The Warlock of Rhada (21 page)

He held his hand steadily raised.

He saw Linne Warleader in the first row of horsemen. Very brave, Glamiss thought icily, and very foolish. To attack a position like this one with a cavalry charge was what he would have expected from Linne and Ulm. There would be widows in Vara keep tonight, Glamiss thought bleakly.

He dropped his hand and the air thrummed with quarrels. The charge broke up a dozen meters from the platform. Mares shrieked, clawing at the air. Men spilled from their saddles and fell back upon their fellows. Glamiss saw a dark face turn crimson, a sword spin high in the air, red-smeared at the hilt where a quarrel had mashed a hand and fingers.

He raised his hand again. Lowered it. The air hummed once more with iron missiles. Now the charge was folding back upon itself, tumbling back like a river of flesh and iron, down the moraine.

Then Ulm’s soldiers were retreating--those left alive. There were a score of men and a half dozen mares among the boulders of the slope. Some lay still--others twitched and jerked, still others crawled down the gouge in the ground left by the retreating glacier, leaving a red trail behind them.

“A pity to kill good horses,” a warmen said behind Glamiss.

The warleader did not turn. He did not want his men to see the gray bleakness in his face. A waste, he was thinking, a senseless brutal
waste.
Men should die for something. Not like this, for the Red Fist and Ulm’s dull-witted jealousy.

He glanced at the sun. Hours until darkness. Time for a dozen of these hopeless, bloody attacks. Earlier he had looked forward to the test of battle. But now, seeing the dead in the moraine and the wounded crawling over the red-smeared stones, he hated the sight and smell of fighting.

“They’re coming again, Glamiss Warleader.”

He saw that they were, Linne’s hulking strength once again in the lead.

Glamiss felt a chill satisfaction. Stupid, yes. But there were no cowards on Vyka.

The crossbows were reloaded with the last of the quarrels. The next charge would be met with javelins, and then the next hand to hand, blade against blade. It would be a long, terrible afternoon, Glamiss knew, and victory--if it came--would be bitter.

Unhallowed knowledge brought the Dark Time . . .
So I say this to you: Seek not to know, for to know is to sin
. . .
He who disturbs the mysterious ways of the Universe is heretic, and enemy of God and Man.
And he will burn.

--Talvas Hu Chien, Grand Master and Grand Inquisitor of Navigators,
Interregnal period

When the end came, it came very swiftly. Dissent led to revolution, revolution to anarchy, anarchy to the rule of warlords. The Empire quite literally
imploded,
collapsing under the pressure of revolt on the frontiers. Rigell XXVIII died in the rubble of atom-blasted Nyor, surrounded by his drug-and pleasure-enfeebled nobility. They died like sheep.

One exception was The Right Honorable Lady Dihanna alt Aldrin, Mistress of Vega. She gathered a small force and attempted to fight her way back to Aldrin. It has been suggested that her intention was to collect the galactic Heir, said to be in seclusion on Aldrin, but this is unproven. The Lady Dihanna’s squadron was englobed by the starships of the Revolutionary Dictatorship of Canopus near the Horsehead and wiped out, effectively ending any hope of a Restoration of the Rigellian hegemony.

--Matthias ben Mullerium,
The Decline and Fall of the First Stellar Empire,
Late Second Stellar Empire period

Navigator Emeric of Rhada rubbed his burning eyes and read on. He had been at it for hours now, and the glittering letters that flashed across the cathode ray screen of the library computer seemed to dance and skitter about in his head. But still he kept at it, his Nav-trained mind hungry for knowledge.

The computer’s programming had ended, he understood now, at a point in time (he no longer cared how long ago it was in years) when the Empire was actually in the process of collapsing. The Outer Marches were in revolt, Imperial military and police units were mutinying, “people’s militias” were dispensing summary “justice” throughout the Rimworlds, and the social services that meant the difference between civilization and barbarism were collapsing.

He felt worn and light-headed from fatigue and hunger, but the pulsing flow of information from the computer seemed to sustain him like a drug; he would pay the price of it later, but for now he could not drink the torrent of facts fast enough.

He had, in the time since Glamiss had left him to organize the defense of the hospital, managed to piece together a number of fascinating bits about the hospital itself and the cryonized patients who had once filled it to overflowing.

The hedonistic culture of the late empire had created a whole class of drug-addicted nobility. Trilaudid and other “mind-expanders” had come into general usage among the Imperial aristocracy before the pleasure-seeking nobles and their medics had learned the potential side-effects--one of which was blindness.

The unspoken but clear purpose of the hospital on Aldrin was to preserve the drug-addicted aristocrats (out of the public’s view) until medical science could correct the damage they had done themselves.

The revolution and civil wars had interrupted any hope of this. Even during the time included in the computer’s programming, cryonized patients were being removed to other hospitals nearer the galactic center where they would be safe from the People’s Armies that were spreading terror and destruction through the Rimworld regions.

Lord Ophir, the computer seemed to be saying, remained in his cryonic capsule to the end. It appeared that the hospital staff had been instructed by the liege of Aldrin, one Lady alt Aldrin, to remain with the King-Elector’s frozen body until relieved.

It was obvious that the expected relief had never come and the doctors had finally deserted the hospital and its single, most-royal patient.

