medallion left-handed, hoping it would give him enough time to complete his
spell. ‘Do I look like a priest to talk about gods?’ he said. ‘Watch my dagger,
madman.’
The other smiled, waiting as Samlor cocked the heavy blade. It caught a stray
beam of sunlight. The double edge flashed black dawn.
‘By the Earth that bore this,’
Samlor cried,
‘and the Mind that gave it shape;
By the rown of this hilt and the silver wire that laps it;
By the cold iron of this blade
and by the white-hot flames it flowed from;
By the blood it has drunk and the souls it has eaten
– know thy hour’
Samlor hurled the dagger. It glinted as it rotated. The blade was point-first
and a hand’s breadth from the smiling face when it exploded in a flash and a
thunderclap that shook the city. The concussion hurled Samlor backwards,
bleeding from the nose and ears. The air was dense with flecks of paint and
plaster from the frescoed ceiling. Dyareela stood with the same smile, arms
lifting in triumph, lips opening further in throaty laughter. ‘Mine for a
sacrifice!’
A webbing of tiny cracks was spreading from the centre of the dome high above.
Samlor staggered to his feet, choking on dust and knowing that if he was lucky
he was about to die.
Heqt’s gilded bronze head, backed by the limestone spire, plunged down from the
ceiling. It struck Dyareela’s upturned face like a two-hundred-ton crossbow
bolt. The floor beneath disintegrated. The limestone column scarcely slowed,
hurtling out of sight as the earth itself shuddered to the impact.
Samlor lost his footing in the remains of Regli’s coachman. An earth-shock