Dragons of War (43 page)

The Mammoth Master rose and accompanied Heruta on a swift inspection of a mammoth pen, then to see a young ogre, freshly born, learning to walk in a small pen. Helping him learn were some bullnecked imps equipped with goads and whips, who tormented the great beast and drove it into a killing rage.

Following, above, skipping from rail to rail, came the wren.

"They must kill soon after birth," said the Mammoth Master in a cold voice. "It must be the first thing they learn. Then they will always want to kill."

The Great One answered him, in a harsh, rasping voice.

"This world teems with life. Pruning is necessary."

An old slave was pushed into the young ogre's pen. The imps withdrew into little safe holes.

The ogre stalked the slave. The man scrambled back and away with little screams of terror. The ogre pursued him and with a sudden roar it lurched forward and grabbed for its prey. The poor man lost control of his bowels and sprang backward, but slipped on his filth and fell, then was grasped by the ankle and lofted and dangled.

He screamed. The ogre tore him limb from limb and stuffed the pieces into its mouth.

"Very, vigorous," said Heruta Skash Gzug.

A special squad of albino trolls, enormously strong, came in to assist the imps in subduing the young ogre. They carried heavy clubs.

"After they have killed the first time, it is vital that we overpower them and render them submissive to our domination."

A net dropped from the ceiling and was yanked tight on control wires held by the imps. The ogre started to break the net, but then the trolls fell on it and clubbed it to the ground and beat it into submission.

"Very good. But production has not met the quota."

The Mammoth Master nodded humbly.

"Indeed, there have been problems."

"Describe them."

The Mammoth Master found his mouth dry.

"The ogres do not take consistently in the wombs of the mammoth. We place the ogre egg as prescribed by the Ogre Development Team. The bull mounts. We know this bull is very fertile. But the ogre egg does not develop past the first week. Then we have the stillbirth problem. One in five we lose like that, and we don't know why. Worse we lose another mammoth cow every time for no purpose, and we are chronically short of cows."

"What do the Ogre Developers say?"

"They blame the cows. They say they are not fed properly. Or that they are infertile. The truth is their process does not work properly."

"So you blame the Ogre Developers, do you?" said the Great One in an ominous tone.

"Well, I can not blame the cows. They are fed whole corn, alfalfa, grain; they do not want for anything."

"I do not like to hear excuses."

The Mammoth Master blanched and struggled not to show the terror he felt. He had enjoyed the favor of the Great One, and he knew that disfavor could be very hard to endure.

At that moment he was saved. Another presence was approaching, a large presence, but small when compared with that of the Master Heruta Skash Gzug. It was a Mesomaster.

All was silent as the Mesomaster climbed down from his high chair and knelt before Heruta Skash Gzug. Quickly it passed along the information that an energy pulse of extraordinary strength had been detected within Padmasa.

An emergency meeting had been called for the Five. It would take place during the evening nectar, which had already been laid out.

Heruta dismissed the Mammoth Master with instructions to do whatever was necessary to increase production of ogres. Then he returned to his chair, summoning the strength to float himself up and into the seat, armor and all.

Let those who saw this feat stare! This was the great power they had unlocked long ago and now rode to hegemony over the world. This was the visible manifestation of a strength that would lead to their complete mastery of the world and their elevation beyond it onto higher realms. Let them all look on the power and tremble, they who were nothing but slaves!

Heruta Skash Gzug was borne away into the Prime Abyss in the utmost deeps, where it was cold, always cold. The air was chilled by being circulated through a cavern filled with ice brought from the far-off Ice Mountains.

The wren followed the chair down, staying low to the ground in open areas and traveling in short little dashes from one point of cover to the next. Occasionally she felt the scanning field generated by the Mesomasters, but the wren's consciousness was so small that it escaped notice.

