The rain had returned full force by the time Bianca completed her sweep. Already it was getting hard to make out any tracks, even muddy footprints becoming indistinct puddles. As nearly as Bianca could make out the posse of men they had more or less accidentally killed had been pursuing a single individual, probably the wizard, and cornered her at the abandoned temple. Or she had lured them here of course. If there was another force out there, they were clearly far ahead of it, rushing on to try to claim their prize. It was unlikely that the gaudily dressed aristocrats had abandoned the safety of an army to chase after someone who was clearly very dangerous, though one never could tell what a noble might take it into his empty gilded head to do. There seemed little point in putting out pickets in conditions where visibility was so bad but, eternally an optimist, Bianca stationed two men to the east along what had recently been a dirt track and was rapidly becoming a muddy stream. That was the most likely direction for any reinforcements to approach.  That accomplished she returned to the temple where scouts and knights alike were cheerfully pillaging the dead and stacking their corpses against one wall. There was little hope of burning them and less hope of burying them but with any luck they would move on before the stink became too bad.
 
Calliope and Torm had retreated into the half ruined temple to get out of the rain. It was an off putting place to say the least. The roof of the pagoda was supported by massive pillars that had been carved with startling life like serpents that seemed to twine around them, wedge shaped heads striking at the ceiling. The stone floor had been polished smooth by centuries of bare feet, common pathways creating slight troughs in the stone. The overall impression was that of tentacles striking out of a calm sea. The walls were worse, at least those sections not overgown with the thorny bougainvillea that threatened to engulf the place. Every square inch of the walls had been covered with bas relief carvings that seemed to depict some ancient and bloody epic. A figure of a many armed goddess with four breasts seemed to be doing most of the killing, though in some panels she herself was killed or at least badly wounded by various combinations of what might have been gods or demons, their faces carved into leering masks of teeth and tongues. In the corners the carvings were crowded with piled bodies, as though the carnage had been swept out of the way or else the sculptor would have no room for the action. Bad it would have been under normal circumstances but Calliope, or Torm, had kindled a fire out of pieces of broken furniture and the flickering light danced across the carvings, making them seem to twist and writhe.
 
“Charming place,” Bianca observed, leaning close to look at a carving of the Goddess biting the head off a demon while pleasuring herself with one of her other hands.

“Jemel-Sha draws few worshipers, even here where ever rock has a score of devotees,” Calliope replied. “Her temples are always in the wilderness for to invoke her name too close to your home is said to invite disaster.”


“She is a war goddess then?” Bianca inquired, coming over to the fire and sitting herself down, allowing the heat to begin to dry her sodden clothing. Calliope made an equivocal so-so gesture with her left hand.

“In the Fan Cities it is always hard to know, sometimes it seems every god is the god of everything, and if they aren’t they have an avatar who is. Sometimes two avatars of a single good will even go to war. I doubt anyone has a coherent theology of it all. Jemel-Sha is a goddess of war, but also of entropy, rebirth, purification, renewel.. well renewal in the same way forest fires bring renewal.”

“Is that why you came here? To pray for forest fires?” Bianca asked. Calliope laughed but it was a cold and mirthless kind of a laugh.

“I came here because it was the only place I could think of to make a stand, even then the Seven Pricks would have had me if it hadn’t been for your timely intervention.”

“Seven Pricks?”
 
“I guess they are technically called the Seven Princely Advisors,” Calliope explained, “but usually people just call them the Seven Princes, or the Seven.. I guess they are the Six now that you kicked Curman Ji’s teeth in, may Jemel-Sha feast on his balls.” This last statement was made with a curious gesture in which Calliope kissed her finger tips then touched them to her forehead, then her heart. Bianca assumed this was some kind of religious gesture. The scout drew her pistol and cracked open the frizzon, laying it down facing the fire so the heat might dry the sodden powder, though the White Lady alone knew how she was going to keep it dry once she went back outside. From context Curman Ji had been in charge of the hit squad they had wiped out in front of the temple.

“You have my thanks for that,” Calliope added, though it sounded somewhat like an afterthought.

“It seemed like you might have had it covered,” Torm observed, eyeing the sorceress out of the corner of her eye. Calliope grimaced.

“Those men you saw were Thugee,” Calliope explained, refering to the muscular types rather than their perfumed overseers. “They train them to hunt down priests and wizards, they are resistant to magic, a combination of mental conditioning and warding tattoos.”
 
“You still seemed to be holding your won,” Bianca pointed out, remembering the animated stone tiger disemboweling one of the men on the path. Calliope grimaced slightly in the firelight, admitting to any kind of weakness obviously hurt the woman.

“You have to sleep sometime,” she admitted.

“Why were they after you in the first place?” Bianca asked, changing the subject though potential not to one any more pleasant to the sorceress. This brought on another smile, though there was something different in this one.

“I was the Prince of Shivapor until those seven pricks fomented a rebellion,” she admitted.
 
“Prince?” Bianca asked with a cocked eyebrow. Calliope waved the distinction away.

“In this dialect Prince is applied to men and women both, it is a male noun but they apply it to anyone who is… princing I suppose. By the same token you are Prince if you rule regardless of your actual birth. Oh they care about caste of course. There are as many castes as there are gods, though broadly they break down into priests, nobles, warriors, artisans, and farmers. Not that this is determinative you understand, there are warriors who are princes, even an artisan in Kalingareae, I think he used to be a shipwright? You get enough power and they will hold their nose and dine with  you despite you ‘ritual impurity’ or whatever,” Calliope explained. Bianca shruged her shoulders. She had visited many lands during her career with the Silver Swords and found the complexities of local life and religion to be both baffling and largely irrelevant.
 
“You aren’t a local I take it?” Bianca asked, more for something to say than from any real sense of interest. Calliope was pale and looked more like Torm racially than she did any of the bodies piled up against the temple wall. It had taken a moment for Bianca to notice that, not because it wasn’t obvious, but because she was used to the Company which held men and women of every nationality not to mention dwarves who were not human at all. Homogenous populations were not something that was part of her mental architecture.

“Oh Stars no, I’m from Betony, came out here a few years ago working for a spice trader and decided I could do better,” Calliope said. A wizard travelling with a spice trader who set herself up as a queen in only a few years? There was certainly a great story there. Come to think of it wasn’t Torm from somewhere near there?

“So what are you planning to do now? I doubt these Seven Pricks are just going to let things go,” Torm said, taking a drink from a waterskin which he passed to Bianca. She took a drink as well and was pleased to discover the water had been cut with palm wine, an old cavalryman’s trick to keep the dust from choking them. Calliope leaned forward, her eyes dark and predatory.

“Well now that I have met you, I was hoping to pay you a small fortune to help me take my city back…”