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When he started forward, up into Biton's valley, Adiatu
"Yes, I did know that." Gerin nodded.
"But there's summat else you might not ha' known," Adiatu
"As a matter of fact, I knew that, too," the Fox answered. "They tried to kill me here. Van and I-and Elise, too-killed all of them but one. He decided moving against me wouldn't be a good notion, but Balamung caught him and burned him in a wicker cage."
"Ah, I mind me I heard summat o' that, now that you speak of it," Adiatu
"Not unless you plan on trying to murder me inside the temple, the way those other Trokmoi did," Gerin replied.
"Nay, though I thank you for the offer," Adiatu
"For your sweet and generous praises, far beyond my deserts, I thank you most humbly," the Fox said, and Adiatu
Rihwin gave him a sour look. "For your sweet and generous praises, lord king, I thank you." Gerin chuckled and dipped his head, conceding the round to his fellow Fox.
When Dagref drove the chariot up toward the temple to Biton, Adiatu
Ferdulf turned a fine semidivine sneer his way. "Why should I care what my father thinks or does?" he returned. "Since he has no room in his life for me, do his views on others-even other gods-matter?"
"I told him he shouldn't have got into the wine," Gerin murmured to Van.
The outlander rolled his eyes. "A man's own children don't listen to him. Why should anyone else's children?"
"Whose son is that?" one of the guardsmen asked, pointing up to Ferdulf.
"Mavrix's," Gerin answered. "The Sithonian wine god got him on one of my peasant women."
"Is it so?" The warrior's eyes widened. "But Mavrix and the lord Biton worked together in driving the monsters off the surface of the earth and back into the caverns under Biton's shrine."
"So they did," Gerin agreed. "And it was the most quarrelsome cooperation you've ever seen in all your born days."
They drove past several neat little villages and the fields surrounding them. The peasants in the valley of Ikos were all freeholders, owing allegiance to no overlord save Biton. That arrangement had always smacked of anarchy to the Fox, but he, like Aragis, fought shy of trying to a
Ferdulf flew down and hovered alongside Gerin like a large, bad-tempered mosquito. In confidential tones, he asked, "Do you think the farseeing god will be able to tell me how to take vengeance on my father?"
"I have no way of knowing that," Gerin said. "If I were you, though, Ferdulf, I wouldn't get my hopes too high."
"He's all god," Ferdulf muttered. "It's not fair."
"No, it probably isn't," Gerin admitted, "but I don't know what you can do about it, either."
White against greenery, the marble walls of Biton's shrine gleamed ahead. The earthquake that had released the monsters had also overthrown it, but Biton's own power restored it at the same time as Biton and Mavrix recontained the monsters.
"Isn't that pretty?" Adiatu
"So he does," Gerin said, "and it's worth your life to try to steal any of them. Biton has a special plague he uses to smite people who walk off with what's his. I've seen one or two he's killed with it. It's not a pretty way to go."
Adiatu
Outside the gates, attendants took charge of the two chariots. No others waited there. The shrine did not draw the crowds it had before the earthquake, let alone before the days when folk came from all over the Elabonian Empire, and even from beyond its borders, to gain the Sibyl's oracular responses.
A plump priest with a eunuch's smooth face led the travelers into the temple compound. Ferdulf had been drifting along a couple of feet off the ground. As soon as he passed through the entranceway, he descended to the earth with a thump that staggered him. He glared toward the temple ahead. "He's a full god, too," he growled resentfully, "so I have to do what he wants. Not what I want. Still not fair."
Adiatu
Gerin's voice was dry as he gave Adiatu
"Och, 'tis no easy thing you ask of me, Fox darling," the Trokm- chieftain said with a sigh. His eyes flicked from the statues to stacked ingots to great bronze bowls supported on golden tripods. "I'd heard of these riches, but the difference between the hearing of them and the seeing of them with the eyes of a man himself, it's the difference 'twixt hearing of a pretty woman and lying with her. And these won't be all the gauds, either, I'm thinking."
"You're right about that, too," Gerin said. "There's plenty more in the caverns off the route to the Sibyl's throne." Adiatu
He glowered at the frieze on the entablature above the colo
They went into the temple. Adiatu
Ferdulf exclaimed, too, but he was pointing at the cult statue of Biton that stood near the opening into the caverns below the shrine. The statue was not an anthropomorphic representation of the farseeing god, as were the rest of the images in the compound. Instead, it was a column of black basalt utterly plain except for scratches that might have been eyes and a jutting phallus. "How old is it?" Ferdulf whispered; in this place, even he showed a certain amount of respect for the god who ruled here.