As it chanced, the door was quite well hidden in an alcove, though the hangings
that would once have completed the camouflage were long gone. There was no time
to consider might-have-beens, no time for anything but the pantalooned Beysib
who turned, membranes flicking in shock across his eyes. He was trying to raise
his bow, but there was no time to fend Samlor away with the staff, much less to
nock one of the bone-tipped arrows. Samlor punched the smaller man in the pit of
the stomach, a rising blow, and the point of the long dagger grated on the
Beysib’s spine in exiting between his fourth and third ribs.
The Beysib collapsed backwards, his motion helping Samlor free the knife for
another victim if one presented himself. None did. The nictitating membrane
quivered over the Beysib’s eyes. In better light, it would have shown colours
like those on the skin of a dying albacore. The blow had paralysed the man’s
lungs, so that the only sound the guard made as he died was the scraping of his
nails on the stone floor.
Samlor slid the body back through the trap door, from whence its death had
sprung. He hoped the victim was not a friend of Hort; he sympathized with simple
folk looking for solace apart from the establishment of such as Lord Tudhaliya.
But they had made their bed when they stole a child from the House of Kodrix.
The temple had been a single, circular room. It was roofless now, and its girdle
of fluted columns had fallen; but the curtain wall within those columns still
stood to shoulder height or above. That wall had been constructed around only