Omago smiled faintly. “I could tell you stories about Veltan all day if you wanted to hear them. He used to spend a lot of his time in my father’s orchard when I was just a boy.”
“Stealing apples?” Keselo asked.
“No, it was usually in the springtime when the trees were in bloom. An orchard in the spring is more beautiful than any flower garden, and Veltan always spends several weeks in that orchard when the trees are in bloom. We’d sit there and talk—well, he would. I just listened. There are things about Veltan that only the people of his Domain know about.”
“Really? Such as what?”
“He offended Mother Sea once, and she banished him to the moon.”
Keselo’s eyes had almost closed, but they popped wide open. “Did I hear what you just said right?” he demanded. “Did you say that Veltan’s been to the moon?”
Omago laughed. “Oh, yes. Mother Sea was very irritated. Veltan had to stay on the moon for thousands of years. That was the moon’s idea, actually. She enjoyed his company, so she lied to him and told him that Mother Sea was still angry about something he’d said. Veltan was really put out when Mother Sea told him that he could have come back home after a month or so.”
“You’re just making this up, Omago,” Keselo accused.
“I’m just passing on what Veltan told me,” Omago said. Then he paused. “I notice that it did wake you up a bit,” he added. He glanced off to the east. “We’re getting closer to sunrise, I’d say. Unless the bug-people have changed the rules, they should be coming back up the hill before too much longer.”
“You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to,” Keselo said then, “but how is it that an ordinary farmer like you managed to snare a beauty like your wife.”
“I didn’t,” Omago replied. “She snared me. She came past my orchard once in the early summer when I was thinning out my apples, and she wanted to know what I was doing. I explained thinning to her, and then she went off down the road. I couldn’t think of anything but her for weeks after that. Then she came there again and made the bluntest announcement I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”
“Oh? What did she say?—if you can remember.”
“Oh, I can remember it, all right. She said, ‘My name is Ara. I’m sixteen years old, and I want you.’”
“That gets right to the point,” Keselo said. He was just a bit surprised that Omago’s story had pushed his weariness aside. He was wide awake now, for some reason.
“There is something I should really tell you, Keselo,” Omago continued. “I don’t want to offend you, but I don’t really like this soldiering very much. I don’t like to tell others what to do, and the idea of killing things that look like people—even though they aren’t—makes me sick at my stomach.” He shrugged. “I guess somebody had to do it, though, and Veltan sort of depends on me. I just hope I don’t make too many mistakes.”
“I’d say that you’re doing very well, Omago,” Keselo replied. “You invented the spear. If my history professor back at the university knew what he was talking about, you compressed about a thousand years of human history into a couple of weeks.”
Omago looked just a bit embarrassed and he glanced off to the east again. “The tip of the sun just came up above the horizon,” he reported. “I expect that the bug-people will be coming up the hill before long.”
From out in the Wasteland there came that now-familiar roar that echoed back from the nearby cliffs, and once again the lumbering, oversized (and, Keselo believed, underbrained) new breed of bug-people came shambling up the glittering slope toward the now-empty breastworks which had been abandoned by Narasan’s forces the previous night. As had happened several times before, the empty-headed servants of the Vlagh were completely baffled by the absence of soldiers behind the now-vacant breastworks.
“Bugs aren’t too intelligent, are they?” Omago suggested.
“Rocks are probably more intelligent,” Keselo replied, carefully feeling for the pulse in his left wrist with the fingers of his right hand.
“Are you hurt, Keselo?” Omago asked with some concern.
Keselo shook his head. “Just counting,” he replied. “If I’m right, we’ll hear another roar from out there in just about fifty-seven heartbeats.”
“Your heart, maybe,” Omago disagreed. “Mine seems to be beating just a little faster.”
They waited, and sure enough, the voice of the Vlagh roared forth the command to charge yet again.
“Fifty-three,” Keselo reported. “Something out there appears to be a little faster than the others.”
“Where did you come up with that idea?”
“It was one of the things we were trained to do when we were student soldiers,” Keselo explained. “Precise timing can be crucial in certain situations. It doesn’t work too well if you’ve been running, but I’ve been standing in one place since first light.” He nodded toward the now-occupied breastworks they’d abandoned the previous night. “Here they come,” he said.
“And there they go,” Omago added as the attacking force encountered the reintroduced poisoned stakes. Keselo had been very relieved when Commander Narasan had rescinded his earlier command and allowed his men to go back to the previous practice of planting those stakes to slow the attacks of the bug-people. If things went the way they were supposed to, the Church armies would soon arrive to take over for Narasan’s army, and Gunda had bluntly advised his friend that keeping as many of his men alive as possible was far more important than maintaining their supply of snake venom.
“It’ll take a bit longer for the word to get back to the Vlagh this time,” Keselo predicted. “The stakes always confuse them, and it takes them more time to send the report back.”
