The Warlock of Rhada (20 page)

Filled with a sense of unreality at this peculiar conversation, Glamiss asked: “The old man--the Lord Ophir--can he be cured of whatever is wrong with him?”

“No. There has been no research on the trilaudid addiction syndrome since 3565 GE, and no medical research of any kind since 3610 GE. Lord Ophir will die.”

There it was, Glamiss thought bitterly. They had stumbled onto a mountain of miracles, but the only living human being who could truly understand them and tell him how these miracles might be used was dying. Blind, drug-addicted, now injured by the idiot attack from the sky, the old man might at this moment be breathing his last.

Emeric, the Rhadan noble, had veered off on another line of inquiry. He was asking the machine, “Is the Lord Ophir a Rhad?”

“Technically, no, he is not. Members of the Imperial Family are all by law considered citizens of Earth, Sol III. However, Lord Ophir was born on Rhada and bears the title of Prince of that colony. It is his personal holding as King-Elector and Heir.”

For an instant Glamiss forgot that the Navigator and the machine were discussing matters millennia out of date. He had heard the words “King-Elector” and “Heir.”

“That old man is the legal heir to Rigell?”

“Unless the Galacton has remarried and fathered sons not registered in the ICH data bank,” came the reply. Glamiss suppressed an impulse to break into foolish laughter. He had been right about the machine having been built by men and not by the Adversaries. Only a device constructed by men--clever, but essentially brainless--would fail to understand that the world it was discussing was dust.

But the old man was legal heir to the Empire.
That
was a bit of information worth having. Had fate, and his own weakness for drugs, not struck him down--
he might have died wearing the feathered cape and carrying the golden flail of Empire--
The irony of the moment bid fair to overwhelm him. He remained silent for a long while as Emeric, his Nav’s brain hungry for knowledge, plied the machine with questions. Now Glamiss’s mind was elsewhere. He was thinking of the blind old man dying among strangers, deserted by his retreating people millennia ago.
That
, the young warleader thought, was the stuff of true loneliness. Abandoned not only by your
kind,
but by your
time
as well...

He was still deep in thought when he heard the call that Ulm’s first waves were attacking up the moraine.

Saint and King together, within the fabled Mountain, Guarded the Immortal who held the Sacred Key to Nyor. A thousand warmen waited, ten thousand more a-coming, Under the black and silken banners.

--Guest Song,
Early Second Stellar Empire period

If the engagement some historians call the Battle of Trama was ever actually fought (which is doubtful), our accounts of it are (to say the least) meager. Secular historians have suggested that the so-called battle was provoked by a Bishop of the Order of Navigators allied with the local warlord. They have further implied that the Order was determined to destroy the mysterious “Mountain of Trama” rather than permit the benefits of its First Empire science to reach the commonality of Vyka. The facts do not support these canards.

--Nav (Bishop) Julianus Mullerium,
Anticlericalism in the Age of the Star Kings,

Middle Second Stellar Empire period

Bishop-Navigator Kaifa, sitting on the broad back of an ill-tempered black mare from Ulm’s stables, watched the disorganized milling about of the Vara-Vykan levy with growing impatience.

The men had taken an hour or more to alight from the starship and immediately had scattered to loot the hovels of the abandoned village of Trama--though what they could possibly find there that was worth stealing the Navigator could not imagine, so poor was the settlement.

The indiscipline of the Varan warmen was more than simply irritating to Kaifa. It was undermining his confidence in the course of action he had now set in motion.

A Navigator of Bishop’s rank was, to all intents and purposes, an independent agent in the far space of the Rim-worlds. By his actions he could affect the political course of events almost at will. And if he were successful--that is, if the results benefited the Order--he would be reckoned accountable to no one, even his superiors within the hierarchy of the Order.

But if his choices were indiscreet--if the results were unsatisfactory to the grim old men who surrounded the Grand Master--retribution could be swift and terrible.

The Order’s computer in Algol had warned of a politico-historical nexus forming on Vyka. It had remembered a forgotten concentration of imperial science within the mountain overlooking the valley of Trama. The decision had been to strike a bargain with Lord Ulm for ecclesiastical sovereignty over Trama. Kaifa frowned. Had it really been
the
decision? Or did it stand, in the records of the Holy Order of Navigators, as
Bishop Kaifa’s
decision?

He looked about him at the barbarian rabble that was Ulm’s army. Of all the men who had served the dropsical Lord of Vara-Vyka, only young Glamiss had commanded a disciplined and trained force. This distinction had cost him dearly--for the jealous men who surrounded Ulm had convinced the Lord of Trama-Vyka that he nurtured a traitor in Glamiss.

But though Kaifa was a worldly man, he was still a priest and dedicated to the real and eternal mission of his Order: to preserve knowledge and to form an island in the barbaric sea that was the Great Sky.

Had he backed the wrong man? That was the question that gnawed at his conscience and his confidence.

The warleader Linne, a hulking and black-visaged brute of a man, was cantering along the front of forming companies, cursing and beating men into position with the butt of his flail.

In time, Kaifa thought, Linne would be exactly like Ulm was now: gross, brutal, and self-indulgent. It seemed very probable that Ulm, having discarded his youngest and most able warleader Glamiss and all the warmen loyal to him, had stripped himself of whatever defense he might soon need against Linne, who would undoubtedly take Vara-Vyka when this fight was over and the starship gone.

