The Warlock of Rhada (3 page)

A short time ago, the hetman and the elders had climbed the moraine, bringing sacrifices of horrible red meat, performing unspeakable rituals. The lord of the nation in which the valley lay, they said, would soon send soldiers to punish them for withholding tribute, and they begged for help. They were like the lower classes always, the Warlock thought disdainfully, unwilling to fulfill their obligations to those set above them. (Had he heard that plaint before? He seemed to listen to an echo of similar words spoken in a great hall by a supercilious man seated on the Star Throne. Was it someone called Rigell? Was it the Galacton? But the Galacton was dust--as Dihanna was dust. The memory vanished like mist in cold sunlight.)

The skin-wearing savages of the valley disgusted him. He sent them away. What could a blind old lunatic who imagined he belonged in another time do if armed men came into these mountains? What did he
want
to do? The hetman did not speak of civilized men, but of barbarians in armor. He felt bleak and abandoned. Dihanna had not come as she promised. No, she had met instead men in steel corselets and armed with the starlight--a thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago--

A dark hatred rose in him like a bilious tide. His old hands trembled with rage. Let them come into the valley at their peril. There were instruments in the hospital, instruments meant as healing tools, but he would be less than a man of the Empire if he could not transform such things into weapons to terrify and destroy barbarians.

With his eye humming and clicking as it changed focus, he turned and walked back into the dimness of the tunnel beneath the mountain. The drug-hunger was upon him, and he shuffled swiftly toward his sleep-tank, feeling the preliminary gentle probing of the million microscopic needles in his living, silvery robe.

--of the various diversions available to travelers in the Province of Vega. Certain of the eagles of Aldrin have been bred as receptors, and thus the adept may, with mental amplification,
become
one of Aldrin’s eagles for a time, hunting and actually shedding blood. “Eagle-riding” is fast becoming a popular sport among the wealthiest of our Rigellian nobles.

Aldrin’s other inducement, of course, is the widely known Cryonic Suspension Center, where presently incurably ill patients may await--

--Golden Age fragment discovered at Aurora,
Middle Second Stellar Empire period

With my companion Warman Oelric of the Foragers, I was riding on the northern bank of the Foaming River at a distance of some fifteen kilometers from my Lord Ulm’s Black Keep on the river delta, and it came to pass in that time and place that we were attacked by three great birds. Of weight they were more than one hundred kilos each, and of span, fully eight meters, and each pinion was armed with great claws as were their feet. It was these birds, in the service of Sin and Cyb, who murdered my companion Oelric of the Foragers, and not I, as God in the Star is my witness.

--From the Vykan Archive, a statement made by an unknown warman of the garrison on the Archery Field, where he was put to death.
Late Interregnal or Early Second Stellar Empire period

Shana, the daughter of Shevil Lar the hetman, known as Shana the Dark, crouched on her haunches and watched the savage birds who had formed a circle around her. She had been repeatedly warned by the Warlock and by her father to avoid disturbing any convocation of the eagles, and in truth the creatures were in a savage mood at this moment, billing one another and eyeing the girl with eyes of metallic rancor. But with the pride of the adept, she had climbed the cliff to the aerie when she saw the birds gathering, certain that they would tolerate her presence. Now she was not so sure: the cruel bird thoughts plucked and snatched at her human brain angrily. She had never known the birds to be so hostile, even in their time of molt.

The master bird spread his wings and screeched defiance first at the invaders of the valley, then at the weyrherds in the meadows below, and finally at Shana. Though the words were not in any sense human, he was saying that Shana was as much an intruder as the strangers and that the flock must now return to its ancient ways. “You cannot any longer compel us. We will kill as we choose.” The alien thoughts tumbled through Shana’s mind in a sickening torrent of the blood of weyr and the torn flesh of men. Shana shivered, and one of the birds nearest her in the convocation circle struck at her with his razor-sharp bill, opening a small cut on her naked arm. She reacted instantly, striking back, her small fist banging feebly against the eagle’s armored throat. But with the blow she hurled the mental key, the simple thought-pattern taught her by the Warlock, that could inflict pain on the birds. All in the circled squawked and danced, and the individual against whom Shana had loosed the discipline gagged and gasped and struggled for balance. Instantly, the birds nearest him began to strike at him until his iridescent feathers were spattered with brownish blood.

“Stop,” Shana said. “Enough.”

The circle subsided into guttural angry duckings and squawkings. The lidless, non-human eyes fixed themselves on the girl with such coldness that she gathered her skin skirt over her thighs and shivered. But she persisted. “I am the Falconer,” she said aloud, repeating the ancient ritual the terrifying old man in the mountain had taught to her. “You have been bred to obey me.”

This was untrue. The birds were native to this place. They had been here long before Shana’s people came to the valley. But the Warlock said that these were the magical phrases, and that the birds learned the ritual as nestlings, and even before. It was part of something he called their “genetic code,” and when an adept such as Shana said them, the birds
must
listen and obey. “To do otherwise would be like a man willing his heart to stop beating,” he had said.

But Shana’s control was not as firm as she had imagined down in the safety of the valley. Up here on the cliff it seemed to her that the vicious creatures might break free of her domination at any moment. She was bitterly afraid and sorry that she had been so brash as to intrude herself into the convocation of eagles.

She said, “Who are the strangers?”

The birds fluttered and danced and said that they did not know. Nor did they care, Shana knew. They were men. And they were men not covered by the taboo she, with the Warlock’s help, had put upon the eagles against killing the men of Trama. Yet she suspected that if the eagles began by attacking the strangers, who must be Lord Ulm’s soldiers, they would end by breaking the prohibition and savaging the people of the valley and their flocks of helpless, grass-eating weyr.

