I was not dreaming, he thought, and then he spoke aloud: “I see and I believe. I
will do it, 0 Swift-footed One, 0 All-father Ils! I will do it, holiest-but-one
Lady Eshi, and Venerable Lady of Ladies Shipri?”
The voice was there, inside his head: All depend on you,son.
Not “all depends,” Hanse realized later. “All depend.” Meaning “all the gods of
Ilsig and the Ilsigi!”
He took up the last of the strong drink he had used all too much since That
Night, the night at Kurd’s, and he poured it out onto the sheet on the floor,
which already showed the scarlet of another form of sacrificial outpouring.
“A libation to the gods of Ilsig!” Hanse said firmly, and-he meant it.
From the secret hiding place it had occupied for a month and more, somehow
resisting alcoholic urges to sell it, he took out a packet. It was the one he
had brought away the morning after That Night. It contained the shining and
obviously valuable surgical instruments of Kurd the vivisectionist, whom Tempus
had lately sent off to another plane of existence or inexistence. Thieving was
out of the question now, and such excellent tools would bring him plenty of
coin, the naked Hanse thought, and he opened the package on the rickety little
table.
And he stared.
The surgical instruments were gone. The packet contained some forty feet of
supple, slim, inch-wide black leather strap; a shirt of superb mail, black; a
plain black helmet with nose-, temple-, and neck-guards. And a ring. It was not
black. It was of gold, and it was set with a large tiger’s-eye, caged in bands