Free The A'Rak by Michael Shea

precisely intended to remind him of what the god could do, and make him embrace this epic homicide with the sense of relief that he had, in fact, felt. Pandagon had been informed of a hecatomb about to take place, and had been manipulated into accepting it gratefully, thankfully eager to serve.
    The priest felt the kindling of anger, deep in his core. The anger gave birth to a perilous inspiration, and an heroic resolve.
    "Great A'Rak," he said when his master had done, "My grateful knowledge of our debt to you emboldens me to dare your august displeasure and take issue with your provisions. But I do not think they are sufficient to ensure orderly, decent, and devout delivery of your just tribute."
    Thus launched, Paanja Pandagon found an effortless eloquence. Compelled, he said, by his loyal abhorrence of the impiety that panic might precipitate, he begged that the A'Rak's monastia be directed to provide the wherewithal to recruit a small precautionary cohort under the humble Ecclesiarch's personal command. It was only because the A'Rak's devoted priest had received in the Academy—as all of his class did—a first-rate military education, and that as a professional in the arts of force he was alarmed at the potential for mutiny here, that he dared the impertinence of correcting his deity's calculation.
    What was the A'Rak a-weighing in the following silence—that long following silence—that led him, at last, led him to utter his gracious assent to the priest's proposition? Paanja Pandagon was to learn two days thence, to his woe.
     
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LAGADEME III
    A basket-work arch proclaimed the place in big wicker letters:
     
BOZZM OF BUTTERCROCK BYRE
CHEESERY & CHURNERY OF RENOWN
     
    The farmstead thus announced, by its appearance, only half remembered the sign's prosperous optimism. The house and barn were of ample scale and proudly gabled; the milking and shearing pens' posts and railings were all marblewood notched and mitered. But all this was now badly weathered, the flowerplots were weedy, and the barn's sheddings of shingles added to the barnyard's litter of bent pails and broken carding paddles.
    The widow Bozzm was milking a momile in that yard, absorbed in the work and oblivious of us. She was an opulent woman, hugely breasted and haunched, and the poise of her bigness on the tiny milking stool seemed a minor miracle. She was not grotesque. A charm auraed her lavishness, and she was as innocently, wholly female as the beast whose udder she eased. Indeed, the pair of them in their tranquil absorption, sitting long-shadowed in the dying day, made a charming tableau of feminine harmony and peaceful mutuality.
    Then she saw us, and surged up, crying, "Dulcetty! Sleekey! She's here! Cousin Pompidor!"
    From a low dome of timbers between house and barn—one of those thick-roofed, half-sunk structures in which the Hagish cellar their dairy and fruit for the coolth—a slant-laid door banged open and two red-cheeked young women as lavish as their mother burst out and charged towards us, arms flung wide, pouring out questions and greetings and laughter, seizing our hands, petting our shoulders, begging the tale of our journey and swearing we were all welcomer than fly swatters at a honey-pie bake-off.
    They seemed more easy hugging us than embracing Pompilla, with whom they seemed awkward, exclaiming simultaneously, "Sweet Auntie!" "Dear Granny!"—the titles mere affectionate honorifics, apparently. What we already knew of Dame Pompilla's volatility made their hesitance towards her easy to understand.
    Widow Bozzm smilingly scolded them, "Girls! Leave dear Cousin Plumpbelow be to talk business with me, and take our dear Nuncio and her friends to the buttery for some refreshment!"
    The two widows walked barn-ward in close conversation, and we were led down into the coolth of the cellar, a bath of appetizing aromas. Plainly they passed much time here. Central in the circular chamber were couches and settles and big lounging