The Treasured One

by David Eddings

  “They cleared away almost all of our stakes in less than half a day, Commander,” Andar reported that evening when they met again atop the center tower in Gunda’s wall. “Fortunately, they don’t appear to be night creatures, so they all pulled back as the sun went down.”

  “Did anybody at all manage to kill one of them?” Gunda demanded.

  Andar shook his head. “Arrows just bounce off of them, and they didn’t quite reach the second breastworks, so none of us had the opportunity to try spears. I don’t think spears would have punched through those shells anyway.”

  “I think we might be in trouble, Narasan,” Gunda declared. “Our main enemy is still that Vlagh thing, and it’s beginning to look like it learned a lot more than we thought during the war in the ravine. Now it’s got bigger soldiers—and armored ones as well. We’d better start coming up with some answers here, or the enemy’s going to walk all over us.”

  “I’ll see if I can find my big brother,” Veltan said. “He’s the expert on insects, so he’ll be able to give us much more specific information.”

  Longbow briefly squinted up at Dahlaine’s bright-shining imitation sun, which appeared to still be joyously aflame. That raised a couple of questions. If Dahlaine’s toy sun was bright enough to cause pain to the bug-bats, why did the other servants of the Vlagh stop advancing when the real sun went down? This war was turning out to be much more complicated than the previous one had been—quite probably because the Vlagh had learned many things during the conflict in Zelana’s Domain, and “learning” and “bug” didn’t really fit together at all.

  Veltan, Dahlaine, and Zelana joined them on the tower after a short time had passed, and Narasan rather quickly described the larger enemy soldiers and the eight-legged turtles.

  “Those are the ones you should try your best to avoid,” Dahlaine cautioned. “Eight legs means spiders, young man, and spiders are even more dangerous than snakes.”

  “I thought snakes were about as bad as it’s likely to get,” Rabbit said.

  Dahlaine shook his head. “Snake venom kills—usually very quickly. Spider venom paralyzes its prey. Most spiders spin webs that capture the prey. Then the spider bites the captive to keep it in one place until the spider’s ready to eat again. It’s not uncommon for a spider to have four or five meals tangled in the web, waiting to be eaten.”

  “That’s terrible!” Rabbit exclaimed.

  “It gets worse,” Dahlaine replied. “A spider doesn’t have jaws—or teeth—so it can’t chew its food. A significant part of its venom is a powerful digestive fluid that liquefies the internal organs and flesh of any creature it attacks. Then the spider’s able to suck that liquid out of whatever—or whoever—it’s having for supper. All that’s left when the spider finishes is skin and bones.”

  “We’d better come up with some way to kill them, then,” Longbow said.

  “Fire, maybe?” Keselo suggested.

  “Fire might be the best answer,” Dahlaine agreed.

  “Is there any part of a spider’s body that’s not protected by the outer shell?” Longbow asked.

  Dahlaine thought about it. “The eyes, possibly.” Then he smiled faintly. “That would give you quite a few targets, Longbow.”

  “Oh?”

  “A spider has eight eyes, you know.”

  “No,” Longbow replied, “I didn’t know that. There might be a few possibilities there, then. Maybe this isn’t quite as hopeless as we first thought it was.”

  3

  Longbow hadn’t slept much in the past few days and he was bone-tired. He went some distance on out into the grassy basin and bedded down in the forest to the west of the geyser. Dahlaine’s suggestion that the turtle-shelled spiders might be an easy target for his arrows had lessened Longbow’s sense of helplessness, and he fell into a deep sleep almost before he’d laid his head down.

  It was much later when he seemed to hear a tantalizingly familiar woman’s voice saying, “Go away, brave warrior, go away.”

  He sat up quickly and looked around, but there was nobody there. He was almost positive that he remembered that rich-sounding voice, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on just whose voice it was.

  He lay down again and went back to sleep almost immediately.

  “Go away, Longbow, protector of Zelana, go away. Put not thyself in needless danger. Stand aside, brave Longbow, stand aside.”

