waited, no one had come chasing him. Looking up at the sky, he estimated he
could just make the Mageguild in time, if he did not get lost again.
4
Thinking back over the last ten months, Tempus realized he should have expected
something like this. Vashanka was weakening steadily: something had removed the
god’s name from Kadakithis’ palace dome; the state cult’s temple had proved
unbuildable, its grounds defiled and its priest a defiler; the ritual of the
Tenslaying had been interrupted by Cime and her fire, and he and Vashanka had
begotten a male child upon the First Consort which the god did not seem to
want to claim; Abarsis had been allowed to throw his life away without regard
to the fact that he had been Vashanka’s premier warrior priest. Now the
field altar his mercenaries had built had been tumbled to the ground before
his eyes by one of Abarsis’ teachers, an entelechy chosen specifically to
balance the beserker influence of the god. And he, Tempus, was imprisoned in
his own quarters by a Froth Daughter in an all-too-human body intent on
exacting from him recompense for what his sister had denied her.
Glumly he wondered if his god could be undergoing a midlife crisis, then if he
too was, since Vashanka and he were linked by the Law of Consonance. Certainly,
Jihan’s proclamation of intended rape had taken him aback. He had not been taken
aback by anything in years. “Rapist, they call you, and with good reason,” she
had said, reaching up under the scale-armor corselet to wriggle out of her