Warrior of the Altaii

by Robert Jordan

“I’ve heard it said, and I’ve been told to be diplomatic toward you. With the Most High, however, I don’t feel very diplomatic. Remove the hood, and hope that I don’t die. I’m holding this shaft by my fingertips. It’ll be in your chest before I hit the ground.”

  Hesitantly it raised its hands and slid the hood off. I stood in shock. The Most High was a most ordinary-looking man, with some sort of box strapped to his throat.

  “You won’t survive this, you realize,” he trilled.

  “Remove the box.”

  With a shrug he unfastened the strap, and swung the box down to smash against a rock. He eyed it regretfully. “I don’t think there’s anybody left who can repair that,” he said in an ordinary voice.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because,” he said as if lecturing, “you now have only a man wearing robes like the Most High’s. You certainly don’t have a Most High to exhibit.”

  “I’ve no intention of exhibiting you. Sooner or later your friends would show up if I did. All I want are the answers to some questions.”

  He laughed. “And how do you intend to make me answer? My friends, as you call them, are already coming to rescue me. If you try to torture answers out of me, they’ll be here before you could make me say anything useful to you. If you try to take me away, they’ll follow. You won’t like having the Most High decide you’re a threat to them.”

  “If you don’t answer,” I said with a smile of my own, “I’ll put this arrow through you, then throw your body in that fire. After that, let the rest of the Most High find out how you died. They’ll probably think it happened in the crash.”

  His face tightened. “I suppose a blasphemous barbarian like you would do—”

  “You don’t look much like a living god to me right now, just another man. Men have names. What’s yours?”

  “Che Sen is good enough,” he said sourly. “What are these questions of yours?”

  I relaxed the draw on the bow, but kept both hands in place. He tensed a little, and I shook my head. “If you want to try your reflexes against mine, go ahead.” He settled back immediately. “Now. Why? Tell me that. Why should you plot with the Lantans against us? And don’t try denying it, or I’ll end this talk now.”

  He knew my meaning well enough. “I won’t deny anything. We did it because it’s necessary that the Lantans found an empire.”

  “Necessary to whom?”

  “To everyone. To this entire part of the world. Tribes of raiders, individual city-states, a dozen rulers, all warring. There can be no stability in that. Nations, empires, these bring stability, order.”

  “And this stability is important enough to destroy my people for?” I asked incredulously.

  “Of course it’s important enough.” His voice rose. “It’s essential that the raider culture be stamped out. You can’t imagine the harm you’ll do if you manage to maintain your hold on Lanta.”

  “What harm? We might raid a bit further east? We need the city. We need it as a base when the seasons go wild on the Plain. We need it to ensure that we can move our herds to lands with water, lands beyond Lanta, when the great heats come, and the deepest waterholes dry.”

  Che Sen appeared puzzled. “I’m surprised you thought of that. It should be beyond barbarians of your level. You should loot the city, enslave the inhabitants, and leave with what you can carry. Still, if you think you can remain simple herdsmen and raiders while you hold the city, you’re mistaken. Holding Lanta will destroy what you are as well as anything we can do. For you it might be best to loot the city and leave, after all.”

  “We’ll stay, I think, and we’ll stay what we are.”

  “You’ll quit your herds and your raids to become empire builders.”

  “If that’s so, why oppose us? What difference if it’s Lantans’ empire or ours?”

  “The Lantans are traders, for all their scheming,” he shouted angrily. “They’ll make a stable, orderly empire. You, you’re raiders and fighters, for all your herding and trading. Your empire will be turbulent, ever expanding. In ten years you’ll be conquering the other cities on the Plain. In twenty years you’ll be spreading beyond the Plain, to the north, the south, the east, in every direction. In fifty, who knows. You may challenge Caselle and Liau. Turmoil, constant agitation. This entire part of the world will be in flux for centuries.” He stopped, suddenly calm. “You’re Wulfgar, aren’t you? The one who led the taking of the city?”

  “I am.”

