“Does that answer your question, Rabbit?” Red-Beard asked the little smith. “In this part of the world we’ve learned not to ask questions when the ground starts to wobble. The best thing to do when that happens is to run away.”
“Which way should we go?” Sorgan asked Longbow, his eyes gone wide.
“The east ridge is quite a bit closer, Sorgan,” Longbow replied, “and in this sort of situation, closer is better, and running is much better than walking.”
“Do you think your unknown friend might be playing games again, Longbow?” Torl asked.
“Why don’t we run right now?” Longbow suggested. “We can ask questions later.”
“And running fast is probably much better than running slow,” Red-Beard added. “Real fast, if you get my drift.”
“Pass the word, cousin,” Sorgan told Torl. “Tell the men to run toward the east just as fast as they can—and let them know that their lives probably depend on it.”
3
Ashad had behaved as if his dream that night in the basin above the Falls of Vash had been more than just a little different from the dream he’d had in our cave under Mount Shrak when this had all begun. There was an urgency in his voice that hadn’t been there in our cave. He didn’t give me very many details, but I got the feeling that what was about to happen frightened him more than a little.
I realized that this wasn’t really the time for reflection, so I advised Veltan and my sisters that it was time for us to take our Dreamers and leave this basin. If Ashad had given me more in the way of details I might have been able to be more precise, but after Yaltar’s twin volcanos had engulfed the ravine above Lattash, we’d all learned that getting out of the way in the face of the natural disasters the Dreamers jerked out of nowhere was the best course of action.
Then I rode my thunderbolt on down to warn Sorgan, Longbow, and Red-Beard, and turned to give Narasan a similar warning.
“Are we looking at something on the order of those twin volcanos that saved the day for us back in the ravine?” Narasan asked rather tensely.
“I can’t be entirely sure, Commander,” I admitted. “Let’s stay on the safe side, though. I think it might be best for you to get all of your men clear of this basin. Did your friend Padan join you here after he’d abandoned his position down by the Falls of Vash, or did he go on over to the east rim?”
“He came here. He’s commanding the men off to the west.”
“You’d better get word to him,” I suggested. “Let’s not take any chances right now.” I glanced down the slope at the barricades Narasan’s men had erected to delay the invasion of the servants of the Vlagh. “Have the insect-people shaken off the effects of Lillabeth’s sandstorm yet?” I asked.
“Not entirely, I think. Their attacks on the third breastwork down there have been sort of tenuous. We don’t really know just how many bug-people the Vlagh had at its disposal, but I’m quite sure that a sizeable number of them were suffocated during that storm. It might take the Vlagh quite a while to bring in replacements.”
“I don’t really think the Vlagh has that much time, Narasan,” I told him. “The Church armies are on the move again, and it won’t be long before they’ll reach your wall here. I think you’d better pull your men back from the slope and send them off to the east as well. Let’s get all of our people out of harm’s way.”
“Right,” the commander agreed. Then he turned. “Gunda!” he shouted. “I need you here—right now!”
Narasan’s balding friend came running along the wall. “Have we got trouble of some kind?” he demanded.
“I’m not sure if ‘trouble’ is the right word, Gunda. Send a runner off to the west to tell Padan that I want him and his men to abandon their positions and come here just as fast as they can run. And send word on down to Andar as well. I want his people up here too.”
“We’ll have bug-people all over us before the sun goes down if we do that, Narasan,” Gunda protested.
“Not if we aren’t here anymore, we won’t. Our grand plan has changed just a bit, Gunda. I think we might want to move on to ‘run away.’ Lord Dahlaine just advised me that the children have been playing again, and we don’t want to get in their way.” Narasan paused, and then he turned back to look at me. “Veltan told us that he and his toy were going to open a passage-way through Gunda’s wall here so that the Church armies would be able to get through to greet the bug-people. Can you get word to him that we’ll need that opening fairly soon?”
I smiled. “My pet’s just as efficient as Veltan’s is, Commander. If Veltan’s busy someplace else, my pet will get to have the fun this time. There will be a highway waiting here when the Church armies arrive.”
The assorted officers in Narasan’s army all seemed to be very fond of the term “logistics,” which I took to mean “getting the right people and the right equipment to the right place at the right time.” Military language tends to be just a bit stuffy at times, I’ve noticed.
The major problem Narasan’s men encountered lay in the fact that Gunda’s wall was only about thirty feet wide at the bottom and even less at the top. Since he had to move about a hundred thousand men off to the ridge that lay to the east, it was obviously going to take more time than I was positive we really had to get them to safety.
Fortunately, the young officer named Keselo came up from the barricades Narasan’s men had built to delay the creatures of the Wasteland when it was beginning to be more and more obvious that Narasan’s men would not reach the east ridge in time. His solution was so simple that I could hardly believe that it hadn’t come to Narasan or any of his senior officers. They did look a bit sheepish when the young man said, “Ladders, maybe? We do have quite a few of those rope ladders, and every man who climbs down to the ground on the south side of the wall is one less who’ll have to run along the top of it.”
