The Altar at Asconel Read Online Free Page A

dismay on Spartak’s long bearded face. “Hm! Taking notice now, aren’t you?”
    “But—Oh, never mind,” Spartak snapped. “Go on!”
    “The first and worst of the priests was a man called Shry, a cripple of some sort in a black gown. By then, Hodat was completely obsessed with Lydis, and Shry had Lydis’s ear. A new tax was imposed to finance a foundation of Belizuek teaching and build a temple, and that was just the thin end of the wedge.
    “They say Grydnik was the first person to grow anxious. Remember him?”
    “Ah—Port Controller of the main spaceport,” Spartak rapped.
    “Correct. I knew him well at one time. He started to wonder where these hordes were coming from—there seemed to be a never-ending supply of priests and acolytes and whatever. He checked on this place Brinze in all the Imperial records. There is no Imperial record of any such planet.” Vix slapped the table with a look of triumph.
    “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The Empire never embraced the whole of the galaxy, though people generally assume it did. It could be a Rim world, some distance from the hub.” But Spartak felt sweat crawling on his skin.
    “And what benefit to Asconel is likely to come from a Rim world probably peopled by pirates and mutants?” countered Vix. “But wait a while longer. I haven’t told you the half of it.” His face darkened.
    “The tax was followed by the extension of special privileges to the priests, the foundation of temples in all the big cities—this thing one year, and that the next. And then …
    “I guess it was the sacrifices which sparked the last resistance in Hodat. Bemused though he was by the witch, he yet had enough love for Asconel and its people to refuse that horrible last step.”
    “Sacrifices?” Spartak heard his own voice utter the word an infinitely long distance away. “Not—human sacrifices?”
    “Human,” Vix echoed, and the word seemed to curdle the air of the room. “And it was then, while Hodat yet refused, that Bucyon came from space with a fleet the equal of the one I used to fight with over by Batyra Dap—ex-Imperial ships.
    “They took over. They killed Hodat. And Bucyon sits in the Warden’s chair with Lydis at his side—she having been the bait dangled ahead of Hodat to lead him to disaster. And Asconel is a ruin of all our father’s hopes.”
    “Is there no resistance to the usurper?” Spartak whispered.
    “Some, some. I hear that Trigrid Zen—remember him?—is either in exile or in hiding on one of the outer planets of the home system, trying to find an opening in the net Bucyon has cast around Asconel. But at last hearing, the devils had proved too clever, and there’s no spirit in the people to support an uprising.”
    Spartak got blindly to his feet. He said, “I—I must go and speak to Father Erton, and tell him I’m called away. And then I’ll fetch my belongings and come with you.”
    “Well!” Vix studied him. “That’s more like the response I’d hoped for, late though it is. But I warn you, I can’t tote all your beloved books and such around the galaxy! I’ve grown used to traveling light in these past ten years.”
    “My books are in my head,” Spartak said quietly, and went out.

IV
    O UT IN THE corridor, Spartak barely paused as he snapped his fingers at a passing novice. It was the same one, by coincidence, that Brother Ulwyn had sent with the panicky message about Vix’s arrival; he was having a bad day’s general duties. Sighing, but obedient enough, he came trailing Spartak and listening to the curt instruction:
Inform Father Erton I wish to see him, collect my belongings and pack them in my cases, have the kitchener prepare two travel packs of food.…
    Their paths diverged just after the last order had beenissued, the novice turning right towards the block of cells in which Spartak had lived since being accepted into the order, Spartak himself continuing straight ahead towards the library.
    He