  “I was coming to meet you,” he said, taking a small box from under his robe. “I was bringing you this. Just push this and—”

  Suddenly the protections Mayra had given me grew warm against my chest. Che Sen gave a yell and threw the box spinning. He snatched off a three-fingered glove and cradled a normal hand to his chest, his face contorted in pain. The box lay on the ground glowing red, and then white. It began to soften and flow, melting a hole into the dirt. In moments there was only the hole, filled with molten metal. The protection grew cool again.

  “Shall I take my try now, Che Sen?”

  He looked up at me anxiously. “No! It was just a misunder—I mean—You had more questions.” He was relieved, as if he knew he’d hit on the right thing. “You must have more questions.”

  “All right, then. A trade. Your life for answers. If the answers stop, your life does. If this”—I touched the protection under my tunic—“tells me you’ve lied, your life ends.”

  “You have something there to tell you if I lie?” he asked curiously.

  “A Sister of Wisdom gave it to me,” I said, avoiding the lie myself. After all, I didn’t say it could tell me if he lied, only that I’d kill him if he did it.

  He seemed to believe, though. He muttered something about witch women and settled back. “Ask. I’ll answer truthfully as best I can. If that thing says my answer is wrong, it’s because what I think is true isn’t. Remember that, and don’t be hasty.”

  “I won’t be. Now tell me something about the Wanderers. Sometimes they carry strange weapons. Our metalsmiths can duplicate the weapons themselves, but the steel involved keeps the Sisters of Wisdom from telling us how to make the pellets fly. How is it done?”

  “You can’t. No, I’m not trying to put you off. The force that makes the pellets move comes from a powder. One of the substances needed to make the powder isn’t available in this world any longer. At least, it isn’t where you can get to it. I’m not even sure that we could.”

  “If you know that much, you must know what world they come from,” I said quickly. “And if they can come here, I can go there and get the substance myself. How can I get there? Where do they come from?”

  “They come from the same place you do, or from where your ancestors came, at any rate. And if I could send you there, I would. Only, you’d die on the way. Haven’t you thought about the fact that all of the Wanderers are women? Actually, there are Wanderers from other species, too, but all of them are female. Haven’t you wondered why you’ve never heard of one male Wanderer? There’s something between their worlds and ours that is inimical to males. They aren’t just killed, they cease to exist completely.”

  He must have thought me stupid not to see a hole in what he’d said. It was time to show him I wasn’t a fool. “Your first lie, Che Sen,” I said, drawing the bow, “and your last. If the men died when our ancestors came, how was there a second generation?”

  “Wait!” He held up his hands like a shield. “Let me explain. Please.” For someone masquerading as a living god, he didn’t hide his fear very well.

  “Then explain.”

  “Long ago,” he began breathlessly, “thousands and thousands of years, we whom you call the Most High were the only inhabitants of this world. Many of the things you take for granted weren’t here at all. No Runners, no fanghorns, no tussat. I could list them for hours. Some of us noticed what you call Wanderers, though, people, beings, animals, that weren’t native to this world. Those men traced the Wanderers, trying t
o find out where they came from. They found it.

  “Think of this world as a canal, like a dirtman’s irrigation canal, dug across a wide flat area that stretches as far as the eye can see. Now imagine that there are other canals, parallel to this one, some wider, some deeper, some moving slower, some moving faster, but none ever touching. Those are the other worlds, the worlds the Wanderers come from, and the rest of you, also.

  “The Wanderers were like bits of spray thrown up by a disturbance, caught by the wind and carried to another canal. Those men discovered how to reach out to those other worlds in order to gather specimens for study. Unfortunately, they were like a man standing on a boat in one canal throwing a bucket on the end of a rope at another canal while blindfolded. They could never be certain which canal their bucket would land in, or, if you think of the flow of the canal as the flow of time, when it would land.

