“This was the deepest part of the inland sea that covered the Wasteland in the distant past,” Veltan explained. “I’ve never actually taken any measurements, but I rather think that depression out there’s even lower than the floor of Mother Sea.”
“Maybe if you talked with Mommy real nice, she’d fill that sinkhole out there with water again,” Padan suggested.
“Mommy?” Veltan looked a bit confused by the word.
“Wouldn’t that sort of get you on her good side?” Padan asked with a feigned look of wide-eyed innocence.
“I don’t think our baby brother would want to take any chances there,” Lady Zelana advised. “He made a mistake when he was talking with her once, and she sent him to the moon without any supper.”
“Are there really that many enemies down there?” Andar asked, staring at the dust cloud with awe.
“They’re probably just kicking up dust to conceal their real numbers,” Danal suggested. “That’s not an uncommon practice, you know. If you don’t have as many men as your enemy has, you don’t want him to know it, and if you’ve got more, you want to hide that as well.”
“It’s possible,” Lady Zelana said, “but this is probably a new hatch. After what happened in the ravine above Lattash, the Vlagh didn’t have many servants left, so it had to spawn more. It might just be that it’s been experimenting again. The Vlagh’s always coming up with different varieties of children.”
“I’m still having trouble with that,” Keselo admitted. “Are we really being attacked by women?”
The burly warrior woman from the Isle of Akalla reached for her sword.
Veltan put a restraining hand on her arm. “He wasn’t trying to offend you, Queen Trenicia,” he said. “It’s just that he’s not at all familiar with your culture.”
“Somebody should explain it to him,” the warrior queen declared.
“I wouldn’t really think of the servants of the Vlagh as ‘women,’ Keselo,” Lady Zelana cautioned. “They’re females, of course, but the majority of all insects are female. The males only have one responsibility—which I don’t think we need to discuss just now.”
Young Keselo suddenly blushed a bright red.
Lady Zelana laughed with delight. “Isn’t he just the dearest boy?” she said to the rest of them. “Anyway,” she continued, “when the Vlagh produces a hatch, it numbers in the tens of thousands.”
“But those would only be babies,” Andar protested.
“Very true,” Zelana agreed, “but the childhood of an insect is only about a week long. After that, they’re full-grown adults.”
“And females as well?”
“Exactly.”
“The life of a boy-bug might be very interesting,” Padan mused.
“It does have some drawbacks, young man,” Zelana warned him. “After he’s performed his duty, he’s of no particular use anymore, so the servants of the Vlagh—females, of course—bite off his head and throw him out with the rest of the garbage.”
“Does a career as a boy-bug still interest you, Padan?” Gunda asked rather blandly.
“I’m starting to have some second thoughts,” Padan admitted with a shudder.
A breeze came up an hour or so later, and it blew most of the dust cloud away, and the onlookers atop Gunda’s wall were stunned by the sheer numbers of enemies they now saw moving purposefully across the ruddy desert far below. “I think it’s time for us to take up our positions, gentlemen,” Narasan said grimly to his officers.
“Is it my imagination, or are the ones down there quite a bit bigger than those we encountered in the ravine?” Padan asked.
Gunda squinted down the slope. “It’s sort of hard to tell at this distance, but I think you might be right.” He turned to Veltan. “Can that Vlagh thing do that? I mean, can it just double the size of its soldiers in no more than a month?”
“Probably,” Veltan replied. “The Vlagh’s an imitator. When it sees a certain characteristic that seems to be useful, it modifies the next hatch to include that peculiarity. The men of the Land of Maag are very tall, so I’d say that the Vlagh imitated that characteristic in this current hatch.”
“Why didn’t it just build bigger warriors right from the start?” Rabbit asked.
“Bigger creatures need more food,” Veltan explained, “and there’s not really very much to eat out there in the Wasteland. There’s been much more food available since the war in the ravine, so now the Vlagh can afford to spawn out bigger servants.”
“Trees and bushes, you mean?”
“Probably not,” Veltan replied. “Wars produce dead people, and other dead things as well. There was plenty to eat after that war. The volcanos burned a lot of that food, but apparently the servants of the Vlagh managed to salvage enough to feed the larger warriors.”
“That’s disgusting!” Keselo exclaimed.
Veltan shrugged. “The Vlagh doesn’t think the way we do, Keselo,” he replied. “It’ll do whatever’s necessary to get what it wants. Then too, there’s never really been enough food out in the Wasteland to feed enough servants to achieve the Vlagh’s ultimate goal. When you get right down to it, that might just be what this war’s all about.”
“Gunda!” Andar shouted from the top of a nearby tower. “Look on past the first rank of enemy soldiers. I think we’ve got an entirely different variety of enemies coming this way.”
Gunda peered through the dust rising from the lower end of the slope. At first he didn’t see anything at all unusual, but then his eyes caught a peculiar movement low to the ground. Then a brief gust of wind cleared the air. “Turtles?” he said. “Why on earth would the Vlagh want turtles?”
“They are about ten feet across, Gunda,” Padan noted, “and if I’m counting right each one of them has eight legs.”
