The Warlock of Rhada (16 page)

“Didn’t
one
of you have the sense to tell those fools this could happen?” the Bishop demanded furiously.

“It was the warleader’s choice, Reverend Father,” Brother Anselm said fearfully. “So it is written in the Book of the Way.”

The Bishop’s eyes glittered dangerously under his red-fisted cowl. “Are you instructing me on the Way of the Navigator, Anselm?”

“No, First Pilot. Certainly not. Only--”

“Idiot,” the Bishop hissed.

Brother Collis, the aristocrat from the Inner Planets, felt the urgings of honor, even though he disliked Anselm, and always would, for his holier-than-thou attitudes. “With respect, First Pilot, there was no way to know the rebels would take shelter
inside
the mountain.”

Kaifa bit his lips. What Collis said was true. Of all aboard the
Gloria,
only Kaifa, himself, knew that the mountain was honeycombed with imperial building. And even he had tended to doubt it, since the information from the Algol computer was suspect. Still, only an ass like Ulm and a fool like Anselm could contrive to attack a mobile force of cavalry from above with stones while carrying a thousand troopers in the holds anxious for combat.

Ancient custom and privilege allowed this sort of stupidity. The warmen, blind and ignorant in the holds, made the tactical decisions even though they were not permitted (under penalty of excommunication) to enter the consecrated ground of the bridge--the only place on board a starship commanding a view of the ground below.

It was true enough that the Navigator crew
could
influence these decisions indirectly, and so it was usually in war. This time, however, he, Kaifa, had allowed the novices to make the approach to the valley, and so it was, in the final analysis, his own fault. He should have flown the approach himself. He wondered what the Grand Master would have to say about his gross error in judgment. Nothing good, that was certain.

“Ground us in that meadow by the river,” he said angrily, pointing at the terrain below. He gathered his robes about him and left the bridge without further comment. It would do no good to chastise the novices for having stuck strictly to the Book of the Way. But all hope for surprise was lost now in that foolish rain of boulders from the bombing-bays. Like it or not, Ulm would have to use his men in siege rather than in maneuver. The “rebels” and whatever else lay hidden in this cursed valley of Trama would now have to be taken the hard way. He would take a certain grim pleasure in explaining this to Ulm in the crudest, most insulting terms possible. Not the attitude of a charitable churchman, Kaifa thought grimly, but at the moment he felt neither charitable nor churchly. He would have to assign himself a suitable penance when all was over. Something severe, self-flagellation or a long fast at least. Ave Stellas and Salve Dominis would never expiate the sinful anger he felt at this moment.

The scene in the hospital tunnel was one of breathless confusion, but Glamiss moved with authority through the spaces crowded with men and horses, restoring order, counting casualties, letting himself be seen by troopers.

Emeric and the Vulk Asa had cleared a space where the light of the still open archway reached into the dimness, and there they ministered to the injured Warlock and the girl villager Glamiss had carried in, out of the rain of stones from the starship.

The villagers who had attended the devil machines on the platform had vanished into the interior of the mountain, and so far no one had taken it upon himself to follow them. The warmen were grateful for the shelter of the tunnel, but they were badly shaken by the attack from the air and by their mysterious surroundings. The mares, most of whom had been moved away from the tunnel mouth, were growling and lamenting, upset by the unfamiliar footing and the dark cave in which they had suddenly found themselves.

The Navigator lifted the girl’s head and bathed her forehead with a bit of cloth dampened from his water bottle. Glamiss had probably not meant to injure her, but her cheek was bruised, and as she opened her eyes she grew plainly frightened. Little wonder, Emeric thought, with the featureless Vulk nearby and the confusion all around. The girl’s eyes fixed on the Red Fist of the Inquisition decorating Emeric’s cowl, and her breath seemed to catch. The Navigator muttered an oath and pushed back the cowl so that the symbol would be invisible.

“Better now?” he asked.

The girl nodded slowly.

Vulk Asa moved nearer. Emeric understood that he was using the Vulk mind-touch to sooth the peasant girl’s fears.

She said tremulously, “The Warlock. Is he dead?”

“No,” Emeric said. “Hurt, but not dead yet.”

Tears glistened in the girl’s eyes. “He’s only an old man. A crazy old man. We thought he could save us.”

Perhaps what she said was true, Emeric thought. It remained to be seen. To be safe, he made the sign of the Star on her narrow brow.

Shana tried to rise and managed to come to a sitting position. In spite of himself, Emeric recoiled a bit from the smell of the poorly cured weyr skins she wore. It was difficult to think of people so poor as enemies of the Order and subjects for the interrogations of the Holy Inquisition. There was something terribly wrong with the social order that brought the folk of the Great Sky only fear and death.

The girl sensed his revulsion and a look of bitter pride touched her unformed features. She moved away from the priest, pressing her slender shoulders against the curving rock wall of the tunnel. Emeric had a flashing insight. This must be the adept; she seemed almost as skilled as the Vulk in reading those about her.

“Where is my father, Nav?” she asked. “What have you done to the others?”

“Was your father one of those at the devil machines?”

The term “devil machines” made Shana remember the Inquisition again and she said, “They were the old man’s magic, Nav. The Adversaries had nothing to do with them.”

Emeric could not help but smile at her courage. “Are you so certain of that--?” He paused, waiting for her to identify herself.