  “One time they might bring back some strange beasts, the next nothing but primordial slime. One time a group of fairly civilized humans, the next stone-age primitives, or Runners, or fanghorns, or a thousand other things. Several times the people or beings caught had weapons powerful enough to give trouble. There was considerable worry about them, but they were always eventually absorbed into the populations of the sequestrations they were put into.”

  “Sequestrations?”

  “No matter. They don’t exist any longer. Something was caught that didn’t want to be caught, something powerful enough to fight being drawn here, to strike back. In the space of a single day civilization disappeared from this world. We dug ourselves out of the rubble, but we could barely help ourselves. We had to let the inhabitants of the sequestrations fend for themselves. Your ancestors rode out of one of those sequestrations, just as the ancestors of every civilized or uncivilized being on this world did, excepting only us.”

  “You’ve told me quite a lot, Che Sen.”

  “Have I?” He seemed surprised. “Well, if so, what does it matter? You can’t make any use of it. Only one of your Sisters of Wisdom who put a truth-spell on you herself would believe it.”

  “But I can make use of it,” I said. He looked disbelieving. “Perhaps no one would believe me, but what if rumors were spread about what you revealed to me? What if it was whispered that the Most High are only men hiding behind their hoods, that rather than being all-powerful living gods, they’re barely hanging on to the scraps of the power they once had? What if the rumors say the Most High dabble in the affairs of men out of fear where men may go without their interference?”

  His face was a sickly white. “A flyer would land in front of your tent, and Most High would kill you on the spot for blasphemy. And the word would be spread about what happened to the man who dared lie about the Most High.”

  “But you wouldn’t hear it, would you.” I smiled. He looked even sicker. “If they killed me, what would they do to one of their own who revealed all of this? You’d be dead before me.”

  “But it wouldn’t change anything. You’d still die.” A crack had appeared in his voice. He was ripe.

  “I won’t tell,” I said, and he nearly collapsed with relief. “I’ll just have Mayra make it into a rumor-spell. She won’t like acting the rumormonger, but she’ll do it for me. If I die by any action of the Most High, those rumors will spread, and every rumor will say it came from a Most High who calls himself Che Sen. So you’d better see that your friends decide it’s better that I live, after all.”

  “But I’m not high enough to have a say in those things,” he shouted.

  “Try,” I told him, backing away. “Try very hard.”

  The last sight I had of him was sitting there watching me, looking as if he’d like to think of something to make me change my mind. He didn’t look happy. I thought he’d do it, though. It seems that Most High or not, men want to live.

  Orne and the others were waiting nervously when I came out of the forest. They were spread in a semicircle, weapons in hand, as if ready to fight should something besides myself emerge. Their relief was palpable.

  “It was a Most High, my lord?” Orne asked. He looked me up and down as if to find some injury I might not tell him about.

  “It was.” I unstrung the bow, returned it and the sheaf of arrows to my saddle and mounted.

  “And?”

  “And nothing, Orne. I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you what happened in there. You can understand that, when dealing with the Most High.”

  He didn’t understand any such thing, but if I wanted no more questions, he’d ask none, and see that no one else asked any either.

  “Where to now, my lord?”

  “Back to Lanta, but only long enough to gather the lances. By nightfall I want everyone on the move north.”

  Behind us one of the Most High’s flying carts glided like a giant wheel to land in the trees. We didn’t even look back.

  XXVII

  A SMALL SPELL

  Dawn had yet to come. Mondra had set an hour before, but Wilaf and t’Fie were still up. T’Fie headed north this time, cast aside in the battle with the others. I wished Mayra was there to cast the omens of that.

  Below us lay the enemy camp. There was little light from the moons, but enough to see that the Morassa tents and the Lantans’ were separate this night, not mingled in groups as they had been. Had a few more been sleeping, I’d have wished I had all three ten thousands with me, and not just one.

  I nodded, and Orne put his hands to his mouth and gave the cry of a loto. Those night flyers seldom came this far north, especially once the cold came, but no one who shouldn’t hear was both close enough and alive. The outer ring of sentries had already made a last acquaintance with Altaii steel. Answering cries rippled softly, and we moved forward.

