The Warlock of Rhada (8 page)

Shevil said hopelessly, “You cannot arm us against the warmen?”

“Arm you?
Arm
you? Is that what you want? Is that all you think about, savage? Didn’t I see you fighting against two of your own stinking kind only a moment ago? With a knife in your hand?” The voice rose again to that imperious pitch.
“I am not a man into whose presence one may come armed! I could have you killed for that!”

Shevil hung his head, hope dead, beyond knowing what to do now. The creature might be a demon, but if so, it was a wildly insane demon and disinclined to help the folk in any way.

“You have a knife. Give it to me at once, or I shall call the Guard!”

Shevil looked dumbly at the knife he still held. It came to the family from a demon place and now a demon demanded its return. He extended it, hilt first. The Star and Spaceship gleamed in the light from the fluoroglobes in the ceiling of the tunnel. The Warlock’s eye whispered and hummed.

“Rigell,” the Warlock whispered, the lense fixed on the Imperial signet.

Memory battered against the synapses blocked by drug-hunger. Rigell on the Star Throne. The Hall of Mirrors in Nyor. Nyor--Queen of the Stars. Fragments of the past glittered like bits of broken crystal in Lord Ophir’s mind.

Rigell was dead--long, long ago.
I am the Star King,
Ophir thought.
I am the Galacton now.

His eye searched the weathered faces of the man and the girl before him.
These are my people.
He raised the lense to encompass the darkening sky dusted with the milky glow of the galactic lens and the sliver of the first moon. He remembered such a sky, on the world where he was born. The name? What was the
name?
A Rimworld, where there were few visible stars. A world of a star-system near the edge of the galaxy, far from Nyor, farther still from the blazing skies of the crowded Inner Marches.

“Lord--” Shevil released the knife-that-burns and let the old demon hold it.

“I am trying to
remember
...”

“Yes, lord, but the
warmen--”
Shevil felt Shana’s cautioning touch on his forearm.

“He will help us,” the girl whispered.

“I am
the Galacton!”
The old man shrieked suddenly. The eye fixed once again on Shevil Lar, and the voice firmed and took on that deep regal timbre. “I
rule.”

“Of course, Lord. In this valley--”

“Everywhere.“

Shevil fell silent and whispered to himself a prayer that Shevaughn had taught him:
Blessed are the mad, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.

“There are invaders in the valley, you say?”

“Yes, Lord,” Shevil said hopelessly.

“Then you must bring my people here, to me. We will shelter them here until the legions arrive. The penalty for unlawful war is terrible death.” The eye moved very close to Shevil and he struggled to bear the scrutiny without flinching. “Do I know you?” the old man asked. “The girl I recognize. She is my falconer. But who are you?”

“I am Shevil, Lord. Shevil Lar of Trama.”

“Title? Your title, man! Quickly!”

Shevil looked at Shana helplessly.

“He is Duke of this place, Lord,” Shana said, remembering the old title.

“Well, then, Duke Shevil,” Ophir said grandly. “Bring your folk to me. The Star King is father to his people. We will shelter here.”

“In the mountain?” Shevil asked. “They will not come, Lord. They will be afraid.”

“This girl has been in the mountain,” Ophir said, dismissing the objection. “There is nothing to fear.”

“You know that, father,” Shana said.

“But my daughter is an adept,” Shevil said. “She is called a witch. The people will not heed her.”

The Warlock said sternly, “If you are Duke of this place,
order
them to shelter with me. If they will not, let them face the rebels alone. The Galacton will defend his holding.” With that, he turned and moved down the corridor, his robe extinguishing the lights behind him, one by one.

Shevil said desperately,
“They will not do it, Shana.“

“We must try to make them do it, father,” the girl said quietly. “Is there another way?”

“Shana,” Shevil Lar said, “I don’t think he is a warlock or a demon. I think he is a mad old man. Nothing he says makes sense.” The girl held her father’s arm and said with a wisdom far beyond her years, “Whatever he is, Shevil, he offers us more than Ulm’s soldiers.”

With deep misgivings, taking his daughter’s hand, Shevil Lar picked his way between the still guttering, discarded torches down the mountain toward the dark houses where his people trembled in fear--caught between the madness of the Warlock and the lances of the warriors waiting for dawn on the ridge.

Historians of the Inner Planets have had, for many years, a tendency to regard the Rhad as simply a troublesome and warlike people, given to periodically disturbing the peace of the galaxy. This is an oversimplification of the Rhadan role in stellar politics. While it is true that during the Interregnal and Early Second Empire periods Rhadan warbands ravaged the Rimworlds with unparalleled ferocity, it is also true that the men of Rhada were among the first to support the standards of Glamiss during the Reconquest. And chroniclers of the First Empire record that Rhada, though far from the seat of Imperium at Nyor (on Sol III), was traditionally the personal holding of the King-Elector--the Heir to the Star Throne of the First Empire Galactons.

--Vikus Bel Cyb-1009,
Rhadan Influences in Galactic History
,
Early Confederate period

Though I am not Rhadan by birth, I take pride in my Imperial Principate of that place. It is fitting that this world of warriors should always be the hereditary holding of the man chosen Heir to the Imperium.

--From a letter written by Fremir ibn Sol alt Messier (Rigell XXV)
discovered in the Imperial Archive of Nyor during the Late Second Stellar Empire period

Through the deepest part of the night, those hours when both moons were in the sky, Glamiss watched the valley through his monocular. He noted the torches and the gathering at the valley’s far end, but even through the instrument, it was impossible to make out clearly what the people of Trama were doing in the distant moraine. First there was a gathering, and then, much later, he could make out a few figures moving up the moraine in the cold moonlight--but how many, and to what purpose, he could not be certain.

