“I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to that,” Andar declared. “Fighting wars against females is so unnatural.”
“That particular female thinks that all we are is something to eat, Andar,” Danal disagreed. “Ordinary courtesies go right out the window in a situation like that, wouldn’t you say? Let’s face it, my friend. If the Vlagh happens to invite you to dinner, you’re likely to be the main course.”
THE INLAND SEA
1
Veltan, like the others, had been more than a little dubious about Longbow’s assertion that the Church armies were unknowingly coming to aid them in their struggle with the servants of the Vlagh, but the sudden appearance of that “sea of gold”—which wasn’t gold—and the almost hysterical reaction of the assorted Trogites coming up from the south had convinced him that the voice which had come to Longbow had spoken truly.
The more troubling question gnawing at Veltan now was just exactly who this unknown friend was, and how she had managed to pull off such a colossal deception. It was quite obvious by now that their “unknown friend” had been operating at a level of sophistication far beyond anything Veltan or his brother and sisters could possibly have managed.
Right now, however, Veltan had more important things to attend to. He sent out his thought to his pet thunderbolt, and somewhat to his surprise, she didn’t grumble or complain as she almost always did, but came to him immediately.
“Good baby,” he said to her. “We need to go on down to the Falls of Vash and have a look at some people down there.” He hesitated slightly. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything, but do you suppose you could be just a bit quieter than usual?”
She flickered questioningly.
“I guess it’s not really all that important, dear,” he said. “There’s been quite a bit of peculiar weather around lately, so those strangers won’t be too surprised—no matter what happens.” He mounted and settled himself. “Let’s go, baby,” he said, glancing at the slowly settling sandstorm.
He was more than a little surprised when they reached the huge waterfall and his pet rumbled faintly instead of producing that deafening crash.
“Good girl,” he said. “That was just fine. Wait here. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
He dismounted and drifted on down through the air toward the crudely constructed bridge that connected the Trogite ramp with the rim of the gorge that lay to the south.
The red-uniformed soldiers of the Amarite church were plodding up the ramp, and there were very few of them still waiting down below.
“Well, good enough,” Veltan murmured. “From the look of things, I’d say that this is the tail-end of the column. Give them another half-day, and they’ll all be up here.”
Then he saw a familiar face among the Trogites coming up from below.
“I guess that answers that particular question,” Veltan murmured as he watched the scrawny former soldier Jalkan limping up the ramp, accompanied by a grossly fat clergyman stumbling along beside him, wheezing and sweating gallons as he came. The two of them were surrounded by bleak-faced guards wearing the black uniforms of the Regulators.
Veltan reached out with his ears to see if the two enemies might possibly reveal anything useful.
“It’s only a little farther, Adnari,” Jalkan said in that nasally whining voice that Veltan had always found so irritating.
“Let me catch my breath, Jalkan,” the fat man wheezed, stopping and wiping the sweat off his face.
“No,” Jalkan said firmly. “We can’t block off the ramp. The last brigade’s still behind us, and we can’t delay them.”
“I don’t give a hoot about the soldiers, Jalkan!” The fat man flared. “Their only purpose in life is to serve the Church, and in this part of the world, I am the church.”
“Not in a war, Adnari Estarg,” Jalkan disagreed. “Not unless you’d like to take up falling and dying as a hobby. The soldiers in that brigade know that there’s gold just ahead, and if you delay them too much, they might very well decide to dispose of you by shoving you off the side of the ramp, and it’s a long way down from here.”
“They wouldn’t dare!”
“Would you really like to bet your life on that, Adnari?”
The fat man looked back over his shoulder at the impatient men in red uniforms who were glaring at him. “The Regulators will protect me, Jalkan,” he declared.
“Did you want to bet your life on that as well?” Jalkan demanded. “Now that Konag’s not with us anymore, we can’t really trust anybody. Konag was the one with the iron fist, and the other Regulators obeyed him out of terror, and then they terrorized the soldiers in our five armies. Konag was our key, but he’s gone now, so we can’t lock doors anymore.”
Veltan scratched his cheek thoughtfully as a distinct possibility came to him unbidden. Something—or more probably, somebody—had moved the clever little Rabbit to do something very uncharacteristic. First he’d carved out a bow, and the Maags had never been very interested in archery. Then the little man had been stirred to violence by Konag’s brutal slaughter of any and all Church soldiers who broke ranks and tried to run on ahead of the armies to reach the imitation gold before their comrades did. And then Rabbit, who should at best have been a rank amateur as an archer, dropped Konag dead in his tracks with a single arrow.
“I’d say that we’ve definitely got some serious tampering going on here lately,” Veltan mused.
There was a bit of shouting coming up to Veltan from the red-uniformed soldiers who’d just crossed the bridge and reached the rim of the gorge, and the word that rang out the loudest was “gold!”
Veltan glanced to the north across the grassy basin. There were a few yellow-speckled crags jutting up out of the Wasteland, but the real “sea of gold” lay some distance below the north ridge and Gunda’s wall. It should not be visible from here, but there it was, bright and gleaming, and out in plain view.
