The Warlock of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  Glamiss, his head thrown back, weapons raised, was calling again to the owner of the mountain’s magic. “I know you, Warlock! I know about dreams and illusions! You are my brother, Warlock! We’re both mad and I’m coming for you now!”

  The Navigator rode to Glamiss’s side and spoke quietly. “Glamiss--”

  The Vykan turned and said to Emeric, quite calmly, “Do you realize what this means, priest? Up there, somewhere on that mountain, there are still machines with power to run them--’’

  The Navigator made the sign of the Star. “Abominations, Glamiss. The lnquisiton was right. The Adversaries live in this cursed valley.” His voice trembled with revulsion, remembering, as a priest should, the tales of the falling suns, the death of billions that accompanied the dissolution of the Empire.

  “I want those machines, Emeric,” Glamiss said in a dead level voice. His wild enthusiasm seemed muted now, and Emeric realized that it had been largely a show for the men, a display to hearten them for a foray up the moraine.

  He frowned, thinking that his friend had been changing steadily ever since entering the valley of Trama-Vyka. Very gradually the simple warrior had been turning--into what? A schemer, a traitor to his bond-lord? Worse yet, into a blasphemer and a seeker after forbidden knowledge and power?

  That was the worst of it--for Emeric, priest that he was and an officer of the Holy Inquisition, felt the same terrible temptations. If there were truly imperial machines in that place, what strange powers might they bestow on the man who took them for himself? The crown and feathered cape might not be a vain dream, after all. But at what price? Was he, Emeric Aulus Kevin Kiersson-Rhad, prince of the Northern Rhad, priest and pilot of the Holy Order of Navigators, failing in his holy mission as chaplain here? Were the Adversaries, Sin and Cyb, stealing the soul of his friend before his very eyes?

  “If there are machines, Glamiss--”

  “And there are,” Glamiss interrupted him, pointing at the holographic figures his troopers were now tentatively examining.

  “If there are--they are the business of the Order and the Inquisition.”

  Glamiss said evenly, “We spoke of this before, Emeric. I told you that what there is in this valley will be mine.” His eyes were pale and cold as iron.

  “Even at the risk of your soul?”

  “At the risk of ten thousand souls. Ten million.”

  “Then may the Star show mercy,” Emeric said in a heavy voice. And in his mind he saw the suns falling again and fleets of starships storming across the galaxy in war. Was it a vision? he wondered. Was God in the Star giving him some preview of the future?

  Glamiss gripped his shoulder and spoke earnestly. “Don’t judge me yet, old friend. Don’t judge me at all, in fact. This may all be God’s work.” He smiled thinly. “Who really knows what waits for us up there on the mountain?”

  Emeric, depressed, shook his head. “Not I, Glamiss.”

  “Nor I. All we know is what lies behind us. A sullen animal--my lord Ulm--and a thousand men to kill us. You heard the Vulk say it.” He looked up at the glacier and the mountain with hungry eyes. “What would you have me do, Emeric? Shall we wait like weyr for the slaughter?” He favored the priest with his dazzling smile and Emeric could not suppress the lift it gave his heart. Glamiss had the gift of leadership, that was undeniable. It was his strength and his greatest danger. “Or shall we ride up the mountain like warriors and men to meet this warlock? Tell me what you will do, old friend.”

  Emeric of Rhada sighed and shook his head sadly. He looked up at the burning disk of Vyka in the sky--the personification of one of the many aspects of God. “Salve me, Stella,” he murmured. And to Glamiss he said, “There was never any real doubt what I would do for you, was there? I am too much your friend, Glamiss Warleader. It may be the damnation of our immortal souls.”

  The iron-colored eyes grew dark and veiled. “And it might lead to Nyor, priest. We can only try.” With that, he turned away and ordered the troop to form for the move up the moraine. And in the marketplace the images spoke on, unheeded. “Now, soldiers, march away: and how thou pleasant, God, dispose the day!”

