And the man leaped, firing once, twice.  The second beam took Rynason in the left wrist and spun him off-balance for a moment.  But he was already firing in return, rolling to one side.  His third shot took the man’s right shoulder off, and bit into his neck.  The man staggered forward two steps, trying to raise his stunner again, but suddenly it clattered to the floor and he crumpled on top of it.  A pool of blood spread around him.

Rynason moved back to the cover of the side wall, and watched for the other men.  The first one had got too near; Rynason hadn’t realized how easily they could approach in this near-darkness.  He felt the numbness of the stunnerbeam spreading nearly to his shoulder; his left arm was useless.  Cursing, he trained the disintegrator along the line of the steps and fired.

The disintegrator cut through the stone as though it were putty, for a range of twenty feet.  Rynason played the beam back and forth along the steps, cutting them down to a smooth ramp which the attackers would have to climb before they could get to him.

One of them tried to leap the last few levels before Rynason could cut them, but he sliced the man in two through the chest.  The separate parts of the man’s body fell and rolled back to the untouched levels below.  He had not had time to utter even a cry of pain.

For a time, now, there was complete silence in the wind.  Rynason could see the inert legs of the last attacker projecting out over the edge of the third level down, and undoubtedly the others saw them too.  They were hesitating now, unsure of themselves.  Rynason stayed pressed to the stone floor, waiting.  The wind whipped in a rising moan through the upper reaches of the building.

Another of the men slipped over the edge of the massive stairs, hugging the deeper darkness at the side of the stair-wall, and slowly inched his way up the newly-flattened ramp.  Rynason watched him coldly, through a grey haze of fury which was yet tinged with despair.  What use was all this, the killing, the blood and sweat and pain?  It disgusted him—­yet by its perverse senselessness it angered him too.

He cut a swathe through the crawling man, through head and neck and back.  A gory shell-like hulk slid back to the foot of the ramp.

And abruptly the remaining men broke and ran.  One of them rose and stumbled down the steep levels of the stairs, heedless of his exposure; with a shock, Rynason saw that it was Rene Malhomme.  Another followed ... and another.  There were almost a dozen of them on the stairs; they all broke and ran.  Rynason sent one beam after them, biting a depression into the rock wall beside them.  Then they were gone.

Rynason moved back from the head of the stairs and leaned wearily against the stone.  His left arm was beginning to tingle with returning circulation now; he rubbed it absently with his good hand and wondered if they would try the sheer walls on the other side of the Temple.  He had scaled one of these ancient walls, but would they try it?  Certainly they stood little chance coming up the stairs, unless they gathered for a concerted rush.  And who would lead such a suicidal attack?  These men were vicious, but they valued their lives too.