by Dave Duncan
The man heaved himself erect in his chair to glare at Dosh, and his robe crumbled away to dust.
Without turning, D’ward whispered, “Go!”
Dosh spun around and shot out of the chamber.
27
In panic, he fought his way through darkness, finding the tunnel by ricocheting off furniture, bouncing against tall urns, stumbling over chests, tripping on goblets and vases, knocking down giant candelabras and suits of armor. Debris cascaded to the floor behind him, and his flight must have sounded like an earthquake. He had no idea what sort of a door he would find, or if he would be able to open it. In the end there was no door—he flailed out into moonlight and rolled head over heels down the steps.
That was not the last of his troubles. Evidently the trespassers’ violation of the sanctuary had been observed and all the available clergy had assembled to beseech Visek’s forgiveness. At least forty white-robed priests and priestesses were on their knees there, chanting a lament. Dosh plowed into them like a runaway snowball, bowling over seven or eight before he came to a stop.
The green moon whirled in the sky above him, accompanied by flashes of flame and more stars than he had ever seen before. Three or four men threw themselves on top of him to restrain him, although he would not have been capable of even sitting up, let alone making a run for it.
The singing ended. People shouted. Order of a sort was restored.
Dosh found himself lying on the floor, with his arms and legs pinned. A burning agony in his nose was spraying blood. He peered up groggily at a ring of irate faces. Several tried to speak at once before one elderly man established his seniority.
“Where is your accomplice?” he screeched. He was standing between Dosh’s widespread legs and looked dangerously liable to start kicking if he did not receive a satisfactory answer.
Dosh licked his lips, choking on blood from his nose. His left ankle throbbed. “With Holy Visek, of course.” The old man hesitated, considering the implications.
Poor Dosh had been in tight spots before, although probably none tighter than this. He groped for self-confidence, which was not readily accessible in his present condition. “He will be along shortly. Is this how you normally treat the Great One’s guests?”
Amazingly, it worked—or at least the old man did not lash out with his feet, which was the most immediate danger. He scowled uncertainly and then stepped back. “Get him up!”
The hands holding Dosh’s legs were removed. Those on his arms heaved him erect. The whole temple swayed vertiginously and a spasm of agony shot through his ankle. He stumbled and was held upright, balancing on one foot, nauseated by the battering and the blood he had swallowed.
“Who are you?”
That was a very good question, but it did not seem to have a suitable reply. “Tion,” came to mind. No one would question a god’s right to come calling on another, but a god would not fall down a flight of steps; a god would not arrive cut, bruised, and unable to put any weight on his left foot.
“A friend of the Liberator’s,” was another possibility. It had the advantage of being the truth, but it would lead to extremely unpleasant consequences.
“I am not at liberty to answer that,” Dosh said.
Someone struck him and the temple rocked again. This time he did throw up, which at least made the senior priest back away and held off further questioning for a moment.
But not for long.
“Guards!” squealed the old man, almost gibbering in his fury.
The cordon of priests and priestesses parted to admit a squad of armed men, moonlight glittering on blades and armor and reptilian eyes.
“Interrogate this criminal!” the high priest quavered. “Find out who he is and what he is doing. Get the truth out of him.”
The shiniest guard looked around uneasily. “Here, Venerable One?”
“Yes, here! Now! Immediately!”
As soldiers replaced the priests holding his arms, Dosh braced himself for unpleasant experiences. Oh, poor, poor Dosh!
“What are you doing?” demanded a voice from the throne. D’ward came striding down the steps. “Release that man!”
He wore nothing but a peasant’s loincloth, but his voice rang with the brazen prestige of bugles. The crowd opened, men and women and even soldiers backing away. Dosh swayed and steadied, teetering on one leg.
Blue eyes seared the onlookers. “Stand back!” They all retreated one more step. “Farther!” The clearing widened. Then D’ward turned to Dosh and pulled a face at what he saw. He reached out and touched his throbbing, burning nose. The pain stopped instantly. Dosh wiped off the blood with his arm.
