The Warlock of Rhada (6 page)

Glamiss, unaware, went on in that strange, still voice. “There are starships in my dream, a sky filled with them. And behind me a warband--but a greater warband than I have ever seen--an army with strange banners.” He smiled slowly and turned to look at his friend. “What do you make of that, friend priest?”

The Navigator was silent for what seemed a long time. He knew, without knowing why he knew it, that he must speak with great care and precision, for he was certain that the spirit of the Star was nearby.

“Glamiss,” he said evenly, “what do you know of Nyor?”

“The Queen City of the Stars? What everyone knows. That it does not exist. That it probably never existed. It is like Earth, a legend--no more. Or perhaps, less romantically, it was simply the capital of the lost Empire.”

“Nyor exists, Glamiss Warleader. Nyor has always existed,” the Navigator said. “I have spoken with starship Navigators who have
been
there. It is far off across the Great Sky, and it lies in ruins now. But it once stood on an island between two rivers, Glamiss. The island is called Manhat, and the Galactons ruled from that place. They ruled for five thousand years, Glamiss, and their symbols were the flail, the dagger, and the feathered cape.”

Glamiss stared at the priest with cold eyes; his face seemed suddenly to have been cut from stone. “Don’t joke with me, priest. We are friends, but don’t joke with me about this thing. It is not a matter to use lightly.”

“As the Star is my witness, I speak the truth,” the Rhadan said.

“How does it happen I have never heard of it?”

“It is Navigators’ knowledge--not for the unconsecrated man.”

“And yet you tell it to me?”

The Navigator nodded slowly. “In violation of my vows, Glamiss. May the Star forgive me, but there are times when a priest is also a man. I told you I believe you are a chosen one. Perhaps it has been given to me to recognize you for what you will become. I know no reason I should be given such grace--I’m not a very good priest. I’m too proud by half, and far too worldly. I’ll never be a saint. But I know what I know. I can feel it, here, inside my guts. One day, you
will
wear the feathered cape, Glamiss. It will probably take your lifetime--and mine. But the
time
is right for a great conqueror. There’s been too long a night, my friend. And I believe you are the man. So I violate my vows. I should feel shame, perhaps, but I feel none.” He turned away and stood on the edge of the ridge, looking not down into the valley of Trama, but up at the sky where the light was slowly going, and where the sparse stars of the Vykan night would soon shine feebly through the thin clouds. “That is why I will serve you, Glamiss Warleader--down there in the valley tomorrow, or across the Great Sky when that time comes.”

The Vykan grasped the Navigator’s shoulders and managed a half-smile. “We’re both mad, you know. It must be this place.”

Emeric shook his head somberly. “I know one other thing. There will come a time when I must again choose between you and my Order. The choice I make then may not be the choice I make tonight. But that will be many years from now--in Nyor.”

Vulk Asa huddled by one of the fires and turned his blind face toward the two figures conversing in the fading light. He heard one of the warmen laugh and speak to his battle-partner.

“Look at them up there, will you? Glamiss and the priest, settling the hash of the whole bloody world.”

The Vulk smiled inwardly. He had seen it all happen before in the course of his race’s group-life. Passive, directed by forces humans would not begin to understand for a million years, the Vulk had seen the wheel of history turn many times.
We watch,
Vulk Asa thought,
and we wish you well. But we do not interfere.

And across the miles he felt the caressing touch of his sister-wife’s thought:
Guide them gently and they will go far.

Conditions will be so terrible that no man will be able to lead a decent life. Then will all the sorrows of the Apocalypse pour down upon mankind: Flood, Earthquake, Pestilence and Famine; neither shall the crops grow nor the fruits ripen; the wells will dry up and the waters will bear upon them blood and bitterness, so that the birds of the air, the beasts in the field and the fishes in the sea will all perish.

--From the
Nürnburg Chronicle
(AD 1493 Old Style)
Middle Dawn Age period

The cyclic repetitions of human history fill me with a sense of
déjà vu.
I am the mightiest of men--and the most frightened.

