The Treasured One: Book Two of The Dreamers

by Eddings, Leigh;Eddings, David

  “That’s not really much of a problem, Padan,” Skell said. “Every Maag longship has fish-netting on board. If we can catch fish, we don’t have to sail back to port to buy more beans. I’ll talk it over with cousin Sorgan when he gets up here, but after he sees that dead bug-bat, I’m sure he’ll go along with Rabbit’s idea. The notion of a flying enemy probably won’t sit any better with him than it does with me.”

  Skell’s brother came up out of the narrow creekbed about midmorning the following day and joined Skell’s scouting party near the geyser. “Now that’s something you don’t see very often,” he said, pointing at the geyser. “I can’t remember the last time I saw a waterspout on dry land.”

  “Strange things happen in strange country, Torl,” Skell said. “Are your men stringing ropes up along that creek?”

  “They’re only about an hour behind me, and cousin Sorgan and the Trogs aren’t very far behind them.”

  “Good. We’re probably going to need some forts in place before too much longer.”

  “Have you spotted any enemies yet?”

  “Oh, yes. We didn’t know that they were enemies right at first, but they’re out there.”

  “Boring holes through the ground again?”

  “Not that we know about. I suppose it’s possible, but the only ones we’ve seen so far have been flying.”

  “You’re not serious!”

  “I’m afraid so, Torl. That Vlagh thing’s been experimenting again, and now we’ve got bats watching everything we do.”

  “Bats?” Torl said incredulously.

  “It didn’t make me very happy either, Torl. We might just have to hole up until the archers get here—at least after the sun goes down. We haven’t seen any of them in the daytime yet.”

  “Are they poisonous—like those snake-men we came up against back in the ravine?”

  “Red-Beard says they are. Longbow killed one of them so we could take a look at it, and Red-Beard told me he was catching the smell of venom when he got close to it.”

  “How can we possibly hide from them after the sun goes down?” Torl’s voice was just a bit shrill.

  “Calm down, Torl,” Skell told him. “That clever little smith from the Seagull has already come up with an easy answer. All we’re really going to need is fishnet, and every Maag ship in the fleet’s got about a half mile of fishnet stored in the hold. When one of those bat-bugs gets all tangled up in the netting, he won’t be a problem anymore.”

  “Sometimes that little Rabbit fellow’s so smart that he makes me sick.”

  “Just be glad that he’s on our side, little brother,” Skell said.

  5

  Cousin Sorgan and Narasan the Trog came up out of the narrow gorge about noon that day and joined Skell’s small group of scouts near the geyser. “Ho, Skell!” Sorgan shouted, “have you seen any snake-men up here yet?”

  “Not a one, cousin,” Skell replied.

  “We got up here before they did, then,” Sorgan said.

  “I wouldn’t start celebrating just yet, Sorgan,” Skell said. “I think we might end up missing those snake-men before this is all over.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We’ve got a whole new breed of enemies this time, Sorgan. These enemies know how to fly.”

  “That’s not funny, Skell.”

  “Do you see me laughing, cousin?”

  “You’re just making this up.”

  “Not even a little bit. We’ve got a dead one under that brush pile over by that water spout. It’s got bat wings and a bug head. Come and look for yourself. There were dozens of bats flapping around one night, and Longbow had one of those hunches he gets all the time, and he picked one of the bats out of the sky with an arrow. As it turned out, that hunch of his probably saved a lot of lives. When it’s flapping around in the dark, it looks pretty much like an ordinary bat, but when you take a closer look, ‘ordinary’ goes right out the window. It’s a bat with a bug’s head, and just to add to the fun, it’s got a strong smell of that venom the snake-men in the ravine had during the war we fought last spring. We kept the carcass, so you can look for yourself.”

  Skell led them to the temporary camp near the geyser and uncovered the bug-bat’s carcass. It was starting to get just a bit ripe, so Skell moved around to the upwind side. “As you can see,” he told them, “It looks like an ordinary bat—or a mouse with wings—right up until you get to its head. That’s when ‘bug’ takes over.”

  “Are you certain that it’s venomous?” Narasan asked dubiously.

  “Red-Beard told us that he could smell the venom,” Skell replied. “I’ll take his word for it. I’m not going to touch the silly thing with my bare hands just to make sure.”

  “Have they killed any of your men?” Narasan asked.

  “Not so far. Longbow thinks that these bug-bats are just scouting for the time being. Bats would make good scouts, wouldn’t they? I’m definitely hoping that scouting around is all our enemy uses these things for. If the whole enemy army’s nothing but bug-bats, we’re in a lot of trouble. Just the thought of an enemy that knows how to fly makes my blood run cold. Rabbit came up with an idea that might work. He suggested that we might want to bring all of our fishnets up here and tent over any place where we’ll be after the sun goes down with netting.”

  “Maybe,” Narasan said a bit dubiously. “How far is it to the most likely invasion route?”

