The knights rode directly through the apparitions and the milling crowd.

‘Defend our God!’ the priest shrieked, his lips flecked with foam. His parishioners, however, chose not to do that.

The mud idol on the crude altar seemed to be moving slightly, even as a distant hill seems to dance and waver in the shimmering heat of a summer afternoon. Wave upon wave of sheer malevolence emanated from it and the air was suddenly deathly cold. Sparhawk suddenly felt his strength draining away, and Faran faltered. Then the ground before the altar seemed to bulge. Something was stirring beneath the earth, something so dreadful that Sparhawk turned his eyes away in sick revulsion. The ground heaved, and Sparhawk felt cold fear grip his heart. The light began to fade from his eyes.

‘No!’ Sephrenia’s voice rang out. ‘Stand firm! It cannot hurt you!’ She began to speak rapidly in Styric, then quickly held out her hand. What appeared there glowed brightly and seemed at first no larger than an apple, but as it rose into the air, it expanded and grew brighter and brighter until it was almost as if she had conjured up a small sun to hang in the air before the idol, and that sun brought with it a summer-like warmth that burned away the deathly chill. The ground ceased its restless heaving, and the idol froze, once again becoming motionless.

Kurik spurred his trembling gelding forward and swung his heavy chain-mace once. The grotesque idol shattered beneath the blow, and its shards flew out in all directions.

The naked Zemochs wailed in absolute despair.

Chapter 25

‘Round them up, Sparhawk,’ Sephrenia said, looking with a shudder at the naked Zemochs, ‘and please make them put their clothes back on.’ She looked at the altar. ‘Talen,’ she said, ‘gather up the fragments of the idol. We won’t want to leave them here.’

The boy didn’t even argue with her.

The ‘rounding up’ did not take very long. Naked, unarmed people do not customarily resist when mailed men with sharp steel in their hands start giving orders. The priest with the narrow head continued to shriek at them, however, although he was very careful not to give them any other reason to chastise him. ‘Apostates!’ he howled. ‘Defilers! I call upon Azash to –’ His words trailed off into a kind of croak as Sephrenia extended her arm and the serpent head reared from her palm, its tongue flickering. He stared at the swaying image of the reptile, his eyes bulging. Then he collapsed and grovelled in the dirt before her.

Sephrenia looked around sternly, and the other Zemochs also sank to the ground with a horrified moan. ‘Perverted ones!’ she snarled at them in the corrupt Zemoch dialect. ‘Your rite has been forbidden for centuries. Why have you chosen to disobey mighty Azash?’

‘Our priests beguiled us, dread Priestess,’ one shaggyhaired fellow gibbered. ‘They told us that the prohibition of our rite was a Styric blasphemy. They said that it was the Styrics in our midst who were leading us away from the true God.’ He seemed blind to the fact that Sephrenia herself was Styric. ‘We are Elene,’ he said proudly, ‘and we know that we are the chosen ones.’

Sephrenia gave the Church Knights a look that conveyed volumes. Then she looked at the rag-tag band of unwashed ‘Elenes’ grovelling before her. She seemed about to speak once, her breath drawn in to deliver a shattering denunciation. Instead, however, she let out the breath, and when she spoke, her voice was clinically detached. ‘You have strayed,’ she told them, ‘and that makes you unfit to join your countrymen in their holy war. You will return to your homes now. Go back to Merjuk and beyond, and venture no more to this place. Do not go near the temple of Azash, lest he destroy you.’

‘Should we hang our priests?’ the shaggy fellow asked her hopefully, ‘or burn them perhaps?’

‘No. Our God seeks worshippers, not corpses. Henceforth you will devote yourselves to the rites of purification and of reconciliation and the rites of the seasons only. You are as children, and as children shall you worship. Now go!’ She straightened her arm, and the serpent-head emerging from her palm, reared up, swelling, growing and becoming not so much a serpent as a dragon. The dragon roared, and sooty flames shot from its mouth.

The Zemochs fled.

‘You should have let them hang that one fellow at least,’ Kalten said.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I just set them on the path of a different religion, and that religion forbids killing.’

‘They’re Elenes, Lady Sephrenia,’ Bevier objected. ‘You should have instructed them to follow the Elene faith.’

‘With all its prejudices and inconsistencies, Bevier?’ she asked. ‘No, I don’t think so. I pointed them in a gentler way. Talen, have you finished yet?’

‘I’ve got all the pieces I could find, Sephrenia.’

‘Bring them along.’ She turned her white palfrey then and led them away from the rude altar.

They returned to the cave, gathered up their belongings and set out again.

‘Where did they come from?’ Sparhawk asked Sephrenia as they rode along in the biting cold.

‘Northeastern Zemoch,’ she replied, ‘from the steppes north of Merjuk. They’re primitive Elenes who haven’t had the benefits of contact with civilized people the way the rest of you have.’

‘Styrics, you mean?’

‘Naturally. What other civilized people are there?’

‘Be nice,’ he chided her.

She smiled. ‘The inclusion of orgies in the worship of Azash was a part of Otha’s original strategy. It brought in the Elenes. Otha’s an Elene himself, and he knows how strong those appetites are in your race. We Styrics have more exotic perversions. Azash really prefers those, but the primitives in the back country still hold to the old ways. They’re relatively harmless.’

Talen drew in beside them. ‘What do you want me to do with the pieces of that idol?’ he asked.

‘Throw them away,’ she replied, ‘– one piece every mile or so. Scatter them thoroughly. The rite had already begun, and we don’t want someone to gather up the pieces and put them back together again. The cloud’s trouble enough. We don’t want Azash Himself behind us as well.’

‘Amen,’ the boy said fervently. He rode off to one side, stood up in his stirrups and hurled a fragment of mud some distance away.

‘We’re safe then, aren’t we?’ Sparhawk said. ‘Now that the idol’s smashed, I mean? And as soon as Talen finishes scattering it?’