So did the king and his family, and a few of the bravest of the courtiers. Most of the latter, however, and the girl
acolytes and the thronging thousands of spectators, threw themselves flat on the hard ground. They threw
themselves flat” but they did not look away or close their eyes or cover their faces with their hands. On the
contrary, each one stared with all the power of his optic nerves.
The god’s mouth opened, his lips moved; and, although no one could hear any sound, everyone felt words resound-