Shana could not imagine a slaughter of men, for she was sixteen seasons old and had never seen men killed. But as a weyrherd, she could visualize the slaughtered flocks and this was real to her: real and terrifying.

The hot sunlight of Vyka burned down on the bone-littered rock shelf where the aerie overlooked a patch of meadow and a bend in the river. Shana was sweating. She wiped her damp palms on her small breasts and closed her eyes, trying to see through the eyes of the eagles. The birds’ thought patterns were frightening and chaotic; the Warlock had explained to her (impatiently, testily) that they only seemed so because they were not human. Through the clutter of images came a bird-memory of the strangers, seen from high above. A line of shining men. Armor, Shana thought,
as the eagles see it.
Well, there was no doubt that the intruders were warmen; the village elders had been expecting them, this full season past. But there was a brown man with the soldiers, brown with loose, coarse skin.
The habit of a priest-Navigator,
Shana thought with sudden panic. She and the folk of the valley feared the clergy and the Red Fist of the Inquisition even more than they feared the Adversaries, Sin and Cyb.

Her fear confused the mental discipline and she lost the images. Her mind retreated through the cacophony of blood and hunger and shrieking cries that customarily filled the tiny minds of the great birds. As she mentally fled, she recognized the eagles’ resentment of her--the puny human creature who forced them to hunt only outside the confines of their valley.

She came to her knees and bits of bone and rock cut into her naked shins. She straightened so that she knelt among the great birds, her eyes on a level with theirs. Suddenly she raised her arms, hands spread, in a grotesque parody of a bird taking flight. She gave them the command:
“Go! Fly! Keep watch!”

The convocation erupted into angry screaming, for the eagles had no wish to obey her, but she was the adept and they unwillingly stretched, stirring the bones and dry leaves and twigs that littered the rock as their great clawed pinions beat the air and they lifted from the aerie to soar on the currents rising along the cliff from the valley below. The rock-face seemed to erupt with birds and their shrill cries echoed across the meadows and the river.

Trembling, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps, Shana stumbled down the narrow ledges toward the land below. There was blood on her brown arms and legs and her bare feet burned on the hot rocks, but she did not pause as she ran to give the folk warning of the thing the eagles had seen. And as she ran, her adept’s mind felt still another thing, a strong pulse of mental power coming at her from the southern ridge. She reviewed the eagle-images and became aware of a thing she had missed on first probing. One of the tiny men rode with the Lord Ulm’s warmen. She did not know what this might mean, but the strong brain-waves were upsetting the birds, setting their cramped minds at odds and making them behave irrationally.

Her fear grew stronger and her naked feet burned on the sun-heated rocks. Shevil would know what must be done. She ran on, dark hair streaming and thick terror in her heart.

Fear the Vulk, for he sees without eyes and knows the Black Arts and dreams of the blood of children. He is not as men are.

--From
The Vulk Protocols,
authorship unknown, Interregnal period

How little we really know of the Vulk. We believe that he lives long, that he touches minds, that he loves men. We do not know
how
long, or if he really knows
our
thoughts, or
why
he should love us. Of this alone we are certain: in ten thousand years of star-voyaging, only the Vulk have we found sharing our eternity.

--Matthias ben Mullerium,
Vulkish Customs Among the Rhad,
Late Second Stellar Empire period

Glamiss could hear his troopers behind him making camp. The scent of the freshly killed game was heavy in the clean mountain air. He dismounted and shouted for the Vulk to be sent to him, then returned to his moody scrutiny of the valley. The eagles were flying again. Something had disturbed them and sent them soaring away from their steep cliffs and bare trees.

The war mares danced and stretched their claws and Glamiss said dourly to Emeric that he had better dismount before Sea Wind’s nervousness unseated him.

The priest’s mare and his own, Blue Star, were gifts from Emeric’s cousin, Aaron, a young man already known as Aaron the Devil, who was heir to the lands of the Northern Rhad and the conqueror of the Central Rhad’s plains and grasslands. If Rhada were ever to have a single ruler, that ruler would surely be Aaron.

Glamiss bit his lower lip in gloomy thought. All across the galaxy the warlords were stirring, each in his own land, with great ambitions. The worlds of the Great Sky were thinly peopled. Planetary populations numbered in the hundreds of thousands--though the exact figures were unknown. It had not always been so. In the time of the Empire, the legends told of billions upon unnumbered billions. The priests claimed that Sin and Cyb destroyed the Golden Age. Glamiss suspected that it was something more mundane: war first, then pestilence, then war again, with star-destroying missiles, and finally a great aeons-long night of barbarism. But now there was a tension in the galaxy. Men on horseback were trying to recreate a world that men like gods could not preserve.
And what shall my part in it be,
Glamiss wondered?
What hope for the dream?
He was more than twenty seasons old and he ruled nothing but a warband that did not even owe him allegiance, but knelt to Ulm of Vara, a petty robber holding a barren plain.

Blue Star butted him with her silky nose. The animals of Rhada were unique. Long ago, Emeric claimed (perhaps with provincial pride), the men of the Golden Age had brought the stock of legendary Earth to Rhada, breeding it there for generations to produce the finest chargers in all the galaxy. The Rhadan stallions were far too fierce to be tamed for war, but Rhadan mares bore the warleaders of a hundred planets on their narrow backs.

Blue Star’s nostrils dilated at the scent of the open game-bags. She pushed against Glamiss again and said, “Eat, Glamiss. We eat
now.”
Her voice was sibilant, the words distinct to a warman accustomed to the language of the mares.

“Go eat, then,” he said. “But eat what has already been killed.”

Blue Star tossed her narrow head and bared her saber teeth. “Hunt. We hunt.”

Glamiss looked at the sky and the distant, disturbed eagles. He did not wish to risk Blue Star in this country of savage birds. “No,” he said.