The Rebel of Rhada
Page 14
Suddenly, there was a ripping pain across his side. He had seen the thrust coming and had not had the strength to parry it completely. Now, he thought, as the blood ran hot under his pierced mail shirt, he’ll finish me. There was no despair or fear, for the euphoria of battle was upon him, and he had become exalted with the strange mixture of fatalism and joy that filled the Rhad when they did combat.
But the cyborg fought on as before: coldly, methodically. The style and force combined to produce a virtuoso performance with the sword, but there was not the hot drive of human savagery. Kier felt a tingle of desperate hope.
“Enough!” The squat Denebian had stepped between the combatants, signaling the end of the first encounter.
Kier dropped his sword from his aching hand and stood, legs apart, sucking in breath. His side was numb and wet. He would have stumbled but for Cavour and Han the Vykan rushing to his side and guiding him into the ranks of the silent Rhadan party.
Kier could feel Cavour lifting his armor and calling for bandages to stop the blood flowing down his ribs. Nevus said, “The creature is a devil.”
Ariane, her eyes filled with mingled fear and relief, held onto his mailed hand. She asked Cavour, “Is the wound bad?”
“Bad enough,” the warlock replied, working to bind it.
Kier looked at Erit and Gret. The Vulks were strangely silent, unmoving.
“The flail!” the Denebian called. “The encounter of the flail!”
The star kings rumbled. The first stanza of battle had disturbed them, and they could not say how. None had ever seen Tallan of Sarissa fight, and the strange coldness of the engagement troubled them.
Han shook free the chains of the barbed flail and handed the weapon to Kier. His young face was pale. “The Star be with you, Warleader,” he said.
Kier’s fingers closed over the grip of the cruel weapon, and he stepped forward. His side was beginning to stiffen, and he knew that he must press the attack with all his remaining strength or be defeated.
He snapped the chains forward in a low attack, aiming at the hem of Tallan’s mailed shirt. The air hissed with the speed of the barbs, and Kier felt the tips strike home.
The god-metal of the Sarissan’s armor bent and ripped, and the barbs bit into the flesh underneath.
A trickle of pale blood flowed down the cyborg’s thigh. Nothing more. Kier’s hope faltered. The creature hardly bled. A man would have been crippled by such a blow.
The cyborg moved forward, and for a time Kier could only catch the whistling chains again and again on the haft of his own flail as he was once again forced backward steadily, step by step.
The legends of cybs and demons rose in the Rhad’s mind, and he wondered desperately if this cruelly methodical fighting creature before him was not, actually, some devil risen from the dark dead.
His foot struck the base of a stone column, and he twisted to avoid a smashing blow. He could not. The stones beside him took the main force of the stroke, but there was still force enough in it as it caught his chest to drive the breath from him, rip his mailed shirt, and lay his flesh open to the ribs. He heard Ariane’s despairing cry.
On one knee now, he parried a second downstroke with his flail, and the chains became entangled. Tallan snapped his flail away with a swift movement, and Kier drove himself to stand, desperate and unarmed, against the column.
Death seemed but an instant away in the heavy silence of the crowded chamber. Kier’s body seemed on fire with the pain of his wounds, and he watched with stony eyes as Tallan raised his flail for the finishing blow.
“Enough!” Kier could scarcely believe that the second encounter was finished or that Tallan could stop the descending blow in time even if he wished.
But the blow did not fall. Tallan released his grip on the flail and turned away, as coldly as he had begun the combat.
Kier sagged against the column and closed his eyes. Ariane and Cavour were desperately at his side.
Cavour said, in a strangled voice, “King--you cannot win.”
The fatalism of the Rhad, Kier thought ironically. He fought against the blackness that flickered around the edge of his vision. It was as though inevitable death were stalking him.
He sank to the floor and rested against the column while Cavour worked feverishly on him.
Kier signaled the Denebian to him, and when the scarred face was near his, he said, “If I lose the next encounter, my people are to return to Rhada. They will not fight against you.”