“Spiders?” Gunda demanded. “Part turtle and part spider? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“I’m afraid it does, Gunda,” Veltan disagreed. “I think the Vlagh just stole a very good idea from our Trogite friends.” He reached out and tapped Gunda’s metal breastplate. “This idea, actually,” he said. “Now the Vlagh has soldiers that wear armor.”
“But why did it use spiders instead of reptiles?” Padan demanded.
Veltan shrugged. “Spiders can move faster, and they can spin webs.” He frowned. “I’m not entirely certain about this,” he admitted, “but I think spider venom is even more deadly than reptile venom.”
“I think we’re in a lot of trouble,” Padan said.
The larger variety of snake-men made a few probing attacks along the outermost breastworks, but fell back as the sun settled toward the western horizon, and Commander Narasan sent out word that it was time for a conference.
“Definitely time,” Gunda muttered to himself as he went down the stairs on the backside of his wall to join the others.
“These are at least twice as large as those we encountered in the ravine,” Keselo reported, “but it didn’t seem to me that they were quite as quick or agile.”
“Bigger has always been clumsier,” Rabbit suggested. “I learned that fairly early in life.”
“It’s possible—even probable—that this is the first hatch of these larger snake-men,” Veltan disagreed. “It’s going to take them several generations to adjust to their altered size.”
“Doesn’t that suggest that we’ll win this war before they’ve learned how to deal with their new size?” Padan asked.
“I wouldn’t make any large wagers on that, my friend,” Gunda disagreed. “If what happened in the ravine is any indication of what they’re capable of, they might just surprise us, and when you’re fighting things with poisonous fangs, ‘surprise’ usually means dead.”
“Did any of those larger ones come anywhere near your breastworks, Keselo?” Narasan asked.
“No, sir,” Keselo replied. “It seemed to me that all they were doing was watching.”
“Were you able to get any idea of just how thick their shell
s are?” Red-Beard asked.
“Not really,” Keselo admitted. “They were holding back.”
“An arrow with an iron tip might penetrate those shells, but I don’t know that I’d want to bet my life on that.”
“We might want to give some thought to catapults, Commander,” Andar suggested. “If ‘sharp’ won’t do the job on those beasts, then ‘heavy’ leaps to mind.”
“It has some possibilities, sir,” Brigadier Danal agreed. “A fifty-pound rock would almost certainly shatter those shells, wouldn’t you say?”
“It’s worth a try, I suppose,” Narasan agreed.
Then Sorgan Hook-Beak’s younger cousin Torl joined them near the fire.
“How are things going on down south,” Veltan asked.
“Well,” Torl replied a bit dubiously, “we burned all the ships the Trogs had anchored down there, but I’m not sure that did us all that much good. There were some very strange things going on down there.”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning, Captain Torl?” Narasan suggested.
Torl shrugged. “We burned every one of their ships, but it didn’t mean a thing to them. They’d already left the region by the time we got there.”
“Left?” Gunda exclaimed. “Where did they go?”
“I’d say that they’re coming here,” Torl replied.
“Do you suppose you could start from the beginning, Captain?” Narasan asked again.
Torl described a number of very peculiar events down on the south coast and what he called a “fairy tale” was the most peculiar. Gunda couldn’t fully understand what Torl was describing, but Narasan seemed to think it might be important, so he took Torl on down to where Veltan and his sister were staying. Gunda shrugged. He had other things on his mind just then.
There were several hundred of the enemy bug-bats tangled up in Rabbit’s fishnets the next morning. Longbow had told them that the flying enemies were in all probability serving only as scouts, but they were still venomous, and that made Gunda go cold all over. He sent a crew of his men armed with long, venom-tipped spears down along the wall to dispatch the helplessly fluttering creatures and another crew wearing thick leather gloves to untangle the dead enemy scouts from the nets and then to dispose of them.
The larger variety of the enemies Sorgan Hook-Beak had called “the snake-men” made a few very tentative approaches to the breastworks on down the slope, but there was nothing even remotely resembling an all-out attack as yet. The huge ones with turtle-shell breastplates stayed quite some distance to the rear, which didn’t bother Gunda all that much, since the crews that he’d put to work building catapults weren’t quite ready yet.
It was about noon when the bleak-faced archer Longbow came up across the grassy basin to speak with Commander Narasan and Veltan. Gunda went on down the stairs at the rear of his wall to join the small group that met with the archer.
“Are those Church soldiers still coming up through those gullies?” Padan asked.
“I think they’ve pretty much given up on the gullies,” Longbow replied. “The shepherds showed us every single route that anybody could possibly follow to reach this basin, and there were archers covering them all. It took those soldiers quite some time to realize that they wouldn’t stay alive if they tried to reach the top through those passes, so now they’ve all gathered at the foot of the waterfall.”
“They’re going to try swimming instead?” Padan asked.
Longbow smiled faintly. “Not that I’ve seen so far,” he replied. “Apparently they’ve given up the notion of finding some easy way to get up here, so they’ve fallen back to ‘difficult.’”
“Oh?” Padan said. “Ladders, maybe?”