--Attributed to Rigell XXVIII,
last Galacton of the First Stellar Empire

In his drugged sleep of dreams, the old man who had been Ophir ben Rigell ibn Sol alt Messier, Nephew and Heir to the Great Throne, Lord of the Sky Isles and the Marches, Prince of Rhada and High Duke of Cygnus, Amir of Tau Ceti and King-Elector of the Empire, could both see and remember.

His robe, on orders from the hospital computer, administered his maintenance dose of trilaudid each time he slept. The regimen was an improvisation, for the hospital computer having waited in vain for centuries, for someone to tell it how to cure the old man’s addiction and drug-induced blindness could prescribe nothing better. Once the patient was taken from the cold Sleep, the withdrawal of the drug would kill him--and he was too old to be put back in the vaults. He could not again be wakened.

The effect of trilaudid was, in its early stages, a feeling of well-being and euphoria. The user became aware of intense pleasure in every physical and mental activity, and the unpleasant aspects of life were transmuted into sources of joy. The Lord Ophir had, long before coming to the vaults of the cold Sleep, passed through that stage. He had entered the final stages of addiction in which the trilaudid addict began to shut down his sensory extensions into the real world, the more fully to appreciate the delights to be enjoyed inwardly. The first faculty to go was generally sight, and so it had been in the case of Lord Ophir. He had been almost totally blind before the Lady Dihanna (at the Lord Rigell’s insistence) had prevailed upon Ophir to take the Sleep.

Cannily, he had known even as he boarded the
Delos
that night, millennia ago, that her real purpose had been to store him until some cure for his addiction (rather than merely his blindness, which was but a symptom) could be found.

In his alert dream, at his own choice, he relived those days. He remembered that trilaudid addiction had been widespread among the lords and nobles of the Empire. That “unimportant” civil conflict on the Rim had been, in fact, unimportant only to an aristocracy and a large upper-middle class removed from reality by trilaudid and its derivatives. The Inner Worlds had been gutted of purpose or discipline by their own popular, drug-oriented, and permissive culture. A few nobles--Dihanna had been one of them--had striven for a rebirth of discipline. Ophir considered this with dreamy pleasure: they had obviously failed. The Empire was no more.

With trilaudid rerouting the electrical impulses of his brain, Ophir could survey the softly featureless landscape of his memories with joy. Even the knowledge that in his waking state he would be irritable to the point of paranoia, that his memory would be paralyzed, that his blindness would force him to rely on the prosthetic eye he wore--all this gave him drug-pleasure. For it assured him that he would turn to sleep again--the sleep of trilaudid.

Dihanna,
he thought dreamily, and his pleasure-sharpened mind recreated her. He touched her glossy ebony skin, felt the tight, wiry texture of her flame-colored hair. She seemed to be saying: “You see, I
did
join you after all, Ophir.” And: “I was wrong, wrong to oppose pleasure and happiness and love--” Some ancient flicker of reality sparked in his brain, and for just an instant he knew that he was with a false Dihanna, that she would never have spoken so about drug-happiness. But almost instantly, the trilaudid in his bloodstream blunted the single synapse, and Dihanna became once again the soft, acquiescent creature his addiction had made her.

His uncle, the Galacton, said: “You are the heir, Ophir. You cannot--” The mere suggestion of the word “cannot” triggered the drug reaction again, and the Galacton smiled down at his favorite nephew from the Great Star Throne and said, “Yes, of course, yes--whatever gives you pleasure, my young lion--”

The images darkened, faded. The computer had detected visitors at the tunnel mouth and, knowing they sought the Warlock, was waking him. Lord Ophir fought to keep to his drug-dream, but the computer was immune to the ethic of trilaudid: “Whatever gives you pleasure, do.” It turned his robe cold and he awoke. Bitterness overwhelmed him. Once again he could not remember his own name. His brain seemed to have ceased to function. He felt half-alive as the infusion of the drug slowed, a million tiny needles withdrawing from his withered flesh.

He opened his electronic eye. On the telescreen above his sleep-tank the computer had projected the scene in the moraine.

