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When the god abandoned possession of Selatre, she staggered as if stunned. Gerin put an arm around her, steadying her and keeping her from falling. She looked around in surprise. "Did I say something?" she asked. "What did I say?"

"That was the farseeing god," one of the temple guardsmen said, his voice clotted with awe. "No one else-the lord Biton."

"Biton?" Selatre's eyes opened very wide. "Did the lord Biton speak through me?" She seemed to be taking mental stock. "It might be so. I feel the way I did when-after-" She stopped in confusion. "But he couldn't have."

"He did," Gerin said. He let his hand tighten for a moment. "We all heard it." His companions and the guards nodded. He repeated the verses that had come from her mouth, adding, "Not much doubt about what they mean, either."

He was looking straight at Lamissio. Of all those present when the mantic fit hit Selatre, only Biton's priest doubted it was genuine. "How could the farseeing god speak through a vessel he himself discarded?" Lamissio said. "How could he speak through a woman not a maiden?"

But the guard who had first acknowledged that Biton was speaking through Selatre answered. "Gods make rules, and gods break rules, too. That's what makes them gods. And the prince of the north has the right of it here, too. No way to mistake the meaning of the oracular response."

Not all the response was clear. Gerin saw that, even if no one else did. Biton had given him leave to go down under the shrine and bargain with whatever powers were associated with the monsters. He had not said those powers would keep any bargain once made.

Van took a step toward Lamissio, plainly intending to force his cooperation if he could get it no other way. Gerin started to step away from Selatre to block the outlander. Before he could, Duren did. Their eyes met for a moment. The Fox knew he and his son were seeing the same thing: that if even the guardsmen recognized that Biton had, rules or no rules, filled Selatre for a moment, the priest could not help but give way.

And so it proved. Muttering something ungracious under his breath, Lamissio said, "Very well, it shall be as you say-and pray the farseeing god will permit no disasters to spring from it." Then his dour front tottered and collapsed, as the temple behind him had during the earthquake a decade before. "The god has expanded my notion of the possible," he murmured, which struck Gerin as far from the worst way to phrase it.

Van had let Duren hold him away from Lamissio, but he hadn't been happy about it. Now he growled, "You expand my notion of time wasting. Take us down there, and quit dawdling about it."

"It shall be as you say," Lamissio answered. "In the face of the words of the god I serve, how could it be otherwise? But there shall be one more brief delay." Van growled again, this time dangerously. Lamissio held up a plump hand. "The Sibyl has already taken her place in the chamber below the shrine. I shall send one of my colleagues down there to bring her forth. Should the worst befall and the monsters break loose once more, would you have her trapped in that chamber, with them between her and safety?"

That left Van with nothing to say. His gesture might have meant, Get on with it. The priest went into the shrine. Gerin, meanwhile, turned to the temple guardsmen. "You'd better be ready at the mouth of the underground opening. If we don't come up and the monsters do, your best bet is to try to hold them below ground. If they spread over the land again-" He didn't go on. He didn't need to go on.

Time seemed to crawl by very slowly. How long did a priest need to go down to the Sibyl and come back with her? At last, after what seemed much too long a time, a eunuch came out with the maid who had given Gerin and Duren the oracular response earlier in the year.

She and Selatre stared at each other. Gerin saw the shock of recognition run through both of them as each knew the other for what she was. The Sibyl nodded to Selatre, then let the eunuch lead her away. Lamissio came out of Biton's shrine and beckoned the Fox and his companions forward.

As she walked up to the temple, Selatre said, more to herself than to anyone else, "I never dreamt I would come here. And oh! — I never dreamt the god would speak to me, speak through me, again. Amazing." Her face glowed, as if a lamp had been lighted inside her.

Walking along with her, Gerin quietly worried. She had forsaken the god for him, but now that Biton had returned to her, would she still care about the merely human? The only way to find out was to wait and see. That would not be easy. Any other choice, though, looked worse.

Geroge and Tharma exclaimed in wonder at the magnificent ornamentation within Biton's shrine. Lamissio stood waiting near the black basalt cult statue with the jutting phallus, and near the rift in the ground through which supplicants descended to the Sibyl's cave-or, as now, to a journey and a fate apt to be blacker than any found there.

"I think our usual rituals no longer apply," the eunuch priest said. "We are not going into the depths of the earth to see the Sibyl, nor even to treat with the farseeing god in any way. All we can pray for now is our own safety."

"You don't have to come with us, Lamissio," Gerin said. "You're liable to be safer if you don't, in fact."

But the priest shook his head. "I am in my place. The god has permitted this. I leave my fate with him."

Gerin bowed, honoring his courage. "Come, then," he said.

As he strode toward the rift in the ground opening onto the hidden ways that ran deep underground, he glanced at the cult statue of Biton. For a moment, the eyes scratched into the living rock came alive: the god, he thought, was looking out at him. Then, as they had before on other visits to the shrine, Biton's eyes faded back into the hard, black stone.

Or they faced into the stone for him, at any rate. Selatre murmured, "Thank you, farseeing one," as she drew near the image, and seemed to speak more intimately than she would have to basalt alone.

Lamissio picked up a torch and lighted it at one of those near the entrance to the caves. Then, long robe flapping about his ankles, he walked down the stone steps that led into the cavern. Gerin took a deep breath and followed.

Sunlight vanished quickly, at the first turn of the path. After that, the torch Lamissio carried and those stuck in sconces set into the wall gave the only light. Geroge and Tharma whooped with glee at the way their shadows swooped and fluttered in the moving, flickering light.

"Keep an eye on them," Van muttered to Gerin.

"I am," the Fox answered, also under his breath. Caves and the underground were the monsters' native haunts, or at least the haunts of their kind. If their blood called to them, this was where they were liable to revert to the bloodthirsty ways of which the aboveground world had seen all too much eleven years before. For now, they showed no sign of any such reversion, only fascination with a place whose like they'd never seen.

Some passages in the tunnel that led to the Sibyl's cave were walled off because they held more treasures than Biton's priests displayed outside the shrine. Some were walled off because they held the monsters at bay. Magical wards set before them reinforced brick and mortar.

One of those walls was made of bricks in the shape of loaves of bread, a marker of very ancient brickwork indeed. Actually, the Fox reminded himself, the wall was no older than any other part of the shrine and underground caverns, having been restored by Biton after the earthquake. But, so far as he could tell, the farseeing god's restoration had been as perfect here as elsewhere, so the wall might as well have been-in effect, was-as ancient as it looked.