"I hope not." He helped her up the shelf, and they walked furtively into the tunnel. No sign of anything—till Rack stumbled over the corpse of a zanph. Bending, Nirea saw beyond it the sack and draining ichor of a globe.
"The rebels have been here!"
"Aye." He straightened, his white eye shining in the light of a distant lantern. "How can a god die?" he asked, in a child's puzzled tone. "Lady, no god ever died before. They don't die—'tis in the Credo. How can these rebels slay them?"
"Maybe no one ever tried before. Come on." She hurried to the ladders. Blue-tinged, mouth agape and eyes upturned without sight, there lay a priest, half over the lip of the shaft. He had been de-throated by a pickax.
"This looks like Revel's ferocious work," said Rack. "I hope he's alive. Yes, I do hope so."
"When I last saw him, riding off hell-for-leather on my nag, he was extremely alive, mother-naked and covered with blood but as alive as I am this instant." She went down the ladder hand under hand past three levels, swung off at the fourth. Another dead man lay at her feet; this was a squire, a youngish man in plum and scarlet, very brutally slain by a pick-slash in the brain. It was a man she knew, and momentarily she felt herself a traitor to her kind; then she thought of Ewyo's vices, corruptions, and she snorted defiantly. His gun, its stock remounted and a shell rammed home, was in her hand. She went forward, striding like a man ... and a man who knew what he meant to do.
The end of the tunnel was illuminated vividly by many blue lanterns, and presented to their startled eyes an horrific scene of carnage. The dead lay in piles, in one and twos and fours, their brains splashed on the walls, their guts smeared across the floor, their skulls cloven and their bodies rent. Ruckers lay here, miners and gentry-servants. Squires wallowed lifeless in pools of their highborn blood. Snake-headed zanphs clawed in their rigor at the dead flesh of priests, of rebels, of squires. Here and there lay the vacant sacks that had been gods. At Nirea's feet stretched a man built like Revel, who might be Revel, for his face was gone, burnt away by the touch of the terrible orb-aura at full strength. No, she realized even as she swayed back, it was not he, for this man's body was unscarred, and Revel must be looking like a skinned hare if he yet lived.
What a brawl this must have been! She was about to speak to Rack when she heard a familiar voice, booming brazenly out in the silence of the mine. It came from the black hole at the end of the tunnel.
"Then a whole line of them came down at us, faster than a squire can put a horse over a hurdle, and the forest yet a good half mile away! I had one dagger left, and my trusty small Jerran up behind me. The squires were ashooting, but ineffectively, and the roan was carrying us well and truly; but here came the gods, may they boil in my mother's cook-pot in Hell!
"I looked wildly for something to beat 'em off with, for as you've seen, a touch of their radiance burns your flesh from your bones if they wish it so. Well! The only thing on the whole cursed nag is the scabbard in which a squire keeps his long gun. It's a thing some three feet long or over, of light metal, covered with satin and velvet and silk. I tore it from its moorings, and as the globes came at me, I stood up in the stirrups, naked as your hand, and started to swat 'em. Jerran leaning forward past me, guiding the stallion, for his reach is not half mine."