  “Just a few miles off to the north,” Skell replied. “I think it might cause some problems, though. There used to be a ridge line that had pretty much blocked off that slope that leads down to the Wasteland, but quite a while back it seems that there was an earthquake that opened a gap about a mile wide in the ridge. It’ll take us a long time to build a wall that long, so things won’t be nearly as easy as they were back in the ravine.”

  “Let’s go take a look,” Sorgan growled.

  The Trog commander stood looking down at the littered slope leading down to the barren desert of the Wasteland. “Depending on how much time we’ve got, we could use all that loose stone to build barriers that’d hold the enemy back long enough for us to build breastworks across this gap,” he suggested.

  “Only if the enemies have to walk,” Sorgan replied. “If they’re snake-men like the ones we came up against in the ravine, it might work, but if they can fly over the barriers, they’ll be on top of us before we can even blink.” He looked around. “Where is Longbow?” he demanded irritably.

  “He told me this morning that he wanted to take a look at the ridge line off to the west, Cap’n,” Rabbit said. “I think he wants to make sure that the enemies can’t slip around behind us like they did back in the ravine.”

  Sorgan grunted. “Did Red-Beard give you any kind of idea about how long it’s likely to be until the archers get here?”

  “Right after he saw the bug-bat, he took off running, Cap’n,” Rabbit said. “He’s going to hurry them along.”

  “Good. We’re going to need them, I think. Swords and spears won’t be much good this time, I’m afraid.”

  “The Trogs are better at building walls and forts than we are,” Skell told the scar-faced horseman Ekial. “From what I’ve heard, they’ve got walls all over down there in the Land of Trog.”

  “I thought they were called ‘Trogites.’ Why do you shorten it down to ‘Trog’?” Ekial asked.

  “It’s something my brother and I picked up from our papa. He seemed to think that ‘Trogite’ was a term they’d invented to make themselves sound important. Papa didn’t think much of the Trogs. What they call ships are a lot like floating washtubs. That made things a lot easier for us, though, since we could chase down any Trog ship afloat in about a half a day.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “So that we could rob them of the gold they’d stolen from some people off to the west.”

  “How is it that you’re both on the same side in this war, then?”

  “Lady Zelana
hired my cousin Sorgan to gather up a fleet and come here to the Land of Dhrall to fight a war for her.”

  “She’s Dahlaine’s sister, isn’t she?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard, yes.”

  “What’s it like spending all your time out there on the water?” Ekial asked.

  “It’s the best kind of life there is,” Skell told him. “When you’ve got a good ship and a good following wind, it’s almost the same as flying. The air’s clean, and the waves sparkle in the sun like jewels.”

  “You’re starting to sound poetic, Skell,” Ekial said with a faint smile.

  “Life at sea tends to do that to people.”

  “What made you decide to come here to a place where you’d have to fight a war on dry land, then?”

  “Money, Ekial. Lady Zelana’s got more gold than she can even count, and cousin Sorgan brought about a hundred blocks of it to the Land of Maag to hire an army.”

  “That sounds sort of familiar,” Ekial said. “Dahlaine did much the same thing when he came to Malavi to hire horsemen.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a horse,” Skell admitted. “I’ve heard that they’re a lot like cows—except that they don’t have horns.”

  “There are quite a few other differences,” Ekial said. “Horses love to run, and a good horse can run all day if you ask him to. The Land of Malavi doesn’t have very many trees, so it’s all grassland that goes on for hundreds of miles in every direction. In a peculiar way, I suppose we feel much the same about the meadowland as you Maags feel about the sea.”

  “Except that you don’t get wet when you fall off your horse, do you?”

  “Not very often, no.”

  Then there was a sudden blinding flash of light and a shattering crash of thunder, and Veltan was there. “Where’s Narasan?” he demanded.

  “The last time I saw him, he and Sorgan were looking around down there on the slope.” Skell turned and shouted at one of the men building the breastwork. “You there! Go find Narasan and tell him that Veltan wants to see him!”

  “Aye, Cap’n,” the sailor called back, running off down the slope.

  “Is something wrong?” Ekial asked Veltan.

  “We’ve got trouble on down south,” Veltan said tersely. “There’s a whole fleet of Trogite ships landing on the southern beaches, and I don’t think they’re friendly.”

  Skell dispatched runners to bring most of the significant people to the gap overlooking the Wasteland, while Veltan paced back and forth muttering curses under his breath.

  “What’s this all about, Skell?” Sorgan demanded when he arrived.

  “There’s trouble in the wind, cousin,” Skell replied tersely.

  “What else is new and different?”

  “Don’t try to be funny, Sorgan,” Skell snapped. “This is serious business. Now we’ve got two invasions to deal with instead of just one.”

  “That went by a little fast, Skell. Why don’t you give me some details?”

  “Veltan just got here, and he wants to talk to all of us. I’ll let him describe what’s happening. He saw what was going on, but I didn’t. Let’s get it right the first time, for a change.”

