The Warlock of Rhada (12 page)

The Vulk spoke thinly, as though from a great distance. “The adept is weeping,” he said. “She feels the death of the birds.”

At the forest’s edge, Glamiss had reformed the troop into a single rank and at a command the men moved out into the meadow, throwing lances ready. The birds had scattered, but some few, who were too low to fly over the treetops without making a heavy circle, were forced to fly across the warband’s front. A volley of thrown spears took a further bloody toll from the eagles. Another score fell, pierced by the iron-tipped javelins.

“They flee, Warleader!” a trooper shouted with shrill excitement. He wheeled to break ranks and pursue the flight, sword drawn in futile threat.

“Thesu! Back into ranks!”
Glamiss shouted warningly.

It was too late for the man who had broken the warband’s iron discipline. From low above the canopy of leaves a large bird appeared in a shrieking dive. Emeric watched in horror as the eagle’s talons struck the warman’s unprotected throat, dragged him from his mare, and left him crumpled, spilling his life onto the grass to mingle with the blood of the slaughtered birds.

Thesu’s mare screamed in rage and grief for her master, rearing to reach hopelessly for the vanishing eagles.

A stillness fell on the meadow. Emeric was amazed to realize that the entire engagement had taken no more than the space of five hundred heartbeats.

Despite the urgency of the need to move quickly across the valley, Glamiss took the time required for Emeric to say the ancient prayers for the dead over the body of the foolish Thesu. The Navigator noted that the men approved of this, and he noted, too, the sincere grief on the face of the young warleader. As he prayed over Thesu, he could not help but think of the future he and Glamiss had been discussing earlier. If Glamiss were indeed the conqueror to be, how many times would this scene be repeated? A thousand times a thousand, for though the worlds of the Great Sky lay supine and ready for conquest, a jihad would bleed the galaxy white before it was done.

At a command from Glamiss, the troop loaded the body of the dead warman on his mare, who moaned her sorrow, and placed her at the rear of the column with Vulk Asa. Then the band moved out again, crossing the meadows toward the river.

Once again, Glamiss dispatched outriders to scout ahead and led the troop along the riverbank in the directions of the clutch of hovels that lay under the far loom of the mountains.

In the distance, Emeric could see the soaring shapes of eagles, but the birds stayed high and far off, as though the adept who controlled them had been shocked into despair by the savagery of the Vara-Vykans’ counterattack and could not bring herself to press home another costly foray.

The bright morning was growing slightly warmer as the rays of the Vyka sun touched the lower levels of the western cliffs. Here and there the meadows and the thinning groves of conifers were in sunlight. Emeric said to Glamiss, “It is a beautiful valley, Glamiss Warleader.”

“The sky is filled with beautiful places--and ugly men,”

Glamiss replied bitterly, his heart heavy with the death of his trooper.

The warband moved silently, for on the soft riparian ground the mares’ padded feet made no sound at all. The stillness was palpable, and Emeric listened to it as he would have listened to a whisper.

“Where have the people gone?” he wondered aloud.

Glamiss did not reply, though he was wondering the same thing. Moving steadily along the riverbank, the troop was swiftly approaching the village. But there was no movement in the place. The mill dominating the ford in the river was deserted; the waterwheel turned, and Glamiss could see the paddles rising, dripping diamond bright in the morning sun. But there was no sound and no sign of human habitation.

Beyond the hovels, the warleader could now see the path that appeared to lead upward toward the moraine and the glacier shining ice-blue on the slope of the mountains.

He raised his monocular and studied the rocky, rising ground. He estimated the distance at no more than two or three kilometers, and in the brilliant light the rocks and shadows were sharply limned in the glass. Farther up the slope he noted what appeared to be a platform of dressed stone or ferroconcrete. He felt a tingle of excitement as he realized that he was looking at a remnant of some ancient imperial construction. The stonemasons of Vara--in fact, of Vyka or any other planet of the Great Sky--could produce no such architecture.

He handed the glass to the Navigator riding at his side and said, “Under the glacier. What do you think of it?”

Emeric studied the concrete platform, noting the broad steps and what appeared to be the Anglic inscription on the archway. His heart began to beat more swiftly. “It’s imperial. No doubt of it.”

Glamiss smiled grimly. “The lair of your warlock, no doubt.”

Emeric continued to study the construction. He could not read the inscription at this distance clearly, but it seemed to contain the word “hospital,” and if his memory of the ideographs was accurate, the word “cryonic,” which was almost meaningless to him, for he understood the concept only as “colder-than-possible,” which was but one of the many paradoxes inherent in the language of the men of the Golden Age.

Suddenly his breath quickened. As he watched, human figures seemed to materialize out of the mountain. All but one were simply skin-clad natives of the valley (explaining where the people had gone, it seemed). They were carrying a number of machines of unholy and sinful appearance and placing them on the concrete platform. Emeric made the sign of the Star as he caught the glitter of metal and glass. But it was the figure directing the operations that turned his blood to water. For it must be the Warlock himself. There could be no other explanation for the creature’s singular appearance: dressed in a robe of shimmering silvery metal that appeared flamelike at this distance, bareheaded so that one could see the very ordinary white hair of an old man. But on the Warlock’s shoulder rode a familiar of shining metal with a single, great eye of glass that gleamed in the sunlight.

‘‘Glamiss, Look!“

The warleader took the glass and his lips tightened into a hard line. “Is it a man, priest?” he asked.

