The Treasured One: Book Two of The Dreamers

by Eddings, Leigh;Eddings, David

  “Not to me, it doesn’t,” Torl agreed.

  “I want you to put on full sail, Torl, and get up there just as fast as you can. Like it or not, we do have two invasions, and there’s nothing I can do to stop the one that’ll be coming at Narasan before many more days have passed.”

  “I’ll get the word to him just as quick as I can, cousin,” Torl promised.

  “Even quicker would be better.”

  4

  As luck had it, there was a good following wind as the Lark sailed up along the east coast of the Land of Dhrall, but Torl was fairly sure that luck probably had very little to do with it. Somebody in this part of the world had been doing a lot of tampering here lately. A fair number of events during the war in Lady Zelana’s Domain had made it quite clear that tampering was quite common in this part of the world, but Torl couldn’t for the life of him see just where this unknown tamperer was going. If he was on their side, he should have been trying to stop the second invasion, but it seemed that he was encouraging it instead. Nothing that’d happened down on the south coast made any sense.

  On the off chance that Veltan might be in his house, Torl anchored the Lark just off the familiar beach a few days after he’d left the south coast and walked on up to that peculiar building. When he reached it, the wife of Veltan’s friend Omago was waiting for him almost as if she had known that he was coming. Ara, the farmer’s wife, was almost certainly the most beautiful woman Torl had ever seen, and he could not for the life of him understand just why she’d chosen to marry the rather stodgy farmer, Omago. He was certain that she’d have had much better options.

  “I don’t suppose that Veltan’s here right now, is he?” Torl asked her.

  “I’m afraid not,” she replied in that rich voice of hers. “Did you want to see him?”

  “There’s something he needs to know, ma’am,” Torl replied. “I was sort of hoping that I might be able to catch him here. My luck’s been running very well lately, but it looks like it might have gone sour on me.” He shrugged. “It was worth a try, I guess. Have you heard anything about what’s going on up in the mountains?”

  “Nothing very specific. I don’t think the servants of the Vlagh have begun their attack yet.”

  “That’s something, I suppose. Narasan’s people need to finish building that wall to hold off the enemy, and building a wall a mile or so long is likely to take them a while.”

  “What was it that you thought Veltan should know about?” she asked. “If he happens to stop by after you’ve moved on, I could pass it on to him. Did it have something to do with that invasion of the southern part of his Domain?”

  “It did indeed,” Torl replied glumly. “Cousin Sorgan was positive that we’d be able to deal with it, but our scheme fell apart on us.”

  “Oh?”

  “We burned every Trogite ship down there,” Torl said, “and that should have stopped the invasion dead cold, but it didn’t turn out that way at all.”

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody jerked our grand plan right out from under us. I know that Veltan, Lady Zelana, and their relatives can do all sorts of things that nobody else can do, but it seems that there’s somebody else running around here in the Land of Dhrall who can do even stranger things. That other somebody did something that I don’t think even Veltan could have pulled off.”

  “Really?”

  “The other somebody stuffed a ridiculous fairy tale into the mind of every single native down along the south coast, and they’ll all repeat that fairy story in exactly the same way anytime they hear the word ‘gold.’”

  “How did you find out about this, Torl?” Ara asked him rather sharply.

  “I was talking to one of the natives down there—Bolen, I think his name was—and I just happened to mention gold during our conversation. As soon as I said ‘gold,’ his eyes glazed over and he told me this old story, as though he was reciting something. I thought he’d just gone crazy, but after he’d finished he seemed to wake up and go on as if nothing at all had happened.”

  “How curious,” Ara said.

  “It gets even more curious. Right at first, it didn’t make any sense, but then I had a peculiar notion, and I walked around through several of those villages and said the word ‘gold’ to every single native I met, and would you believe that every one of them did exactly the same thing Bolen had done? Their eyes went blank and each one told me exactly the same story. Somebody—or maybe some thing—is playing a very complicated game down there, and the fairy tale makes the Trogs go even crazier than the word ‘gold’ makes the natives. They all started running off to the north as if somebody had just set fire to their tail feathers.”

  She laughed then. “What an amusing way to put it,” she said with a sly smile.

  The majority of Commander Narasan’s ships were anchored in the bay at the mouth of the River Vash, so the river itself wasn’t as cluttered as it had been when cousin Sorgan’s men had come down out of the mountains. Torl left Iron-Fist in charge of the Lark, and hurried up Nanton’s streambed to advise Veltan that things in the south hadn’t turned out as they’d hoped.

  It was about noon of the next day when Torl reached the top, and he saw that the Trogites had been busy at the north end of the basin. Torl saw that they were building a wall rather than a fort, and their growing wall was already more than ten feet high.

  It took him a while to locate Narasan and Gunda, since they were about halfway down the slope that led up out of the Wasteland.

  “Back so soon, Torl?” Narasan remarked as Torl joined them. “Things must have gone better than we’d anticipated.”