  He jerked himself up into a sitting position again, but there was still nobody there.

  This was beginning to become very irritating. “Don’t pester me,” he grumbled, lying back down. “I’m trying to get some sleep.”

  But yet again the woman’s voice came out of the night in an even more commanding tone. “In the name of Misty-Water, I command thee to go from here. This war is mine, not thine, and I will give thee victory if thou wilt but stand aside.”

  And then the voice of Longbow’s dream was gone, and he sank once more into dreamless sleep.

  “Were you trying to reach me last night?” He sent the soundless question out to Zelana as the sun rose the following morning.

  “It wasn’t me, Longbow,” her silent voice came back. “Are you sure you weren’t just dreaming?”

  “I think I might be just a little too old to be one of the Dreamers, Zelana.”

  “Doesn’t that sort of depend on just exactly what you mean when you say ‘old,’ Longbow?” she asked archly.

  “Don’t do that,” he scolded. “Whoever—or whatever—it was, it was trying very hard to persuade me to just pack up and go away.”

  “It certainly wasn’t me, then. I couldn’t live without you, dear, dear Longbow.”

  “Are we just about done playing?” he asked her.

  “Sorry.” She paused. “Do you think it might just have been the Vlagh—or one of its more intelligent servants?”

  “I don’t see how it could have been. Whoever it was gave me a command to go away in the name of Misty-Water, and there’s no way the Vlagh could know about her or have even the faintest idea of her significance to me.”

  “It could have been just a real dream, Longbow. I’ve occasionally had people tell me that there are times when dreams seem so real that the people who have those particular dreams can’t tell where reality leaves off and the dream begins.”

  “Well, maybe,” Longbow said dubiously.

  During the night Subcommander Andar had pulled his forces back to the third barricade, and, though it was probably futile, they’d laced the intervening open space with the now-customary poisoned stakes.

  Longbow and Rabbit went on down to join their friends just before the sun rose.

  “You’re late,” Andar rumbled in his deep voice.

  “Overslept,” Longbow said with a shrug.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Andar said. “From what I’ve been told, you know more about the bug-people than anyone else, so maybe you can explain just why they pull back every evening. Several hundred of their companions get killed every time they overrun one of our breastworks, but they just turn around and walk away when the sun goes down. Then they have to start over and recapture what they’d had right in their hands the previous day. Isn’t that sort of stupid?”

  “Stupid’s part of the nature of the bug-men,” Rabbit told him. “It might just be that they don’t know that the sun’s going to come back tomorrow. For all they know, the sun dies late in the afternoon, and it’ll stay dark for the rest of eternity—it’s either that, or maybe Big-Mama gets lonesome when the sun goes down.”

  “Big-Mama?”

  “The Vlagh. If I understand what Lady Zelana told us correctly, the Vlagh’s the one who laid all the eggs that turned into the bug-people when they hatched. If she lays the eggs, doesn’t that make her the mommy?”

  Longbow glanced over the top of the barricade. “Good,” he said. “I see that your men planted stakes out to the front. That should bring the spider-creatures here. We need a dead one—fairly soon, I t
hink.”

  “What for?”

  “So that we can take it apart and see if we can find any other weaknesses. Your archers aren’t really well trained enough to drive arrows into a spider’s eye from a hundred paces away, are they?”

  “Not as far as I know, they aren’t,” Andar agreed.

  The introduction of fire missiles hurled by Trogite catapults elevated the sometimes stodgy Trogites quite noticeably in Longbow’s opinion. Naphtha, pitch, and tar in the proper proportions most definitely disturbed not only the larger bug-men, but also the heavily shelled spiders. So far as Longbow was able to determine, setting fire to any creature got its immediate attention. Being on fire probably would be just a little distracting.

  The only problem lay in the indiscriminate launching of the fire missiles into the ranks of the approaching enemies. Longbow dropped several dozen hard-shelled spiders with venom-tipped arrows planted in their eyes, but the bodies he wanted to retrieve in an intact condition inevitably were at least partially consumed by the indiscriminate distribution of fire.

