The Warlock of Rhada (2 page)

He raised his eyes to the ice-bound mountains rising above the valley. One heard rumors in Vara that there were unholy things in those mountains, and that this was the reason the simple people of Trama had failed to send their tribute to the lord of their lands. Even the troopers murmured and listened to the rumors of a warlock--
The
Warlock--who had poisoned the hearts of the weyrherds of Trama against their rightful lord.

Ulm of Vara-Vyka was little better than a brute: a stinking animal of a man. But he was lord of these lands and it was the duty of his captains to enforce his rights and privileges. As a warleader of the Vykan warband, Glamiss would perform his duty. No more, no less. Rebels to the flail and sword. Still, Glamiss could remember his own beginnings, and it was a bitter thing to savage poor people one understood so well.

He crossed his arms over his dagger and flail and squinted speculatively at the westering Vyka sun. Half the day was gone; it would be night before the troop could reach the floor of the valley and build a fortified camp. It would be better, perhaps, to bivouac here on the ridge and test the valley people tomorrow. Besides, there was something threatening about the eagles of Trama, something more than the memory of rumors of magically controlled animals. If the birds were truly bewitched and chose to defend the valley, he would have to go carefully. It would not do to be defeated now. Glamiss was a young man with ambitions, and his plans did not include a check at the hands of peasants and ensorcelled birds.

He called to a trooper, who stumbled across the rough ground with the ill-temper of the habitually mounted man. Glamiss instructed that a camp be built and that the game, killed earlier in the lower valleys, be butchered and divided among the war mares.

When the warman had gone he turned again to the valley and the mountains beyond, trying to sense their mystery. In a short time he would call the Vulk to him and use his powers, and he would discuss his plans with Emeric, who was a gallant warman as well as a priest. But for the moment his thoughts were his own and he would keep them so.

For some reason he could not fully fathom, he felt on the edge of a great change in his life. He would not always be a mercenary captain for men such as Ulm, the lord of Vara. In some way that he did not understand, yet with complete certainty, he knew that one day he would rule his own lands. That was an absurd thought for a penniless soldier, yet he was convinced of it. The moment would somehow come and he would seize it. Men followed him willingly, and yet that was not the reason for his certainty. It was something deeper, more instinctive.
Mystical,
Emeric called it. Glamiss smiled to himself. The noble Rhad sensed it and, being more a man of intellect than was Glamiss, perhaps understood it better. “You are a born ruler, Glamiss,” he had once said. “What a pity you have no country.”

And Glamiss had then almost told his friend of the dream--that dream he had had since childhood, of himself standing astride an island between two broad rivers, with hundreds of starships in the sky and a glittering host behind him. He had a starred crown on his head, a feathered cloak on his shoulders, and a flail and dagger of gold in his hands. What a fantasy that was, he thought, yet how
right
it seemed. And what a sour disappointment to wake in the cold stone barracks and see the pale, distant stars shining through the unglazed windows on a bleak and primitive land nearly empty under the dark sky.

Where were the armies? Where the feathered regalia of a star king? Where the armada of starships?

It will come, he thought.
It will come.

And if the destruction of the valley of Trama and its people was one small part of the cost, he would pay it. Regretfully, but he would pay it.

The Rhadan warlock Cavour (Early Second Empire period) once suggested that starships could attain velocities in excess of 200,000 kilometers per standard hour. Not only did he run the fatal risk of the displeasure of the Order of Navigators by these calculations (in an earlier age he would have been burned), but he earned the derision of his contemporaries. His computations, based on the known elapsed time for flight between the Rimworlds and Earth, resulted in a hypothetical diameter for the galaxy of 12,800,000 kilometers. Even Cavour, a learned man for his day, was shaken by this immense figure, and recanted.

Interregnal investigators, such few as there were, believed that a figure of 666,666 kilometers represented the exact diameter of what they called “The Great Sky.”