Emeric leaned back in the contour chair and squeezed the bridge of his nose wearily. He was unbelievably tired, but the machine had opened up a fantastic window into the distant past--the imperial world of great lords and ladies and men who ruled--not nations and holdings--but star systems. The Age of the first Star Kings.

He had uncovered one other piece of knowledge--
dangerous
knowledge. Glamiss had come into the mountain hoping to find weapons. The discovery that the caves were part of a hospital complex had persuaded him that there were no weapons. But Glamiss’s assumption had been wrong. The computer had printed out a map of the hospital for the Navigator, and it contained indications that there was a small armory in the depths of the mountain. Emeric absorbed this information with dismay, though not with great surprise. Any place protecting an imperial personage would certainly have weapons for its security forces. The Navigator hoped fervently that the other vanished imperials, the human doctors and cyborg attendants, had taken the weapons with them when they fled.

But the thought of the magically terrible imperial weapons (Emeric could only guess at their capabilities) stirred an even deeper fear. He queried the computer once again: “How is this place kept functioning all the time?” He had a dreadful feeling that the reply would come as no real surprise. The libraries on Algol contained much information on the nature of imperial power plants.

The computer flashed the words: “Nuclear power.”

Emeric shivered and punched out: “Expand reply.”

There followed in swift succession a half-dozen sets of plans and schematics detailing the location and capacity of the thermonuclear pile on which the mountain rested.

Emeric made the sign of the Star and bit his lips. Atomics. Naturally. What else could keep this complexity of services and machines operating through millennia?

It was as though the mountain itself had opened, spread batlike wings, and assumed the aspect of sharp-snouted Sin Himself: the dark Adversary.

Vulk Asa found him in an attitude of prayer.

“Nav Emeric.”

The Rhadan looked up bleakly. “What is it?”

“The Warlock wants to speak with you, Lord. “

Emeric rubbed a hand across his eyes. “With me?”

“He is dying, Nav.”

For a moment Emeric was overwhelmed with a sense of the terrible death the old Imperial faced: blind, drug-destroyed, and so dreadfully
alone
; an anachronism thousands of years displaced from his proper locus in the great panorama of history.

A Navigator had duties and obligations to the dying. It was part of the Way.

“I’ll come,” he said, and left the computer terminal reluctantly, but with a sense of returning to his own proper place in time.

It was the darkness that finally convinced Lord Ophir it was time to give up the struggle. As long as the radar-electronic prosthesis implanted in his shoulder brought him images of the outside world, life--even the nightmare life he now lived--was worth
something.

But a stone--a
stone,
by all the stars!--had fallen from the air and smashed his eyes and his body, and now he no longer wished to live in this barbaric dreamland of a future.

Strangely enough, his injury and the destruction of the mechanisms of his robe seemed to have liberated him from his slavery to trilaudid. His body still craved the drug, but the failure of the machines with which the hospital computer had kept him alive had reduced his physical awareness to the level of near-senility. He could no longer want anything very much: not drugs, not sight or warmth or food or--finally--even life.

He could sense the nearness of the barbarian girl, Shana. She had materialized in his blind darkness, and he could feel her near him now. He could smell her, too, he thought, wrinkling his nose with aristocratic fastidiousness. She moved in an effluvium of badly-tanned animal skins and unwashed young flesh.

He felt like talking. The pity was that he could only talk
at
the girl, and not
to
her. Too many centuries separated the center line of their respective lives. Still, knowing how near death was, he made the effort.

“Shana?”

“I’m here, Lord.”

The Warlock laughed inwardly, soundlessly, baring his yellow teeth. “Are the eagles flying, Shana?”

“Yea, Lord. I tried to make them attack the warmen, but they are frightened now, after what Glamiss Warleader did to them in the meadow.”

“It’s well,” he said.

Shana frowned. “Well, Lord?”

“Men should fight their own battles.” He muttered heavily in Imperial Anglic and Shana asked, “What did you say, Lord?”

“Don’t call me that,” he said in dialect.

“You are a great lord, a great Warlock.” The girl no longer believed it, but she, too, knew he was dying and she did not wish to be disrespectful.

“I have only one claim to uniqueness left,” the Warlock said. “I am the oldest living trilaudid addict.” He laughed brokenly.

Shana did not know what to reply and so remained silent.

He lay on a pallet, his silver robe dull and inert. The nutrient tank in the far corner of the luxurious room rippled softly--like the river, Shana thought. Like the river at moons-rise.

“There is something I want done,” Ophir said. “Where is that Vulk?”

“He has gone for the priest, Lord.”

“The priest, is it?” The old man giggled softly. “I’m to have the comforts of religion, am I?”

“It is the Way of the Navigators to comfort the dying when they can,” Shana said practically. Death was a common thing, a part of life. She felt no reticence in mentioning it.

“How civilized,” Ophir said. “In my day, we were not so considerate.” He remembered the plots and counterplots surrounding the monarchy. Nyor had been a golden death-trap, a fortress, a prison for all Rigellians. Perhaps that was why he had turned to trilaudid--for the illusion of freedom. But what did it matter now?

Suddenly the computer spoke through the speaker grille. “Please enter your nutrient bath, Lord Ophir. Your robe is inoperative. If you do not comply, a cyborg will be sent.”