The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [119]
“Your Highness.” Caenvyr bowed from the saddle, then rode off.
Voran turned to Ridvar’s captain. “Your lord needs to know what’s happened here. Send messengers, but four of them, just in case any of the swine are hiding along the forest road. Bring them to me before they leave, so I can tell them the message.”
“Done, then, Your Highness.” The captain jogged off to follow orders.
“Now, as for us,” Voran returned his attention to the two lords. “Let’s gather our men and push on. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a good reason why Govvin hasn’t answered that summons from the gwerbret.”
“So am I, Your Highness,” Gerran said. “The temple’s defensible if the main body of raiders come back for us.”
“Good thought, yet once again. Very well. Let’s ride.”
The temple complex stood at the top of a low hill. From the outside, it looked like a typical Deverry dun, with a high stone wall, crenellated, circling a tall broch tower. In the ward, or so Gerran had been told, the priests had built a round temple of Bel out of the sacred oak wood. When they rode up to the base of the hill, he could see that the gates to the dun hung open, smashed half off their hinges. The warm spring wind brought down the unmistakable stink of rotting blood and flesh.
“By all the gods!” Prince Voran whispered. He started to say more, then merely shook his head in disbelief.
The men behind him began to curse and mutter among themselves. Gerran rose in his stirrups and looked through the gates. He could see what appeared to be irregular tree trunks. standing in the ward.
“It looks like they’ve taken the temple apart, Your Highness,” Gerran said. “Whoever they were.”
“And then they left again,” the prince said. “No man’s going to live in that stink. Dead priests, I assume.”
The prince had assumed correctly, but none of them could have guessed what lay ahead. Most of the prince’s men dismounted and armed, then followed the prince and Gerran while the Cengarn men and the Red Wolf guarded the horses. Cautiously, three abreast, they walked up the hill, then stopped, stunned, at the gates. Ravens rose from a feast, shrieking in annoyance at being disturbed.
Mercifully, all of the priests had already died. Each one of them had been stripped, bound, and then impaled on a long Horsekin spear, inserted in the anus and shoved all the way through to the back of the neck and out again. Their faces, twisted in agony, showed that they’d been still alive during the impalement. A few must have lived for some while, judging from their pain-twisted faces and the way they’d bitten through their own lips. Twelve priests in all, plus four servants, made up the thicket of death.
Gerran heard men behind him turning out of line to vomit off to the side of the gates. Prince Voran himself had gone dead-white, and drops of sweat beaded his face.
“Your Highness,” Gerran said. “Is the high priest one of these men?”
“He’s not.” Voran swallowed heavily. “Let’s look in the temple. He might have taken refuge at the altar.” He turned and called out to his men. “Get these poor bastards down! We’ll bury them properly out in the oak grove.”
The prince allowed Gerran to take the lead. They skirted the impalements and walked around the circular temple to reach the west-facing door. It, too, hung smashed from its hinges. Inside, a few shafts of sunlight streamed from the tiny windows up near the roof, plenty of light to see the remains of the statue of Bel, lying ax-hacked and scattered around the floor. On the stone altar Govvin lay stripped and gutted. The Horsekin had cut him open a few inches at a time and placed his internal organs in tidy lines on either side of him, bladder, guts, kidneys, stomach, and lungs, everything but the heart, which was missing. Ants crawled thick over the corpse and the altar, black with old blood.
“Just what I was expecting,” Gerran said.
The prince dropped to his knees and vomited like a commoner.