“And then the Vlagh will shout again and the ones wearing armor will rush up here and start rolling over the stakes?”
“Exactly. Then, as soon as the turtle-people get close enough, the archers will start shooting arrows at their eyes, and that should just about end this particular attack.” Keselo yawned at that point. “Then we’ll all be able to get some sleep,” he added.
“What if they charge us again?”
“Not very likely, my friend,” Keselo said. “They never have before. It takes a very long time for this particular enemy to modify its tactics—months usually—maybe years, for all I know. Wake me if anything interesting happens.” Then he found a relatively comfortable corner in the breastworks, settled down, and promptly fell asleep.
It was early in the afternoon when Brigadier Danal woke them. “Andar wants to know if you can come up with some kind of explanation for something that’s a bit peculiar, Keselo,” he said.
“Oh?” Keselo said, struggling to shake off his sleep. “What’s that?”
“Take a look at Gunda’s wall—assuming that you can still see it.”
Keselo rose and looked on up the slope at the yellow cloud billowing over Gunda’s wall. “I think that’s what’s called a ‘sandstorm,’ Brigadier Danal—or possibly a duststorm. As I understand it, they’re fairly common in desert country.”
“You’d better let Andar know that it’s something ordinary, Keselo. That thing up there’s making him just a bit edgy. A lot of strange things keep popping up here in the Land of Dhrall, and they’re making Andar sort of jumpy.”
The three of them went on along the breastworks to join Subcommander Andar.
“Keselo says that it’s only what’s called a ‘sandstorm,’ Andar. The world didn’t just split open or something like that.”
“Could you give me a bit more in the way of an explanation, Keselo?” Andar asked.
“I’ve never actually seen one before, sir,” Keselo replied, “but one of the professors at the university told us that in the dryer parts of the world where there aren’t very many trees or much grass, a strong wind can pick up dust or sand and send it billowing along the ground for miles and miles. When the wind dies down, everything settles back to earth again.”
“How long do they usually last?”
“As long as the wind keeps blowing, sir.”
“That’s not very precise, Keselo,” Andar complained.
“That’s always a problem when you’re dealing with the weather, sir,” Keselo replied. “The study of weather involves a lot of things that we don’t understand very well yet. We know that winters are cold and summers are hot, but that’s about as far as we’ve been able to go with any degree of certainty. You might want to tell the men to cover their noses and mouths with cloth, though. I don’t think breathing in sand would be very good for them.”
They all stood watching as the yellow cloud began to roll down the slope.
“I’d say that we aren’t the only ones having trouble with this,” Danal said, looking on down the slope. “The bug-people are streaming out of the breastworks we abandoned last night like something awful was about to happen to them.”
Keselo frowned, probing through the memories of the various courses he’d taken at the University of Kaldacin. Then he remembered something. “I think it might have something to do with the way bugs breathe, Brigadier,” he said.
“Breathing is breathing, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly, sir. Bugs, insects—whatever we call them—don’t have noses like people or animals do. They breathe through a series of holes down their sides instead. A small, ordinary bug wouldn’t really have many problems with a sandstorm because those holes along their sides are very thin. These giant bugs we’ve encountered here, though, would have much larger breathing holes. If one of them happens to take a deep breath in the middle of a sandstorm, there’s a very good chance that it’d suck in enough sand to clog up the breathing holes. If that happens, it’s entirely possible that the bug will die of suffocation.”
“Aw,” Danal said in mock regret, “what a shame.”
“Is it at all possible that this silly sandstorm will kill them all, Keselo?” Andar asked.
“I don’t really think so, sir,” Keselo replied. “That Wasteland out there is pretty much all desert, so sandstorms are probably very common. I’m sure that the bug-people have come up with many ways to protect themselves—burrowing down into the ground, maybe, or even piling dead friends up in heaps and then crawling under them. The fact that they’re running away suggests that they know just how dangerous a sandstorm can be, and I’m sure that they instinctively know how to protect themselves.”
Then from far out in the Wasteland there came a shrill scream that seemed to fade as it came from farther and farther out in the glittering yellow desert.
“Could that possibly be the Vlagh itself making all that noise?” Omago asked.
“It’s possible, I suppose,” Keselo replied. “Then again, though, it probably wasn’t. The Vlagh has many servants whose only purpose in life is to protect their queen. They won’t let anything happen to her.”
“I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to that,” Andar declared. “Fighting wars against females is so unnatural.”
“That particular female thinks that all we are is something to eat, Andar,” Danal disagreed. “Ordinary courtesies go right out the window in a situation like that, wouldn’t you say? Let’s face it, my friend. If the Vlagh happens to invite you to dinner, you’re likely to be the main course.”