Heruta was borne to the entrance to the hall of nectars and essences. An orchestra, hidden in the ground just outside, blew on freezing fingers and broke into happy, triumphal music, with a soaring string section and spirited horns. Timpani rumbled. It was designed to improve the Master's mood, and it always did. Heruta floated through the stone portal, and flipped up his visor as he entered.

The entranceway remained open, but the wren hesitated. Lessis was sure that the open doorway could not be crossed without arousing attention. She needed some way of smuggling herself inside.

She heard a slight rumbling sound nearby.

A three-tiered food trolley was being pushed toward the door by a pair of blinded slaves. On the trolley's shelves were plates with wafers and daubs of essence, and other plates with tiny wedges of sweet pastry.

The wren risked all. She flew into the bottom tier of the trolley and hid by the back, behind bottles of sweet essence.

The trolley trundled through the entrance and past the unseen guards. There was a short dark passage, and then the light grew brighter as they entered the Hall of Nectars and Essences.

It was a wide-open master work of style and elegant inlay. The walls, the ceiling, even the floor, were decorated with wondrous detailed mandalas in pastel shades, lavenders, yellows, pale blues, and pinks. The music from the orchestra outside continued to waft in through hidden apertures.

Hanging on the walls, between intricate mandalas of power, were paintings depicting great moments in the lives of the Five Great Masters.

In the center stood a circular table of white marble with beakers of nectar. And rolling in from the kitchens, came the trolley with essence and wafers.

The others had been waiting for Heruta Skash Gzug. They sipped nectar through platinum straws while they floated beside the table, each demonstrating his power of levitation to the others. Prad Azoz was to the right, Gshtunga opposite, with Prad Datse to the left and Gzug-Therva beside him. Heruta said nothing until he had sipped nectar and taken three wafers with essence.

"What has happened?" he said at last.

There was another silence. It lengthened. At last Gzug-Therva spoke.

"Someone performed with magic inside our perimeter."

"Within our perimeter? They grow too bold. We shall have to clean house again. These networks are always starting up among the slaves. Still, I thought we'd scoured them out recently enough."

"We were very successful the last time, but our enemies are resourceful." Prad Datse always supported Heruta Skash Gzug without hesitation.

"It may be a great hag, come to start up a new network. If so, she has overplayed her hand and given away the game. We shall search high and low until she is uncovered."

"We must take her alive," said Prad Azoz. "Such a one could be the final key to ultimate victory."

"We would all enjoy such an interrogation," said Gshtunga.

Heruta Skash Gzug agreed. "I suggest that we take a few moments for a search of our own. Let us conjoin on the esoteric plane and search out this hag."

They nodded, the eyes of black fire did not blink; theirs was the great power.

They all took a sip of nectar and then put themselves into the Nirodha trance state while Gzug-Therva spoke the syllables of dark power. Like a star igniting in the cosmos, their merged intelligence swelled out across the esoteric planes.

As it went, so a wave of terror filled the minds of every living thing in the vast warrens about them. All were suddenly aware that the Great Ones were active, they felt their huge minds sliding past their own, looking in if they wished, seeing their uttermost secret thoughts if they chose to.

Lessis had warning, and she ducked, by blanking the wren's consciousness down to a level below sleep. She prayed that Ribela was not caught out.

The expanding bubble of their gestalt thought grew out to encompass the underground city, even the Square on the surface far above.

Nothing. Again they unleashed the mind quake, and again they found nothing. After probing for a while by shifting suddenly from one mode to another, dropping through the psychic planes to the ethereal, they gave it up. There was nothing detectable on the esoteric plane within Padmasa.

They broke the conjunction.

"Disappointing," said Prad Azoz.

They all sipped nectar and chewed wafers daubed lightly with essence.

Meanwhile throughout Padmasa, men and women went trembling back to their tasks, sweat congealing on their brows and in their armpits. Such quakes were terrifying, but fortunately quite rare.

The wren's brain was brought back to wakefulness with a snap, however. Lessis risked this, to be certain that neither she nor Ribela had been detected. She found the Five already in conversation.

"The Mesomasters will continue their search."

