"Idiocy!" Ekial had exclaimed.

"That's a fair description, yes," Longbow had blandly agreed. "Many things that work quite well when your enemies are people won't work when they're bugs."

"What would you say is the best way to deal with an enemy that's too stupid to be afraid?"

"I've had a fair amount of success with killing every one I see, friend Ekial."

"All right, then," Ekial said to a number of his friends the next morning, "try to remember that the enemies we'll encounter might look like people, but they aren't. Don't waste time trying to frighten them, because you can't frighten them. They have no idea of what 'afraid' means."

"They might start to understand after a lot of their friends get killed," Skarn said.

"That's the whole point, Skarn. The bug-people don't have friends—at least not in the way that we understand the word. They don't have enough time to grow friendly with other bugs. They live for six weeks, and then they die of the bug version of 'old age.' They take orders from the Vlagh, and that's the only relationship they have. They'll try to follow the Vlagh's orders, and they won't understand what 'danger' means. If we just happened to kill every bug out there but just left one of them alive, that last one would keep on trying to attack us."

"That's stupid!" Orgal declared.

"It goes a long way past 'stupid,' Orgal. Nobody I know of has yet invented a word that describes how brainless the bug-people really are. They don't know how to think. They are poisonous, though, so don't get too close to them. Use your lances, but try not to break them. Concentrate on killing the ones that are close to the bottom of this slope. Don't go galloping out into that silly desert. All we're supposed to do is hold the bugs back until the Trogites get up here and build the fort. As soon as the fort's in place, we're probably going to be out of work."

THE VIOLATION OF THE TEMPLE

Chapter One

It seemed to Ox that Captain Hook-Beak was more than a little disturbed by Lady Aracia's sudden change of position. As long as she'd been willing to sit on her throne listening to the overdone orations of praise, she hadn't caused the slightest bit of inconvenience. Now that she realized just how totally useless her priests were, Sorgan and the other Maags would have to come up with ways to step around their new—and unwanted—helpers.

"I think you'd better pass the word to the other captains, Ox," Sorgan said when they'd returned to the Ascension. "We need to talk this over and come up with some way to keep all those silly priests from finding out what we're really doing here."

"I'll take care of it, Cap'n," Ox replied. Then he went out onto the deck of the Ascension, lowered the skiff, and rowed back to the beach.

It took him a couple of hours to gather up most of the Maag ship-captains, and it was well past midnight before Sorgan could advise the other captains that things had radically changed.

"Everything was going just the way we wanted it to go," he said, "but then the lady who's paying us came to her senses and woke up. She ordered all those fat priests to go out to the west wall of that silly temple to lend us a hand."

"Why didn't you just tell her that we don't need those people, Sorgan?" a captain called Squint-Eye demanded.

"She took me by surprise," Sorgan admitted. "That was the last thing I expected from her. She's not nearly as stupid as we all thought. She came down on those lazy priests of hers very hard. She threatened to kick any one of them who refused to help us out of the priesthood and banish him from her temple."

"I wish I'd been there to see that," a captain called Gimpy said. "I'll bet that most of the faces of those priests fell right off."

"They didn't seem too happy, that's for sure. Now, how are we going to get those fools out from underfoot?"

"Ah, Cap'n," Ox said then, "would you like to hear a suggestion?"

"Sure."

"We've pretty much blocked off that west side of the temple, wouldn't you say?"

"All except for adding another ten feet or so to our fake fort. Where are you going with this, Ox?"

"The west side's just about finished, Cap'n," Ox replied, "but the south side hasn't been touched yet, and the imitation bug-people will attack from any direction we want them to, wouldn't you say?"

Sorgan blinked.

"I'd say that solves your problem, Hook-Beak," Squint-Eye said. "You could have saved us all a lot of time if you'd learned to listen to your first mate. It sounds to me like he's about three jumps ahead of you."

"Or maybe even four," Gimpy added.

"I'm not really sure, Cap'n," Ox replied when Sorgan started asking questions as soon as the other Maag ship-captains had left the Ascension. "The whole idea seemed to come to me while you were telling the other captains about the problem Lady Zelana's sister dropped on us."

"Now you're starting to sound like Longbow," Sorgan said. "Did you hear some lady's voice coming from no place at all?"

"It wasn't a lady's voice, Cap'n. I'm sure that I've heard it before, though. If the idea's as good as I think it is, it most likely came from somebody who knows Lady Aracia very well."

"Veltan, maybe?"

Ox shook his head. "No, I'm sure it wasn't Veltan. Whoever it was didn't have to say very much to me to get the point across. About all our other friend said to me was 'Why not send those worthless priests down to the south wall of the temple and put them to work there instead of where the work's almost finished? Keep them busy, but out from underfoot.' Then it all seemed to come together, and it made a lot of sense. I didn't mean to embarrass you or anything like that, but as soon as I thought my way through the whole notion, I just started to tell you about it without waiting until we were alone."

"Well, whoever it was solved our problem for us, and I don't embarrass all that easy." Then Sorgan scratched his cheek. "I think we might want to take Rabbit and Torl along with us. We'll need to have them tell Lady Aracia that they saw a different group of bug-people sneaking down toward the south wall while we were holding off the west wall from the attack of their friends."

"You might want to talk with Veltan, Cap'n," Ox suggested. "If we can persuade Lady Aracia to send the fat people to the south wall, a few sightings of bug-people creeping through the bushes would confirm what we tell Lady Aracia, and I'm sure that reports of those sightings will get back to her real soon."