“Are we keeping score, Narasan?” Padan asked his friend. “If we are, I think you’d better mark another point in the Keselo column. The ground on the south side of Gunda’s wall is flat and wide, and walking on dirt is easier on a man’s boots than walking on rocks.”
“Don’t beat it into the ground, Padan,” Narasan said. “As soon as the rest of Andar’s men get up here, roll up the ladders and take them across to the south side. Let’s move right along, gentlemen. There’s a strong smell of disaster in the wind, and we don’t want to be here when it arrives.”
“The Church armies are coming up from the south, Narasan,” Gunda reported a couple hours later.
“Have our men reached safety yet?” Narasan demanded.
“Most of them,” Gunda replied. “There are a few dawdlers, of course, but I’m fairly sure they’ll move right along when Lord Dahlaine rips a big hole through my wall. She was a pretty good wall, I suppose, but it’s probably about time to say good-bye to her.”
Narasan glanced at me. “Should my men and I take some kind of cover?” he asked. “If there’s going to be rocks flying all over . . . ? I’m sure you get my point.”
I looked at the rough black wall and made a few rough computations. “I don’t think there’ll be any danger, Commander,” I assured him. “I’ll bring my toy in from the south instead of right overhead. She’ll knock all the stones on down the north slope. Actually, that should work to our advantage. A sudden storm of flying rocks will force the creatures of the Wasteland to take cover, and the Church soldiers will be right on top of them before they have time to reassemble.”
“What a shame,” Narasan replied with a wicked grin.
“You’d better cover your ears, gentlemen,” I warned them. “Loud sounds can damage your hearing, and things are going to be very loud in just a minute.” Then I summoned my pet and unleashed her against the south side of Gunda’s wall.
As she almost always does, my pet overdid things a bit, and a goodly number of the rocks that had formed Gunda’s wall went spinning off to the north for miles, and when they came down out in the Wasteland below, they stirre
d up large clouds of the glittering yellow sand that the Church soldiers found so attractive.
The noise was shattering, of course, but as it began to subside, another sound came rumbling up from deep within the earth, and the ground below shuddered once more.
Then a peculiar thought came to me. Was it in any way possible that Longbow’s unknown friend was feeling a bit competitive? I’d just unleashed a very loud sound, but hers was even louder.
“Impressive,” Narasan murmured. “For a moment there, I thought you might have decided to send Gunda’s wall all the way to the ravine in your sister’s Domain.”
“That wouldn’t really be very polite, Commander,” I said. “I always try my best not to offend my sisters. They complain for years if I happen to make a mistake.”
“It looks to me like the ears of the Church soldiers shut down at about the same time that their minds did,” Gunda noted. “They didn’t even falter when those crash-booms hit them. They’re still running this way as hard as they can.”
“They’re such nice boys,” Padan added with a grin.
The tower where we stood watching was slightly higher than the remains of the wall were, so we had a clear view of what was happening below. The red-uniformed Church soldiers came streaming through the gap my toy had provided. They did falter slightly when they saw that huge desert of glistening sand lying below them, however, and I could almost smell their overwhelming greed. Then their mindless charge continued as they ran down the slope and clambered over the first of Narasan’s barriers.
“And here come the bug-people,” Padan observed, peering down the slope. “In just a minute or two, we’re going to find out if Longbow’s friend knew what she was doing. If those churchies turn around and run away, things might start to get very interesting around here.”
“There’s not much chance of that, Padan,” Gunda said to his friend. “I’d say that by now, the bug-people are much more intelligent than the churchies. There’s a whole lot of stupid in the air around here.”
The oversized “bug-people” the Vlagh had spawned for this particular war were quite obviously almost totally inept. They came blundering forward to meet the charge of the better-armed Trogite soldiers, and very few of them survived. An exultant cheer rose from the Trogite ranks.
“Well, well,” Padan said then, “I do believe I just saw a familiar face. If I’m not mistaken, scrawny Jalkan has just returned to the Land of Dhrall. It hasn’t been at all the same without him.”
Then Veltan’s friend, the farmer Omago, came forward from the other side of the tower with Keselo at his side. “Where?” he asked Padan, his usually friendly voice gone bleak.
“Over near the west side of the breastworks,” Padan replied, pointing.
“Where’s Longbow now that we need him?” Narasan murmured.
“I wouldn’t be too hasty, Commander,” I suggested. “If you look a bit more closely, I think you’ll see some rather filmy threads just on the other side of that barrier. I think Jalkan and that fat man who’s with him are in for a very nasty surprise in a moment.”
“As a matter of fact, I think I do see those threads,” Narasan replied as he peered down at the slope. “That suggests one of the spider-turtles, wouldn’t you say?”
“More than ‘suggests,’ Commander,” I said. “I’ve got a strong hunch that Jalkan’s approaching the end of his career—whatever his current career might be.”
“What a shame,” Padan added sardonically.
“Does anybody happen to know what today’s date might be?” Gunda asked.
“What do you need a date for, Gunda?” Padan asked curiously.
“I was talking with Andar back in Castano a while back, and we both agreed that Jalkan’s deathday should be a national holiday in the Empire.”
“Deathday?” Padan asked curiously.
