The Treasured One

by David Eddings

  “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 mountains 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 Sorgan’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.

  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 i
n 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 the 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.