That, the Navigator thought bitterly, was the recurring pattern of life among the lords of the Great Sky. Cruelty, repression, treachery, and revolt. Again and again he had seen it, and he sometimes wondered about the Order’s notion that simply by monopolizing and protecting the remnants of Empire science they could one day insure a rebirth of Community. Wasn’t it just possible that the Order was wrong? That the only thing that would recreate the Empire was a
secular
conqueror? It was a thought dangerously close to heresy, but Kaifa had studied what history existed and he knew that Man, even long before he left Earth for the stars, had proved himself volatile and aggressive. What refinement Man had achieved had always been paid for in blood. Those who spoke of love and brotherhood were those lucky enough to be born in a time of Man’s rest from his labors; the predators had let it be safe, for a time, to be weak. And then, inevitably, the wheel of history turned and the weak were crushed while the warriors carved another cave of refuge from a hostile universe.

Kaifa brushed these disturbing thoughts aside and stared up at the level place at the head of the moraine. Glamiss’s troopers now made not the slightest effort to hide themselves or their intentions. They would fight--and the ground favored them. Mere numbers would not dislodge them.

Again, Kaifa cursed the momentary carelessness that had allowed Ulm’s orders for bombardment from the air to be carried out. To stone warriors in such a situation had been folly. And the final responsibility had been his own. His brain fuddled with strategy, he had neglected simple tactics. Now Glamiss held the mountain and all it contained, and for an assault force there was only the rabble of Vara-Vyka.

Linne had formed the first troop of the levy in the moraine. The war mares screamed angrily, sensing the nearness of battle. The Bishops’s own mount growled and turned her head to glare at her rider, her fanged mouth open and salivating.

“Stand, damn you,” Kaifa said, crossly.

“We go. We fight,” the mare said.

Kaifa cuffed her across the ears.
“Stand!”
Bloody Rhadan beast. They were near to unmanageable for anyone not trained to ride them. The thought came to him that the young priest with Glamiss was a Rhadan--a noble Rhad, in fact. More trouble for the Order when all this was done, Kaifa thought. Events were like a skein unraveling, tangling. Who could foresee the eventual results of this grubby skirmish in the wilds of a backward fief on a wilderness Rimworld? He shivered with unaccustomed apprehension.

He urged his mount closer to the disorganized rabble milling about in their attempt to form ranks in the confining space of the moraine. As he did so, he was dismayed to see a party of what appeared to be villagers driving a small herd of weyr into the mountain under the protection of the rebel warmen’s crossbows and javelins.

He rode to Ulm’s side and pointed them out. The lord of Vara-Vyka was sweating heavily in his armor and his breathing was hard and labored. He was taking no part in organizing the attack, leaving it all to Linne and the other warleaders.

Kaifa pointed out the foraging party and said irritably, “Can’t you do something to stop that? We’ll never starve them out if all those weyr get into the mountain.”

“I have no intention of making a siege, Holy Father,” the lord of Vara said stupidly. “Let them stuff the mountain with weyr. It won’t save the rebels.”

Kaifa chewed his lips in exasperation. In a controlled voice he pointed out that taking the rebel position by assault might be impossible. “A dozen men can hold that tunnel-mouth,” he said.

Ulm’s glistening face worked dully, his piggish eyes squinting against the glare of the yellowish sunlight. “Now, My Lord Bishop, starships and religion are your business. Fighting is mine. Be content.”

Kaifa stared bleakly at the confusion of the levy--a thousand troopers scattered between the moraine and the starship in the meadow below. Some of the warmen were still rooting about in the village, looking for loot. He was filled with angry despair. The whole affair was turning into a fiasco--from the ill-considered stoning from the air to this--this disorganized mob-scene.

“They will make guest songs of this,” Ulm said fatuously. “People will remember the battle of Trama.”

Bishop Kaifa trembled with the effort of suppressing his fury. He looked longingly up at the mountain thinking of the imperial wonders it must contain. All just out of his reach. All, he thought bleakly, available to young Emeric Kiersson-Rhad. Great Star, what ironies there were in life.

He thought suddenly of the hot sands of his native Nasser, of the blazing sky of the galactic center, and of the noble, lonely life of his Bedouin ancestors. Thirty years’ service to the Order had brought him to this place and the tools crumbled in his hands. Ulm, Linne, and the others were too dull, too stupid even to guess at the importance of what was happening here. But it was too late to change the course of events now. The Algol computer had directed that all this should happen and so it must. But the Order, Bishop Kaifa thought, the
Order
must be protected against failure--against the results of faulty decisions made by a probably faulty machine. He raised his eyes to the yellow star blazing in the clear sky. The Star. God. Allah. Men gave many names to the spirit of the Universe. But it was
there,
always. And computers or no, the Order of Navigators was a
religious
order, and as a servant of God one must have faith. He closed his eyes and said aloud the words he had learned as a child, even before his Selection for the Holy Order; the words of the ancient Book of Nasser, the Koran:
“As for him who performeth a good work, verily Allah is grateful and knowing. “

The first wave of Ulm’s men had begun to gallop to the attack up the boulder-strewn steepness of the moraine.

With a dozen men ranked behind him on the ferroconcrete platform, Glamiss waited for the assault. His eyes were cold and steady as he watched Ulm’s warmen straggle up the steepening slope. He knew many of the attackers; they had been his friends in Ulm’s service. But they were not his friends now, and he gave a quiet order to his crossbowmen.