“And what’s wrong with your foot?”
Dosh felt better already. This breather might not last, but every minute he was not being questioned by those thugs was an improvement. “I broke my ankle.” He thought it was only sprained, but that was a mere quibble.
“Who are you?” The high priest had lost much of his screech.
D’ward turned and studied him for a moment. “Who do you say is the god of prophecy?”
The old man twitched in indignation. “Holy Visek in their avatar of Waatuun.”
“And I am D’ward Liberator, the one foretold.”
Screech became scream. “The heretic?”
Without deigning to answer, D’ward dropped to one knee and took Dosh’s ankle in his hands. His fingers felt ice cold on the hot swelling. He pulled the foot down to the floor.
“Try that.”
Dosh put his weight on it and nothing nasty happened. “That’s fine now,” he said calmly. “Thank you.” He must have banged his head harder than he realized, for obviously this could not be happening. On the other hand, there was not a closed mouth in the audience.
D’ward rose and regarded the onlookers as a proud housewife might inspect cockroaches in her larder. He was taller than almost all of them, which helped. “I am the Liberator. I had business with Visek. Is that any concern of yours? It is prophesied that I shall bring death to Death. And it is written, ‘Hurt and sickness, yea death itself, shall he take from us. Oh rejoice!’”
The high priest’s knees began to buckle, but a younger, larger man beside him caught him by the elbow and held him upright. “The Liberator preaches foulest heresy against the Holy Gods!”
D’ward’s eyes spat contempt at him. “How often have you heard the Liberator preach?”
“I would not let his lies foul my ears!”
“Then let his deeds open your eyes! ‘Rejoice!’ the prophecy says. You have just seen a wonder. What does it take to save you from your ignorance and error? I tell you to rejoice!”
The man looked at Dosh’s nose, down at his ankle. Then he sank to his knees. The high priest followed more circumspectly, and all the rest also. Bronze helmets and white turbans dipped to the floor. Oh, that was much better!
“Rejoice!” D’ward snapped. “Rejoice until the sun rises to warm your cold and unbelieving hearts.” He nudged Dosh and strode away.
Amazingly, no one tried to stop them. Soldiers and clergy cowered on their faces and the most notorious heretic in the Vales walked away unchallenged, his companion at his side. As they trotted out between the pillars and down the steps, he remarked casually, “You know, that was a lot closer than it looked.”
But the priests were not the only ones troubled by ignorance and error. Dosh’s eyes also had just been opened. “I have been a fool!” he wailed. “Lord, forgive—”
“Never mind that now! Can you run? Because I haven’t got anything left! We’ll have to manage on honest sweat and muscle. Can you run?”
“Yes, master.”
“Good man. Then let’s get out of here before they change their minds.”
They ran. The way back was a thousand times longer than the way there had been. Trumb dipped to the west and duly eclipsed, becoming a black moon against a glory of stars, and only the cold blue glow of Ysh lit the road. Dosh should have worried about reapers t
hen, but he was beyond such trivia. As the eclipse ended, clouds moved in; rain began to fall, slowing the pace even more.
He was tortured by both remorse and fury at his own blindness. He had known D’ward for years and identified him as the Liberator earlier than anyone else. He had seen him perform miracles before—they had all been unobtrusive, deniable miracles, but they should have been enough. Lack of morals never bothered him, but he hated to think of himself as lacking brains. In the last half fortnight he had heard D’ward preach about a dozen times, and yet he had let the words roll off his mind like water off a candle. Now he tried to recall all those words, to understand just how much he had missed.
What was D’ward, then? Was he a man sent by the gods, or was he a god himself? Surely only a god could have healed that ankle? Yet D’ward denied the gods. There was only one god, he said, a god Undivided, indivisible. The puzzle was too great to solve on a cold, wet night, jogging along in the mud. Fatigue blurred his mind until he could not think, could only slog along, following the pale glimmer of D’ward’s back in the darkness.