“I am Shana the Dark, daughter of Shevil Lar, the hetman, and Shevaughn Six-fingers,” she said proudly, half-defiantly.

Six-fingers, Emeric thought. That would account for her mind-talent. Her mother was a mutation, Star-touched.

Asa laid his long hands on the girl’s head and leaned toward her in the darkness. She shivered, but did not flinch. Another evidence of courage, Emeric thought. These people feared the Vulk and believed the Protocols.

“All is well, Shana,” the Vulk said quietly.

Shana looked about her at the seeming turmoil: warmen taking up defensive positions at the tunnel mouth, the war-leader calling orders, the mares snarling and calling to their masters. “It does not seem so to me, Vulk,” she said tartly.

Emeric said, “A little respect, daughter. This is Vulk Asa--” He started to say, the Talker of the Lord Ulm and then realized that neither the Vulk nor any member of the troop could now expect anything but a sword blow from the Lord of Vara-Vyka. “This is the Talker of the Warleader Glamiss,” he said.

“The one who struck me?”

“The same.”

“Ulm’s men are in the starship?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are rebels?”

“Not by our choice, but it seems Ulm thinks us so.”

Her expression relaxed slightly. “Then there will be no Inquisition here? No burnings?”

Emeric tightened his lips and made a decision that would change his life. He made it with a single word. It was as simple as that. “No,” he said.

The Warlock stirred and moaned. Dried blood clotted his thin gray hair. Shana went to him and held out her hand for Emeric’s dampened cloth. The Navigator gave it to her and she began gently to bathe the old man’s face. Emeric was struck by her gentleness: an unusual characteristic among the commonality in these bitter times.

“You didn’t tell me about my father,” the girl said. “Is he alive?”

“Unless there are dragons within these caves, he is,” Emeric said. “None of the men at the machines were struck by the stones, but they have all scattered in the mountain.”

The girl regarded him evenly. “Most of the folk are here. We were afraid of you, Nav.”

“Because you withheld tribute from Ulm?” he asked. But he knew better. It was the hated Red Fist that had alarmed the weyrherders of Trama.

“Dihanna
--”

Navigator and weyrgirl turned to look at the Warlock. The old man was breathing stertorously and Emeric sensed that he was badly injured. The deforming metal growth on his shoulder was dented and cracked by the force of the stone fragment’s blow.

“Warlock. Lord. You have been injured. Do not try to speak,” the girl said.

“Dihanna, where are we? I am blind, Dihanna,” the old man said. A crooked smile touched his lips and he said, quite rationally, “I am a prince of the House of Rigell, I am the Lord of Rhada and the King-Elector--and I cannot
see.
What use is a blind Heir, Dihanna?”

Emeric stared at the old man. A prince of the Rigellian House? Impossible. The last Rigellian Galacton died in the sack of Nyor more than a thousand years before.
And Lord of Rhada? My homeworld,
Emeric thought.
What had this ancient witchman to do with Rhada?
He glanced at Asa, and the Vulk nodded. “He believes himself to be all those things, Nav Emeric.”

“He’s crazy,” Shana said patiently. “The folk think him a mighty warlock, but he’s just a poor, crazy old man.”

Vulk Asa said softly, “The hereditary holding of the Heir to the throne of the Rigellian Galactons was Rhada, Nav Emeric. And the man was always known as the King-Elector.”

Emeric exclaimed, “Are you telling me this warlock is a thousand years old, Vulk? Have you lost your reason?”

“I do not say. I do not explain. I simply tell you what is so,” Vulk Asa murmured.

The Navigator stared at the Vulk. Damn them for unreadable aliens, he thought in a sudden rush of xenophobic anger. What, in the last analysis, did anyone know about the
Vulkl
Some said they were immortal--a patent absurdity. Still, they seemed to live on and on and on. They could be
killed
easily enough, but had anyone ever seen one die naturally? Never. They had apparently never built machines, yet in the early Dawn Age, Vulk had been discovered on the worlds of Beta Crucis and told a tale of the destruction of their own home-world of Vulka aeons before. Yet how did they reach the Crucian planets? The Protocols claimed that they had once had the power to travel across the Great Sky driven by the force of their own Vulkish thoughts and that God in the Star had punished them by taking this gift of the Adversaries from them. It was a thing beyond Emeric’s understanding, but one thing was certain: the Vulk knew things men did not and no amount of torture or persecution had ever torn their dark secrets from them. So if Vulk Asa said that the Rigellian Heir had once held Rhada and was known as King-Elector--it was
so.

Emeric studied the injured old Warlock with growing mystification and dread. Was this a man of the Golden Age miraculously preserved beyond his normal span of perhaps a hundred standard years?

He thought of Glamiss’s dream of the feathered cape and star-crown and shivered with the awareness of fate’s strange workings.

This, then, is how it was, and how it shall be:
The people were dissatisfied and complained,
And Sin and Cyb said to the people:
Act, you have Nothing to lose but your chains!
But the Adversaries are deceivers, and therefore
The suns fell.
Weep, Man for you have learned nothing.

--From
The Book of Warls,
Interregna! Period

Then following wars such as had never before occurred in our galaxy. Fleets of worlds, natural and artificial, maneuvered among the stars to outwit one another, and destroyed one another with jets of subatomic energy. As the tides of battle swept hither and thither through space, whole planetary systems were annihilated.

--Account of a vision attributed to one Olaf Stapledon,
a Prophet of the Dawn Age