“That’s like a birthday, but when it involves Jalkan ‘deathday’ is a lot nicer than ‘birthday,’ wouldn’t you say?”
“You won’t get any arguments from me there, Gunda.”
Jalkan helped his grossly fat companion over the barricade, and then he numbly followed—for almost three feet. Then he abruptly stopped and began to claw at the fine-spun web that had just snared him. His gross companion ignored his cries for help and rushed on toward the gleaming desert of imitation gold reaching out to the horizon from no more than a few feet ahead of him. Then he too came to an abrupt stop as the silken web snared him as well.
“Is that webbing really that strong?” Gunda asked.
“Very strong,” I assured him, “and it stretches. The more those two struggle, the more they’ll become snarled up in that webbing.”
Then the hard-shelled spider came scampering out from what appeared to be hastily constructed hiding place just beyond the barricade and quickly spun more and more webbing to hold its two captives more securely.
“Why’s the spider wasting all that time spinning webs?” Gunda asked curiously. “Why doesn’t it just kill them and have done with it?”
“I don’t think you really want to know, Gunda,” I ad- vised him.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” he said stubbornly.
“All right, then,” I said. “Spiders spin webs to snare creatures to eat, but spiders don’t have mandibles like other insects do, so spider venom contains a very powerful digestive fluid that liquefies the internal organs—and the flesh—of its victim. Then the spider sucks that liquid out of the victim.”
“The venom kills them, though, doesn’t it?”
“It paralyzes them, but it’s not instantly lethal like snake venom is. The spider uses its web and the paralyzing venom as a means to store food for later.”
“That’s horrible!” Gunda exclaimed.
“It’s very practical, though,” I told him. “If a spider has its web in the right place, it almost always has a supply of food available.”
Jalkan and his gross companion, now completely wrapped in the spider’s webbing, were screaming for help, but their soldiers ignored them and continued their mindless charge down the slope, drawn by the vast desert of glittering yellow sand far below.
Then there came yet another of those loud rumbling sounds from deep within the earth and an even more violent earthquake.
“Move back!” I sharply warned Narasan and his men. “It’s about to break loose!”
We all scurried along the top of Gunda’s remaining wall toward the eastern end and—we hoped—safety.
The thundering sound from far below us continued, but it seemed to be rising up through the shuddering rock.
And then, perhaps a hundreds yards on down the slope, there came a thunderous eruption that was not molten rock.
It was water, and it gushed forth in a vast wave that swept the Church soldiers and the servants of the Vlagh away indiscriminately.
From far, far out in the Wasteland there came a shriek of frustration that rapidly faded off into the distance as the servants of the Vlagh rushed to carry our enemy off to safety.
Several things came together for me at that point, and I was shaken to my very core by what Longbow’s unknown friend had just achieved. This was why the geyser that had been the source of the River Vash had suddenly gone dry. Unknown Friend had moved it from the center of the basin to the upper end of the north slope to eradicate the servants of the Vlagh and the five Church armies with a single stroke. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a steadily rising body of water down on the floor of the Wasteland. Unknown Friend had just replaced her “sea of gold” with a sea of water that would permanently block off my brother’s Domain from any further attacks by the creatures of the Wasteland.
The now-horizontal geyser produced a great deal of mist, naturally, and the sun was high above, so the sudden rainbow that appeared over the growing sea down in the Wasteland could, of course, have been nothing but a natural phenomenon, but I chose not to believe that it was something that simple. Unknown Friend, it appeared, was very pleased with her pretty inv
ention, and a rainbow is a sort of blessing, after all.
“Well, gentlemen,” I said to our friends with feigned casualness, “I guess that pretty much takes care of everything up here. I suppose we might as well pack up and go on back down the hill.”
It was about two weeks later when we gathered again in Veltan’s map-room. My brother’s map was now seriously out of date, and there was no real reason for us to be there rather than in some other part of the house, but for some reason, we all seemed more comfortable there.
There was quite a bit of storytelling at first. Our friends had been widely scattered during the actual war—if what had happened up there had really been a war. To my way of looking at things, our contributions this time had been minimal at best. Longbow’s “Unknown Friend” had done most of the work. Of course, Ashad’s dream had produced the flood, but the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that “Unknown Friend” had been tampering with Ashad since the very beginning. The “second invasion” in Ashad’s first dream had provided a huge force that had met the invasion of the servants of the Vlagh with enough force to hold them in place until the flood destroyed both enemies.
“Let me tell you, old friend,” Sorgan was saying to Narasan, “we ran on up out of that basin like a fox with his tail on fire. Those earthquakes that set everything to bouncing around raised a lot of memories about the fire-mountains back in the ravine, and the notion of getting cooked alive can make a man run about twice as fast as he ever thought he could.”
“It was a sensible thing to do, Sorgan,” Narasan said. “None of us knew exactly what was going to happen, so getting out of the way made a lot of sense.”
“I seem to remember that ‘get out of the way’ was something Longbow’s dream lady told him forty or fifty times every time he closed his eyes,” Rabbit added. “She knew what she was talking about, all right.” The little man squinted slightly. “Whatever happened to that greedy one who started that second invasion? Did he get drowned like all the other Church people did?”
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