The Warlock of Rhada (24 page)

For the three minds were tightly linked, now. The Vulk could sense the agony of it pulsing through the humming air. Three lives, wildly dissimilar, were being neurologically interwoven. It was a crude process compared to the Triad induced by the Vulkish mind-link, and dangerous. It would have been risky under any circumstances, but the melding of two modern personalities with a third, which was the product of a distant and highly sophisticated age, held the peril of brain-damage and insanity and possibly even physical injury to the nervous system of the three suffering creatures on the gray slabs.

Still, the Vulkish dictum applied:
Do not interfere.
Asa wondered if he could, in fact, stand by and watch Emeric and Glamiss being reduced to human vegetables without intervening. They were, after all, the only humans who had treated him with consideration in the last thousand years of his life--

The Lord Ophir’s life-thread was flickering. The temporary infusion of youthful neural vitality was burning up his deteriorated nervous system. He did not care. He seemed apart from the withering old body on the slab of the exchanger. Like a glow-globe near the end of its functioning life, the mind of Ophir ben Rigell burned brightly, the heat of advancing death searing away the drug-damaged blocks in his personality.

Memories and fresh new impressions blazed. He remembered
everything.

Childhood: the Rhadan sea, silvery under the stormy polar winds--his father, the brother of the Galacton, saying many times, “Ophir, you will probably have the Star Throne one day and the Feathered Cape and Flail of Empire, so learn to serve, my son--the Imperium is not a thousand suns, it is the people, the human billions who have populated the galaxy --history is the key to all things, the bedrock of all human knowledge, for without a history a race is no better than the beasts of the fields or the fishes of the sea--“

The days, hours, minutes of his life flamed in his surging thoughts. He relived the rearing of a prince--a prince destined to rule a galaxy.
History, yes. And science. And the arts--the gentle arts of music--Dihanna, Dihanna, he thought, I remember you clearly now!--and painting and sculpture--There was once a man called Michelangelo and another called Steinberg who moved him deeply--and the less gentle arts of war--

Now, as he remembered the falling suns, the laser-beams with which the Empire could implode a star, he felt the hungry presence of another mind, a soldier’s mind, avid to drain him of his knowledge of destruction. Then came to him memories not his own.
The feel of a war mare’s warm body between his thighs, the thrill of the charge, the jolting bite of steel into flesh, the sweaty fear of waiting in a darkened starship hold for the opening of the assault valve and then the surge into alien sunlight and the shrieks of men in battle. And something more from this mind, the essence that was Glamiss the Warleader--Ambition, the ravening goad of a desire to conquer, to unite, to dominate. It was purest atavism, the aggressive fury that had been bred out of the ruling class of Rigellian times. It was similar to the anger of the Rimworld barbarians who had swept back into the galactic center to smash the Empire, and yet different--for once again it was an outward thrust--a need to bring all the scattered, broken worlds together into--what? Ophir felt a shuddering thrill in the presence of a terrifying appetite for community. His sophisticated mind recognized it as a crude community of arms and oppression, but it was clearly recognizable for what it was--
the Second Empire.
As yet unborn, perhaps stillborn if Glamiss died here and now. But Glamiss’s mind defied death, defied the darkness, dragging Ophir’s with it into a soaring dream of the future--

Other images, as strong.
A soaring cathedral of steel and glass beneath a double sun. Algol. Cowled Navigators at their prayers. The Litanies of Space. Ophir recognized the chanted words as scientific formulae, the manuals of the ancient starship captains of his own day, committed to memory by these austere and dedicated priests. I am Emeric Aulus Kiersson-Rhad, he thought, and felt a flush of pleasure at the Navigator’s memories of Rhada’s wind-lashed coasts and vast plains. That, at least, remained the same across the millennia of Sleep!

The interchange of memories was swifter now, as though this strange Triad sensed that it was burning the life from one of its members. Ophir, as a gift to the mind of the young Navigator (he knew now what the Order of Navigators’ function was in this time) concentrated on remembering that other Church that had, in another Dark Time, kept the light of learning flickering in the night--

Swiftly, and still more swiftly, the memories were shared among the three. All knew what each knew, their brains bursting with new images.

They saw the galaxy, spinning ponderously in emptiness, a million parsecs from its nearest neighbor in space. For an instant they struggled with the concept of the Universe’s reality, their merely human minds tottering, reaching, almost grasping--then falling back into the star-glowing spiral that was Man’s present destiny, defeated but exalted.

It was then that death came.

They could feel its lonely cold approaching. Not from the stars, but from the inner human depths, from the primeval animal soul of Man. It came out of the molten rock that cooled into a teeming sea and a chattering tribe in the trees. It came as the dark leopard, the serpent, the bite of iron, and the nuclear blast. Not with blinding light, but with shadowed sadness.

I am dying, brothers. Withdraw, withdraw,
Ophir thought.

He sensed the disengagement. It was difficult and painful, as painful as the birth of their Triad had been. And he sensed something else, too. For this timeless moment, the Navigator and the Warleader had been one. But now their own personalities began to reassert themselves, and Ophir knew that the soldier was thinking of the power he now held, the knowledge of weapons that lay in the armory within the mountain and what they could mean to a conqueror-to-be. The priest was remembering the hell of war that had brought his Order into being and understanding, for the first time, that primitive men’s power to kill one another must be tightly leashed, lest a permanent darkness fall.

