Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (35 page)

Kit and Ronan and Filif and Dairine and Roshaun all looked at one another.
When in Rome,
Ronan said.

They turned and followed the others. The tunnels, like the paths out in the forest, widened as they went in deeper. Soon the group was hemmed in by other Yaldiv, pressing against them, starting to hum a chorus of sounds deeper and more rhythmic than the ones heard outside. Carried along by the wave of Yaldiv, the wizards were swept into higher-ceilinged spaces, wider hallways and colonnades—and finally through a tunnel opening into the biggest space of all.

It’s like one of those skyscraper hotel atriums,
Dairine thought. The hollow space speared upward into what was probably the highest reaches of the city-hive. In the vast open space, thousands of Yaldiv were already crowded together, and still more were crowding in.

Kit plainly didn’t mean to be caught in the middle of them all, which was an idea Dairine approved of. He and Ronan started pushing and forcing their way closer to one of the farther walls of the great space. The other Yaldiv, workers mostly, let them pass. Shortly they found themselves close to the wall across from the tunnel by which they’d entered. The space was somewhat bowl-like, like their cavern. By being near the wall, they were slightly higher than most of the other Yaldiv. They turned to look out across the tremendous gathering … and saw what they had not been able to see before because of the crush and press of Yaldiv bodies.

The space was shaped more like an ellipse than anything else. At what would have been the farthest focus of the ellipse, on a dais maybe a hundred feet in diameter, lay a huge and swollen form, glowing with heat. Dairine instantly knew what it was from her earlier look at the species précis in Spot. It wasn’t a Queen; it was a King.

The original carapace of a Yaldiv body was now almost the smallest thing about it. The organic structures inside that carapace had long outgrown it, burst out of it, pushed it up and away; the whole original sloughed-off body, now split in two, clung to the top of the much-enlarged thorax like a little shriveled pair of wings. Down near the floor of the dais, the head of the King was almost invisible in the shadow of its vast bulk. The mirror-shade eyes were two tiny dots nearly lost in the upswelling of the vast, puffy body.

Near the head, on each side of it, stood a line of slender Yaldiv, smaller and lighter than the warriors.
Handmaidens,
Dairine thought, watching them come and go. She’d had a chance to check Spot earlier for some of the details on Yaldiv physiology, and immediately thereafter she’d really wished she hadn’t. These handmaidens, though, weren’t doing any of the things that had grossed her out. They were bowing before the head, feeding it, then moving away again. But Dairine found that this grossed her out differently—the mindless, endless munching of the mouth-mandibles as the handmaidens put food into it, bowed, moved away. She gulped and quickly turned her attention elsewhere.

It was hard. This whole gigantic space seemed to direct one’s eye back to the swollen thing lying at the heart of it, the apparition before which, as if before some indolent living idol, the whole mighty congregation of Yaldiv lay bowed down in abject worship.
And of course I’m anthropomorphizing,
Dairine thought.
It’s not like your toenails or your spleen worship the rest of you. These guys don’t even see themselves as separate from the King.
But the air was thick with feelings, and she was having trouble keeping her own reactions in order.

This was a problem that recently had been getting worse for her.
Is this Roshaun’s fault somehow?
Dairine wondered.
Or something to do with Spot?
Whatever the cause, the feeling of sheer evil that flowed off the King, and was reflected back to it by its worshippers, was horrifying to Dairine, and familiar. She’d felt it before, on the mobiles’ world, during her Ordeal. This was the sentiment behind the terrible gloating laughter she had kept hearing back then—the amusement of the Lone Power, darkly entertained by the pitiful struggles of mortal life in the universe in which It went from door to door selling Its invention, Death, to the unwary. But here there was something different about the silent laughter. There was a sense of smugness.
There’s nothing more to do here,
It seemed to be saying.
Everything’s just the way I want it. Now all there is to do with eternity is take it easy and enjoy what I’ve accomplished.

It’s not the
whole
Lone Power at all,
Dairine thought.
It’s an avatar, like all the others. Maybe a more aware one. But, otherwise, it may not have a lot of autonomy.