“That will not be enough for the Sarissan,” the Denebian said.
“At least promise me that my aides will be sent home.” Kier touched Han the Vykan’s shoulder and Ariane’s masked face. “The rest can stand hostage.”
Ariane started to speak, but Kier pressed her shoulder with the last of his failing strength.
“That much I can promise, I think,” the Denebian said somberly.
Kier closed his eyes and let his helmet fall to the flagstones.
He felt a warm presence.
Gret was at his side, Erit behind him. It seemed to Kier that Gret was speaking; yet the Vulk’s thin lips did not move, and it seemed that time had slowed, almost stopped. The people around him, Ariane, Han, Cavour, Nevus--all seemed frozen, scarcely moving.
King--do not be afraid.
It was Gret. The mind-touch. Never before had Kier felt it so strongly. It had form and clear reality, a great, soothing warmth.
I could not do this alone. Erit is with us.
Kier nodded drowsily.
We can help you.
Yes, Kier thought.
We can do this, but there is danger.
Kier felt as though he were smiling. Danger, indeed. What greater danger could a man face than that fighting machine in human form that was destroying him bit by bit?
There are worse things than dying, King.
Gret, Erit. Gret-Erit. They were one. The thoughts came with luminous clarity now.
The danger is madness, King. An eternity of madness. We do not know what damage it would do to charge a human brain with Vulk powers.
There was no pain. There was only a timeless questioning. Eternity?
You once asked me if Vulks died, King. They die. All things die. But a Vulk lives for a human eternity. If we tamper with your mind and destroy it, you will live a Vulk lifetime, King.
How long? Kier asked, dreading the answer it seemed he already knew.
Twenty thousand years, King.
Twenty thousand years of madness. Twenty--thousand--years!
For a moment it seemed that all the demons of hell rose in Kier’s mind: a sick and febrile revulsion, dark terror, winged furies from an eternity of horror.
He felt the sadness and the gentle grief of the Vulks.
He saw the stars, scattered like dust across the cosmos, and the Vulk loneliness, a billion years before men came to tell them that they were not alone in the universe.
The murders and the killings, the pogroms, the human fear--all these were as nothing to the Vulks because they shared creation with one other intelligent creature--man.
Come, he said.
“The Encounter of the Dagger!” the Denebian called.
Kier rose and stood. Ariane stared at him and felt a dread emptiness, a loss. The Vulks had touched him, only that. And now he stood, and his eyes were no longer the familiar Rhadan blue--they were dark and farseeing. She thrust her knuckles against her lips to stifle the sudden desperate fear that chilled her.
Kier stood quite still, his naked dagger in his hand.
He was aware of all the living beings around him. Ariane --a sadness there. Cavour--he could hear the thoughts of a man hungry for knowledge and buried in the dark confusions of a medieval mind. Nevus--thoughts of war there, bloody thoughts of battle. But even the battle plans were primitive, rough-hewn as the man himself.
He knew the turbulent minds of the star kings: greedy, savage--some fearful, some brave, some troubled. And beyond the confines of the
hall he could sense the life of animals, of insects stirring in the jacaranda trees in the ravaged gardens, of gulls sweeping over the gray waters of the rivers.
He touched minds briefly with Gret-Erit and felt their warmth and comfort.
Tallan stood before him, in a fighting stance, knife extended. Kier realized that he could read the cyborg as Gret could read ancient machines. Within the cyborg’s skull Kier could sense the flashing circuitry of the ancient artifact that gave the creature life.
Pseudo-life.
Even that, like a Vulk, Kier was reluctant to destroy.
Tallan swept forward, and Kier felt the surge of subconscious terror in the onlookers that was the source of the cyborg’s power over these primitive men.
Unwillingly, Kier drew his weapon back. In the electronic brain of his adversary was something like hate, but it was not hate.
It was the purpose of a machine--built by men to destroy men.
Kier’s arm moved with inhuman swiftness. His blade flashed across the intervening distance and buried itself in the cyborg’s skull.