But Ophir’s nervous system was used up, seared by the flood of youth that had coursed through him under the influence of the machine. His brain alone functioned now, and soon it would stop, for his heart had stopped beating, his blood was cooling.

He made a last effort.

Do not fight one another, brothers,
he cautioned.
Work together.

He sensed the growing dichotomy, the divergent sense of purpose in the two young minds he had primed with his life’s knowledge.

He was regretful, but to him it could no longer matter. The primeval darkness closed in on him. He felt--alone. Glamiss and Emeric were gone and, with them, their vitality.

Yet it was strange. Death, that had a moment ago seemed so worrisome, came now as a friend. It is time, Ophir ben Rigell ibn Sol alt Messier thought, mentally smiling at his pompous, man-made dignities. Dihanna, it is time and past time.

The electrical activity in the old brain cells that was Ophir slowed and peacefully stopped.

The Warlock of Rhada was dead.

He had given Emeric and Glamiss a glimpse of the final serene darkness. It was his last gift.

The moment that Glamiss donned the feathered cape, he laid claim to the Star Throne. Considering that his following was fewer than fifty fighting men, it was a gesture of astonishing arrogance--and courage.

--Nav (Bishop) Julianus Mullerium,
The Age of the Star Kings,
Middle Second Stellar Empire period

That night on Aldrin, called Vyka by the folk of that place, the Mythic Age died in a single thunderclap, killed by the hand of a Saint. I can say no more.

--From the Testament of Anselm Styr, Navigator,
burned by the Inquisition in the last year of Talvas Hu Chien’s Grand Mastership

Glamiss and Emeric went to the valley of Trama-Vyka as strangers and friends. They left it as enemies and brothers.

--Vikus Bel Cyb-1009,
Rhadan Influences in Galactic History,
Middle Confederate period

Lord Ulm of Vara sat heavily on his war mare and surveyed the scene before him with dull despair. The light fading from the greenish Vykan sky still exposed a vista of military disaster. Five assaults had been launched against the rebellious warmen entrenched on the mountain, and the only tangible result lay all about him in the mounds of dead and the straggling lines of wounded.

Ulm’s slow mind struggled with the concept of defeat and what defeat would mean to him personally. Already, Linne Warleader was muttering to the other captains about Ulm’s inability to dislodge the rebels from their position. The leaders were listening to him, throwing dark glances at their bond-lord.

But that was not the worst. Halfway up the bloodied moraine the Bishop-Navigator was counting the casualties, ordering wounded men out of the action, and back to the starship in the meadow. Kaifa would not do that if he did not despair of Ulm’s ever accomplishing what he had set out to do.

In the light of afternoon, how simple it had appeared, Ulm thought dully. This morning he had left his keep with a thousand men and the approval of the Order of Navigators. Now the remains of his force stood near to mutiny and the Bishop offered no help, his dark Arab face grim in the fading light of the Vyka sun.

Ulm’s clumsy mind grappled with the reality of his situation. His warmen could be taken from him at any moment by any captain with a solution to the absurd blind alley into which the Varan force had drifted. It seemed to the warlord that Fate was conspiring against him. He had no sense that if Fate had conspired, it was not specifically against
him
, but in favor of another. The nexus of power had formed in this valley. A politico-military nucleus had taken shape, formed by forces stretching across time and distances beyond his imagining.

The forces were not beyond Kaifa’s imagining--far from it. The Bishop stood surrounded by more than enough military power to accomplish what the Order had directed him to accomplish. But it had been so badly used that he was helpless now. The fault, he told himself, was his own. From its inception, the move against Glamiss and this valley had been ill-starred. Small mistakes had grown into a pattern of personal catastrophe--
personal,
because the Order
always
survived and prospered. That was the bitterest reality, and--strangely--the only satisfaction the worldly priest could claim. For within that mountain, amid those marvels of Empire science he, Kaifa, had hoped to take for himself and the Order, was another priest. Suddenly, in the declining Vykan day, the power had shifted from his own experienced hands into those of Emeric Kiersson-Rhad.

For the first time in many years, Kaifa of Nasser, Bishop of the Order of Navigators, felt humbled by the strange and mysterious ways of God in the Star.

Linne Warleader marshaled his company for the last assault of the fading day on the rebels entrenched on the mountain. The troopers had lighted torches to make a fire-charge, and the orange light turned the bloodied rocks black. Linne did not imagine that his charge would be successful, but he had weighed the temper of his own men and those led by the other captains, and he felt certain that one more costly repulse would bring general revolt against the authority of the Lord Ulm.

Then, as custom demanded, he would seek the priest’s permission (which could not be refused) to challenge Ulm for the holding of Vara. The laws and customs of the feudatories of the Great Sky were simple and direct. A warlord ruled so long as he was fit to rule. Defeat was reason enough to cause his subordinates to challenge him.

The firelight played on Linne’s heavily bearded face. His eyes, close-set on either side of the iron nose-piece of his cone-shaped helmet, held an expression of triumph. He would lead the charge, even knowing it could not succeed. Then he would kill Ulm, assume his mantle, and settle down to starve the rebels from the warrens within the mountain. No amount of Empire warlockry could save them then. And the Bishop would return to Algol only after having consecrated Linne as holder of the lands of Vara-Vyka.

For a moment his dark mind even toyed with the idea of holding Kaifa and the
Gloria
on Vyka. A warlord with a starship of his own could spread havoc among the Rimworlds. Linne’s ambition, though livelier than the cloddish Ulm’s, still extended no farther than that.