The Altar at Asconel Read Online Free

brother.
You’re talking like your dust-dry books, not like a human being!” Vix gulped another mouthful of wine. “Maybe you’ve been cooped up here so long you’ve forgotten how to make regular conversation!”
    The jab went home. Spartak flushed. “I’m sorry. It’s true I’ve spent more time reading than talking these past several years. But it’s been in a good cause,” he added defensively, thinking to penetrate the other’s hostility. “I’m working on a history of Asconel.”
    “Faugh! I’m not concerned with the dead past. I’m worried about the future. Don’t your books tell you that that’s under our control, while the past is what we find it and we can’t set it to rights?” Another gulp of wine, and once more the mug was held out for refilling. “Besides, I don’t much hold with working at distance. Asconel is its own history.”
    “I—” On the verge of a hot objection, Spartak checked. “I’ll tell you something, too,” he continued after a moment’s pause. “That’s a far more philosophical remark than I ever expected to hear from your lips!”
    “By the nine moons of Argus, if you can’t learn something in ten years’ traveling, you might as well be dead.” Vix put his hand to his waist, as though uncomfortable at the absence of his sidearms. “And I’m not dead. Well, let’s not bicker among ourselves. I’ll tell you what I can, if you’ll agree not to argue about my calling Lydis a witch.”
    You challenged me on the term
—But Spartak bit back the retort. He was now absorbing the important points of what Vix had told him: Hodat dead, a usurper ruling Asconel,some cult with an arrogant priesthood dominating the citizens. All this added up to a frightening whole. He nodded for Vix to go on.
    “The reason they call Lydis a witch seems plain enough to me,” the redhead asserted. “Don’t you recall Hodat as the most levelheaded of us? Don’t you recall what plans he’d made, of his own accord, for his eventual marriage and fatherhood?”
    “Surely,” Spartak agreed. “He had in mind to make a formal alliance with some other world which had recovered well from the Imperial collapse.”
    “Right. What could have made him settle for a woman whose very home planet wasn’t known?” Vix thundered. “If that wasn’t witchcraft, I’m a—No, I get ahead of myself. Listen.
    “This woman Lydis appeared one day, off a ship from no one knows where. Somehow, she got herself to the attention of Hodat, and once they’d met, things went out of control. He said, so the story runs, that this woman knew his innermost thoughts—that she was like a part of himself. Before anyone knew what had happened, she was being talked of as his wife-to-be.
    “True, for a while things went well enough, I’m told. The witch Lydis was said to be beautiful, which is a good start for any woman, although she never appeared in public except in a long black gown with a veil over her hair. Like Tiorin foresaw, there was a plot to depose Hodat because of some decree or other, and allegedly she warned him of it, having seen into the minds of those who planned it.”
    “A telepathic mutant,” Spartak muttered. “There are said to be some such.…I’m sorry. Continue.”
    “So far so good. Then the priests of Belizuek started to come in. It had always been Imperial policy that if anyone was fool enough to want to spend time talking to idols or the empty air they should be allowed to get on with it, so under the guise of religious freedom they were permitted to land. Hodat started listening to them a great deal. I ought to say this was some cult to which Lydis herself adhered, by the way—said it was from her home world of Brinze.
    “People started to get worried when the rumor got around that Hodat was considering adopting this belief himself; when the word was passed that he might impose it on the whole of Asconel, people got really alarmed.” Vix broke off, noting an expression of