  Chapter Ten

  If one were seeking a single word to express the spirit of the Interregnum, that word might well be paradox. Men lived the most barbaric lives while co-existing with the sophisticated remnants of First Empire civilization. For example: throughout the darkest period of that dark age, the Navigators owned a functioning computer on Algol II (though it might be more accurate to say that the computer owned the Navigators). The device was destroyed in the intra-clerical Stellar Heresy Rebellion during the reign of Torquas IV, but in the last years of the Interregnum, the machine was still being used to solve social problems in much the same way that it was used by the men of the Imperial Academy of Astro-demography a thousand years earlier. Similarly, the starships (in the control of the Navigators), perhaps the pinnacle of Imperial technology, carried near-barbarians not only from star system to star system, but from place to place on the surface of the various planets.

  It has been suggested by no less an historian than Navigator Julianus Mullerium (Middle Second Stellar Empire period) that the emergence of Glamiss of Vyka as the dominant god-king figure of the late Interregnum, and his subsequent sweep across the galaxy at the head of the Vykan, Vegan, and Rhadan hosts, was due--at least in part--to his having, in some way, solved the basic paradoxes of the human socio-and astrodemography of that most critical moment in history.

  --Vikus Bel Cyb-1009, Principles of Astrodemography, Cassette LXI,

  Early Confederate period

  --dielectric interphasers stabilize primary spatiotemporal valences, making access to the engine cores unnecessary--and extremely hazardous. Core servicing will be performed only by qualified personnel in Imperial Naval Starship Facilities (Class A7 or above). However, since the estimated service life of the stellar drive unit has been computed to be 106 Earth Standard Years, it is extremely unlikely--

  --speed of star class vessels may be varied from 0 kps (hovering atmospheric flight) to 109 kps (intersystem transit). Crew training has been simplified to an extreme--

  --Golden Age fragments

  found at Station One, Aurora

  Bishop-Navigator Kaifa sat alone in the great hall of the Gloria, his cowled head resting wearily against the intricately carved back of his episcopal throne. His eyes, deeply set in a harshly lined face, were closed and his gnarled right hand idly fondled the iron symbol of the Holy Star that hung from a chain about his neck.

  Around him, in the ill-lit and flickering darkness of the hall, the air of the starship seemed to hum and quiver with the impulses that flowed in magical invisibility from the engine cores deep in the vessel’s keel. The wall-torches were guttering low but the Navigator made no move to call an attendant to replace them. Outside the ship, he knew, there was sunlight--the yellow-green brilliance of the Vyka Sun--but the darkness of the great hall suited his mood and state of mind.

  Though he could not hear them, the men of the Vara-Vykan levy filled two of the starship’s lower bays--their horses and gear three more. The stink of unwashed bodies tainted the atmosphere and stirred the Bishop’s memory. From the age of twelve he had periodically breathed the heavy air of starships filled with warriors. He had been but a boy when his father, the Lord-Amir of the South Hadj on Nasser, bonded him to the Order. For a moment the Bishop remembered the sandy wastes of his home planet--the tall date-palms rising starkly against the hot white sky. Nasser was a planet of the Procyon system--a wilderness of emptiness away from this part of the galaxy. Even Kaifa, high churchman that he was, and with thirty years experience as a Guide of Starships behind him, could not say with certainty how far away. Nasser’s sky at night, he recalled with uncharacteristic nostalgia, blazed with the stars of the Inner Marches, for it lay near the center of the Great Sky. How long it had been since he had seen so glorious and friendly a sky at night! How bleak and empty seemed the skies of Aldrin (he used
the ancient name out of ecclesiastical habit; the natives called the planet and the star both Vyka).

  He rubbed at his eyes and returned to his scrutiny of the relic on the table before him. It was a star map, or rather a fragment of a map, printed on plastic more than two thousand standard years earlier. Since it depicted the stars, it was a holy object, and as such had been in the keeping of the Order of Navigators for many decades.