In the fifth standard hour of the night, Warman Quant relieved him at the watch, and Glamiss returned to the bivouac to roll himself in his furred cloak and sleep for the time remaining until dawn.

The sky was filled with the bluish promise of sunrise when Vulk Asa woke him. The eyeless face looked smooth as stone in the shadowless skyglow.

“Glamiss Warleader, I have dreamed of Rahel,” the Vulk said.

Glamiss waited, wise in the ways of the Vulk. Asa’s dream might be simply one of the mildly prescient dreams the Vulk frequently had (and which often provided intelligence of coming events that a clever warman would be advised to heed)--or the dream might not be a dream at all, as humans understood the term, but a sleep-waking contact with another Vulk, usually stronger and clearer than the mind-touch contacts forced by the daylight necessities of the Vulks’ masters.

“She is well?” Glamiss inquired, as manners dictated.

“Well enough, Warleader,” the Vulk said with equal courtesy. Glamiss, though accustomed to these elliptical Vulkish conversations, suppressed a certain impatience. Rahel, as the more sensitive of the two Vulk owned by the House of Vara-Vyka, was always kept confined in whatever keep Lord Ulm was using to house his people. Glamiss considered this summary deprivation of liberty an unnecessary cruelty, but it was common practice among the lords of the various planets in this part of the Great Sky.

“She delivered your message to the Lord Ulm, of course.”

“May she be thanked. But? There’s a ‘but’ of some sort in your manner, Asa.”

“The Lord Ulm refuses to send more men, Glamiss Warleader. He declares that fifty are more than enough to punish a village of weyrherders.”

Glamiss frowned. He had not really expected Ulm to respond favorably to his request, but neither had he expected a flat refusal. Ulm, for all his bravado and bombast, was a compromising man. It had cost him lands and power on Vyka.

The Vulk waited.

“Was there something else, Vulk Asa?” Glamiss asked in a hard and angry voice.

“Rahel says that what the Lord Ulm says is not what the Lord Ulm intends. She says that the Bishop-Navigator Kaifa arrived at Vara with the starship
Gloria in Coelis
during the night--”

Glamiss frowned. “So soon? Emeric said--” He broke off and stared appraisingly down the slope to where Emeric the Rhadan was packing his kit and strapping on his weapons among the warmen. A faint suspicion struggled against his trust and affection for the Navigator. Were the Navigators playing with him? Were there plots within plots here? The Order’s ways were often devious, sometimes even treacherous.

“There is more, Glamiss Warleader.”

Glamiss looked at the Vulk’s face. Like a smooth stone, he thought, an ageless, immutable permanence lived in that face. He shivered slightly and made the sign of the Star on his palate with his tongue. “Say on, Vulka Asa. What more is there?”

“This morning the warband’s horses were loaded aboard the
Gloria,
together with war machines. She believes the men will go aboard soon with Lord Ulm, the Bishop, and the two Inquisitors who came with him from Aurora.”

Glamiss felt the prickling warning of threatened disaster. “How do you read this, Asa?”

The Vulk turned slightly toward Nav Emeric, who was
strapping his mailed shirt now, arming himself. “Wouldn’t you prefer to discuss this with the lord Nav Emeric?”

Glamiss’s eyes narrowed. “I would not. I asked you a question. Answer it, Vulk.”

Asa inclined his head. “My sister-wife, she-who-shares-with-me, and I believe that we were sent into this valley as a diversion, Glamiss Warleader. The Inquisition knows more of the strangeness here than you believe--”

“And Emeric?” Glamiss asked harshly.

“The lord Navigator is as innocent as I, Warleader. His order does not share all things with all its members.”

“Can I believe that?”

“Yes, you can believe it. The Bishop has known of the witchcraft in Trama for a long time--or so Rahel thinks. The plan to use Ulm’s warband to cleanse the valley comes from Algol, from the Grand Master Talvas, himself.”

“Then why was I sent here with a small force?” Glamiss demanded.

“You are young, Glamiss,” the Vulk said, “but you know the ways of the world. The answer is in your mind. I see it there.”

“Ulm wants me dead.”

“Yes, Warleader.”

“He daren’t risk a simple dagger or a challenge--”

The Vulk smiled thinly. “You are too popular with the warband for that. He will tell the soldiers that you have turned rebel--that you are bewitched by the dark powers in Trama. The Bishop-Navigator will support him--in exchange for a free hand for the Inquisition in this place.”

“Well now,” Glamiss said, holding his heavy Vykan sword thoughtfully. “I have come up in the world, Vulk Asa. Who would have thought a poor herdsman’s son would rate a plot for his execution? With the connivance of the holy Order, at that.”

Emeric, overhearing, stood at his shoulder. “What’s this about executions, Glamiss? And the Order?”

Glamiss fixed his friend with a cold stare. “It seems you are expendible, Nav Emeric, for all that you’re a noble of the Northern Rhad. Ulm is embarking the warband on the
Gloria
--but not exactly to come to our assistance here. He’s weeded out the troopers loyal to me for this foray, and now he’s coming with the warband to kill us. With the aid and blessing of the holy Order, friend priest. What do you make of that?” Disbelief flashed in Emeric’s eyes--and faded. There were, he realized, two faces to the Order of Navigators. One was theological, compassionate, concerned with the saving of the ancient treasures and men’s souls. The other was simply expedient. What Glamiss said was quite possible--even understandable, if the rumors about witchcraft in Trama were true. The Inquisition sought to wipe out the black arts root and branch, true. But what the Inquisition burned out of the laity often found its way into the laboratories of Algol. The Order could be a stern father, cautioning all men in the Great Sky to “do as I say, not as I do.”

Emeric raised his eyes to Vyka’s first rim, now breaking through the mists of early morning along the treeline. He murmured an Ave Stella. Again, he thought, faith is challenged.