The Treasured One: Book Two of The Dreamers

by Eddings, Leigh;Eddings, David

  “We were fairly sure things were going to work out that way, Rabbit,” Ox said.

  “They hit a snag , though,” Rabbit announced. “Some other men dressed in black clothes had used ladders to get up to the rim, and they were waiting when the red-suits came across the log. The ones in black suits grabbed the red-suits and threw ’em off that rim. From what Torl and Padan told us, I guess the black-suits are the ones who make sure that the red-suits do what they’re supposed to do, and they make sure that the red-suits get the point by killing anybody who tries to break the rules.”

  Sorgan winced. “How far down would you say it is from the rim to the rocks down below?” he asked.

  “Two hundred feet at least, Cap’n,” Rabbit replied. “I wouldn’t say that very many red-suits walked away after a fall like that.” He shuddered. “Anyway, Padan sent me up here to let you know that the bridge is finished and that the red-suits won’t just come dribbling in up here. They’ll come here by the hundreds at least.” He paused. “Oh, one other thing, Cap’n. Padan and his people are about an hour behind me, and he said he’d really appreciate it if there was somebody here to show him how to get to your barricade without having to tiptoe through those poison stakes.”

  “We’ll see to it, Rabbit,” Sorgan said. “Now why don’t you hustle on up to Gunda’s wall and let Narasan know what’s afoot?”

  “I’ll do ’er, Cap’n—just as soon as somebody shows me how to get through the poison stakes in the other trenches without coming down with a bad case of dead.”

  Padan and Torl reached Sorgan’s first trench before first light and they were some distance ahead of their men.

  “Rabbit stopped by and told us that things have changed just a bit,” Skell advised them. “He wasn’t just making things up, was he? Are those men dressed in black really that brutal?”

  “Worse, probably, big brother,” Torl replied. “Padan here sort of filled me in on the organization of those Church armies, and if I understood it right, the Trogite Church tends to take brutality out to the far end. The ones they call ‘Regulators’ keep the soldiers—and the priests themselves—in line by using pure terror. I guess their standard approach goes something along the lines of ‘if you don’t do what we tell you to do, we’ll kill you.’ Then they prove that they mean just what they say by killing a few right there on the spot.”

  “Is he making this up, Padan?” Sorgan asked skeptically.

  “No, Captain Hook-Beak. That’s pretty much how the Regulators operate,” Padan said. “The Church is out to get the money, and any kind of decency went out the window a long time ago.” He peered out into the darkness on either side of Sorgan’s trench. “I gather that the east sides of these trenches lie along the riverbank,” he noted. “How have you managed to block off the west side?”

  “We got lucky,” Sorgan replied. “There’s a rock face that runs for about a mile along the west ridge. I suppose that a man could climb up that face if he really wanted to, but it’d probably take quite a while. If those Church soldiers are all excited about the imitation gold out there in the desert, they wouldn’t want to waste that much time. Our poisoned stakes at the bottom of these trenches aren’t very long and we scattered tree leaves over the top of them to keep them pretty much out of sight.”

  “Are you sure that they’ll penetrate the soles of those soldier- boots?”

  “I wouldn’t want to try to run across the trench to find out. How much longer would you say it’s likely to take all of those Church soldiers to get up here?”

  “As near as I’ve been able to determine, they’ll be at it for about two and a half days, Captain. Now, whether they’ll wait until all of their men are up here before they start, or march this way a battalion or so at a time, I couldn’t say.”

  Sorgan and Padan were standing atop the barricade farthest to the south at first light the following morning, and so far as Sorgan was able to determine, the Church armies had not as yet begun their march. “No visitors yet,” he said to Padan. “Are you positive that those Church soldiers won’t recognize our yellow ribbons as markers?”

  “Not very likely, Captain,” Padan replied. “Gunda and I came up with that notion when we were still children, and we kept it pretty much to ourselves. We know what they mean, but nobody else does.”

  “What about that one called Jalkan? If I understood what Narasan told me, that scrawny rascal was a member of your army for quite a long time, but now he’s a part of the enemy army.”

  Padan shook his head. “Gunda, Narasan, and I kept the idea strictly to ourselves,” he said. Then he smiled faintly. “If you wanted to get right down to the bottom of it, we were being just a bit childish about it. The yellow ribbons were our idea, so we kept them entirely to ourselves. We don’t use large strips of yellow fabric, and most of the time they’re nothing but yellow string. How did you manage to sneak in and steal our secret?”

  “Narasan was more or less obliged to tell me about it after he sent you along with Skell’s scouting party. Skell would probably have thought you’d just gone crazy when you started tying yellow ribbons to bushes and trees along the way.”

  “Here comes Longbow,” Padan said, pointing off toward the north, “and it looks to me like Rabbit’s showing him the way.”

  “Good. We definitely don’t want to lose Longbow. Lady Zelana would skin me alive if I let anything happen to him.”

  “Any sign yet of those ‘friendly enemies’?” Longbow asked.