  He pursed his thin lips. Like so much else that originated in the time before the Adversaries, Sin and Cyb, had brought down the Empire, it was enigmatic.

  To begin with, it was a two-dimensional projection of three-dimensional space, so that only a vague approximation of the spatial relationships could be derived from it. Nor were distances indicated in any terms the Bishop could understand. It was, in fact, a page from a primer on astrography written for children of the Golden Age, to whom many far more sophisticated learning aids had been available. Still, it was a genuine relic, and the Navigator’s fingertips caressed the smooth plastic lovingly and with reverence.

  An incomplete sentence, in the spiky Anglic ideographs of the Empire, had been written across the bottom of the map. (By some long dead schoolchild? Kaifa wondered. “The first cryonic storage facility in the Empire was built on Aldrin in 15--” Strange are the ways of the Holy Star, the Bishop thought. Perhaps two thousand years ago a student had made a note on a map in a book to provide in this time the only certain confirmation of the Algol computer’s warning of a coming social crisis.

  Kaifa closed the illuminated cloth and leather binding that protected the relic lovingly. He rubbed his eyes again and estimated the time the Gloria in Coelis had been in slow-flight. No more than minutes to Trama now, he judged. It was almost time for him to go to the bridge.

  He stretched his legs, wearied by the weight of his iron mail. I’m growing old, he thought, while still a young man. The demands of God in the Star were heavy.

  He thought of his Order, a few thousand men spread across the vastness of the Great Sky. A few men, fewer starships. All working to keep alive the light of religion and knowledge . . . and for what? All Navigators, he thought, must have these doubts sometimes. There was so much to do and a man’s life was so short. One could but spend oneself picking out, winnowing, and preserving the bits of wisdom that remained after the great and terrible fall of the Empire that ruled a thousand suns. And one could never be certain that what one did was truly holy, for Sin and Cyb were everywhere--waiting to strike the race down still again.

  A man grew worldly in this mission, Kaifa thought. How much better, how much more holy, would the contemplative life be. But each man did what he was ordained to do. He, Kaifa, was a warrior at bottom and the councils of the Order were never mistaken in their assignment of tasks. Even the grim Talvas Hu Chien, the Grand Master whose Holy Inquisition had burned a million sorcerers and heretics, had been chosen for his work. He had not sought it any more than had Kaifa his own.

  The gnawing question always was, however, how much of what a Navigator was ordained to do was truly the work of God--and how much was the work of the Adversaries? Even the computer on Algol was, after all, a machine--tainted with Sin. And in a more practical sense (for Kaifa was above all else a practical man) one had to wonder how effective the device really was. Great quantities of its memory had been excised and destroyed by zealots centuries ago. Other information had been fed into it: information that was questionable, to say the least. Irreplaceable components had been worn out and destroyed over the years by fanatics who demanded to know such things as “How many angels can stand on the point of a sword?” and “How many eyes has the Great Demon Cyb?”

  At best, Kaifa thought, rising tiredly, it is doubtful that we priests have made the very best use of the few bits of science that survived the holocaust. But what was one to do? Man, after millennia in space, was still only Man, a weak and sinful--even foolish--vessel for life. Sometimes Kaifa secretly wondered if mankind was not some sort of dreadful joke foisted off on the Universe by an ironic God.

  But, since he was practical, and since only the Order of Navigators maintained even a semblance of order among the worlds of the Great Sky, he accepted both Man and Universe as he found them. Civilization, he believed, was the business of Man. And bitter experience proved that it must, like Man himself, stand on two legs, not one. The Empire had been a single leg and it had stood perhaps three thousand years--an instant in universal time. In the so-called Golden Age there had been no church, no Order of Navigators, no real spiritual strength to form the second leg. And so the suns had fallen. Now, the Order existed--but there was no state, for the Empire lay in rubble. The problem, the task, seemed insoluble and endless. Perhaps Man really was a cosmic joke.