  “Andar!” he finally shouted. “Would you please stop throwing fire out there? You’re burning everything in sight.”

  “That was sort of what we had in mind, Longbow. If something works, don’t change it, I always say.”

  “That’s the problem. It doesn’t work—not for me, anyway. I want a raw turtle, not a cooked one.”

  “Oh, maybe I overlooked that. How long do you think it’s going to take you to kill one of them and retrieve the carcass?”

  Longbow swept his eyes across the stake-dotted slope between this third barricade and the one perhaps a hundred paces on down below. There were several hundred dead enemies—mostly already burned to a crisp—lying between the two barricades, but none that were intact. “Why don’t you tell your men to relax for a while?” he suggested. “They’re probably a bit tired after all this hard work anyway. Let a few enemies get close to us. I’ll decide which one I want, kill it, and retrieve the body. Then your men can go back to cooking everything in sight.”

  He looked out over the top of the barrier and saw several of the oversized bug-men tentatively advancing, but the hard-shelled spiders seemed to be holding back. It was quite obvious that the Trogite fire missiles were making the servants of the Vlagh a bit nervous.

  When the advancing bug-men reached the center of the open space between the two barricades without being showered with fire, however, the spider servants grew more bold and began to come spilling over the barricade on down the slope.

  “Not the best decision there,” Longbow muttered under his breath as he carefully drew another arrow from his quiver.

  The newer servants of the Vlagh were obviously more intelligent than the ones Longbow and his friends had encountered in the ravine above Lattash, but their expanded intelligence seemed to have been limited to the introduction of a certain amount of caution. Of course fire would get the immediate attention of almost any creature in the whole world.

  Longbow waited until one of the hard-shelled spiders was no more than a few yards from the front of the barricade, and then he loosed his arrow directly at one of the large eyes at the front of the creature’s head. The creature collapsed instantly, and several Trogite soldiers vaulted over the barricade and dragged the dead enemy back behind the protective wall.

  “That’s all we need, Andar!” Longbow shouted. “Build up the fire again!”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Andar bellowed.

  Then the catapults lashed forward again, raining fire down on the servants of the Vlagh once more.

  Dahlaine spent most of that afternoon carefully examining the Vlagh’s most recent experiment. “That thing out there never ceases to amaze me,” he told Longbow, Veltan, and Zelana after he’d finished. “This particular creation isn’t what it seems to be. There’s no hint of reptile here. This thing’s nothing more than a modified spider.”

  “That shell doesn’t look very spiderlike to me, big brother,” Veltan disagreed, as Rabbit and Narasan joined them.

  “The shell’s nothing more than a modification of an ordinary spider’s outer skeleton, Veltan. Evidently, the Vlagh saw the value of the Trogite breastplate, and then it looked around in the animal world until it found something that closely resembled it—the turtle-shell, of course. Then it altered a spider to add that defensive shell to ward off the arrows that eliminated so many of its servants during the war in our sister’s Domain. The thing that troubles me the most here lies in the Vlagh’s experimentation with spiders. There’s no real connection between spiders and the Vlagh’s usual servants. The average spider lives on a steady diet of creatures that closely resemble the standard servant of the Vlagh. What we’ve got here is something on the order of what you’d get if you crossed a cat with a mouse.”

  “That’s absurd, Dahlaine!” Zelana protested.

  “The Vlagh is an absurdity, dear sister. Hadn’t you noticed that? What baffles me the most here is just why the Vlagh chose spiders to serve as its armored servants. There are several varieties of beetles that would probably have worked just as well, and beetles are much closer to the Vlagh’s species than spiders are. Spiders are solitary creatures, and the original servants of the Vlagh cluster up.”

  “The world of bugs is awfully complicated, isn’t it?” Rabbit observed.

  “Indeed it is,” Dahlaine agreed.

