I protested.

Hurry. The thing will accept defeat soon. The minions of the state will bestir themselves. It will be to your advantage to be absent when they arrive. You will not be absent if you do not hasten.

That was true, though maybe it wasn't his full concern. I played along, anyway. I started at the beginning and gave him everything to the moment I'd gotten in a step ahead of the spider. The telling took a while.

He took a while longer to digest everything. I was pretty antsy when Dean stuck his head in. "Mr. Garrett, that thing gave up."

I hurried to the front door and peeked out. Dean was right. It was staggering down the street, not even trying to walk on air, spending more energy scratching than going. I bounced back into the Dead Man's room. "It's headed out, Chuckles. We don't have much time." I leaned back into the hall. "Dean, tell Maya we've got to get out of here."

He scowled at me. He muttered and cursed and made it damned clear he thought I had no business putting Maya at risk.

The Dead Man said, If I can have your attention?

"You got it, Smiley."

Your sense of humor never rises above the juvenile. Pay attention. First, it is probable that you are correct. The attacks upon this house were not launched either to get you or because the place belongs to you. For a moment I considered it possible that I was their target. That seemed reasonable under the assumption that this trouble springs from the source I suspect. But that source should not be aware of my presence, considering its prior indifference to researching the nature of its adversaries. So its focus, its interest, must be something within the house.

Say what? He knew who was stirring all the commotion?

Have you bothered to examine the guest room ? You did not mention having done so, yet I cannot imagine any protégé of mine having been so lax as to have overlooked the obvious.

He was going to bounce right up on his high horse. He loves it when he nails me.

Damn it, I'd thought about this before and I hadn't bothered to see if Jill had left something.

Sometimes you get too busy to think.

Now, with him sitting there smirking, I began to wonder if Jill hadn't set me up.

"Dean! Go upstairs and see if Jill left anything in the guest room. Maya can help you look. If you don't find anything, look wherever she could've gotten to while she was here. If you still don't find anything, look where she couldn't have gotten. There must be something."

Better late than never.

"Right. I'm sure the neighbors will agree when they try to figure out why their houses got torn up."

He understood. If he'd gotten off his mental duff back when, we might not have this mess now.

Let us not fall to bickering, Garrett. Time has been wasted. Let us waste no more.

"Check. So let's get at it. You think you know what's going on? Do you know anything about these Sons of Hammon?"

I recall them. A vicious and nihilistic cult. For them all life is sorrow and misery and punishment and shall continue to be till their Devourer has been unchained to scour the world clean. The many shall be consumed and the True Believers, the Faithful, who serve without cavil, who help release the Devourer and set the Devastation in motion, shall be rewarded with perpetual bliss. Their paradise resembles the adolescent paradise of the Shades cults. Milk and honey, streets of gold, an inexhaustible supply of suppliant virgins.

"That part doesn't sound so bad."

To you it would not.

I waited for him to tell me more.

The cult's roots reach back to the time of your prophet Terrell. It was declared heretic and a persecution launched against it a thousand years ago. Till then it was just one of countless Hanite cults. The heretics fled into various nonhuman areas. A colony formed in Carathca, where its doctrines became polluted by dark elfish nihilism, then fell under the sway of devil-worshippers who brought it around to its present philosophical form three hundred years ago. About that time its high priests began claiming direct revelations from heaven, revelations the laity could feel themselves. The cult began acting politically, trying to hasten the Devastation.

They were persecuted, Garrett. First in the power games of empire and churches, then because the masters of Carathca grew afraid of them and wanted to drive them out.

The cult faded into the human population, which supported it because humans were not well treated in Carathca. It deployed all the instruments of terror. After two generations it mastered Carathca. The dark-elfin nobility survived only as puppets. The countryside for fifty miles around fell under cult sway. Fanatic assassins went out to silence the Devastator's enemies. The cult became so dangerous, so vicious, that the early Karentine Kings had no choice but war or submission. They chose war, as humans always do, determined to exterminate the cult. For a time it seemed they had succeeded. King Beran declared them extinct only to be assassinated by a branch which had established itself in TunFaire under another name. His son Brian continued the fight and, it appeared, succeeded in extinguishing the cult's last lights a century and a half ago. Do you follow?

"Well enough. I don't understand, but I don't have to understand to deal with them, do I?"

You need understand only that they are more dangerous than anyone you have ever battled, excepting perhaps vampires defending their nest. They do not just believe, they know. Their devil god has spoken to each of them directly and has given each of them a look into a paradise where they will spend eternity. They will do anything because they know there is no penalty to compare with their coming reward. They fear nothing. They are saved and will be born again, and concrete evidence has been given them for this. They need take the word of no one but their god himself.

I got a really creepy feeling. "Just wait up, Old Bones. What the hell? I don't need this. I'm a nonbeliever. You trying to tell me there's no side of the angels, that there really is a god and he's really a devil and—"

Hold! Enough!

I calmed down a little, though I was still pretty shaky. Think about stepping up face-to-face with possible proof that something you find completely repellent is the law of the universe.

We Loghyr have never found proof of the existence of any gods. Neither have we disproved their existence, although logic militates against it. They are not necessary to explain anything. Nature does not provide that which is not needed.

He'd never spent half a year trying to survive in a swamp infested with five-hundred parasitic species. Were gods some sort of psychic or spiritual parasites?

However, proof or lack thereof are unnecessary to the mind that must believe. And that mind becomes doubly narrow and doubly dangerous when it is given what it perceives as proof. Then it can begin to create that in which it believes.

Hanging out with him wasn't all a dead waste. "You mean somebody is running a game on the Sons of Hammon, making like he's their god? Fooling them into doing his dirty deeds?"

Someone was back when the cult ruled Carathca and its environs. We who brought about his downfall believed we had destroyed him. Perhaps we failed. Or perhaps another has taken his place, though what other there could be is a greater puzzle than how the one we fought could have escaped to nurture his wickedness in secret.

I was on a roll. "We're talking another dead Loghyr here, aren't we?" It didn't take much imagination to see how my old buddy here could kick ass if he wasn't so damned lazy.

We are. We are speaking of the only Loghyr ever to have gone mad. We are speaking of a true son of the Beast, if you will, who did great evils while he lived, in the guises of several of your history's bloodiest villains, and who strove to do greater evils still after the righteous slew him.