The priest with the narrow head continued to shriek at them, however, although he was very careful not to give them any other reason to chastise him.
“Apostates!’ he howled. “Defilers! I call upon Azash to -‘ His words trailed off into a kind of croak as Sephrenia extended her arm and the serpent head reared from her palm, its tongue flickering. He stared at the swaying image of the reptile, his eyes bulging. Then he collapsed and grovelled in the dirt before her.
Sephrenia looked around sternly, and the other Zemochs also sank to the ground with a horrified moan. ‘Perverted ones!’ she snarled at them in the corrupt Zemoch dialect.
‘Your rite has been forbidden for centuries. Why have you chosen to disobey mighty Azash?’
‘Our priests beguiled us, dread Priestess,’ one shaggyhaired fellow gibbered. ‘They told us that the prohibition of our rite was a Styric blasphemy. They said that it was the Styrics in our midst who were leading us away from the true God.’ He seemed blind to the fact that Sephrenia herself was Styric. ‘We are Elene,’
he said proudly, ‘and we know that we are the chosen ones.’
Sephrenia gave the Church Knights a look that conveyed volumes. Then she looked at the rag-tag band of unwashed “Elenes’ grovelling before her. She seemed about to speak once, her breath drawn in to deliver a shattering denunciation.
Instead, however, she let out the breath, and when she spoke, her voice was clinically detached. ‘You have strayed,’ she told them, ‘and that makes you unfit to join your countrymen in their holy war. You will return to your homes now. Go back to Merjuk and beyond, and venture no more to this place. Do not go near the temple of Azash, lest he destroy you.’
‘Should we hang our priests?’ the shaggy fellow asked her hopefully, “or burn them perhaps?’
‘No. Our God seeks worshippers, not corpses. Henceforth you will devote yourselves to the rites of purification and of reconciliation and the rites of the seasons only. You are as children, and as children shall you worship. Now go!’
She straightened her arm, and the serpent-head emerging from her palm, reared up, swelling, growing and becoming not so much a serpent as a dragon. The dragon roared, and sooty flames shot from its mouth.
The Zemochs fled.
“You should have let them hang that one fellow at least,’
Kalten said.
‘No,’ she replied. “I just set them on the path of a different religion, and that religion forbids killing.’
‘They’re Elenes, Lady Sephrenia,’ Bevier objected.
‘You should have instructed them to follow the Elene faith.’
‘With all its prejudices and inconsistencies, Bevier?’ she asked. ‘No, I don’t think so. I pointed them in a gentler way. Talen, have you finished yet?’
‘I’ve got all the pieces I could find, Sephrenia.’
“Bring them along.’ .She turned her white palfrey then and led them away from the rude altar.
They returned to the cave, gathered up their belongings and set out again.
.Where did they come from?’ Sparhawk asked Sephrenia as they rode along in the biting cold.
“Northeastern Zemoch,’ she replied, “from the steppes north of Merjuk. They’re primitive Elenes who haven’t had the benefits of contact with civilized people the way the rest of you have. ‘
‘Styrics, you mean?’
‘Naturally. What other civilized people are there?’
‘Be nice, ‘ he chided her.
She smiled. ‘The inclusion of orgies in the worship of Azash was a part of Otha’s original strategy. It brought in the Elenes. Otha’s an Elene himself, and he knows how strong those appetites are in your race. We Styrics have more exotic perversions. Azash really prefers those, but the primitives in the back country still hold to the old ways. They’re relatively harmless.’
Talen drew in beside them. ‘What do you want me to do with the pieces of that idol?’ he asked.
‘Throw them away,’ she replied, ‘ one piece every mile or so. Scatter them thoroughly. The rite had already begun, and we don’t want someone to gather up the pieces and put them back together again. The cloud’s trouble enough. We don’t want Azash Himself behind us as well.’
“Amen,’ the boy said fervently. He rode off to one side, stood up in his stirrups and hurled a fragment of mud some distance away.
“We’re safe then, aren’t we?’ Sparhawk said. ‘Now that the idol’s smashed, I mean? And as soon as Talen finishes scattering it?’
‘Hardly, dear one. That cloud’s still there.’