  “Wilt thou not hear me, brave warrior?” the soft voice half roused Longbow from his sleep. “The victory is mine, if thou wilt but stand aside. Though they know it not, the armies that come up from the south are mine, and they come here at my bidding. I command thee to stand aside and impede them no more. Go from this place. Stand no more between me and my victory.”

  Longbow came up with his eyes wide open as a number of things came together all at once. Torl’s account of the ridiculous fairy tale the farmers far to the south in Veltan’s Domain had automatically repeated each time they heard the word “gold,” and the Trogite soldiers’ obsessive response to the tale suddenly began to make sense. Somebody—some woman, evidently—had picked up the idea of using gold for bait, and she’d just neatly caught about a half-million Church soldiers.

  But why?

  The more Longbow thought about it, the more certain he became that the voice in his dream’s continual repetition of “get out of the way” meant exactly that. And the instruction was clearly not meant for Longbow alone. His friends were also supposed to stand aside so that the two distinctly separate enemies could fall upon each other in a war of mutual extinction.

  “Good boy,” the now-familiar voice murmured fondly. “I was sure that you’d get my point—eventually.”

  “I need to talk with you, Zelana,” Longbow sent out his silent, urgent call the following morning.

  “Some new disaster, perhaps?”

  “I don’t really think so. I think your brothers should sit in as well, and probably Narasan too.”

  “Is something bothering you, Longbow?”

  “I’m not sure if ‘bother’ is the right word. If I’m anywhere at all close to being right about this, we’re getting help—from somebody we didn’t even know was there.”

  “That’s very irritating, Longbow. Don’t leave things hanging up in the air like that.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m still trying to sort this out. Maybe we should meet down near the geyser. I don’t think we want to spread this around just yet—and we definitely don’t want word of this to get back to the Vlagh.”

  “This had better be good, Longbow.”

  “If I’m anywhere close to being right, it goes a long way past good.”

  Longbow went out of the forest where he usually slept and walked on down to the noisy geyser, trying to sort through his most peculiar experience.

  When he reached the geyser that was the primary source of the River Vash, Zelana and her brothers were already there, along with Rabbit, Keselo, Gunda, Torl, and Narasan.

  “What’s this al
l about, Longbow?” Rabbit asked.

  “Let’s go back just a ways,” Longbow said. “Ashad’s dream told us that there was going to be a second invasion of Veltan’s Domain, and, sure enough, five Church armies showed up on the south coast almost before we reached Veltan’s house.”

  “This is all ancient history, Longbow,” Gunda protested.

  “Perhaps, but I think we might want to take a second look at it. Now, then, the Church soldiers rounded up all the local people down there and then sat around rubbing their hands together while they waited for the slave-ships to arrive.”

  “We’ve heard about all this before,” Narasan said.

  “I know, but perhaps we weren’t listening quite hard enough. Before the slavers even made it to the beach, something very peculiar was going on. Torl tells us that every time one of those farmers heard somebody say ‘gold,’ he went into a kind of trance and recited an ancient fairy tale—which probably wasn’t really all that ancient, since Omago had never heard of it. Then, after any one of the Church soldiers heard the story, he immediately decided to give up army life and run north just as hard as he could. Then, after they discovered that trying to come up here through the various ravines, gullies, and passes was extremely dangerous, they gathered together to build that ramp, which isn’t really in a very good place, and they’ve stayed at it with what seems to be mindless determination.” He looked at Narasan. “You know much more about those Church armies than I do. Does that sound at all like something they’d normally do?”

  “Probably not,” Narasan conceded, “but the thought of vast amounts of gold just lying on the ground waiting for them to come along and pick it up might have unhinged their minds just a bit.”

  “All of their minds? Wouldn’t at least a few of them want more proof?”

  “I think I see what you’re getting at, Longbow,” Narasan said. “Those Church soldiers aren’t behaving normally, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they’re charging at my rear, and I can’t hold them back and fight off the bug-people at the same time. What set you off on this?”