“I’ll teach you history, barbarians!” he was screeching, laughing wildly as the metal insects bathed the landscape in streams of dreamfire. “Those are the American tanks at Kasserine! They fought there in the dawn of time, savages! Fear the past, animals!”
But the soldiers he called barbarians, savages, and animals showed very little sign of falling into funk in the face of the ghostly war machines. Shana could see that they sat their mares without flinching, and when the tumult seemed about to weaken the resolve of one or another of their troop, the warleader--a handsomely made young man on a blue-skinned charger--rallied them to stand their ground.
In a matter of heartbeats, that proud young warrior would be totally convinced that this was the Warlock’s worst. When that happened, he would order a charge up the moraine, and the villagers on the platform would be ridden down and killed if they resisted.
Impatiently, her fear for the folk crowding out her fear of the Warlock, Shana moved forward and tugged at the warm, shimmering mesh of the old man’s gown. “Warlock! Warlock!”
Shevil Lar and that spineless creature Tamil Hind--who had once dreamed of marrying her, Shana thought angrily --turned to regard her, white-faced. The sight of her importuning the Warlock frightened them.
“Shana, no!” her father called fearfully. “He will strike you dead!”
But far from striking her dead, the Warlock seemed to be completely unaware of her or any of the folk who had foregathered here on the platform with the devil machines. The old man continued to shout and caper as though, Shana thought, the warmen in the moraine were completely subject to his will.
“Warlock, listen to me!” She clung to the slippery fabric of the robe, and a part of her mind learned what a fragile wisp of a body there was beneath the metal mesh. The thing on his shoulder hummed and clicked and whirred as he moved about. Nearby, it did not frighten the girl as it should have. Always before, when she had sat at the Warlock’s feet learning to control the eagles, she had been too awed to study the device carefully. But now she realized that it was not, as some declared, the Warlock’s familiar. It was, like the devices on the platform, simply some sort of machine.
“Warlock, hear me!”
The old man stopped capering and turned, his terrible blind eyes seemed to search for her. The glittering lens of the thing on his shoulder fixed on her at last and he spoke. “Ah, Shana? What is it? Can’t you see I’m busy, girl?” His grin showed aged teeth. “I am giving the barbarians a history lesson, yes. You can see that, can’t you? Now leave me alone, child.”
“Warlock,” the girl said urgently. “Sir. Lord. Please listen to me. The images are not frightening the warmen. See for yourself...” She waved her thin brown hands at the moraine desperately.
“I have all the soldiers of history to fight for us, girl,” the old man said wildly. “They must be frightened! “
“No, Lord. See for yourself. Look at their warleader. The one on the blue horse. He’s laughing at us, Lord. At you--please look--’’
The Lord Ophir frowned at that and his temper surged. Barbarians laughing at a Rigellian prince? His memories tumbled, clotted, in his drug-damaged brain. “I am the Imperial Heir! The King-Elector!” he said in Anglic. The girl understood the language, but not the sense of what he was saying, he knew. Why didn’t she understand him? She was a subject of the Rigellian Empire, as were those savage-looking horsemen at the foot of the hill. They were all dependents of the alt Messier family, all of them, and all that dwelt in this place, and all that lived on the planets of all the thousand suns!
God, he thought, why can’t I remember properly? It was the effect of trilaudid on the time-sense, the memory. Images came and went so swiftly--
“Warlock, Lord! We have to hide in the mountain,” the girl was saying urgently. “You have to take us into your mountain and close the doors on them. Warlock, listen--” She seemed near to tears and Ophir was disturbed that the child should be so upset. What was it, he wondered, that was distressing her so? Wasn’t she enjoying the holofilms?
The other villagers on the platform set up a clamor. “They’re coming! They’re attacking! Save us, Warlock!”
Ophir turned his prosthetic eye on the soldiers below. They were indeed moving up the slope, picking their way easily through the boulder-strewn moraine. The morning sunlight glinted on iron mail. The slotted eyes of the mares gleamed like turquoise.