There were a couple of very unlikely possibilities that might explain just how something that should be completely out of sight was right there to be seen. On a few occasions, Veltan had encountered mirages, those inverted reflections of far distant things, but always in the past, they’d been limited to water.
“It would seem that Longbow’s friend is very creative,” Veltan mused. “Good, though,” he added with a grin.
“I really wish you wouldn’t do that, Veltan,” Sorgan Hook-Beak complained when Veltan’s pet deposited him no more than a few feet away from the pirate. “It almost scares me out of my skin.”
“I’ll mention that to my pet, Sorgan,” Veltan promised, “but I don’t think she’ll listen. She loves to startle people.” He looked down into Sorgan’s third trench. “I see that you’re still planting stakes,” he noted.
“It works out pretty well, Veltan,” Sorgan said. “The whole idea here is to slow down the Church Trogs, and it takes them quite a while to dig the stakes up.” Then he chuckled. “We’ve been cheating just a bit, though.”
“Cheating?”
“We don’t waste venom anymore. The Church Trogs creep across the trenches on their hands and knees, very carefully digging up stakes that aren’t really anything but bare wood sticks. As long as they believe that the stakes will kill them, their advance is dead slow.”
“I think we might want to change the rules, Sorgan,” Veltan suggested. “The last Church army has finally made it up to the rim. Now that they’re all up here where they’re supposed to be, it’s time for us to get out of their way so that they can go say hello to the bug-people.”
“I hope Longbow knows what he’s talking about,” Sorgan said a bit dubiously. “Are you certain sure that those Church Trogs will do what they’re supposed to do?”
Veltan nodded. “Longbow’s friend pulled off another of her deceptions. There were a few crags sticking up out of the Wasteland, but when the bulk of that last Church army reached the rim, she gave them something much prettier to look at. They saw the entire Waste
land—and all the pretty sand she’d put out there for their entertainment. Now they’re just dying to get out there and claim it.”
“How did she do that?”
“How would I know? She’s so far ahead of me that I can’t really understand anything she does. Pull back, Sorgan. It’s time for us to get out of the way.”
“It’s going to take a while, Veltan,” Sorgan said. “My men are going to have to pull those stakes if we want the Trogs to move any faster than a slow crawl.”
“Why don’t you let me take care of that, Sorgan?” Veltan asked with a broad grin. “My pet needs a little entertainment anyway. I’m fairly sure she’ll enjoy blasting all your stakes into splinters, so why don’t we let her have all the fun?”
“What’s happening on down there, Veltan?” Commander Narasan asked when Veltan’s pet deposited him on the central tower of Gunda’s wall.
“Everything’s going like it’s supposed to, my friend. Lillabeth’s sandstorm made things much easier for us. That fifth Church army has finally reached the rim, so they’re all up here now. I just advised Sorgan that it’s time for him to get out of the way and let those greedy churchies come on up here.”
“Padan passed through Sorgan’s barricades and trenches when he pulled his men back after the churchies started building that bridge,” Narasan said then. “From what he told me, the River Vash will have Sorgan and his men blocked off if they decide to go east. He’ll have to go on up that west ridge, won’t he?”
Veltan shook his head. “He told me that he’d leave a small force behind his last barricade to delay the Church armies, and then his main force will come north to the geyser and then go on off to the east.”
“What’s going to happen to those men he’ll leave behind?”
Veltan smiled. “Sorgan told me that those men are the fastest runners in his entire army. He’s quite positive that they’ll be able to outrun the churchies without even working up a sweat.” He paused. “I almost forgot something that might brighten your day.”
“Oh?”
“Scrawny Jalkan—along with a very fat Estarg—are coming to call. It’s a shame that we won’t be here to greet them, but we’ll be terribly busy getting out of their way.”
“I don’t suppose you’d consider a brief delay, would you, Veltan?” Narasan asked.
“What did you have in mind, Narasan?”
“Something sort of slow—and extremely painful.”
“Why don’t we let the servants of the Vlagh have him, Narasan?” Veltan suggested. “They have ways of inflicting pain that go far, far beyond anything you could possibly dream up.” Veltan paused. “This is suddenly turning into a very unusual sort of war, wouldn’t you say? We’re just standing off to one side cheering enthusiastically while our two deadliest enemies exterminate each other.”
“I have it on the very best authority that wars like that are the very, very best that any army ever has,” Narasan replied.
2
Red-Beard was quite pleased with the way things were going here in the Domain of Zelana’s brother. He’d rather hoped that things might move more slowly, but winning was the goal, after all, and fast or slow was secondary. As soon as this war ended, it was almost certain that a new one would begin, and, of course, he’d be obliged to take part in that one as well. Out beyond that one, there’d be yet another. Red-Beard was almost positive that these wars would plod on along until the people of his tribe decided that somebody else might be more suitable to take up the burden of being the chief, and right now that was Red-Beard’s main goal in life.
When Padan pulled his men back away from the Falls of Vash after the Church armies had completed the bridge that linked their ramp to the rim of the basin, Red-Beard had decided to stay behind. Things were more interesting here in the grassy basin, and friend Longbow might need some help.
The two of them joined up with Sorgan Hook-Beak as the Maags pulled back from the series of barricades on the west side of the upper River Vash.