THE INLAND SEA
1
Veltan, like the others, had been more than a little dubious about Longbow’s assertion that the Church armies were unknowingly coming to aid them in their struggle with the servants of the Vlagh, but the sudden appearance of that “sea of gold”—which wasn’t gold—and the almost hysterical reaction of the assorted Trogites coming up from the south had convinced him that the voice which had come to Longbow had spoken truly.
The more troubling question gnawing at Veltan now was just exactly who this unknown friend was, and how she had managed to pull off such a colossal deception. It was quite obvious by now that their “unknown friend” had been operating at a level of sophistication far beyond anything Veltan or his brother and sisters could possibly have managed.
Right now, however, Veltan had more important things to attend to. He sent out his thought to his pet thunderbolt, and somewhat to his surprise, she didn’t grumble or complain as she almost always did, but came to him immediately.
“Good baby,” he said to her. “We need to go on down to the Falls of Vash and have a look at some people down there.” He hesitated slightly. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything, but do you suppose you could be just a bit quieter than usual?”
She flickered questioningly.
“I guess it’s not really all that important, dear,” he said. “There’s been quite a bit of peculiar weather around lately, so those strangers won’t be too surprised—no matter what happens.” He mounted and settled himself. “Let’s go, baby,” he said, glancing at the slowly settling sandstorm.
He was more than a little surprised when they reached the huge waterfall and his pet rumbled faintly instead of producing that deafening crash.
“Good girl,” he said. “That was just fine. Wait here. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
He dismounted and drifted on down through the air toward the crudely constructed bridge that connected the Trogite ramp with the rim of the gorge that lay to the south.
The red-uniformed soldiers of the Amarite church were plodding up the ramp, and there were very few of them still waiting down below.
“Well, good enough,” Veltan murmured. “From the look of things, I’d say that this is the tail-end of the column. Give them another half-day, and they’ll all be up here.”
Then he saw a familiar face among the Trogites coming up from below.
“I guess that answers that particular question,” Veltan murmured as he watched the scrawny former soldier Jalkan limping up the ramp, accompanied by a grossly fat clergyman stumbling along beside him, wheezing and sweating gallons as he came. The two of them were surrounded by bleak-faced guards wearing the black uniforms of the Regulators.
Veltan reached out with his ears to see if the two enemies might possibly reveal anything useful.
“It’s only a little farther, Adnari,” Jalkan said in that nasally whining voice that Veltan had always found so irritating.
“Let me catch my breath, Jalkan,” the fat man wheezed, stopping and wiping the sweat off his face.
“No,” Jalkan said firmly. “We can’t block off the ramp. The last brigade’s still behind us, and we can’t delay them.”
“I don’t give a hoot about the soldiers, Jalkan!” The fat man flared. “Their only purpose in life is to serve the Church, and in this part of the world, I am the church.”
“Not in a war, Adnari Estarg,” Jalkan disagreed. “Not unless you’d like to take up falling and dying as a hobby. The soldiers in that brigade know that there’s gold just ahead, and if you delay them too much, they might very well decide to dispose of you by shoving you off the side of the ramp, and it’s a long way down from here.”
“They wouldn’t dare!”
“Would you really like to bet your life on that, Adnari?”
The fat man looked back over his shoulder at the impatient men in red uniforms who were glaring at him. “The Regulators will protect me, Jalkan,” he declared.
“Did you want to bet your life on that as well?” Jalkan demanded. “Now that Konag’s not with us anymore, we can’t really trust anybody. Konag was the one with the iron fist, and the other Regulators obeyed him out of terror, and then they terrorized the soldiers in our five armies. Konag was our key, but he’s gone now, so we can’t lock doors anymore.”
Veltan scratched his cheek thoughtfully as a distinct possibility came to him unbidden. Something—or more probably, somebody—had moved the clever little Rabbit to do something very uncharacteristic. First he’d carved out a bow, and the Maags had never been very interested in archery. Then the little man had been stirred to violence by Konag’s brutal slaughter of any and all Church soldier
s who broke ranks and tried to run on ahead of the armies to reach the imitation gold before their comrades did. And then Rabbit, who should at best have been a rank amateur as an archer, dropped Konag dead in his tracks with a single arrow.
“I’d say that we’ve definitely got some serious tampering going on here lately,” Veltan mused.
There was a bit of shouting coming up to Veltan from the red-uniformed soldiers who’d just crossed the bridge and reached the rim of the gorge, and the word that rang out the loudest was “gold!”
Veltan glanced to the north across the grassy basin. There were a few yellow-speckled crags jutting up out of the Wasteland, but the real “sea of gold” lay some distance below the north ridge and Gunda’s wall. It should not be visible from here, but there it was, bright and gleaming, and out in plain view.
The Treasured One: Book Two of The Dreamers Page 43
