Treasured One

by David Eddings

  “Not really,” Zelana replied. “There were servants of the Vlagh involved in Kajak’s attack on the Seagull back in the harbor at Kweta, remember.”

  “Yes, but that only involved a few Maags. This time, we’re talking about a half-million men—and Kajak had actually seen the gold Sorgan had stacked up in the hold of the Seagull. The only thing the Trogites off to the south have to go on is a rather vague folk tale, and why would that give them any reason to attack Narasan’s army? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Don’t blame me for that, Longbow,” Zelana replied. “Go shout at the Vlagh.”

  “Sorry, Zelana. Irrational things irritate me, that’s all. All I really came here for was to suggest that you and your brother should come by Gunda’s wall and head off any wild ideas Narasan might devise. The notion of being attacked from two directions at the same time is starting to disturb him quite a bit, so we’d better see what we can do to settle him down.”

  “It’ll cost you a kiss-kiss, Longbow,” she said with a sly little smirk.

  They gathered near the back side of Gunda’s black basalt wall late that afternoon as the sun neared the ridge line to the west. Narasan and most of his officers were there, and Rabbit and Torl sort of represented Sorgan.

  “Just to make sure that we all know what this is all about, why don’t you tell us what you saw near that waterfall, Longbow?”

  “There’s not really too much to tell, Narasan,” Longbow replied. “The Church armies seem to have finally realized that trying to come up here through those various streambeds wasn’t going to work for them, since we had archers in place to shower arrows on them every time they tried that. Now they’re all gathered just below the falls, and they’re building a ramp up along one side of that gorge.”

  “That’s stupid, Longbow,” Rabbit declared. “Your bowmen can rain arrows down on them all day long if they do that.”

  Longbow shook his head. “They’re roofing it over, little friend. From what I was able to see, the roof’s not very substantial, but it’s good enough to hide them, and an archer has to be able to see what he’s shooting arrows at.” He paused, squinting off toward the rosy sunset. “Their ramp isn’t really all that wide, though,” he added. “I suppose we could put a sizeable number of archers in place to kill them as they came out into the open. We’ll need a lot of arrows, though.”

  “You’re on your own this time, Longbow,” Rabbit said with a sly grin. “My forge and my anvil are still on board the Seagull, so I won’t be able to help you very much.” Then he frowned. “This is starting to have a very familiar smell, Longbow. The thought of all that gold on board the Seagull turned Kajak’s head off back in the harbor at Kweta, and now we’ve got several Trogite armies that seem to be having the same problem.”

  “That’s something we might want to consider, Veltan,” Zelana said to her brother. “When you came looking for me in the Land of Maag, you picked up a few hints in Weros that the Vlagh had servants in the Land of Maag, and they’d been tampering with Kajak.”

  “Picking up a few Maag pirates is one thing, dear sister,” Veltan replied dubiously, “but we’re talking about five Trogite armies and half of the priesthood of the Amarite church here. I think you might be stretching things more than a little bit.”

  “It’s not impossible, little brother. The Vlagh had servants watching us—even when we were a long way from the Land of Dhrall—and that means that it’s aware of just how big an impact gold has on the outlanders. In a very real sense, we’ve been using gold as bait. I caught Sorgan, and you caught Narasan. Wouldn’t you say that the Vlagh might very well have realized just how good our bait really is? If it’s had servants out there waving gold at those Amarite priests—and all those Church armies—it’s entirely possible that it’s managed to catch more than a few of them, and now they’re blindly rushing up from the south, overcome with greed and totally unaware of just exactly what will happen to them if they win.”

  “And just what might that be?” Gunda asked her with a puzzled look on his face.

  Longbow stepped in at that point. “After they’ve rushed up here and destroyed you and all of our other Trogite friends, the Vlagh won’t really need them anymore,” he explained. “If that’s the case, it’s quite possible that the servants of the Vlagh will invite their newfound friends to dinner, where the friends will be the main course.”