Then, quite suddenly, the troop paused. Ophir saw the rider in homespun habit point skyward. Ophir looked and his old heart began to pound and lurch with mingled apprehension and a terrible joy. A starship! The immense tapered hull hung low over the ridges to the east, the drive fields shimmering and glowing opalescent on the metal skin.
As the Warlock watched the great vessel moved majestically up the valley between the towering cliffs. It filled the air with a humming organ-tone that rose and fell in concert with the brightening and dimming of the coruscating dimensional-displacement fields that surrounded it.
The sight of the starship broke through scarred synapses in the old prince’s brain. This was not the Delos, he realized. It was a smaller, star-class military transport. In such ships had the legions of the Empire been carried across the galaxy to garrison duties, colonial wars, and ceremonial stations. The blazon of the Empire on the prow had been painted over, and symbols had been added: a stylized star, a crudely made spaceship, and the legend Gloria in Coelis.
As the hovering ship moved almost directly overhead, blotting out the sun-disk of Vyka with its great bulk, Ophir could see that the great machine was old, old. The hull, beneath the shimmering forces that dazzled the eye, was pitted with the debris of centuries in space. The glassy curve of the transparent bridge was scratched and dulled. Inside the bridge, even at this distance, one could see dark cowled figures moving.
The old man’s heart almost broke then, for nothing that he had seen or experienced since his awakening from the Sleep had told him more clearly that his world was gone in the dust of time. He had a fleeting memory of himself, a young man, riding through the surf of the Rhadan Sea with Dihanna laughing at his side. Gone, all gone.
“Warlock, Lord.” Shana stood by his side, looking up at the tears leaking from the blind eyes. The starship had frightened her even more than the near presence of the warmen in the moraine, for she could not imagine what the appearance of the holy machine might portend--nothing good, certainly. But at the same time, her young heart was touched by the old man’s grief.
His thin, blue-veined hand caught at hers and held it. She did not move. The others were running precipitously into the tunnel, leaving the devil machines, shrieking that the Day of Wrath was upon them. Shana wanted to run, too, but she could not bring herself to break away from the grieving old man who stared blindly at the monster in the sky and wept.
Ophir felt his robe sensing his drug-need once again and preparing his maintenance dose. “No,” he said brokenly. “Let me alone.”
Shana, her hand still caught in his, and thinking he spoke to her, was confused. “What shall we do, Lord? Tell me.”
“There is nothing to be done. Nothing.”
Shana looked fearfully at the starship. The kilometer-long hull was rotating slowly, prow swinging toward the lower valley. Along the underside she could see sections sliding back, exposing dark caverns within.
The warmen in the moraine began to move again, at a gallop this time, streaming toward the opening in the mountain. Suddenly a rain of crudely shaped round stones began to fall from the open bays of the starship. They struck the ground with a thudding thunder, scattering the warband below. Mares screamed and soldiers shouted defiant curses. She watched the warleader astride his delicate blue mare. Behind him came the Navigator and a Vulk. Shana wanted to close her eyes and scream as she saw a boulder strike behind them, splinter into fragments, and crush several soldiers and their mounts.
Then the warleader was upon them, his mare leaping easily onto the platform. Shana felt herself being torn away from
the Warlock, swept upward and across the young man’s saddle. She fought to free herself, but as his mare sprang for the shelter of the tunnel something thundered across the concrete platform from above. It was a boulder dropped from the starship that broke into fragments as it struck the archway’s metal frame.
Shana saw with sudden horror that the Warlock was down, bleeding and still as any mortal. She struggled to free herself from the warman’s hold and failed. Then the mare galloped into the tunnel and the darkness. She fought again to be free and the warman, exasperated, struck her backhanded across the jaw, blotting out even the darkness.
