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reached to seize Anaheim. The metaphysician suddenly crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. At first everyone assumed that he had fainted from fear. Baptiste kicked him hard in the ribs, his boot leaving a dirty mark on the previously spotless white bodysuit. The body moved, but only as though it were dead weight. There was no sign of life.
    'Revive him! Wake him up and kill him!'
    The Old Metal Monster bent over Anaheim. He put a hand inside the top of the metaphysician's bodysuit. 'He's dead.'
    'Dead?'
    'A former metaphysician.'
    'What did he do? Die of fright?'
    The Old Metal Monster straightened up. 'Sure didn't look like it to me.'
    It sure did not look like that to Reave, either. He had seen a man die of fright. It had involved choking, shaking, and turning green in the face. This was something totally different. It was as though Anaheim had just vacated his body and was not planning to come back. It was a little like the act of discorporation, except that those who had mastered the technique invariably left their mortal bodies on hold, waiting for their eventual return. Anaheim appeared to have gone for good. Most of those who had witnessed the incident seemed to be thinking the same way as Reave. Later there would be stories of how, in the fraction of a second before he had collapsed, a tiny bright thing had left Anaheim's mouth and flown up into the air. Reave had not seen anything of the sort, and he was convinced that it was simply a decoration of the tale, but the fact that the story was born at all gave strong indication of how the encounter with Anaheim was looked upon by the rank and file.
    A black rage descended on Baptiste. He ordered Anaheim's body hung up on the gallows and mutilated. If the metaphysician did decide to return, he would not have much of a physical body to come back to. The Old Metal Monster wanted to know what to do with the woman.
    'What woman?'
    'The one we were trying to hang before he came out of wherever he was hiding.'
    Baptiste made an angry, impatient gesture. 'So hang her. Hang the whole lot of them if you've got a mind to.'
    It proved to be a long hot afternoon of smoke, yellow dust, screams, and drunken fighting. In addition to the brewery, the raiders had also smashed their way into what turned out to be the local distillery and discovered over two hundred bottles of a fiercely potent single malt. With whiskey fire in their bellies, the army of Vlad Baptiste became really creative. A group of riders dragged some of the remaining townspeople out to the edge of town, to a spot some fifty yards from the stone wall. One by one the prisoners were turned loose with orders to try to escape over the wall. Then, betting among themselves on how far each one would get before he or she was gunned down, the drunken raiders started blasting away with howls of drunken laughter. Even the promise that anyone who actually made it all the way over the wall would be spared was a cruel deception. The two who did were rounded up again and forced to face some fresh horror.
    Baptiste had his large battle tent set up beside the gallows, on the square in front of the ziggurat. He took no part in the slaughter but sat all through the long afternoon in his tent, still and brooding. The strange nondeath of Anaheim seemed to have had a profound effect on him. It probably did not bode well for someone. Those black moods usually ended by escalating into a towering rage and plans for bloodlettings that were bigger and more spectacular than any that had gone before.
    The pseudosun went down in a searing, bloodred sunset; Reave did not know if the effect was caused by the smoke from the burning buildings or if the sun was controlled by some kind of human mood sensor. Bodies swayed on the gallows in a brisk evening breeze that had come with the sunset. By the end of the afternoon there was more than one scaffold in the small town, heavy with its strange fruit. Extended multiple rapes were being