The first time they stopped at a stream to drink, even before he had washed off the dried blood, he tried to ask for guidance and forgiveness.
“Don’t worry about all that now,” D’ward said. “There is time yet to straighten it all out. How are your bruises?”
As the hours passed, Dosh began to stumble more and more often. D’ward would hear his steps falter and come back and help him up, plastered with mud, and get him moving again. And then even D’ward seemed to run out of strength—although his strength was much more strength of will than of body, for he too was reeling on his feet. And the rain was becoming a downpour.
They took shelter under a bridge at a place where the road ran straight, a low causeway crossing marsh and lakes. At intervals it rose on timber bridges to let the wandering streams drain through, but at this time of year the water was low, exposing sand. The two of them crawled underneath and stretched out between the weed-furred piles with groans of contentment. Rain drummed on the planks only inches above them, but they were out of it.
Almost out of it—Dosh eased away from a dribble.
“Sleep awhile,” D’ward mumbled.
“One fortnight or two?”
“Just one. When Prat’han wakes up and finds I’m not there, he’s going to murder me.”
After a bemused moment, Dosh worked out why that sounded funny, and surprised himself with a chuckle.
“Mm?” D’ward said. “Oh, well, when I get back he will. He’ll have to manage somehow, won’t he? Trouble is, we have a long trek to do today.”
“Skip it,” Dosh murmured. The Liberator had told Visek that he went from node to node. He wondered what a node was. “Rest today, go tomorrow.”
D’ward began muttering about winter being due and the problem of finding enough food if the Free stayed in one place, but his voice came from a long way away….
“Watch it!” A warning hand caught Dosh’s head just before he jerked it up and cracked it against a beam.
He blinked in alarm, wondering where he was, why he was so confoundedly cold, wet, and sore, and who the bastard was who was sprinkling water on him. Then he heard the noise, and registered the vibration in the timbers above him that was shaking off the moisture. Green moonlight shone on the stream beyond the bridge, so they had not slept very long. An hour, perhaps, not as much as two. The rain had stopped.
“What…?”
“Soldiers!”
Many hooves tramping across the bridge.
Dosh heaved himself up on an elbow to peer over his companion and study the shadows on the water. He saw shapes of lancers on moas, heading west. He looked at D’ward, two eyes shining in the darkness, and asked, “They’re after us?”
“Not us two, I think. The Free. We’ll have to wait until they’re gone, and then go back and try to cut around the lakes.”
“No!” Dosh said. “Once they’re off the bridge, they’ll speed up again. We’ll never get there before them, no matter what way we go.”
D’ward groaned. “Suppose you’re right.”
The rear guard passed and the noise faded into the distance.
Why go on? If the Niolian cavalry was moving against the Free, then the Liberator would return to find his followers massacred, arrested, or scattered. But of course D’ward would go back. There would be no talking him into deserting. And if he were there, then he might work another miracle, even without the help of Irepit. He was the Liberator.
Dosh thought back to his servitude with Tarion, the Nagian cavalryleader. “It may be possible. They’ll bivouac before dawn to rest their mounts. We may get in front of them then.”
It sounded impossible. It was impossible, for two exhausted men on battered, bleeding feet. But they did it.
As dawn was painting rosy tints on Niolwall ahead of them, they trotted past a field where moas were grazing on stubble and men huddled around campfires. Those proud lancers showed no interest in two peasants going by on foot and did not challenge. As soon as they were out of sight, D’ward quickened the pace. Somehow Dosh kept up with him on his shorter legs.
The campsite of the Free was much less organized and covered a far greater area. The pilgrims were awake, most grouped along the riverbank, washing, rolling up bedding if they had any, singing hymns, or eating whatever scraps they had saved from the evening meal. Few of them noticed the two bedraggled, mud-splattered young men walking along the road, and probably none recognized their leader without his priestly gown.