  “Not yet,” Sorgan replied. “Of course, it’s still early. The sun isn’t even up yet. How did Narasan take our news, Rabbit?”

  “He claimed that it was awful unnatural for him to approve of anything those Church armies came up with, but that deep down, he really approved of what those Regulators did to persuade the soldiers not to run on ahead so that they could get more gold. I think he’s looking forward to what’s going to happen when the Church armies come face-to-face with the bug-people.”

  Sorgan grinned. “That’s our Narasan for you,” he said, “but to tell the truth, I’m sort of looking forward to it myself.”

  “Enemy to the front,” Padan announced in an almost bored tone of voice.

  Sorgan turned quickly to look off toward the south. “Now that’s what I’d call an army,” he said. “I was still just a bit nervous about the ‘sneak ahead and get more’ crowd, but I’d say that the Regulators got their point across.”

  The massive army of men in red uniforms were marching in what Narasan called “quick step,” and it seemed to Sorgan that they were making good time—until they reached the edge of Sorgan’s first trench. The front rank looked dubiously at the ten-foot drop to the bottom of the trench, and then they began to melt back in among the following ranks.

  “I seem to be catching a certain lack of enthusiasm,” Padan said with a grin.

  “If a man’s not careful, he can break both of his legs in a jump like that,” Sorgan said. “I’d imagine that I’d be a bit edgy about it myself.”

  A lean man with an ugly face and wearing a black uniform conferred briefly with other men in similar uniforms, and his underlings—if that’s what they were—moved rapidly along behind the now-hesitant red-uniformed men, pushing them off the edge of the trench.

  “Efficient, maybe,” Padan observed, “but just a bit extreme, perhaps.” Then he peered into the trench. “Just how close to the other side of the trench did your people plant those stakes, Sorgan?”

  “Real close.”

  “The venom seems to be as strong as it was before,” Padan noted. “It looks to me like everybody who went down over there is dead.”

  Sorgan grinned at him. “That was the whole idea, Padan. Now that those men in red have seen what’s waiting for them, they’ll have to slow down and very carefully start digging up the stakes. I’d say that it’s likely to take them about two days to clear the bottom of the trench. By then, there’ll be twice as many soldiers standing on the far side waiting to come this way.”
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  “Shrewd,” Padan said. “After two or three more trenches, I’d say that all five Church armies will be up here jumping up and down and waiting for the time when they can run out into the desert to gather up as much imitation gold as they can carry.”

  But it didn’t turn out that way, Sorgan was forced to admit. There was another get-together of the Regulators, and the one who was apparently their leader snapped out some fairly blunt instructions. Then the Regulators moved out again grabbing hold of more soldiers. This time, however, the Regulators didn’t just push the soldiers over the edge of the trench.

  They threw them instead—just as far as they could—and the pile of dead soldiers began to stretch farther and farther out into the trench as the Regulators carpeted Sorgan’s trench with people.

  “That does it!” Rabbit exclaimed in a voice that didn’t have the slightest trace of his usual timidity. He raised the short bow that Sorgan had assumed was a little more than a decoration and drew an arrow from the quiver belted to his back. “Which way did that one called Konag go?” the little man asked Torl.

  “Ah . . .” Torl’s eyes swept across the far side of the trench. “I think he’s that one standing off to the right side, Rabbit,” he said. “Do you think you can take him from here?”

  “I’m definitely going to try,” Rabbit announced, drawing his bow and sighting along the arrow-shaft.

  His bowstring sang when he released it, and his arrow arced slightly as it flew over the trench.

  The black-uniformed man who’d ordered his subordinates to throw live soldiers out into the trench to carpet over Sorgan’s stakes had been watching with an expression of bleak satisfaction, but that expression faded as he stiffened with Rabbit’s arrow protruding from the middle of his forehead. Then he fell on his back with his blank eyes staring at the sky.

  “How did you do that?” Sorgan demanded of his little smith.

  “We call this a ‘bow,’ Cap’n,” Rabbit explained, “and the thing that’s sticking out of that fellow’s head over on the other side of the trench is called an ‘arrow.’ If you put them together just right, they’ll do all sorts of nice things to people who aren’t nice.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Rabbit,” Sorgan said. He turned to look at Longbow. “Have you been giving him lessons on the sly, maybe?”

  “Not me, Hook-Beak,” Longbow replied. “It’s quite possible that he just picked it up himself after he watched us shoot arrows into the creatures of the Wasteland back in the ravine.”

  “That comes fairly close, Cap’n,” Rabbit conceded.

  “You must have spent hours and hours practicing, Rabbit,” Torl said.

  Rabbit shrugged. “It doesn’t really take all that long, Torl—especially if the only thing you practice is hitting. I didn’t waste any time practicing missing.” He frowned slightly. “I suppose I could teach myself how to miss,” he said, “but it might take me quite a while to learn how. Maybe if I work on it a bit, I will learn how to miss.” And then he laughed with an almost childish delight.

