Long pause. Because the doubt and shock, and the beginning of disappointment, were absolutely intense. So long a pause that the woman spoke again: 'My blacksmith, as you call him, has gone to the temple of Ils and will not be back until morning.'

On one level - the level of his desire - it had the ring of truth. But the denying thought was stronger. Suppose this was Azyuna, forced by her shamed brother-lover to make one more entrance into the home of the healer; so that the brother could use some mysterious connection with her to penetrate hard walls. Then, when death had been dealt, Ils would again be disgraced.

Thinking thus, a reluctant Stulwig said, 'You are freed of your promise, Illyra. Fate has worked once more to deny me one of the great joys of life. And once more enabled you to remain faithful to that hulking monster.'

The healer uttered a long sigh; finished: 'Perhaps, I shall have better fortune next time.'

As he returned to his sheepskin he did have the male thought that a night when a man made love to a goddess, could surely not be considered a total loss.

In fact-Remembering, suddenly, that the affair had also included embracing, in its early stages, an Illyra look-alike, Stulwig began to relax. It was then that sweet sleep came.

1

The storm swept down on Sanctuary in unnatural fury, as if to punish the thieves for their misdeeds. Its hailstones were large as fists. They pummelled Wideway and broke windows on the Street of Red Lanterns and collapsed the temple of Ils, most powerful of the conquered Ilsigs' gods.

The lightning it brought snapped up from the hills and down from the devilish skies and wherever it spat the world shuddered and rolled. It licked round the dome of Prince Kadakithis's palace and when it was gone, the Storm God Vashanka's name was seared into the stone in huge hieratic letters visible from the harbour. It slithered in the window of Jubal's walled estate and circled round the slavetrader's chair while he sat in it, turning his black face blue with terror.

It danced on a high hill between the slaver's estate and the cowering town, where a mercenary named Tempus schooled his new Syrese horse in the art of death. He had bought the tarnished silver beast sight unseen, sending to a man whose father's life he had once saved.

'Easy,' he advised the horse, who slipped in a sharp turn, throwing mud up into his rider's face. Tempus cursed the mud and the rain and the hours he would need to spend on his tack when the lesson was done. As for the screaming, stumbling hawk-masked man who fled iron-shod hooves in ever-shortening circles, he had no gods to invoke - he just howled.

The horse wheeled and hopped; its rider clung tightly, reins flapping loose, using only his knees to guide his mount. If the slaver who kept a private army must flaunt the fact, then the mercenary-cum-Guardsman would reduce its ranks. He would teach Jubal the overweening flesh merchant that he who is too arrogant, is lost. He saw it as part of his duty to the Ranke Prince-Governor he was sworn to protect. Tempus had taken down a dozen hawk-masks. This one, stumbling, gibbering, would make thirteen.

'Kill,' suggested the mercenary, tiring of his sport in the face of the storm.

The flattened ears of the misty horse flickered, came forwards. It lunged, neck out. Teeth and hooves thunked into flesh. Screaming. Then screaming stopped.

Tempus let the horse pummel the corpse awhile, stroking the beast's neck and cooing soft praise. When bones showed in a lightning flash, he backed the horse off and set it at a walk towards the walled city.

It was then that the lightning- came circling round man and mount.

'Stand, stand.' The horse, though he shook like a newborn foal, stood. The searing red light violated Tempus's tight-shut lids and made his eyes tear. An awful voice rang inside his head, deep and thunderous: ' You are mine.'

'I have never doubted it,' grated the mercenary.

'You have doubted it repeatedly,' growled the voice querulously, if thunder can be said to carp. ' You have been unruly, faithless, though you pledged Me your troth. You have been, since you renounced your inheritance, a mage, a philosopher, an auditing Adept of the Order of the Blue Star, a-'

'Look here. God. I have also been a cuckold, a footsoldier in the ranks, a general at the end of that. I have bedded more iron in flesh than any ten other men who have lived as long as I. Now You ring me round with thunder and compass me with lightning though I am here to expand Your worship among these infidels. I am building Your accursed temple as fast as I can. I am no priest, to be terrified by loud words and bright manifestations. Get Thee hence, and leave this slum unenlightened. They do not deserve me, and they do not deserve You!'

A gust sighed fiercely, flapping Tempus's woollens against his mail beneath.

'I have sent you hither to build Me a temple among the heathens, 0 sleepless one! A temple you will build!'

'A temple I will build. Yes, sir, Vashanka, lord of the Edge and the Point. If You leave me alone to do it.' Damn pushy tutelary god. 'You blind my horse, 0 God, and I will put him under Your threshold instead of the enemies slain in battle Your ritual demands. Then we will see who comes to worship there.'

'Do not trifle with Me, Man.'

'Then let me be. I am doing the best I can. There is no room for foreign gods in the hearts of these Sanctuarites. The Ilsig gods they were born under have seen to that. Do something amazing: strike the fear of You into them.'

'I cannot even make you cower, 0 impudent human!'

'Even Your visitations get old, after three hundred and fifty years. Go scare the locals. This horse will founder, standing hot in the rain.'

The thunder changed its tune, becoming canny. 'Go you to the harbour. My son, and look upon what My Majesty hath wrought! And into the Maze, where I am making My power known!'

With that, the corral of lightning vanished, the thunder ceased, and the clouds blew away on a west wind, so that the full moon shone upon the land.

'Too much krrf,' the mercenary who had sold himself for a Hell Hound sighed. 'Hell Hound' was what the citizenry called the Prince's Guard; as far as Tempus was concerned. Sanctuary was Hell. The only thing that made it bearable was krrf, his drug of choice. Rubbing a clammy palm across his mouth, he dug in his human-hide belt until searching fingers found a little silver box he always carried. Flipping it open, he took a pinch of black Caronne krrf and, clenching his fist, piled the dust into the hollow between his first thumb joint and the fleshy muscle leading to his knuckle. He sniffed deeply, sighed, and repeated the process, inundating his other nostril.

'Too much damn krrf,' he chuckled, for the krrf had never been stepped on - he did not buy adulterated drugs - and all six and a half feet of him tingled from its kiss. One of these days he would have to stop using it - the same day he laid down his sword.

He felt for its hilt, patted it. He had taken to calling it his 'Wriggly-be good', since he had come to this godforsaken warren of magicians and changelings and thieves. Then, the initial euphoria of the drug past, he kneed his horse homewards.

It was the krrf, not the instructions of the lightning or any fear of Vashanka, that made him go by way of the harbour. He was walking out his horse before taking it to the stable the Hell Hounds shared with the barracks personnel. What had ever possessed him to come down-country among the Ilsigs? It was not for his fee, which was exorbitant, that he had come, for the sake of those interests in the Rankan capital who underwrote him - those who hated the Emperor so much that they were willing to back such a loser as Kadakithis, if they could do it without becoming the brunt of too many jokes. It was not for the temple, though he was pleased to build it. It was some old, residual empathy in Tempus for a prince so inept as to be known far and wide as 'Kitty' which had made him come. Tempus had walked away from his primogeniture in Azehur, a long time ago, leaving the throne to his brother, who was not compromised by palace politics. He had deposited a treatise on the nature of being in the temple of a favoured goddess, and he had left. Had he ever, really, been that young? Young as Prince Kadakithis, whom even the Wrigglies disparaged?