On the other side of the trail, on the boulder-strewn slope with the Liberator’s tent near the pulpit rock, the Warband with shields and spears was moving over the ground like foraging ants, as if searching for bodies. Prat’han was the first to recognize the newcomers. The big man shouted and came leaping down the hill to greet them, looking ready to weep with relief—and also about ready to run his spear through Dosh for having abducted the Liberator. The rest of the warriors came running in to cluster around. Dosh flopped down on the grass.
D’ward remained standing, drooping with fatigue. “Water, please, food if there is any. I’ve got to clean up and dress. Pass the word that I will not preach this morning and get them moving. We’re going to have trouble.”
Teeth shone. “We can sharpen our spears now?” Gopaenum demanded.
“Yes. Yes, you can sharpen your spears. And I fear you may blunt them, too, before the day is out. A troop of lancers’ll be here very shortly.” D’ward rubbed his eyes wearily. “We mustn’t lie around here like fish on a slab. Get everyone moving.” He pointed.
The trail ahead crossed the river at a ford and then wound off through a watery morass of lake and sedge.
“Can’t ride moas through that!” Part’han said, sounding disappointed.
“Can’t follow us more than two or maybe three abreast, either!” crowed little Tielan Trader, who had more brains than was thought seemly back in Nagvale. “You want us to hold the bastards off, Liberator? Hold the road?”
“No. I’d rather we got ahead of the crowd. Or as much of it as we can.” D’ward limped off toward the tent. Prat’han snapped orders and then followed him.
Suddenly alone, Dosh lay back on the grass. In the last horrible hour he had been unable to think at all. He had almost forgotten the lancers. Now he had arrived, the Liberator had arrived, and the Niolian cavalry would doubtless arrive very soon.
He ought to go back down to the river and clean up, but he did not think he could move another step. He could just curl up where he was and hope the lancers did not notice him or care about one heretic—or would at least not wake him before they skewered him. A loud jingling…He forced his eyelids open. Prat’han Potter was squatting beside him like a small mountain, shaking the money bag and grinning like a rock eater.
“Don’t you want this back?”
Dosh’s mouth felt full of sand. “Not especially. You hang on to it. I’m in no fit state to guard it.”
/> The big man chuckled and produced a hunk of bread as big as two fists. “How about this then?”
Instantly Dosh was aware of a monstrous hunger raging inside him. He heaved himself up on an elbow. “Now that does look interesting!”
“Cheese? Pickles? Smoked fish?”
Afraid he might drown in his own saliva, Dosh sat up. “Brother Prat’han, you have just earned a place among the stars of heaven.” He bit greedily. “I mean, you will be united forever with the True God,” he corrected.
His companion grinned approvingly at this declaration of Liberator creed.
Already D’ward was striding down the hill to the river, conspicuous in his hooded gray robe, surrounded by the War-band. Perhaps a hundred of the Free had already crossed the ford and were moving off along the road into the marshes. All the rest would follow the Liberator and the lancers would come and that plan seemed totally wrong. Dosh thumped his sleepy brain; he had just worked out the answer when Prat’han put the question, frowning.
“What happens when the troopers get here?”
What he meant was, “D’ward doesn’t usually hide behind his friends.”
“They’ll use a lot of military jargon,” Dosh said, munching. “Technical terms for feces and impregnation and unnatural sex that god-fearing people like you don’t know. They won’t fancy charging two or three abreast along miles of track with swamp on both sides and lots of cover for archers or spearsmen, not to mention a thousand pilgrims getting in the way. If they do try it, the pilgrims can jump into the water and escape.”
Prat’han grinned, a mouthful of ivory. “So they’ll have to go the long way round and catch us at the other end? Wherever that is?”
“Probably.” Dosh groaned and began to rise.
Prat’han offered a hand and hauled him upright. He handed over his spear. “Take this. Your feet look like raw meat. We get down to the river, I’ll clean them up for you. Wrap them, too.”