The Treasured One: Book Two of The Dreamers

by Eddings, Leigh;Eddings, David

  The dream of Dahlaine’s little boy had troubled Ara very much. At the outset, everything in Ashad’s dream had gone exactly as she’d intended, but then Ashad had wandered off on his own. Now they all faced the distinct possibility of a second invasion of Veltan’s Domain coming from somewhere off to the south. The motives of the Vlagh were very clear, but Ara could not for the life of her understand why the outlanders to the south would have any reason whatsoever to invade the Land of Dhrall.

  Dahlaine’s original scheme had been adequate, but only barely. It had stepped around the wall that stood before both generations of gods—the wall that forbade the taking of any kind of life—but at that point, Dahlaine had seriously blundered by unleashing the Dreamers with absolutely no control whatsoever over what forces the dreams might turn loose. Ara had shuddered back from a number of ghastly disasters that had been entirely possible. At that point she’d had no choice. Always in the past she’d just been an observer, but Dahlaine’s idiotic decision had forced her to step in and take control. In a very real sense, Dahlaine had provided the Dreamers, but Ara provided the dreams.

  Sometimes, though, the Dreamers had run off on their own, and that irritated Ara no end.

  Then she remembered something that had happened in the Land of the Maags. Eleria’s dream in the harbor of Kweta had been more in the nature of a warning than an announcement of an absolute certainty, and that warning had given Zelana’s archer all that he’d needed to meet the threat of an unscrupulous Maag named Kajak. Could it possibly be that Ashad’s dream of a second invasion of Veltan’s Domain had also been a warning? If that were the case, the second invasion might never come to pass in the real world.

  For right now, Ara needed much more information about the people of the land to the south. Once she understood them, she might very well be able to stop that second invasion before it ever took place.

  It was on a beautiful morning in early summer when Veltan advised Omago and Ara that the hired armies would be arriving that very day, and that Yaltar was still very disturbed by the disastrous results of his dream about exploding mountains. Ara was quite sure she’d be able to ease the little boy’s sense of guilt, so she decided to go on down to the beach with Veltan and her mate.

  Even before the outlander ships reached the shore, Ara felt suddenly awash with the jumbled thoughts of the various men who were on board those ships. Curiosity was foremost in their thoughts, of course. The outlanders had been totally unaware of the existence of the Land of Dhrall before the previous winter, so it was only natural for them to be curious. There was also a certain amount of apprehension. The creatures of the Wasteland had been so altered by the Vlagh that they were unlike anything else in all the world, and that disturbed the outlanders to no small degree.

  The name of Zelana’s archer Longbow kept cropping up. With only a few exceptions, the outlanders had been awed by that icy man. Ara tentatively reached out and touched the mind of the archer, and she found that he was not, as many on the ships believed, some kind of inhuman monster. He was coldly practical when a situation required that of him, but he did have normal emotions.

  Then she very briefly brushed across an awareness so foul that she shuddered back in horror and disgust. One of the soldiers in the Trogite army was the most corrupt man Ara had ever encountered, and he was driven by a towering greed. So far as that particular soldier was concerned, the war with the servants of the Vlagh was of no particular significance. What he really wanted was every speck of gold in the entirety of the Land of Dhrall. Then several things came together all at once, and Ara realized that she’d just found the source of the second part of the dream of Ashad. “Well, now,” she murmured, “isn’t that interesting?”

  “What was that again, Ara?” Omago asked her.

  “Nothing, dear heart,” she replied. “Just thinking out loud is all.”

  Ara braced herself and reached out to touch the filthy mind of the outlander called Jalkan, and she found nothing even remotely redeeming there. There was arrogance aplenty, and greed, cruelty, cowardice, and, perhaps more important, a towering lust.

  “Now that might be the answer to the whole problem,” Ara mused. “If this beast isn’t around anymore, Ashad’s second invasion won’t happen at all.”

  A number of very interesting possibilities came to Ara at that point. If she could stir Jalkan’s lust enough to push him over certain lines, she was almost positive that dear Omago would respond appropriately. She’d be obliged to take things down to the most primitive level, of course, and that troubled her more than a little. The end result, however, would fully justify what she’d have to do.

  After a brief discussion on the beach, Veltan took a goodly number of the outlanders and a couple of the hunters from Zelana’s Domain to his house to show them a room where he’d set up a miniaturized duplicate of the terrain in the vicinity of the Falls of Vash. Ara began to prepare dinner for Veltan’s guests while Zelana, Eleria, and Yaltar watched. Ara was not really concentrating on the cooking, however. Pushing her sense of revulsion aside, she turned her senses backward in time to the point where she could unleash the overwhelming urge to mate in any living male, and, as was the case in all warm-blooded creatures, that involved a specific scent. The scent would unleash Jalkan’s lust most certainly, but it should also drive Omago into raw violence, and that would immediately eliminate Ashad’s second invasion.