  “That’s terrible!” Gunda exclaimed in horror.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Gunda,” Andar said. “When you’ve got two enemies and one of them eats the other one, it solves quite a few problems, wouldn’t you say?”

  “All right, then,” Narasan said in a crisp tone, “we might not like this very much, but we are going to have to deal with it. If anybody has any ideas, now’s the time to let the rest of us know about them.”

  “We do have the advantage of higher ground,” Danal mused. “That roof the Church soldiers are building over their ramp might protect them from arrows, but I don’t think it’s sturdy enough to stay in place if we start dropping boulders on it.”

  “Particularly when we’re dropping them from two hundred feet up,” Andar added in his deep voice. “That ramp of theirs is an interesting idea, but it’s got a few holes in it—or it will have after we’ve dropped some five-ton boulders on it.” He frowned. “They should have realized that, shouldn’t they? The commanders of the Church armies aren’t really all that bright, but even an idiot would be able to see that, wouldn’t he?”

  “Their brains have gone to sleep,” Sorgan’s cousin Torl said bluntly. “That’s what I was telling you before. Just as soon as one of the farmers down south recited that fairy tale about oceans of gold up here, the soldiers started to run in this direction as if their very lives depended on it. They aren’t thinking anymore, so they can’t see any holes in a plan that some half-wit scrapes off the wall. Somebody’s tampering with them somehow.”

  “It is the sort of thing the Vlagh might try, little brother,” Zelana suggested to Veltan.

  “I have to admit that it smells a bit Vlaghish,” Veltan agreed, “but as closely as we’ve been able to determine, there are five Church armies down there. That’s a half-million men, Zelana! Some of those men should be at least partially awake, wouldn’t you say?”

  Zelana shook her head. “The Vlagh’s accustomed to dealing with large numbers of servants, and there’s no such thing as independent thought among its creatures.” She paused. “If the level of thought among those Church soldiers has been reduced to that of insects, the only thing that concerns them right now is the possibility that others might reach the gold before they do.”

  “You could be right, dear sister,” Veltan agreed glumly.

  “They’ll have to get up past the waterfall before they give us much trouble,” Narasan said firmly as he adjusted his iron breastplate. Then he looked at Padan. “Why don’t you gather up a few thousand men and go on down to the south end of this basin, old friend? Let’s find out how much Church soldiers enjoy a sudden downpour of five-ton boulders.”

  “Iff’n y’ want ’er that way, that’s the way we’ll do ’er,” Padan declared in a clever imitation of the Maag dialect.

  “Clown,” Narasan murmured with a faint smile.

  It all sounded quite practical, but Longbow had a few doubts. Something very peculiar was happening, and Longbow was quite sure that he wouldn’t rest easy until he managed to put his finger on just exactly what it was.

  The discussion among the black-leather-clad Trogites continued even after the sun had gone down, but Longbow didn’t see that it was really getting anywhere. Zelana, clad in filmy gauze, was sitting beside a small fire some distance away from Veltan’s hired soldiers with the sleeping child Eleria in her arms when Longbow quietly joined them. “What does firelight taste like?” he asked curiously.

  “Smoke,” she replied. “It’s not nearly as pleasant as the light in my grotto, but it’s better than darkness. What are Veltan’s soldiers doing?
”

  “Arguing,” Longbow said. “There seems to be quite a few disagreements about just exactly how to proceed. If you’d like, I’ll escort you two back to your little camp near the geyser, and we can put Eleria in a more comfortable bed.”

  “I don’t really mind holding her, Longbow,” Zelana said, looking fondly at the little girl’s face, “but you might be right. She’ll probably sleep better in a regular bed.”

  Longbow smiled and helped her to her feet. Then he took the sleeping child Eleria in his arms. “This isn’t going at all the way we’d expected, Zelana,” he said quietly as they walked on down toward the geyser. “Gunda’s fort and the barricades Padan and his men built on down the slope below the wall would have probably held the creatures of the Wasteland back—if the archers from your Domain hadn’t been diverted to hold back that second invasion. To make things even worse, Narasan just had to send a goodly number of the men we’ll need here to go on down to the falls to destroy the roof over that ramp. We need more men, but we don’t have any.”

