Free Rebel of Antares by Alan Burt Akers Page B

lit up an area that curved in a subtle way like a crown rink, so that I guessed I was over the side porch of the great hall of Malab’s Temple. Dust choked everywhere. I saw no more bodies, for which I was profoundly grateful.
    A distant noise, like a clink of metal against stone, floating from the opposite side made me hare over the shallow dome, kicking dust. By the time I reached the opposite door, passing the ranked cubbyholes stuffed with skulls and skeletons, there was sign of no one. The torches were all burned low, some guttering. No doubt they afforded light to the watchkeepers of the dead. The believers in the power of Malab’s Blood wished to remain in his temple when they were dead and not to be buried in the ranked mausoleums of the Forest of the Departed. As for Malab, your ordinary uncouth fellow like myself will quaff a good measure of Malab’s Blood, and comment on the quality of the wine. Such is one belief to an unbeliever. As for Malab’s Blood itself, as a wine I drink it when there is nothing finer to be had.
    Stairs led down beyond the door. They would open up to the little porch that gave ingress to the major porch on this undamaged side of the temple. I rattled down the stairs quickly, but I went silently and my rapier snickered out before me as I went.
    No one waited for me at the foot of the stairs.
    Another damned door and this time I was out in the street.
    The side alley was shadowed in the lights of the suns. I ducked back and went the other way, skirting around behind the pierced traceries, searching the ground floor of the temple. I could see no one, yet there had been that clink of steel on stone.
    Back and forth I went, and nothing. Again I climbed, this time creeping out along the crazy half-exposed stairway where the other side wall had fallen away. Nothing. Back again in the vast and shadowed Great Hall of the temple, with all the fine furnishings removed, the idol missing from the alcove above the altar, the floor dusty and slick, I stared about.
    Three men advanced toward me in the shadowed light.
    I said — very damned quickly! — “It’s me. Jak.”
    Barkindrar’s sling stopped its whirling, and Nath’s bow lowered.
    “You were nearly feathered there, Jak,” said Nath.
    “After my shot had squashed his brains in,” said Barkindrar.
    “This is no time for a professional argument.” I spoke more sharply than I intended. But I felt the pressures. “Where are Tyfar and Jaezila?”
    They did not know.
    So, once again, we went through Malab’s Temple. Nothing.
    At last I said, “Very well. They are not here. They will have escaped. They must have!”
    “Of course,” said Kaldu in his heavy assertive way. He was Jaezila’s personal retainer, a big-boned, powerful man, who wore his brown beard trimmed to a point. He was capable of such anger when aroused in defense of his mistress that he could tear a savage beast in half with his bare hands, or so it was said. “All the same,” said Kaldu, looking about. “It is passing strange.”
    “Deuced strange.”
    “They could have gone back to the tavern,” said Nath. “But it is hardly likely—”
    “They would not run off and leave us,” said Barkindrar.
    That, we all agreed, was most unlikely.
    So, once again, we searched.
    This time, in that same damned crown rink of a place above the porch, where the moldering bones glinted in the light of guttering torches, we heard a choked cry. Instantly Kaldu was tearing at the nearest heaps of bones, flinging them about in careless savagery. He hauled a pile of skulls away and Tyfar’s face showed, the eyes fairly sticking out, the cheeks scarlet, and the gag partly wrenched away from his mouth. He was making the most ferocious sounds beneath the gag.
    I stared at him. As they hauled him out I saw he was unharmed, if covered in skeleton dust. I felt such a heart-melting sense of relief I took a deep breath. So that made me say, “Just a moment, before you remove the gag. The