Kier could see the wild sparking of severed circuits flashing with a kind of desperate vitality----into a kind of death.
The cyborg stiffened. His limbs jerked in a spasmodic, toylike dance. Then he crashed to the floor, a ruined colossus.
Kier felt the awed fear of the star kings, then their terror as they realized that they stood hostages now for the failure of the rebellion.
Gret-Erit-Kier agreed: It is best that they do not know. Any of this.
Kier said, “Let him be buried as a star king. It is his due.”
He felt a great, sad regret. The wonder of man, he thought, that he could create such an instrument--a thing the non-mechanical Vulks could never have done--but to such ignominious purpose.
The star kings were clashing their weapons.
Kier felt Ariane behind him. He turned and looked on her with Vulk eyes: loving, ancient, tender with the affection of a father for a small child.
He took the helmet from her head, and the star kings stared at the daughter of Glamiss.
Someone murmured, “Queen-Empress--!”
Kier shook his head. “Han,” he said quietly. “Go into the Galacton’s chambers. You will find Mariana there. She will take you into the tel. Go with her and bring the Galacton here.”
Ariane stared fearfully at Kier, so strangely possessed.
Within minutes, Han had returned. With him were Mariana and a grimy Torquas, rubbing at his eyes and staring at the assembled kings.
Ariane said, “How did you know, Kier?”
“I knew.”
“I am the Galacton,” Torquas announced petulantly.
The star kings, moving like a silent wave, knelt.
Torquas turned to regard his wife frowningly. “You had me locked away, Mariana. I could have you killed.”
Mariana looked haggard and old. “I beg for mercy, husband,” she said. Kier could sense the fear and the mingled hope for fresh plots in the woman’s mind.
He intervened.
Torquas declared, “You are not my wife any longer. You are divorced. You will return to Vyka and stay there.”
Mariana bowed her head.
Torquas said clearly, “Ariane is regent.”
The star kings clashed their weapons again. And Kier turned away from the arguing and quarreling that began almost at the instant that they knew their lives were, for the moment at least, safe. Vykans from across the river were pouring into the city to restore some order. Kier felt a great weariness. He saw Ariane as though from an immense distance. Strange images of winged things and colored beams of light filled his thoughts.
The creature Gret-Erit-Kier was disintegrating. He understood this and knew what the price might be.
Will it be madness, then? he asked. Gret-Erit replied, We do not know, brother. Kier turned and walked away, wanting to be under the sky when it came.
It was growing dark.
Here and there, in the deepening darkness of the sky, Kier could see a star. For a long while he stood alone listening to the sounds around him, sensing the flow of life. It seemed to him that the power to know was fading away, leaving only strange images.
A man leading a ragged army with strange weapons across a snowy wasteland. He could not tell how he knew it, but that was an image of the past . . .
Three gaunt figures on crosses atop a hill that in the muttering dusk looked like a skull--
A sweeping vision of star clusters and suns without number, the center of the galaxy seen as only a Navigator might see it from the bridge of a great starship--
Hallucinations? The beginnings of an eternity of grief and terror? Or the accumulated memories of a race old before man was born?
The images faded and with them the sense of sharing the life of all things under the sky.
The power was going. The human mind was not yet ready to accept it. Kier felt a deep and gentle sadness.
He heard a voice behind him. It was Ariane. And he had heard her, not sensed her.
She came to him and looked into his troubled, shadowed eyes. She saw the sadness, but they were once again the eyes of a man.
“Will you tell me one day, Rebel?” she asked gently.
Kier slipped his arm about her and looked again at the sky. The stars were much brighter, and from horizon to horizon stretched the edge of the galactic lens that men, time out of mind, had called the Milky Way.
“One day, Ariane, I will tell you,” he said. “If I can.”
Across the deepening night a meteor flashed with brief intensity. It seemed to Kier that it was like the life of a man against the night of history. And if it seemed brief and to no purpose, at least it burned brightly and gave a touch of light to the dark.
Table of Contents
THE REBEL OF RHADA
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