  “I don’t think ‘better’ is the right word, Commander,” Torl replied. “We burned all those Trogite ships, of course. That only took us a day or so, but the Church soldiers, the priests, and even the slavers had already left by then.”

  “Left? Are you saying that they’re marching this way?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it a ‘march,’ Commander. ‘Run’ would come a lot closer.”

  “I don’t quite get your point, Torl,” Gunda said.

  “I think we’d better find Veltan,” Torl suggested. “Something very strange happened down on the south coast, and Veltan’s the expert on ‘strange,’ isn’t he? To put this in the simplest way, the invaders are completely disorganized, and they’re all just blindly running toward these mountains as if their lives depended on it. Somebody has been playing games down there, and they’re the kind of games that only Veltan and his family could understand.”

  “I think he might be down near the geyser,” Narasan said. “Let’s go find him.” Narasan’s eyes were bleak, and his expression was grim.

  “I tried it myself,” Torl told Lady Zelana and her younger brother. “Every time I said ‘gold’ to any native down there on the south coast, his eyes went blank and he recited that same silly story. I listened to the whole thing the first few times, but after that, I just walked away and left the native talking to himself.”

  Veltan squinted at Torl. “Did the story stir any odd feelings in you?” he asked.

  “Boredom, before long. After you’ve heard the same story five times in a row, it’s not really very interesting.”

  “I’d say that we’re looking at a selective infection, baby brother,” Lady Zelana said. “The story excites the Trogites, but it doesn’t have any effect on the Maags.”

  “It might even go a bit further, sister mine,” Veltan suggested. He looked speculatively at Torl. “Do you think you remember the story well enough to be able to recite it for us?” he asked.

  “Probably upside down and backward if you really want me to,” Torl replied.

  “Let’s hear it, then.”

  “Did you want me to blank out my eyes as well?”

  “No, that won’t be necessary. Just recite the story.”

  Torl cleared his throat. “It was long, long ago when a man of our village grew weary of farming, and he went up into the mountai
ns far to the north to look at a different land.” As he continued, he noticed that Veltan was watching Commander Narasan very closely.

  “. . . And having seen what was there, the adventurous farmer returned to his home and never again went forth to look for strange new things, for he had seen what lay beyond the mountains, and his curiosity had been satisfied,” Torl concluded.

  “Did that story affect you in any particular way?” Veltan asked Narasan.

  “It was rather colorful, I suppose, but I don’t know that I’d want to hear more like it.”

  “That’s probably because you’re not a priest, Commander,” Torl suggested. “Isn’t it one of the rules of the Trogite Church that all the gold in the world belongs to them?”

  “He’s quick, isn’t he, Veltan?” Lady Zelana said. “It seems that this ‘infection’ is even more selective than I’d originally thought. It seems to be aimed directly at the members of the Trogite clergy—and their hirelings.”

  “Why did it point them all at the mountains, then?” Veltan protested. “Why didn’t it send them running across the face of Mother Sea?”

  “Evidently, whoever came up with this clever idea had something else in mind,” Lady Zelana replied.

  The longer Veltan, Lady Zelana, and Narasan discussed the matter, the more exotic their notions became. So far as Torl could see, they were just scraping things off the wall. Quite obviously he’d chosen the wrong people here. He needed somebody with a more practical approach, and Torl knew exactly who he should be talking with, but he was quite sure that Veltan and Lady Zelana would be offended if he just turned around and walked away.

  It was late afternoon before the supposed “experts” had finally exhausted all possible—and several impossible—explanations and gave up.

  Torl politely thanked them and casually sauntered away as if there was nothing pressing on his mind. As soon as he was out of sight, however, he went directly to Longbow’s separate camp back in the forest beyond the geyser. It had been quite obvious during the war in Lady Zelana’s Domain that the continual chatter of the Trogites—and even the Maags—irritated Longbow, since he much preferred quiet. When Torl reached Longbow’s campfire, however, the young Trogite called Keselo was there, and so was Rabbit, the smith of cousin Sorgan’s Seagull.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Torl announced as he joined them.

  “We’d heard about that, Captain Torl,” Keselo said. “I thought your cousin Sorgan had volunteered to take care of it.”

  “Sorgan’s answer didn’t quite solve the problem,” Torl said rather ruefully. “We did burn every Trogite ship that was anchored along the south coast, but I don’t think the Trogs even know that their ships are gone. It seems that somebody is playing some very exotic games down there.”

  “Games?” Rabbit asked.

  “‘Tricks’ might come closer. When the Church Trogs first came ashore, they rounded up all the people who lived in the villages down there and herded them into pens. Then some other Trogs who were dressed in black uniforms began to threaten their prisoners with all sorts of hair-raising things if the prisoners wouldn’t tell them where all the gold in the entire Land of Dhrall was hidden.”

  “Regulators,” Keselo said grimly. “They’re experts in the fine art of torture.”