A warrior with strange glowing patterns laid out on its carapace came forward and was joined by several others. It abased itself before the dais, along with its compatriots. The King never gave it even a glance, as far as Dairine could tell.
Though whether it can move at all is the next question,
she thought.

The crowd began slowly to press toward the dais. “The day is done! Let the Arch-votary speak!” a Yaldiv said, lifting up its forelegs. Others began to chime in: “Let the Arch-votary tell us the Great One’s will for tomorrow!”

More and more Yaldiv began to chant together: “Speak! Tell us the Great One’s will! Speak!” This went on until the warrior with the glowing patterns on its shell, the Arch-votary, lifted its own forelegs.

The assemblage swiftly became quiet.

“All praise to the One!” the Arch-votary said.

“All praise to the One, the Great One, the King, the Lord of All, the Master of Creation!” said all the gathered Yaldiv together. They all bowed to the swollen mass on the dais. It annoyed Dairine, but she bowed, too, as Ronan and Kit and everyone else was doing.

“Let the sacred story be told!” said the Arch-votary.

“Let it be told,” the immense crowd whispered in awe.

“In the beginning was the One,” said the Arch-votary. “And all things were well. But then, from outside, came Another. That Other said to the One, ‘Your way is wrong, and this other way is right; bow down to me and admit your wrongness!’”

“Down with the Other! Death to the Other!” the crowd answered.

“And the One rose up and said, ‘Evil Other, old shadow-ghost that haunts the ancient darkness, you have no right to question my creation or my will! I will never bow down to you.’”

“Never!” the crowd cried. “The One is all! These are in the One, and no Other!”

“And the Other spoke in pride, saying, ‘If you will even now bow down and admit your wrongness, you shall be forgiven!’ And the One spurned this craven word. Then the Other spoke in threat, saying, ‘If you do not bow, you shall be punished and driven out!’”

“The One must not bow! The Other is evil, the Other is outside!” chanted the crowd.

“But the Other could not frighten the One, or move It from Its purpose!” said the Arch-votary. “And when it realized this, the Other came with its minions and made everlasting war on the One. But it could not prevail. And while these are Its faithful servants, the evil Other can never prevail, not until worlds’ end and beyond!”

“Praise to the One! We will always be loyal! We will fight the Other until the ends of the worlds!” cried the crowd, and bowed down before the King.

Dairine kept doing what everyone else was doing. But she was both infuriated and disgusted.
It takes the truth and twists It around to serve Its own purposes. But It doesn’t take any more of the truth than It absolutely has to … because truth’s essentially good, and It hates it for that.

“Now the One in our King gives commands for the next stage in the new war against the Other’s minions in our world,” said the Arch-votary. “Tomorrow a great force of warriors will be sent to intercept marauding warriors who are coming to attack our hive and devour us and our children. By bringing them the gift of death, we will turn their evil to good. By ending their miserable lives, we bring them peace, inside us, inside the King.”

“Glory to the great King! Glory to the One in the King!” the crowd shouted.

“The One in our King commands that we allow the attackers to cross the Great Ravine,” the Arch-votary said. “When enough of them arrive on our side, we will attack and destroy them. Their flesh will feed our King, and be the beginning of thousands of new children. Those children will grow into mighty warriors and fertile handmaidens, who will labor until their breath fails them for the destruction of the Other!”

“Let the Other be destroyed forever!” the crowd cried in anger and joy. “Death to the enemy of the One!”

“Go now and prepare the Other’s death,” said the Arch-votary, “and the glory of the One!”

“We go for the One’s glory!” cried the assembled masses.

The warriors stepped away from the dais, leaving that huge bloated shape lying there tended unendingly by its handmaidens. The assembled Yaldiv began streaming out the many entrances to the heart of the hive.

So there you have it,
Dairine thought.
Not just a declaration of war on the other hive, but on all the other “Others” in the universe, everything that’s not the Lone Power’s … or the Lone Power Itself.

What now?
she heard Filif say to Kit.