  The inner ring of sentries, standing within the light of torches ringed around the camp, shifted uneasily, looking at the men on either side of them. No doubt, after the past few days’ happenings, they wondered if they actually heard horses walking out there in the darkness. And if they did, should an alarm be given, or would it be another useless stand-to? Finally, in several places along the line, men decided to give warning. They were too late. Before they had a horn to mouth, we were on them.

  I lanced a sentry as I passed into the tents and caught another as he ran from a tent buckling on armor. The lance head caught in his chain mail, and I abandoned it. Throughout the camp screams of panic warred with shouts for order. Drawing the curved saddle sword, I pressed deeper into the encampment.

  As I dashed down the lanes between tents I struck at those who came close enough, but I went out of my way for no one. I wanted tent ropes and tether lines for horses. Here and there fires flared as a collapsing tent failed to extinguish a burning lamp. Horses running free, panicked by the shouting and the fires, added to the confusion, breaking into the groups of Lantans trying to form, trampling running men.

  Then some Lantan and Morassa horsemen began to appear, as warriors managed to gain their horses. One of them spotted me and, yelling wildly, couched his lance and charged. I’d given orders that no one was to accept combat if it could be avoided, but I moved to meet him anyway. I loosed the reins, guiding my horse with the pressure of my knees, and angled my shield across my body, sword arm trailing back. Screaming, the Lantan rushed at me, and, as his lance point touched my shield, I twisted the shield to send his lance over my shoulder. My sword slashed forward, my arm’s force added to that of my charge. A shock traveled down my arm, and the Lantan rolled off the back of his horse.

  I pulled to a halt, and Orne and my battle drummers joined me. Each of the two had a pair of large kettle drums fastened one on either side of his horse.

  “It’s time to be out of here,” I shouted. The noise in the camp was getting louder, and no little of it was the sound of combat.

  The drummers began beating out the message. From another part of the encampment it was answered, then another, and another. Even through the clash of arms and the screams of dying men and frightened horses
, they could be heard clearly.

  “Now, ride,” I ordered.

  As swiftly as we’d struck, that swiftly did we melt back into the darkness. Behind us was only death and turmoil. Many of the tents were burning, and no few of the supply carts, and the light they cast showed utter confusion.

  Trumpets sounded. Orders came in shouts. Men ran here and were then sent there. Formations were gathered, then broken up as men left to fight fires or gather horses. Men fighting fires or gathering horses were pushed into formations to await our next attack.

  Slowly, though, order began to be restored. Reason seemed to gain the upper hand. Men moved to fight the fires. Others set at gathering the horses. The rest waited in formation, tidy lines and squares for the Lantans, loose groups for the Morassa, against another attack. The fires died, the horses were gathered, and the folding of the camp was begun. They were coming after us, all two hundred thousand or more of them. As I watched it, I laughed to myself. We had them, now. They were ours.

  When I’d arrived from Lanta, I’d gone straight to Lord Dunstan, who’d led the two ten thousands who’d harassed the northern army. My first question was abrupt. “What about the fanghorns?”

  He smiled. “There’s not a one to be found. The last anybody’s seen was closing in its den more than a tenday ago.”

  I heaved a sigh of relief. We needed the fanghorns in their dens and hibernating if we were to win.

  The second thing I did was to take a package that Mayra’d given me from my saddle and find a secluded spot. There were two dolls in the bundle, a Lantan guardsman and a Morassa, and a packet of powders. I set a small fire and made an arrangement of cords to burn through slowly and drop the dolls and the packet of powders into the fire. Then I left. It was bad enough for a man to be dabbling in magic. I didn’t want to be around when the spell was actually invoked by the flames.

  The enemy had protections and wards, of course, to keep magic from being used against them. If there’d been any hope of divining their next move, of spying on their councils, or better yet, of turning some of them against the others, of even laying a curse on them, Mayra would’ve come. Their protections and the wards would guard against things of that nature, though.