  “They didn’t have to use it this time,” Torl declared. “Every time a Trog—or anybody else—said the word ‘gold’ to a native, the native sort of went into a trance and recited a fairy tale kind of story about some farmer who’d gone up into the mountains and found a place that was covered with gold instead of dirt. As soon as any Trog down there heard that story, he took off toward the north like a scared rabbit—no offense intended there,” Torl apologized to the little smith.

  “It doesn’t bother me all that much, Cap’n Torl,” Rabbit replied. “I’ve heard it a thousand times.”

  “Anyway,” Torl continued, “as more and more Trogs heard that story, the priests who were supposed to be in command suddenly found out that they didn’t have any armies anymore, because the soldiers who were supposed to protect them had decided that they didn’t want to be soldiers anymore, and they were running in this direction just as fast as they could. Then, since there weren’t any soldiers there to guard those slave-pens, the natives kicked down the fences and went away.”

  Keselo suddenly started to laugh.

  “It gets better,” Torl told him. “Just before we got down there, a fair number of black ships hauled into the bay and the slavers came ashore to buy all the natives from the fat priests, but the natives had already left. That’s when we arrived and set fire to all their ships, and that didn’t make them very happy at all—particularly when they realized that the natives were probably sharpening knives and spears and axes and planning to stop by to show them just how unpopular they were—and by then there wasn’t anybody around to protect them. The assorted priests and slavers didn’t have very many options at that point, so they all ran north out of those villages, hoping against hope that if they happened to be lucky enough to catch up with the soldiers, they might even live long enough to see the sun go down.”

  “He tells funnier stories than Red-Beard, doesn’t he?” Keselo said.

  “As soon as you finish laughing, we’ll get into the ugly part,” Torl said. “Given the number of ships we burned along that coast, I’d say that there are about a half a million crazy Trogs running in our general direction right now. I think we’d better come up with a way to head them off, or we’ll have bug-men coming at us from one direction and Trog-men coming at us from the other.”

  He squinted at Longbow’s campfire. “I’ll admit that right at first I thought that whoever had come up with that wild story was trying to help us, but now I’m not so sure. Those Trog soldiers went out of their minds when they heard the story, so they aren’t even thinking coherently anymore. Doesn’t that mean that they won’t take orders from anybody now?”

  “Probably not,” Keselo agreed. “Any sort of discipline has vanished, I’d imagine.”

  Longbow was squinting bleakly at the sunset. “I don’t like the smell of this at all,” he said. “I’d say that right now those soldiers are thinking at about the same level as the servants of the Vlagh think. I’m fairly sure that the Vlagh wasn’t at all happy, about what happened to all its servants in the ravine above Lattash. The overmind was probably even less happy, since the death of thousands of the servants almost certainly reduced the ability of that group awareness to solve problems. Right now, I’d say that protecting the lives of the remaining servants might be more important than moving into new territory.”

  “That makes sense, I guess,” Rabbit admitted. “Where are you going with this, Longbow?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” Longbow replied. Then he blinked. “Sheep!” he exclaimed. “It was right there in front of me, but I didn’t see it!”

  “You lost me there, I think” Rabbit said.

  “I’m sure there was a time when sheep were wild animals—sort of like deer. Then men came along and tamed them.”

  “I still don’t get your point.”

  “People aren’t the only creatures who tame other creatures for their own purposes. Ants tame sow-bugs, and other insects do much the same thing. The Vlagh needed soldiers to do the fighting—and the dying—to protect the overmind. If we kill too many of the servants of the Vlagh, the overmind will fall apart. The Vlagh needed slaves, and it enslaved the Church soldiers off to the south with the word ‘gold.’”

  “Is that silly thing really that clever?” Torl demanded incredulously.

  “It’s not really a single thing, Torl. What one sees, they’ve all seen, and after they’ve seen it, the overmind comes up with ways to use what they’ve seen. I hate to admit this, but it seems to be working very well right now.”

  “That’s terrible!” Torl exclaimed. “How can we possibly win in a situation like this?”

  “Don’t rush me,” Longbow said in an obvious imitation of cousin S
organ’s rough voice. “I’m working on it.”

  THE TREASURED ONE

  1

  The scent of the lamb roast that was currently baking in one of Ara’s brick ovens suggested that it needed perhaps just a touch more garlic to fill out the flavor. Herbs and spices had always lain at the core of fine cooking, and Ara’s nose had led her down the proper path for as long as she could remember, and that was much, much longer than anyone around her realized. She carefully sprinkled the roast with grated garlic and then pushed the pot back into the brick oven reserved for the baking of meat.

  The continual murmur of the thoughts of those around Ara seemed perhaps a bit quieter this afternoon than was usual. She could hear Omago, of course, but there was nothing particularly unusual about that. She was quite sure that she’d be able to hear Omago’s thoughts from half a world away. There was an almost poetic beauty to her mate’s thinking, and it had been that beauty which had drawn her to him in the first place.