The villagers of Trama were there in force. Torches burned, though the last light had not yet faded from the sky. They were chanting dark verses from that mess of superstition they called The Warls.

The computer said, “Go. It is good for you to see other humans.”

The Warlock snarled, “Humans? Savages. Beasts.”

The computer made no distinctions. It was concerned only with the well-being of its patient, and it had been told, aeons ago, that without contact with others of his kind, man, the social animal, withers and dies.

“It is bad therapy for a patient to refuse visitors when he is able to see them,” the recorded voice said.

“Why do they bother me?” the Warlock asked, rising unwillingly from the tank.

The question was recognized as rhetorical and not answered.

“Why
me!”
This time an answer was wanted. But the hospital computer’s billion software packages did not include anything pertinent to skin-wearing savages in the hospital valley. Instead, like any doctor, it said, “It will do you good to see them.”

The Warlock’s eyes, dark with trilaudid blindness, jerked and trembled.
“Who am I?”
he burst out hopelessly.

This information the computer did have, but it was considered poor therapy to present trilaudid addicts with contradictions. The computer, again like any doctor, lied for the patient’s good. “I am not programmed to answer that. When the doctor comes, he will decide what must be done. “

“The doctor is never coming!”
the old man screamed.
“No one is coming--ever!”

“You have visitors,” the computer said primly. And then, with maddening electronic smugness, repeated, “It is bad therapy for a patient to refuse visitors when he is able to--”

The Warlock fled from the room.

In the deepening dusk, Shevil Lar led the villagers in the litany, the chant from the Warls.

“From the rage of the star-raiders,
Save us!”

The torch-lit faces, raised in supplication to the blank and empty tunnel mouth, swayed in the flame-brightness. The response came like a rumble on the wind from the mountains.

“Salve!”
“From the fire in the sky,
Protect us!”
“Salve dominus!”

The language was the ancient tongue, a slurred and corrupted thing filled with the clicks and elisions of the Old Anglic of the Empire and mingled with words and phrases borrowed from languages still more ancient, their origins lost in the mists of the Dawn Age.

“O Warlock, filled with wisdom,
Protect us!”
“Salve, rey de la noche!”

Shevil raised his torch and made the Dark Sign, the Star with Four Points, the Cross of Night, that summoned warlocks and propitiated both Sin and Cyb. The tunnel mouth remained empty and Shevil was filled with a hopeless despair. The Warlock was capricious, and he, Shevil, had warned the folk that he might not come.

The bearded faces of the men in the first circle were unreadable in the torch light. But the women who stood behind them were afraid and their faces showed it. It was the women who had been most willing to accept the gifts of Sin and Cyb from the creature who lived under the glacier: the mill, the new ways to heal the sick, even the training of Shana’s gift to curb the marauding eagles. The women were afraid of the priest-Navigator who Shana said rode with the warmen of the Lord Ulm, but they were even more frightened at the thought that the Warlock might now choose simply to forget the folk of Trama valley.

Shevil said, “Bring the weyr.”

The men carried the struggling animal spread-eagled. Its soft dark eyes were fearful. It knew it was meeting its death, Shevil realized. But what good would it do? The fly-blown carcass of the last sacrifice to the Warlock of the mountain still lay where they had left it on their last meeting here. The rotting smell of it tainted the cold evening wind.

“Shana.”

Shevil’s daughter carried the knife. It was an ancient weapon, intricately carved and damascened with scenes of strange battle on its bright blade. The pommel had been worked in soft yellow metal into the flaming Star and Spaceship of the Old People. It had been brought by the folk to the valley in time past, during one of the migrations from the plains. Shevil’s great-great-grandfather was said to have found it in the night-glowing ruins of some ancient battlefield, a place where the Suns fell. It was said among the people that the old man, the first Shevil Lar, had sickened and died after his blasphemous invasion of that blasted place. His hair had turned gray and fallen away in patches, and he had weakened and had known no peace, so great was the taboo. And finally, he had died and none could save him. There was no one even to try, for he had been shaman in those days, the healer of the sick folk, and if he could not save himself, then no man could.