  Sorgan was fairly sure that Longbow had trained Rabbit in the secrets of fine archery. “We’ll worry about that some other time,” he muttered.

  “What was that?” Padan asked him.

  “Just thinking out loud,” Sorgan replied, staring across the trench. “I think that one arrow might have changed a few things,” he said.

  “I’ve heard a few stories about that Konag,” Padan replied. “I’ve heard that even the highest-ranking churchmen are afraid of him.”

  “Were afraid,” Sorgan corrected. “Now that he’s dead, I don’t think anybody’s afraid of him anymore.”

  “Maybe,” Padan said, still looking across the wide trench. “It looks to me like those Church soldiers are starting to shed some of their timidity. One of the Regulators just got a sword in the belly.”

  “What a shame,” Sorgan replied sardonically.

  “There goes another one,” Padan reported. “Things seem to be getting a bit exciting over there.”

  “Don’t start cheering yet, Padan,” Sorgan growled. “If those soldiers over there work up enough nerve, they’ll kill all of the Regulators, and then they’ll go right back to ‘I can run faster than you can’ and they’ll all start dribbling down the north slope in twos and threes, and the bug-people will have them for lunch.”

  “Not as long as your poisoned stakes are in place, they won’t. They’ll have to crawl along on their hands and knees, pulling those stakes out one at a time. That should slow them enough for the rest of their forces to catch up with them.”

  “We can hope, I guess,” Sorgan replied dubiously.

  It was not long after noon when there was a sudden flash of intense light and a shattering crash of thunder.

  “Do you have to do that, Veltan?” Sorgan demanded irritably.

  “She gets me where I need to go in a hurry, Sorgan,” Veltan explained. “Please don’t irritate her. I need her right now.”

  “What’s happening, Lord Veltan?” Padan asked Zelana’s younger brother. It seemed to Sorgan that Padan sometimes overdid his pretended politeness.

  “My big sister’s Dreamer just solved a number of problems for us, gentlemen,” Veltan replied. “If you look off to the west, you’ll see her solution boiling this way.”

  Sorgan jerked his head around and saw a seething yellow cloud streaming over the ridge-top. “What is that?” he demanded.

  “It’s called a ‘sandstorm,’ Captain Hook-Beak. You probably don’t see very many of those out on the face of Mother Sea.”

  “Almost never,” Sorgan agreed.

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Lord Veltan,” Padan objected. “Won’t that pretty much stop the Church soldiers still coming up that ramp dead in their tracks?”

  “The sandstorm’s out here, Subcommander, not down there,” Veltan replied with a broad grin. “The soldiers who are already here will have to take cover, but the ones coming up that ramp and crossing that bridge won’t even know what’s happening up here.” Then he suddenly laughed. “And it gets even better.”

  “Oh?”

  “The sandstorm’s blowing in from the southwest, and after it sweeps past Gunda’s wall, it’ll almost certainly roll on down the slope leading up from the Wasteland.”

  “That might just disturb the bug-people a bit,” Padan suggested with a broad grin.

  “Quite a bit more than just ‘disturb,’ Padan,” Veltan replied. “The servants of the Vlagh will need shelter even more than these Church soldiers will. That lovely sandstorm’s going to freeze everything in place—except for those Church armies that’re still coming up out of the gorge. They’ll keep moving, but nobody else will.”

  “Not even us,” Sorgan reminded him.

  “Don’t rush me, Sorgan,” Veltan said. “I’m still working on that part.”

  5

  Keselo was very close to exhaustion. It made sense, certainly, to do these periodic retreats under the cover of darkness and Lady Zelana’s helpful fog-banks, but a night without sleep came very close to cutting Keselo all the way down to the bone. He stood wearily with his new friend Omago near the center of the sixth breastwork pushing out from Gunda’s wall as the first light of morning stained the edge of the eastern sky.

  “Why don’t you try to catch a few winks, Keselo,” Omago suggested. “I can keep an eye on things, but I don’t think any of those bug-people will start to move before sunlight.”

  Keselo shook his head. “I couldn’t sleep right now, Omago,” he said. “I’m positive that our enemies will be coming up the slope before long, so I’m wound just a little tight.”

  Though it seemed a bit unnatural in light of the differences in their cultures, Keselo had developed a strong friendship with Omago. They got along very well, but Keselo had frequently been startled by the frequent leaps in Omago’s thinking. “Have you come up with any new ideas, my friend?” he asked.

  “Nothing that might be useful,” Omago confess
ed. “I’m just a bit tired too.”

  “That’s been going around here lately,” Keselo said. “Andar’s a very good officer, but he pushes his men a bit harder than necessary. There’s an idea. Maybe if we sang lullabies to him for a couple of hours, he’d drift off to sleep and we could all get some rest.”

  “I sort of think that your Commander Narasan would jump all over him for that,” Omago suggested.

  “Probably so,” Keselo agreed. “It was just a thought. Why don’t you see if you can keep me awake by telling me stories about Veltan? I never got to know him very well back in the ravine in Lady Zelana’s Domain.”