Touched by the Gods
Page 12
They would continue in this fashion, adding to their numbers, until the Nazakri controlled an unbeatable force, a force that could march across the central plains to Seidabar and destroy the Domdur capital, throw down the walls of their vaunted citadel and slaughter their abominable Empress and all her kin. Rebiri estimated ten thousand nightwalkers would be sufficient.
He had had his fill of the little pinpricks he had inflicted on the Domdur here in the lands east of the Govya Mountains. Killing a few officials, terrorizing Matuans – what good was any of that, in the long run? The Domdur could endure a century of such trivial attacks; they could simply outlive Rebiri, and Aldassi, his spirit contaminated by his feeble sun magic, could not control the nightwalkers or make more of them once Rebiri was gone.
No, if he was to avenge Basari's defeat and free the Olnami from Domdur oppression, he had to strike at the Empire's heart, at Seidabar.
It was his destiny to destroy Seidabar; he knew it.
A god had told him.
He had not known it was a god at first; he was not even aware that anything had been addressing him. He had known things, known that fate had chosen him for greatness, but he had not known how he knew until that first nightwalker, the one he had created in the alleys of Pai Shin, had told him.
“A god speaks to you,” the nightwalker had said.
At first Rebiri had thought the undead thing was speaking metaphorically in referring to the sense of destiny the Olnami warlord felt, but eventually he had realized that the creature meant it literally.
“Then the gods favor me?” he had asked it.
“I know only that one god speaks to you,” the nightwalker had said. “I can sense it, one of my ancient foes, at times.”
“One of your foes? One of the Domdur gods? Which is it?”
“I don't know,” the nightwalker said. “It is a god, and it speaks to you. That's all I know.”
That was hardly a satisfying explanation, but in time Rebiri had realized that it was enough.
A god spoke to him. The sense of destiny he felt was the words of a god.
The gods favored him, then. The gods wanted him to carry out his plan. They wanted him to destroy Seidabar and throw down the Domdur.
The rumors were surely true, then; the Domdur had fallen from divine favor. The oracles had fallen silent not because the gods thought the Domdur ready to rule the world without divine guidance, but because the gods had abandoned the Domdur. The gods wanted an end to their domination of everything beneath the Hundred Moons.
That was surely it – but the nightwalker would not confirm it, nor did the god who spoke to him manifest in any more obvious manner. There were times when he knew things, when he was certain of the rightness of an action, when he could sense that his eventual triumph was inevitable.
But that was all. No oracles spoke to him, no visions came to him in his dreams.
Still, it was enough.
The gods favored him. He would make his ten thousand nightwalkers, and he would destroy the Domdur.
Of course, making ten thousand nightwalkers would take time; the black crystal on his staff could only contain enough darkness to create perhaps forty or fifty before it required renewal.
But he had time. The fire in his staff's other crystal made him strong, gave him the power to defend himself from whatever might threaten him. He was old, but still far from death. He could build his forces up steadily, moving about the slopes of the mountains, letting the nightwalkers guide him to the caves and hollows where the darkness could be found. In time, he would have his army, enough to destroy Seidabar.
Already, he thought he might have enough to take the Domdur fortress at Ai Varach. If the Empire ever stirred itself enough to send an army to hunt him down, he would do that, make Ai Varach his base, and build his forces there until they were ready to make the long march across the open plain.
But he doubted he would ever need to. So far the Empire had done almost nothing to oppose him. Guards had been increased, warnings issued, but no armies had marched out against him.
Three centuries earlier Domdur armies had swept through Olnami like swarms of locusts, thousands upon thousands of soldiers, overwhelming everything with their numbers. Now the garrison at Ai Varach was a few hundred men, the city guards in Pai Shin the same.
The Domdur had grown weak. Their time was over. He would march unopposed across the plain, and would smash the gates of Seidabar. It was inevitable.
The Domdur would not, could not, stop him.
He smiled as the snow began to erupt, and corpses to stir and sit upright. Even the stink was not enough to ruin his mood.
#
Prince Granzer looked at the report Lord Gornir had handed him and frowned. He settled farther back in his chair, then looked up across the table at Gornir.
“You're sure of the accuracy of this?” he asked.
“As sure as I can be,” Gornir replied. His chair at the Council's table was empty; he stood at the center of the half-ring to address his fellows. “The rebels have switched their tactics, from scattered assassinations and terrorism to systematic slaughter. Furthermore, their numbers are growing steadily.”
“But how is that possible?” Lady Mirashan asked. “I don't doubt it, my own sources report the same, but I still have no reports of serious discontent with anything but our failure to destroy the insurgents. Where are they recruiting these new members?”
“They are apparently transforming the dead into nightwalkers, my lady,” Gornir said. “I don't know how, or even why, but they seem to be doing it.”
“That's insane,” Lord Kadan protested.
“That does not mean it isn't true,” Lord Sulibai remarked from the far end of the table.
“It doesn't mean it is true, either,” Kadan retorted.
“Lord Kadan,” Prince Granzer said, his voice deep and commanding. “Why have your soldiers not yet hunted down these troublemakers and dealt with them?”