  When Ara went to Veltan’s map-room to tell the men assembled there that dinner was ready, she was exuding that most primitive of scents, and Jalkan, as she’d anticipated, responded with a few off-color remarks that clearly indicated that he expected things to go much further. Omago responded to those comments quite appropriately but, unfortunately, didn’t take it quite far enough. At the last moment, his innate decency pulled him back. Despite the urges of his primal instincts, Omago did not kill their enemy.

  Ara suppressed her own primitive urge to scream at that point. She’d just discovered that raw instincts are almost impossible to control, and in a situation where the desired result did not come to pass, screaming would be instinctive.

  Veltan’s Trogite friend, Commander Narasan, had been stunned by Jalkan’s remarks, and Ara hoped that he’d take the appropriate steps, but for some reason he did not reach for his sword.

  What was the matter with these people? At great personal expense, Ara had given everybody in that round room all the excuse they’d ever need to exterminate the filthy Jalkan, but they’d all just passed it up. Why wouldn’t anybody do what he was supposed to do?

  Narasan ordered the Trogite Padan to put Jalkan in chains and imprison him in one of the Trogite ships standing just off the beach. That was something, Ara conceded, but for some reason, nobody seemed to realize that there’d been a much simpler answer.

  It took Ara the rest of the day and most of the night to clear away the last of her primeval instincts and she felt a bit wrung-out the following day. Instincts sometimes accomplished things when nothing else would work, but they were absolutely exhausting—particularly when they didn’t achieve the desired goal.

  It came as no real surprise a week or so later when word of Jalkan’s escape reached the house of Veltan. It seemed to Ara that every time she turned around, Ashad’s silly dream was ahead of her. No matter what she tried to do to prevent the second invasion, the dream thwarted her. For some reason that she could not even begin to understand, that second invasion was absolutely necessary. “I give up,” she said, throwing her hands in the air.

  Since it was quite clear that Omago would be very much involved in the upcoming war, Ara listened carefully to the discussions in Veltan’s map-room and—as she probably should have known that he would—Omago volunteered to go up along the coast to the mouth of the River Vash with the scouting party of Sorgan Hook-Beak’s cousins, Skell and Torl.

  As sometimes happened, Ara had a strong premonition that something very significant would turn up as her mate and a small party explored a trail that Nanton t
he shepherd knew quite well. Ara had learned in times long gone that she should never ignore one of those premonitions, so she decided to accompany the scouting party—inconspicuously, of course.

  As the two Maag longships sailed north along the eastern coast of Veltan’s Domain, Ara’s thought followed them curiously, and when Skell and a few friends left the ships to follow the shepherd up the steep course of the small tributary of the River Vash, Ara’s thought followed them with that premonition growing stronger and stronger with every mile.

  It was about midmorning on the small party’s second day of struggling up the narrow streambed when a burly Maag called Grock made a startling discovery. “I just found gold, Cap’n!” he shouted. “Gold! There’s tons of it up there in that rock wall!”

  It was Keselo, the young Trogite soldier, who suggested that the little smith from Sorgan’s longship might be the logical one to verify the nature of the yellow flake.

  Ara sensed the enormous disappointment of Skell and the rest of the little group when Rabbit proved to them that the bright yellow flake was not gold.

  It was fairly obvious that Keselo had known from the very start that what Grock had discovered was not what it appeared to be, and Ara probed the young man’s mind and discovered that what Grock had found was a peculiar combination of iron ore and sulphur.

  Ara realized that this was what had aroused that premonition in the first place. If Jalkan’s greed for gold was going to be the reason for Ashad’s second invasion, this false gold might turn out to be very useful.

  Ara withdrew her thought from Skell’s scouting party and went into her kitchen to examine some very interesting possibilities.

  It required a bit of experimentation for Ara to get the proper mix, but her kitchen was the natural home of experimentation, so on her third try, she produced a sizeable amount of bright yellow flakes that were identical to the one Grock had found in the mountains.

  She was very pleased with the results of her experiment—until she saw the heaps of glittering sand lying all over her kitchen floor. Muttering to herself, she went to fetch her broom.

  2

  The small group of men Nanton the shepherd had led up to the grassy plain above the Falls of Vash were busy exploring the region. It was more open than the ravine above the village of Lattash had been, and that seemed to concern the seafarers quite a bit. Given the number of servants the Vlagh could send charging up out of the Wasteland, Ara could understand that concern.

  As evening was settling over the little camp near the geyser, the bats came out, and Longbow the archer quite suddenly came up with a notion that chilled Ara down to her very bones. A single arrow proved that Longbow’s notion had been very correct. The bats were not at all what they had appeared to be, and Ara had a sudden urge to take up her beloved mate and go directly back home.

  After a bit of discussion, though, the clever little smith called Rabbit came up with the notion of using fishnets to protect them from the flying enemies, and that eased the tension to some degree.