“But the cloud’s never really hurt us, Sephrenia. It tried to make us melancholy and afraid, but that’s about all and Flute took care of that for us. If that’s the best it can really do, it’s not much of a threat.’
‘Don’t let yourself grow overconfident, Sparhawk,’ she warned. ‘The cloud – or shadow, whichever it is – is probably a creature of Azash, and that would make it at least as dangerous as the Damork or the Seeker.’
The countryside did not improve as they rode eastward, nor did the weather. It was bitterly cold, and the billowing clouds of black dust erased the sky. What little vegetation they saw was stunted and sickly. They were following something that sort of looked like a trail, though its drunken meanderings suggested wild cattle rather than men. The waterholes were infrequent, and the water in them was ice which had to be melted down to water the horses.
‘Cursed dust!’ Ulath suddenly bellowed at the sky throwing aside the cloth which covered his mouth and nose.
‘Steady,’ Tynian said to him.
“What’s the use of all this?’ Ulath demanded, spitting out dust. (We can’t even tell which way we’re going.’ He pulled the cloth back across his face and rode on, muttering to himself.
The horses continued to plod on, their hooves kicking up little puffs of frozen dust.
The melancholy which had beset them in the mountains lying to the west of the Gulf of Merjuk was obviously returning, and Sparhawk rode on cautiously, watching with chagrin as the mood of his companions rapidly deteriorated even as he kept a wary eye on nearby ravines and rocky outcrops.
Bevier and Tynian were deep in a somber conversation.
‘It is a sin,’ Bevier was saying stubbornly. “To even suggest it is a heresy and a blasphemy. The Fathers of the Church have reasoned it out, and reason, coming as it does ~from God, is of God. Thus God Himself tells us that He and He alone is Divine.’
‘But -‘ Tynian began to object.
‘Hear me out, my friend,’ Bevier said to him. ‘Since God tells us that there are no other Divinities, for us to believe otherwise is blackest sin. We are embarked upon a quest founded in childish superstition. The Zemochs are a danger, certainly, but they are a worldly danger, even as the Eshandists. They have no supernatural allies. We are throwing our lives away searching for a mythical foe who exists only in the diseased imaginations of our heathen enemies. I will reason with Sparhawk about this presently, and I have no doubt that he can be persuaded to abandon this vain quest.’
‘That might be best,’ Tynian agreed, albeit somewhat dubiously. The two of them seemed totally unaware that Sparhawk was clearly riding within earshot.
‘You’ve got to talk with him, Kurik,’ Kalten was saying to Sparhawk’s squire. ‘We haven’t got a chance in the world.’
“You tell him,’ Kurik ~growled. ‘I’m a servant. It’s not my place to tell my lord that he’s a suicidal madman.’
“I honestly believe we should slip up behind him and tie him up. I’m not just trying to save my own life, you understand. I’m trying to save his too.’
.I feel the same way, Kalten.’
‘They’re coming!’ Berit screamed, pointing at a nearby cloud of swirling dust. “Arm yourselves!’
The warlike shouts of Sparhawk’s friends were shrill, tinged with panic, and their charge had an air of desperation about it. They crashed into the dust-cloud, swinging their swords and axes at the unfeeling air.
‘Help them, Sparhawk!’ Talen cried, his voice shrill.
‘Help them with what?’
‘The Monsters. ~They’ll all be killed!’
‘I rather doubt that, Talen,’ Sparhawk replied coolly, watching his friends flailing at the dust-cloud with their weapons. ‘They’re more than a match for what they’re facing.’
Talen glared at him for a moment, then rode several yards away, swearing to himself.
“I take it that you don’t see anything in the dust either,’
Sephrenia said calmly.
‘That’s all it is, little mother – just dust.’
‘Let’s deal with that right now.’ She spoke briefly in Styric, then gestured.
The thickly billowing dust-cloud seemed to shudder and flinch in upon itself for a moment, and then it gave a long, audible sigh as it slithered to the ground.
‘Where did they go?’ Ulath roared, looking around and brandishing his axe.
The others looked equally baffled, and the looks they directed at Sparhawk were darkly suspicious.