"The Mesomasters reported this so-called witch magic."

"I felt it," said Gshtunga. "Something of the sort happened."

"Of course, Gshtunga. If you detected it, then it happened. But the hag must have left our perimeter."

"Or died of fright," said Prad Datse with a noise that some might understand to be a chuckle while most would think of scratchy chalk squeaking on a teacher's blackboard.

"The Mesomasters will have to intensify their efforts. Nothing could have hidden from our search."

"Perhaps Prad Datse is correct," said Gshtunga, and the group broke into further chuckles.

Heruta Skash Gzug made an emphatic sound that brought a silence.

"Let us turn to the matter of ogre production levels."

The eyes of black fire were all turned to him.

"There is a problem with the quality of the seed produced by the Ogre Developers."

"Difficulties always attend the introduction of something new like this," said Gshtunga. "I warned that this might happen."

"There is no problem, Gshtunga," said Gzug-Therva. "The invasion force is well equipped with ogre-class trolls."

"But how is the invasion proceeding? We have heard nothing for more than a day!"

A silence fell. Then Heruta spoke.

"We approach the critical moment more quickly than we had expected. The enemy is concentrating in a place called Fitou. Our demonstration force will now move out to confront them within three days."

"How great is the enemy force?"

"They have scraped up everything they had, perhaps forty thousand to put in the field."

"Will our demonstration be strong enough?"

"General Lukash assures me that the enemy in Fitou will be fooled, and that our demonstration force will be large enough to hold them in Fitou."

"And our prime host will then move onto Marneri as planned?"

"Exactly, good Prad Datse. We shall find Marneri virtually undefended. We shall take the fabled white city of the Bright Sea. Then we shall move on and take Bea and then Pennar. Three of the enemy's cities in one stroke. We shall build a mountain from their skulls!"

The wren flinched.

"Fetch up the sweets. I have a desire for a pastry with quince essence dripped upon it."

"And I will have honey."

Their conversation moved on to the need for reinforcements. The progress so far had been exemplary, but with the witch empire it was important to carry the thing through all the way. There would be more fighting. The witches would die hard, stabbing back all the time. Eventually, of course, they would have to seize the nettle and build a great fleet to take control of the seas, and then they could at last capture the Isles of Cunfshon and extirpate the witches and their thralls.

Lessis barely heard the final phrases, her thoughts in turmoil. The terrifying thing was that the plan was very likely to succeed. Lessis knew that any Argonath army that held seven legions would be capable of surviving the onslaught of the enemy's whole host in a defensive battle. But how would ogres do in fighting with dragons? And unless the commander of that army realized quickly enough that he was being duped by a demonstration force while another army marched toward Marneri, then complete disaster would overtake the Argonath.

Such an army could live off the country while it cut through the lush provinces of Aubinas, Lucule, North Troat. The legions would be far behind and would have to throw off the demonstration army and march to intercept the enemy's main host. There would be no opportunity to set the field of battle. The demonstration host would be large, perhaps larger than the legion army. It would be a difficult and dangerous task to evade such a force, and light out in pursuit of an even bigger one. To be caught between the two would be tantamount to risking utter destruction.

It was a perfect plan. If the ogres were a complete surprise, as they might well be, then the general in command of the legions might easily become rattled. While compensating for Ogres, he might mistake what was happening elsewhere and be fooled into standing still.

Slaves reached in to pull out bottles of essence with which to drench sweet wafers. The wren dodged the hands, then pecked at the few crumbs of wafer that were left on the plates when they were loaded back into the trolley.

The Five had left. The trolley was trundled out by the slaves. The wren slipped away unseen and flew into the shadows of the Prime Abyss.

The wren returned to the bull mammoth's pen. She had to wait for an hour before imps came to open the gates and bring in fodder and whole corn for the great beast within.

The mammoth fed while the wren pecked at insects and grains of corn. The imps departed. The mouse appeared in the straw.

Lessis passed on what she had heard.