--Matthias ben Mullerium,
The History of the Rhadan Republic,
Late Second Stellar Empire period

--and for the treatment of certain as-yet-unconquered diseases, cryonic storage offers the best hope. It is not too fantastic to imagine a man of the future, suffering from cancer, leukemia, or some other illness, spending ten, twenty, or even a thousand years in low-temperature suspended animation waiting for medical science to solve his particular problem. It is even possible that atomic-powered, fully automated facilities could awaken a given patient when the computer in charge decided that sufficient time had elapsed, or when further cold-storage might irreparably damage the patient’s tissues. What a magnificent awakening! To open one’s eyes and see the World of the Future! Great, teeming, clean cities; vistas of--

--Dawn Age fragment discovered at Tel-Manhat, Earth,
in the Late Second Stellar Empire period

The Warlock, so-called by the ignorant folk, stood on the ferroconcrete tunnel-mouth of the hospital and stared with blind eyes at the valley of Trama. He was facing south, across the lower couloir of the unnamed glacier that had, for two thousand years, gradually receded, leaving a pebbled moraine and a half dozen icy, leaping rivulets that plunged into the valley to feed the more slowly moving river.

He could not remember clearly when he had come to the hospital. The weather had been warmer then, and the glacier had been high above the entrance to the deep caverns and halls and wards. He was almost certain that the hospital had been completely alive, thronged with star-class patients. Cyborgs had been everywhere, attending to the last needs of the soon-to-be Sleepers. His memories were indistinct because drugs did damage the brain, and so did the Sleep, if it lasted too long. And no one knew exactly
how
long was
too
long. No matter. He had been blinded by trilaudid and on the way to death when Dihanna insisted that he take the Sleep.

Dihanna! The name evoked a surge of emotion, a terrible longing, a thrill of pleasure. He remembered sailing his goldenwing--a spaceship made like a jewel and driven by the pressure of light on golden foil sails a thousand meters tall--with Dihanna by his side. He saw again the Jovian moons in the dark sky and heard the sound of Dihanna singing and playing the synchromion so that the ghostly melodies filled the fragile hull with the music of the spheres.

How beautiful was Dihanna--the Right Honorable Lady Dihanna alt Aldrin, royal cousin of the Rigellian Emperor, Patroness of the lands of High Canopus, Mistress of Vega-even now, her titles rolled easily off his tongue and, Great Star!, he could not remember his own name--
could not remember his own name.

Tears formed in his blind eye sockets.

How long had he been here?

The glacier--it had moved from the place he remembered in the high ravine, and it had at some time covered the entire slope of the mountain down to far below the present tree-line. It had left the moraine as evidence. And then it had receded, and the feathery conifers had grown again, and the cyborgs had left the hospital, and the folk of the plain had lived and died and had been driven, generations ago, back into these meadowed valleys. The bulky instrument implanted in his left shoulder hummed and whispered and translated the light and shadow of Vyka’s day into impulses his brain could accept as sight. It “saw” the weyr herds grazing, the thin smoke rising from the peasant hovels near the river.

These people knew almost nothing of the Empire, of the Rigellian Galactons, of the provinces and cities and worlds without number that he (whom they called the Warlock) knew.

So long, then?

Time enough for the very galaxy to change, to become empty, for a civilization of peasants and herdsmen in animal skins to take over.

He frowned, trying to remember. There had been civil war on the Rim when he took his leave of Dihanna. And racial troubles in her lands of High Canopus. She had said, “I will wait a year. If they cannot give you back your eyes, I will join you and wait with you in Sleep.” Yes, he was almost certain she had said that. He
remembered
it; they had been standing on the great promenade of the Starship
Delos,
surrounded by the thronging, brilliantly dressed passengers for the Outer Provinces, and the orchestra had been playing and below,

Nyor, Queen City of the Stars, a blanket of gems in the velvet night of Earth--

“Earth,” he said aloud, grieving.
“Earth, Dihanna--”

The memories (or were they fantasies of a sick mind?) drifted. Dihanna had never come. No one had come to wake him. His entourage had been a glittering multitude, and now they were all gone. There was only the silent hospital and the tranquil valley and the vast emptiness of this world of mountains and forests and distant plains.