  “Why don’t you go on down to the southern part of your baby brother’s Domain and tell Hook-Big to come back up here where he belongs, Beloved?” Eleria suggested in a sleepy sort of voice. “The trouble’s here, not down there.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?” Zelana asked her.

  “How can I sleep when you two keep talking?” Eleria replied in a peevish sort of tone. “Since you’re the one who’s paying Hook-Big, he’s supposed to do what you tell him to do, isn’t he? Let his people drop rocks on the bad people from the south, and then bring the good people back here to do what your baby brother tells them to do.”

  “I think she’s right,” Longbow said a bit ruefully.

  “Of course I’m right,” Eleria said. “I’m always right. Now you owe me a kiss-kiss.”

  “Just go back to sleep, little one,” Zelana told her. “She is right, Longbow. I’ll go on down to the south coast and tell Hook-Beak to stop playing and get back up here as fast as he can.” She paused then and gave Longbow a sly look. “Then you’ll owe me a kiss-kiss too, wouldn’t you say?”

  Longbow chose not to answer that.

  At first light the following morning, Longbow joined Veltan and Narasan on the top of the central tower of Gunda’s wall. “Are they moving yet?” he quietly asked.

  “Nothing so far,” Veltan replied. “They’ll probably wait until the sun comes up.” He peered down the slope. “Exactly where did you put Omago’s men, Commander?”

  “Keselo’s stationed them at the outer edges of the breastworks,” Narasan replied. “If things here go pretty much the way they did back in the ravine, the main enemy attacks will hit the center of that outermost breastworks. Omago’s men haven’t been involved in any real conflict as yet, and over the years we’ve found that it’s usually best to sort of ease new warriors into serious battles. I don’t want to offend you, Veltan, but I’m fairly sure that a goodly number of your farmers won’t really have the stomach for killing.”

  “I think they might surprise you, Narasan. Omago can be very clever when the need arises, and he made quite an issue of the fact that the creatures of the Wasteland are primarily bugs—no matter what they appear to be—and farmers absolutely hate bugs.”

  “We’ll see,” Narasan replied a bit dubiously.

  Longbow was peering down the slope in the dim light of early morning. “They’re starting to move,” he said quietly, pointing out at the rocky Wasteland.

  “I don’t quite—” Veltan began. “Oh, now I see them,” he said. “They’re quite some distance from the first barricade, aren’t they?”

  “We surprised them several times during the war in the ravine,” Longbow explained. “Apparently, the Vlagh doesn’t like surprises very much.”

  “I’ll have to admit that I don’t really know all that much about them,” Veltan said a bit ruefully. “The real expert in my family is Dahlaine. Before the emergence of people, Dahlaine spent eons studying insects. From what he told me once, the Vlagh is something on the order of a thief. When it sees a characteristic that might be useful, it attempts to duplicate it. I’m just guessing here, but I’d say that almost all of its experiments fail, and the altered creatures are dead before they even come out of the eggs. Every so often, though, one of them survives, and the Vlagh duplicates it by the thousands. Then it begins to experiment with the survivors.”

  “That sort of explains all these new varieties of enemies, doesn’t it?” Narasan mused. “The tiny ones we encountered in your sister’s Domain didn’t turn out too well—particularly in the face of those natural disasters. This time we have enemies that fly, as well as enemies that wear armor.”

  “Not to mention some other enemies who appear to be real people,” Longbow added. “This might just turn out to be a very interesting war.”

  “I’d really prefer one that was boring,” Narasan added. “Interesting wars tend to set my teeth on edge.”

  As had almost always been the case during the war in Zelana’s Domain, the attack on the outer breastworks began with a hollow-sounding roar coming from somewhere off to the rear of the advancing force. Longbow noted that the larger servants of the Vlagh were not nearly as agile nor as quick as the smaller ones had been, and they proved to be easier targets for the Trogite archers Red-Beard had been training.

