Saberhagen, Fred - Book of the Gods 1 by The Face of Apollo

Author:The Face of Apollo
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

Now the program of serious terror got under way.

The marauders swaggered in, cowed anyone who looked at them, kicked open the few doors that were slammed at their ap-proach, and began disarming men—though none of these vil-lage men were bearing real weapons. Still several were knocked down, cowed, disabled.

One or two brave boys and angry women met similar fates. Dogs that barked and challenged were ruthlessly cut down.

The bandits seemed unconcerned about the villagers who had managed to hide or run away—it was probably a safe assump-tion they had really nowhere to run for effective help.

An old man, evidently some kind of a local leader, stepped for-ward, trembling. Jeremy gathered, from

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

the few words that he could overhear, that one of the young women already being mo-lested was the old man's daughter or granddaughter.

Although his relatives were now trying to hold him back, he protested in a quavering voice, "It is a very foolish thing that you are doing—"

The old man, now being surrounded by a little circle of ban-dits, screamed out his plea for Apollo's help against the darkness, the barbarians.

"Other gods rule now, you old fool," one told him in a pitying, almost kindly voice.

"In fact," said another, adopting a thoughtful attitude, "we ourselves are the only gods you need. What's the matter? Don't you recognize us?"

A roar of laughter burst out around the little circle. "Anyway, we're the only ones taking any interest in you today! Let's hear some prayers."

The words that came out of the old man's mouth were not a prayer, and a bandit's fist soon shut it for him.

Jeremy meanwhile was experiencing an increasing sense of re-moteness. He realized now that he'd been mistaken about the Intruder—the alien power inside his skull had not fallen idle. Something was going on, but he could not tell exactly what. Whatever it was produced a feeling of disorientation, unsteadi-ness, apart from what could be blamed on the horror he had to watch. And now there was a kind of humming sound—was it in-side his head or out?—that he could not identify. It was a distant very faint but slowly growing noise, a wavery, polyphonic drone, that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

Jeremy closed his eyes—not so much in an effort to blot out horror as to seek something else; he knew not what. There passed before his view a parade of all the images of the gods that he had ever seen, most particularly a collection of the statues and paint-ings he had walked among while at the Academy.

He knew that Apollo (the being whose image at the Academy bore that label) was considered God of

"Distance, Death, Terror, and Awe," "Divine Distance," "Crops and Herds," "Alexikakos,"

Averter of Evil.

Now and again Jeremy grew afraid that the alien thing inside his head cared not at all what might happen to any portion of his own proper mind or body.

The voices of the terrified villagers, men, women, and chil-dren, muttering, sobbing, in repeated

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.