We follow everybody out, I guess,
Kit said.
Ponch, did you scent anything we’re looking for while they were all in here?

I got something,
Ponch said.
The scent was familiar.
He sounded uncertain, though.

Which tunnel did they go out?

I think
—Ponch sniffed the air for a moment—
I think that one.
Ponch indicated one of about ten tunnels off to their right.
I’ll be more certain when I get closer to it.

Okay … let’s go.

As the crowd in front of them lessened, the wizards started heading in the direction of that tunnel: first Kit, with Ponch close behind him, then Ronan, Filif, and Roshaun and, bringing up the rear, Dairine.

So now what?
Ronan said.

Well,
Kit said,
we can spend some more time looking around here. If Spot’s saving data to help us find what we’re looking for, we should get some more.

You won’t need that much more,
Ponch said.
I should be able to bring you to where we can find what we’re after.

Assuming,
Filif said,
that the one Ponch is tracking is located in a place warriors are allowed to go.

So far, that’s been everywhere,
Kit said. But his tone of thought suddenly sounded strained. Dairine looked ahead to see what the problem was.

Until now, there’d been only intermittent traffic through the doorway for which they’d been heading. Now, though, there was no traffic there at all. That doorway was completely blocked by warriors with the same kind of markings that the Arch-votary had worn. And between the group of wizards and the door, the Arch-votary itself stood and waited, watching them.

Suggestions?
Roshaun said.

Just play it cool,
Kit said.

They walked in line up to the Arch-votary. Kit stopped. Dairine, watching him, broke out in a sweat. The Arch-votary lifted those huge claws, but the gesture was not immediately threatening. It was more like the gesture it had used when calling the assembly to order. “This one is commanded to bring these before the King,” the Arch-votary said.

Oh, God, it knows!
Dairine thought, and sweated harder. Kit merely said, “These obey the command.”

The Arch-votary led them across the rapidly clearing hall toward the dais. Dairine was having trouble looking at it steadily. The closer she got, the more she felt that vast glowing mass on top of it was somehow sucking her toward it—sucking her attention into it, maybe even sucking out her will. But then the thought occurred to her that the sensation might have something to do with the
mochteroof. And I’m still me in here,
she told herself fiercely.
No refugee from a dime-store ant farm is going to make me forget that!

The feeling of ebbing will backed down a little bit, but as they got closer, Dairine found she had to expend more effort to stave it off.
If we don’t have to be here too long, I’ll be okay. But if it knows what we are—

“The warriors are brought to you according to your command, Great One,” said the Arch-votary.

Dairine watched Kit to see what he would do. He bowed, as the Arch-votary had done, and Dairine and all the others followed suit.

For a long moment, no one said anything. Then the King spoke.

“You are minions of the Other,” he said.

There was something about the voice that Dairine instantly found repulsive. The voice was very slow and rich, very deep; and somehow it hardly sounded conscious—as if it was not a living thing but some kind of recording, like the kind of thing you might associate with a very high-end in-car GPS system.

“We are servants of the One,” Kit said.

Inside the
mochteroof,
even through her nerves, Dairine smiled at the steady sound of Kit’s voice. He was fighting to keep his anxiety out of it, and it was working.

“Your appearance is that of servants of the Great One,” the King said. “You have the scent of Yaldiv, and the look of Yaldiv. But your souls betray you. They smell of the Other.”

Dairine broke out in a sweat again, and glanced ever so briefly in Roshaun’s direction. Kit said nothing, just met what he could see of those tiny, empty black eyes.

“What is the Great One’s will with these?” the Arch-votary said.

Here it comes,
Dairine thought silently to Spot.
Get something ready.
Slowly, inside the
mochteroof,
she reached sideways into her otherspace pocket and felt around for one of the more deadly wizardries she had at hand.

Then, in the silence, the King laughed.

Dairine actually had to suppress the desire to retch, for the sound was truly revolting. It was full of the casual amusement of someone who has you completely in his power, and can do anything he likes with you. “Let them go about my business as they have done,” the King said. “They have no power here.”