“Veltan seems quite happy about the way things are going,” Sorgan told them as they went upstream toward that colossal geyser that was the source of the River Vash.
“We haven’t made too many mistakes yet,” Longbow observed.
“Do you always have to look on the dark side, Longbow?” Sorgan demanded.
Longbow shrugged. “Habit, I suppose,” he said. “If you expect the worst, anything that’s not terrible comes as a pleasant surprise.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Longbow,” Sorgan said. “As far as I can tell, you haven’t had the time to train Rabbit with that bow of his, but suddenly he’s an archer who’s almost as good as you are. How did you manage that?”
“I didn’t,” Longbow replied. “Apparently, he picked it up on his own.”
“Rabbit’s clever enough, I suppose,” Sorgan said skeptically, “but doesn’t it take a lot of training and years of practice to get that good with a bow?”
Longbow squinted at the horizon. “When he was spending most of his time hammering out those iron arrowheads for me, he and I talked about putting arrows where you want them to go. I suppose it’s possible that he remembered some of the things I told him.”
“All that mysticism about ‘unification’?” Red-Beard asked. “I never did get your point when you told me about it.”
“I don’t really think it’s all that complicated, Red-Beard,” Longbow said. “I’ve given it some thought, and I’m almost sure that the idea of being unified with the target has to be there when the bowman unlooses his first arrow. If it’s there right then, it’ll always be there. If it isn’t, it’ll never show up.”
“Thanks a lot, Longbow,” Red-Beard said sarcastically.
“I wasn’t trying to offend you, friend Red-Beard,” Longbow said. “I was probably just lucky the first time I drew my bow. Our shaman, One-Who-Heals, used to talk about the unification of the bowman, his arrow, and the target quite often when the boys of our tribe began practicing with their bows, and some of us tried it to see if it worked the way he’d told us it would. As it turned out, it did, and the other boys got all sulky about it, because they’d never be able to do it after they’d shot off their first arrow. If Rabbit just happened to be thinking along those lines when he tried his bow the first time, it’s there, and he’ll never lose it.”
“That sounds just a bit far-fetched to me, Longbow,” Sorgan said. “The thing that puzzles me even more, though, is what was it that got Rabbit all steamed up about that fellow called Konag? He went wild about that fellow for some reason.”
“I’m not really sure, Sorgan,” Longbow said. “It might just have been a decision by that unknown lady who’s helping us. If Konag was disrupting her plan, she needed to get rid of him. Since Rabbit was right there, she used him to dispose of an inconvenience.”
Then, even as they marched north toward the geyser, Red-Beard heard a deep rumble coming up from far below, and he looked around with a certain apprehension as he vividly remembered the twin fire-mountains that had ultimately destroyed the village of Lattash and clamped the unwanted chieftainship around his neck.
Red-Beard and Longbow were somewhat behind Sorgan’s men as they moved quite rapidly up the west side of the River Vash toward the geyser. The Church soldiers had moved north rather cautiously at first, but when they realized that the trenches were no longer filled with poisoned stakes, they began to move more rapidly, tearing down the barricades as they came.
“How much farther north do Sorgan’s men have to go to reach the geyser?” Red-Beard asked his friend.
“A couple miles is about all,” Longbow replied.
“Maybe we should tell them to hustle right along,” Red-Beard suggested. “Those red-suited soldiers will be climbing up their backs if they just dawdle along.”
“Sorgan’s going to turn toward the east after he passes the geyser,” Longbow said. “He’s far enough ahead of those Trogites to get clear before they catch up with him.”
Then there came another of those rumbles from deep below, and the ground trembled under their feet.
“That’s starting to make me just a bit edgy,” Red-Beard said. “It’s not a good sign when the earth starts to wobble like that.”
“You could ask it to quit, I suppose,” Longbow replied. “I don’t know if it’ll listen, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.”
“Very funny, Longbow,” Red-Beard said.
Then there came a sudden flash of light, a sharp crack of thunder, and grey-bearded Dahlaine was there. “You’d better tell sister Zelana’s Maags to get out of this basin as fast as they can,” he said. “Ashad just had another one of those dreams, and I’m almost certain that something fairly awful is about to happen in this area.”
“Fire-mountains again?” Red-Beard asked with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“I’m not completely sure,” Dahlaine replied. “Ashad wasn’t very specific. Something’s going on down below, but that’s about all we can say for sure. Tell Sorgan to hustle right along, and I’ll go warn Narasan.”
Sorgan, Torl, and Rabbit were standing around the sizeable fissure in the ground where the geyser that had been the source of the River Vash for the past twenty-five eons had been spurting high up into the air, and the three of them seemed to be more than a little astonished by the fact that the geyser wasn’t there anymore.
“What’s going on here?” Sorgan demanded, gesturing at the fissure.
“I wouldn’t stand around waiting to find out if I were you, Sorgan,” Longbow replied. “Dahlaine came by just a while ago and told us to advise you that something fairly awful’s likely to come along soon.”
“Just exactly what do you mean by ‘awful,’ Longbow?” Rabbit asked as the earth began to shudder again.
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