gentry. I'm not in danger."

"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 sp