The Heretic-eARC

by David Drake

  And your count?

  Fifty-seven adult males. Similar garb and physique indicates that they are likely all members of the same tribe.

  And they were staked out alive? To die in the sun stretched across nishterlaub in this grotesque sacrifice?

  It is difficult to tell due to the state of decay of the bodies, but I would assume so. We will have to get closer for me to verify.

  Of course that’s what happened, Raj put in. And you can be sure that they wounded them in some manner so that an enterprising sort would not have the wherewithal to get himself free and to free the others. Probably broke their legs. That’s what I’d do.

  Would you? Have you?

  No, Raj said. But I’ve seen and had to countenance worse. And now you understand what they are prepared to do to you and your kin if you do not submit, so perhaps it is a good lesson after all.

  Abel rode down among the bodies. He descended a stone-strewn path that looked to be more of a game-animal route than anything humans would use, but his dont retained its sure footing. And as he went down the side of the hill, an odd sound began to assail his ears. It was as if the valley were filled with the dry sizzle of the sort of insectoid plague he’d only seen in the Valley during rice ripening days. Surely the Redlands couldn’t sustain so many bugs?

  The arms and legs of the executed had not been tied to the nishterlaub groundcars with rope of any sort, but with the hacked off branches of a local pricklebush. It was a sort that grew straight up with many thorn-covered shoots about the thickness of two fingers, and sometimes ten elbs long. The thorns had not been stripped from the shoots and had been used to secure the knots in the flesh of the victims.

  Most of the eyesockets were empty, having been eaten out by desert scavengers. This in itself was a clue to Center, who said: One would expect at least some closed eyes, but you’ll notice that there are not any. It seems that they all died with their eyes open.

  You mean with their eyelids sliced off, Raj roughly cut in. So they were to go blind first, before the dehydration got to them.

  Abel leaned over, gazed at the gaping mouth and eyeless sockets of one of the victims.

  Yes, the eyelids were sliced off, said Center. But on one side only, the right. I believe I can project a likely reanimated image of the process, if it becomes necessary to—

  No, thought Abel. Please don’t.

  It was then that he realized what the strange scraping and crackling insectoid murmur actually was: the flapping of the dried-out skin of the victims as the desert wind blew through the declivity.

  Yes, imagine trying to keep one eye closed while the other shrivels like a raisin in the sun, Raj said. Seems as if they couldn’t manage it, poor bastards, and died with both eyes open.

  And then they rode up to Gaspar, who approached on foot and looked up at Abel mounted on the dont. “These are Schlusels,” he said. “I think they killed them all and either took the women and children, or slaughtered them, too, but without the honor of a lingering death.”

  “And who were these an example for, do you imagine?”

  “Around here are good lands. There are larger tribes in the Highsticks. Or there were. We are all Redlanders now,” Gaspar said with a dry laugh. “This is what Rostov intended to do to the Remlaps, too, had I not convinced him that pursuing us into the Voidlands, that place you came across us, would take too much of his precious time and kill off too many of his precious donts.”

  “Well, it seems this is the fate you dodged,” Abel replied, gesturing toward the staked-out tribesmen.

  “Indeed,” Gaspar said. “Although there was the slower contingent trailing behind our main group, some older people and very young children. The Blaskoye got those.” Gaspar poked a pricklebrush wand into the arm of one of the corpses. It had practically turned to leather, and the wand did not puncture it, but merely left an indentation. “We didn’t expect him to be so fast, you see. He has bred his stock with donts he’s stolen from the Valley. Racing donts, I wouldn’t doubt.”

  “Taken, or just as likely traded for,” Abel replied. “In any case, this Rostov seems to be a very organized and dedicated man.”

  “He is a thrice-cursed handful of shit, is what he is,” Gaspar said. “It is my belief that the donts run fast because they want to shake him and his kind off themselves and get clean. But they never can, and so they keep running when other animals might tire.”

  Abel nodded and left the Remlap chief to his thoughts. He hobbled his dont and set it to forage, and then walked deeper into the mass graveyard. The other squads would arrive and ride through soon, but for now it was just himself and the advance party. He brought his carbine along on the general principle that it did not pay in the Redlands to be more than a pace or two from your weapon at any given time.

  Gradually, the shock at the sight of the dead left him, and he examined more closely the object upon which they’d met their deaths. He tried to imagine these masses of what looked like pockmarked stone functioning as a water ram or a gate latch or—

  Observe:

  The Redlands at about eye-height for a man, but moving through the landscape quickly, as a hunting flitter on a low-gliding path might. Moving over hills, winding through a valley. Enclosed, surrounded by more glass than he’d seen probably in his entire life.

  Windows on all sides. A solid roof above to keep out the unremitting sun.

  No wind from the forward movement.

  So this truly is a mere simulation.

  Yes, but a complete one. The front windscreen blocked the wind. Sitting in a groundcar was as wind-calm as sitting in a room of stone.

  So they—

  Drove in comfort. There was also climate control within, of course.

  Abel gave himself over to the experience. His hands on the steering mechanism, a wheel of some sort. Set an elb in front of him and just below sightline: a smooth black tablet or stone with lights and strange hieroglyphics upon it, not of the Land.

  Dashboard, vehicle status readouts such as speed, amount of charge in the electrostatic capacitors, antigrav levitation height from ground. I am presenting to you a sports modification of the Maikler 3F Comet, which is a close approximation of what would have been locally configured models.

  I want to see this thing! Can you take me outside?

  Abel was flying alongside the onrushing groundcar. Its name was not quite accurate, for it hovered at least three elbs off the surface of the ground using some sort of magic.

  Antigrav static generators.

  It was a sleek creature, made for speed. It was a dark red in color and on the end—

  Even in the vision, Abel felt startlement.

  Silver. Silver exactly like the Blaskoye’s knife. What had Center called it?

  Chrome. These are the bumpers of the groundcar. They are meant to ward off collision damage, but also serve the purpose of ostentatious display.

  Rostov’s knife is a car bumper made into a blade?

  That is an accurate assessment. Analysis indicates he acquired it from this former parking lot, in fact.

  Enough. Take me back inside. I want to drive.

  He was back behind the wheel.

  How fast?

  I will translate the velocity and acceleration readouts—

  Abel could suddenly read them: twenty-one leagues per hour.

  The control at your right foot affects acceleration.

  He pressed down, and the speed increased.

  Careful.

  The landscape flashed by at eye level. This was better than the ride through the sky he’d taken in his youth. So low to the ground, the speed was exhilarating.

  This isn’t real. I want to go even faster.

  Your simulation is comprehensive. You can and will crash.

  All right, I’ll slow down. