The Warlock of Rhada (17 page)

“What is history, Teacher?”
“It is the patina of small events on the surface of the Universe.”

--Emeric of Rhada, Grand Master of Navigators,
Early Second Stellar Empire period

Most men, Emeric knew, tended to fear the unknown and their fear made them ineffective. It was Glamiss’s genius that he could organize and function with half the facts needed by ordinary men.

This was what was happening now, in the confusion of the sheltering tunnel. Vulk Asa had warned Glamiss of Ulm’s intentions, but the attack from the air had been unexpected. Similarly, the Warlock’s tactic of trying to frighten the troop away with the images in the village square and in the lower moraine implied a vast technology that Glamiss simply had no capacity to understand. Nor did he know what lay within the mountain. But he had, nevertheless, remained steadfast in his determination to take Trama and whatever it contained for himself. He had probably, Emeric conceded, been almost as frightened by events as any of the members of the punitive force, but his mind and spirit had remained purposeful.

Now he had stationed men to give the tunnel mouth a protection in depth, had sent others within the honeycomb to explore and locate the folk of Trama. He had sent the horses into a large reception area located by scouts at the end of the entrance tunnel and had divided the forty-five men remaining to him into siege-watches. A single pair of troopers had been stationed outside, near the stone-smashed wreckage of the devil-machines, to watch for the approach of Ulm’s levy.

Ulm had been a fool to rain stones on the troop, Glamiss thought as he made his way through the crowded corridor. Unless there were many other entrances to this watch-warren in the mountain, a single section of warmen could hold the tunnel mouth indefinitely against him. But there were questions of supply to be settled--the troop would need food and water, the horses had been recently fed but would eventually need fresh meat.

Nothing was really resolved yet. This place--he looked about him at the smoothly finished walls and the inoperative lighting globes in the overhead--reminded him very strongly of the interior of a starship. And like a starship, it seemed to be partially in operation. Also like a starship, it was incredibly
old.
A thousand questions clamored for answers, yet somehow he felt certain that this hollow mountain was the most valuable and the most important place on the entire planet--possibly in all the Great Sky. For here, in some peculiar way, the Empire still lived: feebly, perhaps, but miraculously.

He located Emeric and the Traman girl he had dragged into the mountain across Blue Star’s withers. They were with Asa, crouching over the silver-clad Warlock. The old man was badly injured and probably would not survive. Glamiss’s warrior’s instinct told him that immediately. He was not sorry for the old fellow as a man--wasn’t he a Warlock, and therefore suspect? But the secrets of this strange, ancient place must be locked up inside that grizzled head. For the moment the situation was stalemated, but any victory even over the Vara-Vykan levy now disgorging from the starship in the valley depended on the powerful mysteries of this place.

“Can he speak?” Glamiss asked.

“He’s raving mad,” Emeric said.

The old man gave a cracked laugh and said in a very rational tone, “The gift of trilaudid is a few hours of sanity before one dies. What a pity it can’t give me back my eyes.”

Glamiss raised his eyebrows at Emeric. “What is that supposed to mean? And what dialect is that?”

“I don’t know what it means,” The Navigator said. “The language is Imperial High Anglic.”

In any other place Glamiss would have been surprised by the use of the old tongue, a language that all but priests understood imperfectly. But here it seemed quite natural. “What is ‘trilaudid?’ “

The Navigator shrugged helplessly, but the old man replied in a voice whose arrogance was not diminished by its weakness. “Who is that speaking? It sounds like a soldier, God help us. Wouldn’t you know there would still be soldiers.” He drew several shuddering breaths. “Trilaudid was a vision of paradise in my time, warrior. We used it to escape from people like you.”

The girl now spoke to Glamiss for the first time. She had been staring up at him and he seemed like a sun god to her, gray-eyed, caped and armed. But she remembered he had struck her, and she had a touch of falconer’s pride. “He’s sick and old,” she said. “And he’s hurt. Don’t trouble him now.” Glamiss regarded her with wry amusement. “You’re braver than your folk, girl.”

“My name is Shana. I am the hetman’s daughter,” she said, standing. Would he strike her again, she wondered, and braced herself for the blow. Warmen were like that, her father had told her, remembering his experiences among Lord Ulm’s men.

“Very well, hetman’s daughter. Suppose you come with me and find the rest of your people. I need them.”

Her eyes flashed defiantly. “For the Inquisition?”

“I’m no Navigator,” Glamiss said shortly. “I need them because we will be under siege here almost immediately. I intend to defend this place and your people will have to help me.”

“Against Lord Ulm?” The girl sounded incredulous. “Are you rebels, then?”

“You saw the starship attack us,” Glamiss said impatiently.

“You promise no harm to the folk?”

Glamiss caught her shoulder in a strong hand and squeezed it painfully. “Don’t bargain with me, Shana-the-hetman’s-daughter. Your people will take their chances, just as my men must. Be satisfied with that or I’ll hunt them down like rabbits.”

The Warlock’s voice came raspingly, and he did not sound at all mad. “Listen to the soldier, Shana. Believe what he tells you when he talks of hunting people down.
That
you can always believe. Soldiers speak the truth when they speak of violence.” Then he moaned and seemed to be taken by a spasm of delirium. “The soldiers always had the answers, didn’t they, Dihanna? Purification by the fire cures everything--” He began to laugh and gasp and finally subsided into deep-breathing near-silence.

Glamiss ignored the Warlock. To Shana he said, “Do you know this place well?”

“Not well. I used to come here, but--”

“You came here alone? To him?” Glamiss indicated the old man.

“It’s not what you think,” Shana said angrily. “I came to learn the eagle-tongue. He has machines that teach here--”

Glamiss’s eyes darkened with anger.
“You
are the one who sent the birds against us?”

Shana swallowed hard to suppress her sudden fear. He looked capable of killing her right now. “Yes,” she said. “I defended the valley--my folk--”

“You killed one of my men. You wounded my mare.”

“You were coming to burn us! To steal our weyr for Lord Ulm! “ the girl protested.

“Enough! God’s peace!” Emeric cried out, standing between them. “What’s done is done, in the Star’s Name! Let it rest. We have other things to think of now. This man needs help--”

Glamiss was about to reply when a voice, mellifluous to the point of being unctuous, sounded through the crowded corridor. It was the voice of the hospital computer and it came through an overhead speaker grill.

The computer’s programming was idiotically unsuited to the present situation, but with cybernetic innocence, the device did its proper best.

“There are unregistered guests in the north entryport. Would all visitors kindly report to Hospital Administration on the fourth level for proper identification and decontamination, if you please.”

The warmen stared upward in shocked disbelief at the witch voice, trying to locate its source.

The computer declared: “There are a number of animals in Reception Three. This is strictly forbidden by hospital regulations.”

“It is the voice of the mountain,” Shana whispered nervously, drawing nearer to Glamiss. “I’ve heard it before.”

The computer continued primly: “Lord Ophir, if you please, return to your room at once. Your envirobe is inoperative and it is time for your medication. Lord Ophir, if you please, return to your quarters at once. It is time for your nutrient bath--”

The voice stopped abruptly with a sound of shattering components as a warman, more nervous and perhaps more perceptive than his fellows, discovered the speaker grille and pierced it with a thrown lance.

The Warlock drew a deep throaty breath and essayed another of his broken laughs. “Who was it shut up that moronic machine? Did someone cut its transistorized throat? Bring him to me and I’ll reward him! A million hectares of Rhada to that man, whoever he is!”

Glamiss was studying the shattered speaker grille with dawning understanding. “It’s something like the images in the village, Emeric. A record is made somewhere and the machines reproduce it. But”--he frowned, his Dark-Age mind struggling with ancient, legendary concepts --”the images spoke blindly, by rote. The voice of this place knows we are here. Explain it to me, Nav.”

Emeric, whose knowledge of computers was limited to the very secret hint of instruction he had received as a novice concerning the Algol device, was unable and unwilling to essay more than the single comment that the ways of God in the Star were not for men’s understanding.

This brought still another cackle of glee from the old Warlock. “That sounds like the voice of the clergy,” he wheezed. “The church instructing the military--the halt leading the blind! Things have not changed so much as all that, after all! Uncle!” he called. “Can you hear them? Wherever you are,
if
you still are, in heaven or in hell, do you hear them? The church and the army are sharing their ignorance with one another again! Now do you still blame me for finding my own way? Were my drugs and dreams so terrible?”

“He raves, Nav Emeric,” Shana said. “Can’t we help him?”

Emeric looked at Glamiss. The warleader said, “Come with me, daughter of the hetman. Let’s see what this place can offer him.”

“You are taking my eyes!” screamed the Warlock. “Shana! My prosthesis is broken! Tell the computer, Shana!
Tell it at once!”

Emeric noted that the Warlock had spoken harshly of the computer, but he now demanded that it--somehow, miraculously--do something about his blindness.

Somehow, the Navigator thought wryly, one felt that this old creature was, or had been, a personage of great consequence: privileged, protected, and indulged. Like all who were so protected and indulged, he despised the source of his privileges. Yet as reality infiltrated the sick old mind, it screamed for still more privilege and protection, and from the very source so recently cursed and reviled.

The Warlock might be a man of the golden Age. In an infinite Universe anything was possible. But he was very, very like the men known to Emeric of Rhada.

That realization comforted the Navigator as Glamiss led Shana away into the catacombs within the magic mountain.

He did not notice the knowing and gentle smile on the face of Vulk Asa, who had listened and remembered and who now understood what this place was and the true identity of the Warlock of Rhada.

The legends and the Protocols said that the despised Vulk had a lifespan of twenty thousand years--and the legends and the Protocols were right.

For the Vulk was a truly ancient race, starvoyagers while men’s ancestors, the australopithecines, were discovering the art of murder.

The Vulk themselves had their legends, which were not as the legends of men. According to their Triad dreams (their linking of racial memory chains in units of three), their ancestors had come across a hyperspatial void when Earth was still a molten ball, thrust through a fold in the cosmos by the power of their minds: a trillion living Triads giving psychokinetic energy enough to move a planet out of a universe threatened with some nameless destruction.

In those times the Vulk were a mighty people, capable of teleporting themselves throughout the known galaxy. But time and entropy were the enemies of all living things, even the Vulk. And so it was that long before men discovered them (first on the worlds of Beta Crucis and later elsewhere), they grew enfeebled and had lost the power to roam at will through near space.

The Vulk were
old;
Man was young. The Vulk were timid, with the fragility of age; Man was aggressive, with the brute strength of youth. Yet in Man they saw themselves--as they had been in another cosmos before time began in this alien universe. And with great wisdom they understood that what Man would become in the next million--the next ten million-years, was yet to be decided. To the last scattered remnants of the once mighty race of Vulka, Man was an opportunity to survive, to achieve. He was vitality, hope for a future--and always a danger to himself and his galaxy. They did not read the future, for they understood that the future is many possible things and events. But they sensed the
possibilities
of the future, and this was the tie that bound them to Man.