Kadan's jaw worked, and his face reddened.
“I'm not the divine champion,” he said. “I don't have any oracles telling me what to do.”
“We know that,” Lady Dalbisha snapped. “But you do have the Imperial Army. So why haven't you used it?”
“Because I don't have the numbers I need to do it,” he said. “I don't have the resources.”
“Why not?” Granzer asked.
“Because I haven't needed them,” Kadan replied. “We've been at peace for centuries; who wants to pay a lot of soldiers to sit in a barracks, eating and drinking with tax money? We keep enough men in the cities and garrisons to deal with any ordinary trouble; we never expected anything like this.”
“Expected or not, it appears to be happening,” Granzer pointed out. “Had we acted immediately when this black wizard first appeared, perhaps we could have prevented it, but we did not, and it's happening. Now, what can we do about it?”
“If the champion were known...” Lord Orbalir began.
“He's not,” Lord Graush snapped. “We've been looking for him, believe me. We've got a dozen people claiming to be him. What we don't have is him.”
“Well, champion or no champion, give me the men and the money and the other resources, and I'll take care of it,” Kadan said angrily.
“You guarantee that?” Gornir asked.
Kadan's face grew even redder.
“No, I don't guarantee it,” he said. “We're up against hundreds of nightwalkers, according to these reports, and a black magician who might be capable of anything. The earth could open and swallow us all at any moment. But if these creatures can be stopped by any natural means, then if you give me what I need, yes, I can stop it.”
“Good enough,” Granzer said, slamming a fist down on the table. “Then you'll have what you need, whatever it is.”
Chapter Fourteen
Malledd smiled as Hmar showed him the trick. It was a simple little twist that did it, that locked the two pieces of iron solidly together.
“That'll stay sealed tight,” Hmar told him. “Unless you know the trick to opening it.”
“You can't just untwist it?” Malledd asked. Then he saw that no, you couldn't, once the iron tongue had snapped into place.
“Not just like that. You have to press here, you see...”
“Father! Grandfather!”
The two men looked up, startled, to see Neyil running down the sunlit lane toward the smithy, his little boots splashing heedlessly through the puddles left by the morning's rain. Malledd put the locking device down on the workbench and went to the door to meet the boy.
Neyil stopped, panting, with one hand on the doorframe; Malledd knelt down to talk on the boy's own level, and waited for him to catch his breath.
It worried him, sometimes, that Neyil seemed to be winded so easily. When Malledd had been six – or for that matter, any other age – he had been able to run all day without tiring. He'd mentioned it to Anva, and to Hmar, and to his mother and his sisters and his uncle Sparrak, but none of them seemed at all concerned.
“You were the odd one, boy,” Uncle Sparrak had told him. “Neyil's just not as sturdy as you were – and neither is anyone else.”
“What is it, Neyil?” Malledd asked, as he knelt.
“Soldiers!” Neyil said excitedly. “In the square! Coats red as blood, with swords and helmets!”
Malledd glanced up uneasily at Hmar, then turned back to the boy.
“What do they want here, did they say? Are they just passing through?”
Neyil shook his head. “They're recruiting,” he said. “They said so. And they've got the tax collector with them, with the tax rolls.”
Malledd looked up at his father. “Do you think we should go see?” he asked.
“As smiths, we're probably exempt from whatever demands they're making,” Hmar said, chewing thoughtfully on his beard, “but yes, I think it would be a good idea to find out what's going on.”
Malledd nodded.
This wasn't really a surprise. The rumors Malledd had first heard from Vadeviya almost five years before had become commonplace not long after the priest's visit, and within a year or so stories had begun to trickle in of open insurrection in Olnamia and Matua, and atrocities committed in the other eastern provinces.
As if that weren't bad enough, there had been tales of darker things than simple rebellion. The Olnamian rebels were reportedly using black magic of some sort, magic that could blast through fortress walls, magic that could make the dead walk, could make corpses fight against the Domdur like the nightwalkers in the old legends.
Black magic of the kind in the ancient stories didn't sound likely, but in these days of silent oracles and the New Magic, who could be sure? The older folk said that the gods wouldn't allow such things, but the gods didn't seem to be paying as much attention to the Domdur Empire as they once had. As Malledd stepped out of the smithy he glanced up at the shining sky and saw a score of tiny moons gleaming overhead, scattered among the wisps of cloud.
As a child he had imagined the gods sitting up there on their moons, looking down benevolently at their human subjects; now he wondered if perhaps they weren't too busy with their own mysterious concerns to remember that a world lay below them.
Certainly, it was hard to understand how the gods could allow the eastern lands to erupt in rebellion. The unrest had spread from Olnamia to Matua and Greya and Govya, and the gods had done nothing. The priests had simply shrugged when they were questioned about it. “The oracles are still silent,” they said.
Malledd had heard stories of Domdur outposts burned, Domdur governors horribly murdered, and had wondered with the rest why the gods did nothing – but he had also wondered, as no one else in Grozerodz dared do openly, whether he should be doing something.
Was he really the gods' champion? Should he be in Olnamia, fighting the rebels?
