He was approaching a temple, the third from the overlord's palace; it loomed before him, a huge cube of black stone, dotted with dark windows and topped by a broad dome. Seven shallow steps led to its, open portals; there were no gates, no courtyard, no indication which deity was worshipped here. He was only a few paces from the bottom step when someone behind him cried, "Hold, overman!"

He hastened his pace, hurrying up the steps; he heard running, feet somewhere behind him as he stepped through the doorway into an antechamber.

The room was small, with a wooden floor that gave dangerously beneath his feet, and walls hung with moldering, faded tapestries. He wondered briefly if the place was abandoned; since the daylight cults were secret, one might have died out without anyone knowing it.

There was a door in the inner wall with a rusty iron handle; Garth grabbed it, only to have it crumble in his grasp. He raised a fist to pound on the door, in hope that someone would admit him; to his astonishment, the door burst inward at his first blow, its hinges screaming in protest. Dust flew up in clouds, and a paroxysm of coughing overtook him, but he managed to stumble through. As he did, he realized there were no further sounds of pursuit behind him; instead, a voice exclaimed in dismay, "We can't go in there!"

He stopped. If he were not pursued, there as no need for haste. He wiped the dust from his stinging eyes and looked about.

The door he had entered through stood beside him, and it was immediately obvious why it had yielded so quickly; it had been eaten away from within by termites and rot, so that his blow had merely finished their work. The latch that had held it remained where it was, rusted to the frame, and the wood had turned to powder around it, so that the door's edge now had a gaping hole in it.

He was in a room perhaps fifteen feet across and twenty feet long; like the antechamber, and unlike any of the other temples he had yet visited, it was floored in wood, wood which sagged visibly at the center beneath the weight of a thick carpet. The walls, too, were wooden, except for one end; that was stone and obviously one of the temple's outer walls, since three narrow windows pierced it, providing the chamber with light.

The room's ceiling was upholstered in silk, silk that was discolored with half a hundred old and new stains, that was black with rot in spots. Like the floor, it sagged in the center. Cobwebs hung from every corner.

There were furnishings; two ornate tables adorned the far wall, flanking a doorway, and an assortment of faded, dusty chairs were strewn about.

Over everything hung the smell, the stench of rot, mold, and decay; Garth suddenly felt quite certain he knew which temple he had entered.

He took a cautious step forward into the room; the floor creaked ominously, and new odors of corruption assailed his nostrils. He put a hand on a woodpanelled wall, only to snatch it away quickly when he felt the wood start to give; like the door, it was riddled by worms and rot. There could be no doubt that this was the shrine of P'hul, goddess of decay.

"Greetings, stranger." The soft voice came from somewhere to his right; the usual guttural Dыsarran accent was modified by a curious lisp. He turned, to see that a gray-robed figure had entered the room.

He started to speak, but stopped as the figure threw back its hood, revealing the reason for the lisp.

"Is something wrong?" The priestess' voice was solicitous.

"No. I was just startled."

The woman's lower lip was a twisted mass of oozing, festering flesh, and much of her face and neck was swollen and shapeless; one of her hands lacked a finger. Garth recognized the human disease of leprosy and shuddered slightly. His pursuers had had reasons other than religious respect for declining to enter this place.

The priestess smiled, the friendly expression made hideous by her affliction. "Of course. It is customary that the servants of P'hul bear her handiwork upon their flesh, but I suppose it might well startle those not accustomed to such sights. Why have you come? What brings a healthy overman to the temple of decay?" Garth noticed that she was aware of her lisp, and struggled particularly hard to be sure she pronounced the name of her goddess correctly. He felt a twinge of pity.

"I was merely curious."

"I am surprised. We see few strangers here. How may I help to satisfy your curiosity?"

"Tell me of your goddess, if you would." Garth was not particularly interested in learning about P'hul, but he wanted time to think, and guessed that the priestess, absorbed as she was with her beliefs, would be quite willing to talk for hours about them with only minimal encouragement. Where he would have raised suspicion by questioning her on more mundane matters, he was sure that in the enthusiasm of the true believer she would not find anything strange in his willingness to listen to endless blather about her religion.

"If you wish, gladly! I am sure you know the basic nature of P'hul; she is the cause and essence of all disease and decay throughout our world. She ages us all, she makes us easy prey for death, so that the old will make way for the young. She turns the leaves green to brown, pulls them from the trees; and makes them rot, so that they will feed the earth. She eats away fruit, that the seeds within may flourish. By plague and disease, she removes the unfit and unworthy. The worms of the earth and the lowly insects serve her, devouring all that she gives them, and in turn they feed the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field. She is the handmaiden of death."

As the priestess spoke, her words distorted by her lisp, Garth thought back over recent events; it struck him suddenly that he had been behaving recklessly, almost idiotically, since leaving the temple of Aghad. Marching openly into the temple of Sai had been foolish, even if it had allowed him to save an innocent life. He had not planned well there; even his fight with the priests had been mismanaged, as he should have been able to overpower all three without killing any.

"There are those who say that death is the great evil of our world," the priestess went on, "and that if P'hul serves him, then she must likewise be evil. That is not so; death would exist regardless of P'hul. The goddess readies us for his touch; is it not better to die old and weary, than to be cut down while still healthy and vigorous?"

His behavior this morning had been even more erratic. There had been no reason to go leaping about on the roof, smashing down the doors of unsuspecting citizens, and so forth. He had merely been responding to the repressed anger that still seethed within him, using up as much energy as possible and finding excuses to destroy anything handy.

"Knowing that one must die after a set number of years, is it not better to know that death will come as the end of a decline, a surcease from decay, than to see it strike abruptly while one is still strong? Our lives are thus in balance, with the ascent from infancy countered by the descent into senescence. Aal, the Eir-Lord of growth, is P'hul's twin and counter; neither could exist without the other. Aal dominates our youth, P'hul our age."

Obviously, he was still resentful of the helplessness he had felt in the temple of Aghad.

"In order that there be growth, there must be decay; for there to be new, the old must make way, else the world would be buried beneath growing things."

It was plain that his effective exile from his homeland at the hands of the Baron of Skelleth, through that stupid oath he had so foolishly taken, still rankled.

"Yet still, even granting the necessity of decay, why should we worship the goddess?"

Buried still deeper, he knew, was anger at the Forgotten King, who treated him like a foolish child and manipulated him like a marionette, and at the Wise Women of Ordunin, the trusted oracle that had first sent him to Skelleth.