  By the time the others had all reached Skell’s temporary camp, Veltan had managed to get his temper under control. “All right, gentlemen,” he began, “after you’d all left to come up here, I received some very disturbing news from the south coast of my Domain, and I went on down there to have a look for myself. Evidently, there are some people down in the Trogite Empire who are very interested in the Land of Dhrall, and they’ve come here to investigate. A huge fleet of Trogite ships is anchored in the large bay between two of the peninsulas on the south coast, and the men from that fleet have occupied several coastal villages and captured almost all of the inhabitants. Most of the men from those fleets appear to be soldiers wearing red uniforms, but there are others who evidently aren’t soldiers, because they’re dressed in black robes, and they aren’t carrying weapons of any kind.”

  “Priests,” Narasan said in a bleak tone of voice, “and the soldiers in red uniforms are members of Church armies.”

  “That explains a few things I didn’t quite understand,” Veltan said. “Anyway, the soldiers have built a number of fenced-in compounds and herded all of their captives into them, and the ones in black robes have been going into those compounds to make speeches to my people.”

  “That has a familiar sort of ring to it,” Padan said. “Let me guess. The priests want to tell your people fairy tales about Amar—how wonderful he is and how everybody who doesn’t fall down on his face every time he hears somebody mention Amar’s name won’t go to paradise after he dies. Is that pretty much the way it goes?”

  “It’s happened before, I gather,” Veltan said.

  “It’s been going around, yes,” Padan replied.

  “As I recall, I mentioned the corruption of the Amarite church to you when you persuaded me to stop begging and go back to work, Veltan,” Narasan said. “The Church has turned corruption into an art form based entirely on raw greed. The thought that so much as a single penny might somehow get away from him sends a member of the clergy into deep mourning.”

  “Excuse me, Commander,” the young Keselo said, “but isn’t it peculiar that the Church fleet managed to find the passageway through the zone of floating ice not long after Jalkan—a former priest—escaped and stole Veltan’s sloop?”

  “Not really all that peculiar, Keselo,” Narasan replied bleakly.

  “You should have killed that one when you had the chance, Narasan,” Skell said. “My brother Torl had an interesting idea not long after you’d put Jalkan in chains. We’d been sort of joking around about taking turns kicking Jalkan up and down the beach. But after we decided that it might get tiresome after a while, Torl suggested that we could just go ahead and give him a decent burial—whether he was dead or not.”

  “Interesting notion,” Narasan agreed. “I really blundered that time. He looked at Veltan. “Have the slave-ships arrived down there yet?”

  “My brother told me about that,” Veltan replied. “Right at first I thought he was joking.”

  “I’m afraid not, Veltan,” Narasan replied. “It’s fairly traditional in these situations. The soldiers round up the native people, the priests tell the natives that the Trogite god will punish them if they resist, and then the slave-ships come by to pick up the people, take them back to the Empire, and sell them to assorted Trogites who are too lazy to do their own work. That’s been going on for centuries.”

  “It’s not going to happen that way this time,” Skell’s cousin Sorgan said firmly. “I just happen to have a large fleet of longships down on the coast, and as soon as I get back down there, I think I’ll gather up that fleet and run on down to that big bay. The Trogites might have come here by ship, but I think I know of a way to arrange things so that they’ll have to walk home.”

  “Oh?” Narasan asked.

  “It’s called fire, Narasan,” Sorgan said with a wicked grin. “I’ll burn every Trogite ship in that bay right down to the waterline, and then I’ll go on out and sink all those slave-ships.” He gave Veltan a slightly suspicious look. “You knew this was going to happen all along, didn’t you, Veltan?” he suggested. “The fact that you’ve got the right man in the right place at the right time goes a long way past coincidence, it seems.”

  “Well—” Veltan said, sounding a bit defensive.

  “I thought so,” Sorgan said. “I’m awfully sorry, Narasan,” he continued, “but it sort of looks like I won’t be able to help you very much in the war up here, because I’ve got a different war to fight on down along the south coast. I’ll see to it that our second enemy won’t come sneaking up behind you while you’re busy up here, though.”

  “Ah, well,” Narasan replied with mock regret. “I think I’ll be able to manage, Sorgan, but it just won’t be the same with- out you.”

  Then they both laughed.

  All i
n all, Skell wasn’t too disappointed that he wouldn’t be allowed to fight the creatures of the Wasteland this time. He’d be going back down the gorge with cousin Sorgan and then sailing the Shark on down to the southern reaches of Veltan’s Domain to fight a war at sea. Skell knew how to fight a land war if it was absolutely necessary, but he much preferred fighting at sea, and the prospect of burning an entire Trog fleet filled him with a warm little glow.

  Then he felt another of those prickly twinges, and he was almost positive that somebody he couldn’t see was watching him very closely. That took a lot of the fun out of his day.

  THE SOUTH COAST