Dihanna is dead. Dihanna is dust.
Somehow, he
knew
that was true. Great Star, the
time
that must have passed! For he was old.

He knew that the cold Sleep did not kill. It slowed the body processes almost to the point of cessation. A man might sleep for two hundred years and age no more than a few days. Yet he was old. He could see the old man’s hands when he held them before the lenses of his “eye”--the skin dry and fusty, the veins blue and knotted, the fingers frail and twisted. He had been a young man when he boarded the
Delos,
a prince. The Patroness of High Canopus, a cousin of the Rigellian ruler of the Empire, would know no other sort of man--

Yet, had she finally known one? A civil war in the Rim-worlds was a small thing in an Empire of a hundred thousand star systems. Yet
had
Dihanna--and all those other glittering folk of Nyor--in the end known some dark barbarian soldier, an atom-blast in his hand, scything down the ancient order of things?

Oh, Dihanna--yes, she was dead. Nyor was dust. There was no Empire. There were only the mountains and the simple folk of the valley they called Trama, the empty sky and the alien star standing now near the zenith of a pale and greenish sky.

He stirred and his metal-mesh hospital gown rustled. The gown fed him, warmed him, probably protected him, as well. He had not yet had cause to know. For lack of anything better to do he had trained the wild eagles of the valley to hunt for the valley folk who, disgustingly, ate meat--red and bloody. For a half-year, through a change in the season, he had roamed the hospital. At first, he had searched for other Sleepers. Then he had called for a cyborg to come and serve him. But there were neither Sleepers nor cyborgs. And there was a fine dust on the gleaming floors, the dust of millennia, his sick mind told him. Somehow, he had been missed or left behind when the hospital had been evacuated--
how long ago?
And why? Had the civil war they had discounted so laughingly that night on the decks of the great
Delos
come plunging through this place with all its barbarian horror? He thought not. There was no destruction. The library was intact. The pile continued to supply power and light and heat. No, the medics and the cyborgs and the Sleepers had gone away. In some haste, he saw signs of that. Those civilized doctors and those magnificently made cyborgs had fled in panic from whatever savagery had descended on the complacent, corrupt, and glittering Empire that had lasted--in his own time--for five thousand years.

The folk of the valley, who sometimes worshiped him as a god, sang the chants of their dark past. The Warls, they called them: the prayers concocted by witches and warlocks to protect them from the fury their ancestors remembered. In the grieving laments and sagas of racial memory lay the dark tale of an Empire (a Golden Age, they said--well, it was not quite that) shattered, collapsing, sinking to barbarism.

From the rage of the star-raiders,
Save us!
From the fire in the sky,
Protect us, O Warlocks!

And now the snow had come and gone three times, and he still remained in the abandoned hospital, not knowing what else to do. He queried the computer, but the machine knew nothing of time. He radio-searched the hyperlight commo bands, and there was no human sound. If the great starships still flew, as the primitive folk of Trama claimed they did, they were mute. Whoever piloted the ships understood their systems poorly, if at all.

Often, the suspicion that nowhere in all the galaxy was there anyone like him left alive drove him to the brink of lunacy and suicide. But he lived on, for he had been a brave man and courage remained.

He would have occasional fits of kindness toward the dull folk of the valley. Like a mad Prometheus, he would give them useful knowledge: the mill in the valley was his innovation, he cured sick children capriciously, ranted history and Imperial protocol into their frightened faces. He taught the youngest daughter of the village chief to tame the eagles when he found she had a gift for the mental disciplines. He remembered, vaguely, lessons in mind-touch from the eyeless race of Vulk--but when and where and, always, how long ago? In a great palace, he thought, in some dark place where a single great moon lit the night, shimmering like silver on the tide of two great, placid rivers. A thousand years ago? Two thousand? Ten?