  As the sun rose up over the ridge line to the east, Rabbit came up the steps to the top of the wall. “Can you see Keselo down there?” he asked. “I don’t really have very many Trogite friends, so I don’t want to lose him.”

  “He’s over on the left side of what Narasan calls the ‘breastworks.’ Narasan says that it’s fairly standard practice to sort of ease beginning soldiers into the main battle.”

  “I don’t think those farmers are going to work out all that well, Longbow,” the little Maag said dubiously. “If you want to make a warrior out of somebody you need to start out when he’s a lot younger than most of the people Omago gathered up are, and the pay needs to be better.”

  “We’ll see.”

  There were more than a dozen of those chest-high barricades laid out across the slope that ran down to the Wasteland, and Narasan’s soldiers—along with Veltan’s farmers—were manning the one farthest away from Gunda’s wall. Longbow and his little friend weren’t able to see very many details, but it appeared that the Trogites weren’t really having too much trouble holding the overgrown snake-men back.

  Then, along about noon, another of those commanding roars came from quite some distance back out in the Wasteland, and the surviving enemies turned and fled back into the red-tinged desert.

  “Now that’s something we never saw back in the ravine,” Rabbit said. “I thought that the bug-people were too stupid to even know how to turn and run.”

  “Maybe they learned a few things in the ravine,” Longbow suggested.

  “I thought you had to have brains to learn,” Rabbit scoffed, “and bugs don’t have brains, do they?”

  “They do have a brain, little friend,” Longbow disagreed, “but they don’t carry it around with them. It’s the Vlagh—or more probably ‘the overmind’—that does all the thinking. Maybe the ‘overmind’ finally realized that throwing servants away isn’t really a good way to win a war.”

  The golden summer afternoon wore on, and there were no further attacks by the servants of the Vlagh. The somewhat tentative nature of this first attack seemed to make everyone atop Gunda’s wall a bit edgy. It was increasingly obvious that most of Narasan’s men shared Longbow’s suspicion that their enemy had in some sense come to realize that sheer brute force had little chance of success.

  “I don’t like this at all, Narasan,” Gunda admitted. “If that thing out there is starting to think—even a little bit—we could be in a lot of trouble here. The midget snake-men we came up against back in the ravine weren’t really clever enough to be able to tell night from day, but these bigger ones? I don’t know. If one of them just happens to pi
ck up a rock and throw it at us, we’re looking at an entirely different war.”

  “You’re being obvious, Gunda,” Narasan observed. “For right now, about all we can do is remain flexible. If the enemy comes up with anything at all new and different, we’ll have to come up with ways to deal with it—in a hurry, most likely.”

  The sun was low over the western ridge when Keselo came on up to the wall. He quickly climbed up the rope ladder and joined Longbow and the others on top of the central tower.

  “The enemies seem to be quite a bit bigger this time, Commander,” he reported to Narasan.

  “We thought that was the case,” Narasan replied. “Did you notice any other peculiarities?”

  “They’re just a little awkward, sir, and they can’t move quite as fast as the smaller ones back in the ravine.”

  “Do they still have the fangs and stingers?” Gunda asked.

  Keselo nodded. “That part hasn’t changed. Their mouth-fangs are larger, and the stingers on their forearms are longer.”

  “That would suggest that their venom sacs are larger, wouldn’t it?” Rabbit asked.

  “We didn’t take one apart to verify that, friend Rabbit.”

  “Just offhand, how many of them did the soldiers kill?” Gunda asked.

  “Several hundred anyway,” Keselo replied. “I didn’t walk along the breastworks and take a count. From what I saw, though, it appears that the venom on our spear-points is still strong enough to kill them. That had me just a bit worried, to be honest about it. If that venom we gathered at Lattash had lost its potency, we could have been in a lot of trouble. The reason I really came up here was to get permission to move Omago’s farmers closer to the center of the breastworks. They seemed to feel just a bit left out because their positions were off to the sides where they were fairly safe. Now that they’ve seen how real soldiers operate, they’d like to see a bit more action.”