  Then Longbow spoke briefly with the burly Red-Beard. It was fairly obvious that arrows would be the best solution to the problem of flying enemies, and Red-Beard went off to the west to hurry along the archers coming down from Zelana’s Domain. Then Skell sent the gold-hunter Grock back on down to bring more men—and fishnets—up to the basin.

  The hard practicality of these men helped Ara to control her sudden panic, and she decided to wait a bit before she grabbed her mate by the arm and ran away with him.

  Skell’s brother Torl reached the basin the following day, and Narasan and Sorgan were only a few hours behind him. Skell led them up to the gap at the north end of the basin to show them the most probable route the servants of the Vlagh would follow when they came south.

  Then Veltan came crashing in on his pet thunderbolt and advised his friends that the second invasion Ashad’s dream had mentioned was coming up from the south. He went on and on about the incursion into the southern part of his Domain, but Ara pulled her awareness back to her kitchen and then sent her thought south to have a look for herself.

  There were several large peninsulas jutting out into Mother Sea on the south coast of Veltan’s Domain, and they formed large, protected bays. There were quite a few farming villages along the shores of those bays, and the wheat-fields stretched inland for several miles.

  It was not the wheat-fields that attracted Ara’s immediate attention, however. There were a large number of bulky Trogite ships with red sails anchored in the bay, and the armed soldiers from those ships were going ashore in the vicinity of every village. The soldiers were busily gathering up all the residents of those villages and herding them at sword-point into crudely constructed pens just outside each village as if they were no more than cattle.

  It took Ara several minutes to get her sudden rage under control, and it didn’t get any better when unarmed Trogites in flowing black robes entered each pen to harangue the terrified villagers about “the only true god in all the world.”

  When one of the villagers in the pen near the largest village on the shore of that particular bay politely advised a fat Trogite who’d just made that announcement that the god of this particular region was named Veltan, two of the black-uniformed outlanders clubbed him into unconsciousness. They might have gone even further, but Ara smoothly deflected one outlander’s club, and he very nearly brained his companion.

  Since the origin of this invasion was obviously the filthy-minded Trogite called Jalkan, Ara sent her thought out in search of him, and he wasn’t all that hard to find. There was a farming village on the shore near the central bay here on the south coast, and there were several red-sailed Trogite ships anchored just off the coast. The natives were all penned up, and the Trogite priests and their soldiers had stolen the huts of those natives. Jalkan was in a fairly central hut, and he was not alone. He was speaking with a grossly fat man dressed in an ornate yellow robe.

  “Nobody was ever very specific about just where the mines were located, Adnari Estarg,” Jalkan was saying. “I’d imagine that they’re up in the mountains, though.”

  “We’re going to need more specific information than just ‘up in the mountains,’ Jalkan,” the fat man said. “There might be gold in this primitive part of the world, but if we can’t get anything more specific than that, it might just as well be on the back side of the moon.”

  “That’s why we brought those Regulators along, your Grace. The Regulators have ways to make anybody talk. We know for certain that there’s gold here. You saw those gold blocks I showed you back in Kaldacin. They prove that there is gold in this part of the world, and all we have to do to locate it is turn the Regulators loose on the natives. After the natives see a few of their friends die while the Regulators are questioning them, I’m sure they’ll start to be very cooperative. How long do you think it’s going to take for the slave-ships to get here?”

  “A week, at least. The slavers buy; they don’t catch.”

  “Things should work out very well, then. It won’t take the Regulators very long to get the information we need out of the natives, and once we have that information, we can sell the natives to the slavers and get them out of our way. There’s a distinct possibility that we’ll make almost as much gold selling the natives to the slavers as we’ll make in the gold-mines.”

  “I never pass up gold, Jalkan,” the fat man said with a broad grin.

  Ara drew back just a bit. The discussion between those two had chilled her to the bone. These people were absolute monsters. Their willingness to wring information out of people with torture raised a very serious problem, though. The people of the Land of Dhrall had never been very interested in gold, so the farmers here in the south probably didn’t even know what the word meant.

  Then something came to her out of nowhere. If the Trogites so desperately wanted to hear about gold, Ara was quite sure she could arrange things so that they’d hear enough stories about it to drive them wild.

&
nbsp; She directed her thought to the crude pens where the Trogite soldiers had confined the villagers and conjured up an “ancient myth” which she then planted in the minds of everyone in that pen. From here on, every time one of the villagers heard somebody say “gold,” he’d automatically recite Ara’s absurd story word for word.

  Then with a faint smile, she sat back and waited for the fun to begin.

  The Trogites that Jalkan called Regulators now guarded the natives, and they were a harsh, brutal group of men who wore black uniforms, apparently to distinguish them from the soldiers, who wore red. The one Jalkan and his fat friend relied upon was called Konag, and Ara didn’t like him at all. She thought it might be sort of nice if he were the one who carried the story she’d conjured up to Jalkan and Estarg.