The Warlock of Rhada (15 page)

Later--if there
was
a later--she thought she would like to know how those boxes with the whirling prisms and shaped glasses formed the insubstantial but real-seeming images below. But she was reasonably certain that this was, in fact, the best the Warlock could do for the folk, and it was far from enough. If the people were to be saved from the warmen’s depredations, they must take refuge inside the mountain again, and the Warlock must close the great metal doors. The thought of such confinement made her shudder, but it was the only hope unless some miracle happened.

One thing was certain. A crazy old man could perform
tricks,
but the sort of miracles required were very probably beyond his powers. She felt sorry for him and, to a lesser degree, for herself and her people.

She had tried very hard to make the eagles attack the soldiers again, but they had refused. The master-bird had been killed by a crossbow quarrel and the flock had become unruly. Grieving for the terrible execution among her falcons, she had nevertheless tried to bring them back to the attack. She had failed. Now, unless something happened very soon, the people of Trama would be at the mercy of Ulm’s hardbitten warriors and, what was worse, at the mercy of the Inquisition.

That was why it seemed bitterly ironic to her that the mysterious silver-clad, blind magician to whom the villagers had prayed and sacrificed for three years--
They even wanted to sacrifice me,
she thought indignantly--was helpless against the armed and mounted men below. Helpless because he was simply a crazy old man.

She watched his back now as he capered and danced and shouted, his cracked old voice mingling with the sound of illusory explosions and mock battle in the lower reaches of the moraine.

“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.

--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.