Longbow shook his head. “Even fanatics wouldn’t be stupid enough to think that would work. It looks like they’ve decided that they need a highway, so they’re building one.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Longbow,” Narasan said.
“They started quite some distance below the falls,” Longbow explained, “and they’re building a ramp along the side of the west wall of the gorge where the falls are.”
“Right out in the open?” Padan demanded. “I wouldn’t have thought that even Church soldiers could be stupid enough to try something like that when your archers are lining the top of the gorge. They won’t get very far up that side if it’s raining arrows on them every minute of the day.”
“They’ve come up with a way to keep that particular rainstorm from making their lives difficult,” Longbow said.
“Oh?”
“I think it’s called a ‘roof,’ Padan,” Longbow explained. “It appears to be a very nice roof that’s going to keep them from getting wet—or dead. I think a fairly large number of them will reach the top of that ramp when they finish building it. Whether we like it or not, it appears that we will have to deal with two separate enemies up here.”
THE SEA OF GOLD
1
It was about noon when Longbow decided that it might not be a bad idea to advise Zelana and her brother of the situation and to suggest something in the nature of a conference before their outlander friends started to make decisions that could quite possibly be disastrous.
As he walked on down into the grassy basin that surrounded the huge geyser, he let his mind wander back to that day in the deep forest that had always been his home when Zelana and Eleria had sought him out and persuaded him—or, more accurately, coerced him—into joining them and their family in this ongoing war. That particular day had changed his life forever.
In many ways, Longbow regretted that. Life alone in the forest had been very simple, since nothing had interfered with the hunt, and the hunt had been his sole purpose since the day when Misty-Water had died. He’d known exactly how to hunt down the brainless servants of the Vlagh and kill them, and he’d found great satisfaction in his ongoing retribution.
It was a warm day, and actually rather pleasant as Longbow went on down toward the geyser. Grassland was not really as nice as the forest, certainly, but there was a certain beauty there. Longbow could see much farther here, of course, but he missed the trees and the excitement of the hunt. War did kill more of the servants of the Vlagh, even as Eleria had said that it would on that day when he’d first met Zelana and the little girl, but wars were complicated, and they involved large numbers of people moving from this place to that, and endless and tiresome discussions and arguments.
That always seemed to come back to him in his dealings with the outlanders. They seemed to enjoy arguing with each other about things that weren’t really significant. A solitary hunter could move faster and reach his goal much sooner than any army in the world possibly could, probably because there was nobody around to argue with.
“I’m not really cut out for this,” Longbow conceded rather ruefully. “Maybe I should have given the whole thing just a bit more thought.”
The geyser which was the source of the River Vash was really quite spectacular—something on the order of a large column of water reaching up for nearly a hundred feet before it flared out, almost like a blossoming flower.
Zelana and child Eleria had set up a rather rudimentary camp far enough away from the geyser to avoid the continual spray of water carried by even the slightest breeze. Longbow amended his notion that the place where they spent most of their time could be called a “camp,” since it consisted of little more than a crude bed where Eleria slept and a wooden pail half-filled with fruit for her to eat. Zelana, of course, did not need a bed, nor food, for she was complete, and needed nothing.
Eleria came to him with her arms out, as always, and when he picked her up, she said—also as always—“kiss-kiss.”
Longbow smiled and then kissed the delightful child.
“Is it my turn now?” Zelana asked.
“All in good time,” Longbow replied. “I thought it might be a good idea for you and your brother Veltan to pay our outlander friends a little visit. Some things have been happening here lately
that have disturbed them quite a bit.”
“Oh?” Zelana asked.
“We have what appears to be a second invasion coming up from the south. Sorgan’s cousin Torl told us a rather peculiar story about some things that happened when the armies of the Trogite Church landed on the south coast of your brother’s Domain. He said that every time a Church soldier mentioned gold, the local farmers all recited a story about a huge amount of gold sand somewhere out in the Wasteland, and as soon as the soldier heard that story, he was driven to dash up this way to gather up as much as he could carry.”
“I’ve heard about that, Longbow,” Zelana replied.
“Right at first, I thought that the Vlagh might have created this hoax as a way to destroy Narasan’s army, but now I’m starting to have second thoughts. Wouldn’t that be just a bit too complicated for the Vlagh?”
“Not really,” Zelana replied. “There were servants of the Vlagh involved in Kajak’s attack on the Seagull back in the harbor at Kweta, remember.”
“Yes, but that only involved a few Maags. This time, we’re talking about a half-million men—and Kajak had actually seen the gold Sorgan had stacked up in the hold of the Seagull. The only thing the Trogites off to the south have to go on is a rather vague folk tale, and why would that give them any reason to attack Narasan’s army? It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“Don’t blame me for that, Longbow,” Zelana replied. “Go shout at the Vlagh.”
“Sorry, Zelana. Irrational things irritate me, that’s all. All I really came here for was to suggest that you and your brother should come by Gunda’s wall and head off any wild ideas Narasan might devise. The notion of being attacked from two directions at the same time is starting to disturb him quite a bit, so we’d better see what we can do to settle him down.”
“It’ll cost you a kiss-kiss, Longbow,” she said with a sly little smirk.
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