  He frowned, fastened his homespun habit across his armored chest, made the sign of the Star, and started for the bridge, thinking of the science the Order would acquire in taking over the valley of Trama and wondering what, if anything, would be done with it.

  Shana the Dark, standing on the platform above the moraine, her slender body pressed against the hard, familiar face of the mountain, had come to a conclusion. None of the other villagers whom the Warlock had impressed into service had yet reached the same conclusion because they were all terribly afraid of the “power” they imagined they had invoked.

  But Shana was cleverer than the rest--cleverer than Shevil Lar, her father, even. Perhaps the same quality of mind that allowed her to touch the souls of the eagles gave her a clearer insight into the minds of men. She could not be certain of this, but she felt it deeply.

  Her conclusion was simply this: the Warlock was crazy.

  And out of this grew many other conclusions that bore strongly on the safety and situation of the folk of Trama.

  For if the Warlock was crazy, it followed logically that he was not a great sorcerer (for sorcerers did not, in the very nature of their superiority to men, go insane). He was therefore a man. A very strange man, to be sure, and one possessed of a knowledge of many things that were strange to the inhabitants of Trama, but still a man with all the faults and weaknesses that condition entailed.

  Shana wondered for a moment where such a man as the Warlock might really have come from--but being a practical woman as well as a clear thinker, she discarded this line of thought as unrewarding for the time being.

  The folk had, with many misgivings, come into the mountain caves of the Warlock for safety. Those who had not, had by now scattered into the forests across the ridge-lines from the valley and might well never be seen again, for that was the way of life in these times.

  But those of the folk who had taken refuge with the Warlock expected the old man to protect them from the soldiers Shana could now see forming up at the bottom of the moraine --the same soldiers who had so savagely defended themselves against her eagles earlier in the morning and who, worse yet, were accompanied by a priest of the Inquisition.

  The magic the Warlock had invoked against the warmen had been showy and impressive. First, there had been the ghostly host that seemed to spring, somehow, from the devil-machines on the platform. After that had come the ranks of gray-uniformed men carrying swastika banners through the impalpable image-snow.

  And now, even as she stood watching from behind the moaning, murmuring ranks of her fellow-villagers, mud-colored machines that resembled huge insects with white stars painted on their sides were crisscrossing the moraine in seemingly furious battle.

  But the machines and the warriors were, every one, illusions. She saw that almost immediately. And so had the soldiers of the lord Ulm. They had realized with discouraging swiftness that they were opposed by nothing more substantial than shadows. Shana gave some thought to that and decided that their leader must be a brave man and a wise one--at least as wise as the Warlock, himself.

  Later--if there was a later--she thought she would like to know how those boxes with the whirling prisms and shaped glasses formed the insubstantial but real-seeming images below. But she wa
s reasonably certain that this was, in fact, the best the Warlock could do for the folk, and it was far from enough. If the people were to be saved from the warmen’s depredations, they must take refuge inside the mountain again, and the Warlock must close the great metal doors. The thought of such confinement made her shudder, but it was the only hope unless some miracle happened.

  One thing was certain. A crazy old man could perform tricks, but the sort of miracles required were very probably beyond his powers. She felt sorry for him and, to a lesser degree, for herself and her people.

  She had tried very hard to make the eagles attack the soldiers again, but they had refused. The master-bird had been killed by a crossbow quarrel and the flock had become unruly. Grieving for the terrible execution among her falcons, she had nevertheless tried to bring them back to the attack. She had failed. Now, unless something happened very soon, the people of Trama would be at the mercy of Ulm’s hardbitten warriors and, what was worse, at the mercy of the Inquisition.

  That was why it seemed bitterly ironic to her that the mysterious silver-clad, blind magician to whom the villagers had prayed and sacrificed for three years--They even wanted to sacrifice me, she thought indignantly--was helpless against the armed and mounted men below. Helpless because he was simply a crazy old man.

  She watched his back now as he capered and danced and shouted, his cracked old voice mingling with the sound of illusory explosions and mock battle in the lower reaches of the moraine.