What could he do that another man couldn't? What did it mean to be the champion? The letter from Dolkout spoke of supernatural endurance and vitality, but as far as Malledd knew, that just meant he was big and strong and didn't tire easily. What difference could one man, however strong, make?
Those questions never went away entirely; any time any mention was made of the turmoil in the east, they assailed him anew. As he and Hmar and Neyil marched up to the town square they were back again, stronger than ever. The beautiful spring weather did nothing to assuage his doubts; if anything, seeing how lovely the world could be made them worse. The last traces of the recent winter – which had been mild, in any case – had vanished, and the trees were green, the untilled fields thick with wildflowers.
It seemed, by the time they reached the square, that the entire population of Grozerodz was there. Malledd saw his sisters and their husbands, saw Onnell and all his other friends, all his regular customers, gathered around the front of Bardetta's tavern.
Even tall as he was, Malledd couldn't see much at first over that throng; he could see sunlight glinting from polished metal helmets and a bright flash of red that might be a soldier's tunic, but no more than that.
But then someone lifted one of the helmeted men up on something – Malledd guessed that Bardetta had rolled out a barrel for the purpose.
Sure enough, the man was a soldier, wearing the red and gold of the Domdur dress uniform. Malledd had glimpsed soldiers sometimes on his visits to Biekedau; he had never seen one in Grozerodz before. It was a disquieting sight, a sign of the troubled times.
The soldier raised his hands for silence, and the crowd quieted.
“People of Grozerodz!” he called. “I am Lieutenant Grudar, and my companions and I have come here today looking for volunteers!”
That was just as Neyil had said. Malledd's lips tightened.
“As some of you may have heard,” Grudar said, “there is unrest in the eastern continental provinces. A wizard calling himself Nazakri and claiming to be the king of Olnamia has rebelled against our beloved Empress. He has used his black arts to raise an army, an army that is even now crossing the Govya Mountains intent on the destruction of the entire Domdur Empire! The Empress and the Imperial Council have authorized the army to issue a call for volunteers – and here I am. I'm passing through on my way to Yildau; when I return this way, in three or four days, I will be glad to escort any men from this village who are willing to fight for the Empire to Seidabar, where they may join the Imperial Army.”
He paused to catch his breath, and murmurs ran through the crowd.
“I would remind you,” Grudar continued, “that it is the Empire that feeds and shelters us, the Empire that the gods chose as the rightful government of everything beneath the Hundred Moons. To serve the Empire is an honor and a privilege!” Then he reached down and caught the hand of another man, and raised it up. “I would also remind you that the Empire has the ancient right to claim the services of one man from each household in lieu of taxes, and that soldiers and veterans are exempt from all taxation. Vanuir here is the tax collector responsible for Grozerodz and Duvrenarodz and Uamor, and has brought a copy of the records with him. The names and families of any volunteer will be recorded, and when that volunteer passes muster in Seidabar, his family will be struck from the tax rolls.”
“Are you pressing men?” someone called.
Grudar shook his head. “It will be a sad and sorry day, my friend, when the Domdur Empire must once again resort to the right of conscription, as we did centuries ago! No, we are calling for volunteers – but if we do not have enough, and someday we find a foe at the gates of Seidabar... well, the Empire does have that right.”
“I'll go,” a man called.
A chorus of shouts burst out – a few men volunteering, while others cheered them on or called back that they were fools.
Grudar held up his hands for silence.
“We'
re not taking anyone with us now,” he said, “but when we come back this way with the recruits from Yildau, Uamor, and Duvrenarodz in a triad or so, anyone who wishes to join us will be welcome. You have at least two days, probably four, in which to make up your minds and pack up whatever possessions you feel you must bring – including one day's food and water, please. Since we don't know how many we'll have, we weren't able to bring provisions. We'll take care of that in Biekedau before we make the march to Seidabar, but please bring enough for the first day.” He looked out over the crowd, then spread his arms wide. “That's all, I think – and I trust Grozerodz will do the full measure of its duty to the Empire. If anyone has a question, my companions and I will remain here for another hour or so to answer you. Thank you!” He bowed, then climbed down from the barrel.
The crowd began to shrink then, as some crowded in more closely and others drifted away. Malledd stood where he was, observing.
Hmar put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, son,” he said. “We have a lockbox to finish.”
“You go on,” Malledd said, not moving. “I need to think.”
Hmar glanced uneasily from his son to the recruiters and back. “You aren't seriously thinking of volunteering, are you?” he asked.
“I don't know,” Malledd said. “Why not? I'm a healthy man in the prime of life, and of Domdur blood.” He didn't mention the priest's letter, but he didn't have to.
“Are you, Dad?” Neyil asked, excited. “Are you going to be a soldier?”
Malledd smiled down at him, but didn't answer. They had never told Neyil about the priest, and thanks to Malledd's adolescent suppression of the subject no one else in the village had yet mentioned it to the boy. Neyil didn't know his father was allegedly some sort of divine champion; he just thought Malledd was the greatest man in the world.
“You're a smith, not a soldier,” Hmar said. “You have a wife and children. It's not as if the enemy were besieging Seidabar – you heard the man, they're still in the Govya Mountains!”