Chapter Eleven
--therefore the tactics of defense during landing operations of capital ships is dependent upon the expected response from enemy high-energy weapons. With meson screens fully extended, the deployment of infantry is limited by the metric-ton capacity of the standard Mark XVII Matter Transceiver: that is to say, units of battalion strength and 18.6 seconds. Starships equipped with the newer Mark XX Transceiver may deploy units of regimental strength at interva--
--Golden Age fragment found at Tel-Paris, Earth
(believed to be part of an Imperial military field manual)
The tactic of bombardment from above with solid missiles, stones and fire-rains is suitable only to situations wherein the enemy has been discovered concentrated in the open. While it may be true, as legends state, that the falling suns were in ancient times carried in the keel-bays of starships, no real parallel can be drawn between a rain of stones and such mighty and sinful weapons. However, it is to be emphasized that the decision to bombard or not to bombard is the prerogative of the warleader, and not the Guide of Starships. The Guide, or Pilot, is a spiritual adviser only. It is the commander of the landing force who must make the tactical decisions, for good or ill.
--Prince Fernald proc Wye, On Tactics,
Early Second Stellar Empire period
Bishop-Navigator Kaifa, his face pressed to the transparent curving wall of the starship’s bridge, loosed a string of most unclerical oaths as he watched the troopers below vanishing into the tunnel in the mountain. The three novice Navigators, chastened by his anger, stood at their consoles in attitudes of holiness and rectitude--the only attitudes they could assume now that they had followed, as was proper, the instructions received from Lord Ulm and his captains.
“Didn’t one of you have the sense to tell those fools this could happen?” the Bishop demanded furiously.
“It was the warleader’s choice, Reverend Father,” Brother Anselm said fearfully. “So it is written in the Book of the Way.”
The Bishop’s eyes glittered dangerously under his red-fisted cowl. “Are you instructing me on the Way of the Navigator, Anselm?”
“No, First Pilot. Certainly not. Only--”
“Idiot,” the Bishop hissed.
Brother Collis, the aristocrat from the Inner Planets, felt the urgings of honor, even though he disliked Anselm, and always would, for his holier-than-thou attitudes. “With respect, First Pilot, there was no way to know the rebels would take shelter inside the mountain.”
Kaifa bit his lips. What Collis said was true. Of all aboard the Gloria, only Kaifa, himself, knew that the mountain was honeycombed with imperial building. And even he had tended to doubt it, since the information from the Algol computer was suspect. Still, only an ass like Ulm and a fool like Anselm could contrive to attack a mobile force of cavalry from above with stones while carrying a thousand troopers in the holds anxious for combat.
Ancient custom and privilege allowed this sort of stupidity. The warmen, blind and ignorant in the holds, made the tactical decisions even though they were not permitted (under penalty of excommunication) to enter the consecrated ground of the bridge--the only place on board a starship commanding a view of the ground below.
It was true enough that the Navigator crew could influence these decisions indirectly, and so it was usually in war. This time, however, he, Kaifa, had allowed the novices to make the approach to the valley, and so it was, in the final analysis, his own fault. He should have flown the approach himself. He wondered what the Grand Master would have to say about his gross error in judgment. Nothing good, that was certain.
“Ground us in that meadow by the river,” he said angrily, pointing at the terrain below. He gathered his robes about him and left the bridge without further comment. It would do no good to chastise the novices for having stuck strictly to the Book of the Way. But all hope for surprise was lost now in that foolish rain of boulders from the bombing-bays. Like it or not, Ulm would have to use his men in siege rather than in maneuver. The “rebels” and whatever else lay hidden in this cursed valley of Trama would now have to be taken the hard way. He would take a certain grim pleasure in explaining this to Ulm in the crudest, most insulting terms possible. Not the attitude of a charitable churchman, Kaifa thought grimly, but at the moment he felt neither charitable nor churchly. He would have to assign himself a suitable penance when all was over. Something severe, self-flagellation or a long fast at least. Ave Stellas and Salve Dominis would never expiate the sinful anger he felt at this moment.
The scene in the hospital tunnel was one of breathless confusion, but Glamiss moved with authority through the spaces crowded with men and horses, restoring order, counting casualties, letting himself be seen by troopers.
Emeric and the Vulk Asa had cleared a space where the light of the still open archway reached into the dimness, and there they ministered to the injured Warlock and the girl villager Glamiss had carried in, out of the rain of stones from the starship.