Emeric wondered at the cold calmness in his friend’s voice. Even a priest, who like himself had been carefully educated to accept the dark wonders of the past, might well be stricken with terror at the look of the apparition directing the activity on the mountain. Yet Glamiss remained unmoved and unintimidated.

“A man, I think,” Emeric said. “The sorcerer of Trama, most probably. See how afraid of him the others are.”

“It’s the business of peasants to be afraid,” Glamiss said. “What I want to know is, can he harm us? What are those machines they are emplacing?”

Emeric shrugged despairingly, filled with a sense of his own and his Order’s inadequacy in the presence of the ancient science.

“I don’t know, Glamiss,” he admitted.

“Are they weapons?”

“I don’t know that, either, Glamiss.”

“They don’t appear to be,” the warman said slowly. “But I’ve heard of machines that once threw firebolts.”

The priest made the sign of the Star. “Energy weapons have all been rendered harmless by God in the Star, Glamiss Warleader--” This was a basic tenet of Navigator dogma. The Star had brought low not only the sinful men of the Golden Age, but he had also destroyed the weapons they used to break civilization down. It was one of the first things taught in the cloister worlds of Algol. But was it true--? The sinfulness of the thought was staggering. A Navigator must not doubt, ever. Still--

Glamiss said dryly, “I hope that the creature up there on the mountain has gotten the word of the Star in this matter, Emeric. Those machines look like projectors.”

Emeric remembered the fragmentary carvings and crystal solideographs he had seen among the treasures of the Order in Algol--pictures of Sin and Cyb killing men in war. Some were battle scenes from the distant Dawn Age, and the weapons were familiar, for they were essentially those used by men now. But others were of the wars of expansion fought by the men of the Empire, and in these the weapons were often energy-based: laserifles, killer beams, and bolt-guns--the very stuff of Sin and Cyb, for in those days the Adversaries were gaining strength for their final, terrible assault on the children of the Star.

“It cannot be, Glamiss. There are no usable energy weapons in all the Great Sky, nor anyone who knows how they are made,” he said with more conviction than he felt.

Glamiss lowered his glass and searched the deserted banks of the river. “Let us hope that your Warlock is as convinced of this as the Order,” he said.

“Amen to that,” muttered the priest.

Glamiss gave a hand signal, and the troop moved into extended order as they approached the ford. Across the river the mill, looking as though it had been hastily abandoned, seemed to stare at the soldiers from blank-eyed windows. Beyond it, among the few hovels of the village, a pariah-dog, its red tongue lolling, loped among the village litter. No other sound broke the morning stillness and Emeric could hear the soft lapping of the paddles in the millrace.

Warman Quant, riding just behind Emeric and the warleader, mumbled an audible prayer. Emeric turned in time to see several others making witchsigns and he felt a pang of exasperation mixing with his apprehension. How were men ever to pull themselves out of this endless barbarism, laden down as they were with all the superstitions a thousand or more years of darkness could produce?

Even the ritual of his own Order, thought the Navigator, was so filled with signs and sigils that a man couldn’t tell what was the true knowledge of the ancients and what was pure warlockry. The Chinese of fabled Earth were said, however, to have had a proverb:
The longest journey begins with a single step.
To bring the race back to the height it had once scaled, to unite the men of the thousand suns again, would surely be a journey of the longest and bitterest sort, one lasting many lifetimes. But it must begin with a single step.

The question was, is this the first step forward?

The valley of Trama, mute and foreboding, might hold the answer.

Glamiss took the first crossing of the river for himself. That was like him, Emeric thought. If there were danger in that silent village, it was Glamiss who would face it first.

Blue Star picked her way daintily through the shallows, her slender legs flashing wetly in the sunlight. When she stood on the opposite bank near the mill, Glamiss signaled for the troopers to cross, two by two, with the remainder holding their lances and crossbows at the ready.

But the crossing was uneventful. The last to ford the river was Vulk Asa, leading the dead warman’s mare and her mournful burden.

The scouts had crossed the river some half kilometer upstream and now they appeared, their mares’ flanks glistening and still wet from the swim.

“Nothing in sight, Glamiss Warleader.”

Emeric unconsciously raised his eyes to the glacier that seemed here to loom over the village. From his position near the mill he could not see the moraine and the high platform built into the mountain, but he was ever conscious of it. For it was there, he was certain, that the folk of Trama had taken refuge with their Warlock.

“They seem to have scattered most of the flocks,” the second scout reported. “The hillsides were swarming with weyr. Fat ones. But no people anywhere.”

“We will scout the village,” Glamiss said. He, too, knew where the folk had gone, Emeric realized. But he would not chance an assault on the mountain until he knew that the village was clear at his back. Emeric thought about Ulm and the entire levy of Vara landing behind them, pinning them all against the moraine with a volley of quarrels and throwing spears, and shuddered. A man in this time must always be prepared to die in battle, the Navigator thought, but it was a bitter thing to be caught and killed in so treacherous a little affair on this barbarous planet so far from Rhada--

“Stay with me, Emeric,” Glamiss ordered, turning Blue Star toward the open space among the hovels that apparently served Trama for a marketplace.

From here one
could
see the platform high under the glacier. Metal glinted there, and that terrible, silvery clothing the Warlock wore. But Glamiss paid no heed. In the field, Emeric thought, his friend became a military machine: each tactical problem being attacked with precision in its proper place, until the strategic plan of whatever battle must be fought lay cleanly and clearly defined. Glamiss was a military genius and only his lowly estate prevented him from exercising his talents to the full. What would he be able to do with armies instead of warbands, with nations and planets instead of fiefs and barbarous berserkers to command?