The villagers who had attended the devil machines on the platform had vanished into the interior of the mountain, and so far no one had taken it upon himself to follow them. The warmen were grateful for the shelter of the tunnel, but they were badly shaken by the attack from the air and by their mysterious surroundings. The mares, most of whom had been moved away from the tunnel mouth, were growling and lamenting, upset by the unfamiliar footing and the dark cave in which they had suddenly found themselves.
The Navigator lifted the girl’s head and bathed her forehead with a bit of cloth dampened from his water bottle. Glamiss had probably not meant to injure her, but her cheek was bruised, and as she opened her eyes she grew plainly frightened. Little wonder, Emeric thought, with the featureless Vulk nearby and the confusion all around. The girl’s eyes fixed on the Red Fist of the Inquisition decorating Emeric’s cowl, and her breath seemed to catch. The Navigator muttered an oath and pushed back the cowl so that the symbol would be invisible.
“Better now?” he asked.
The girl nodded slowly.
Vulk Asa moved nearer. Emeric understood that he was using the Vulk mind-touch to sooth the peasant girl’s fears.
She said tremulously, “The Warlock. Is he dead?”
“No,” Emeric said. “Hurt, but not dead yet.”
Tears glistened in the girl’s eyes. “He’s only an old man. A crazy old man. We thought he could save us.”
Perhaps what she said was true, Emeric thought. It remained to be seen. To be safe, he made the sign of the Star on her narrow brow.
Shana tried to rise and managed to come to a sitting position. In spite of himself, Emeric recoiled a bit from the smell of the poorly cured weyr skins she wore. It was difficult to think of people so poor as enemies of the Order and subjects for the interrogations of the Holy Inquisition. There was something terribly wrong with the social order that brought the folk of the Great Sky only fear and death.
The girl sensed his revulsion and a look of bitter pride touched her unformed features. She moved away from the priest, pressing her slender shoulders against the curving rock wall of the tunnel. Emeric had a flashing insight. This must be the adept; she seemed almost as skilled as the Vulk in reading those about her.
“Where is my father, Nav?” she asked. “What have you done to the others?”
“Was your father one of those at the devil machines?”
/> The term “devil machines” made Shana remember the Inquisition again and she said, “They were the old man’s magic, Nav. The Adversaries had nothing to do with them.”
Emeric could not help but smile at her courage. “Are you so certain of that--?” He paused, waiting for her to identify herself.
“I am Shana the Dark, daughter of Shevil Lar, the hetman, and Shevaughn Six-fingers,” she said proudly, half-defiantly.
Six-fingers, Emeric thought. That would account for her mind-talent. Her mother was a mutation, Star-touched.
Asa laid his long hands on the girl’s head and leaned toward her in the darkness. She shivered, but did not flinch. Another evidence of courage, Emeric thought. These people feared the Vulk and believed the Protocols.
“All is well, Shana,” the Vulk said quietly.
Shana looked about her at the seeming turmoil: warmen taking up defensive positions at the tunnel mouth, the war-leader calling orders, the mares snarling and calling to their masters. “It does not seem so to me, Vulk,” she said tartly.
Emeric said, “A little respect, daughter. This is Vulk Asa--” He started to say, the Talker of the Lord Ulm and then realized that neither the Vulk nor any member of the troop could now expect anything but a sword blow from the Lord of Vara-Vyka. “This is the Talker of the Warleader Glamiss,” he said.
“The one who struck me?”
“The same.”
“Ulm’s men are in the starship?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are rebels?”
“Not by our choice, but it seems Ulm thinks us so.”
Her expression relaxed slightly. “Then there will be no Inquisition here? No burnings?”
Emeric tightened his lips and made a decision that would change his life. He made it with a single word. It was as simple as that. “No,” he said.
The Warlock stirred and moaned. Dried blood clotted his thin gray hair. Shana went to him and held out her hand for Emeric’s dampened cloth. The Navigator gave it to her and she began gently to bathe the old man’s face. Emeric was struck by her gentleness: an unusual characteristic among the commonality in these bitter times.
The Warlock of Rhada Page 11
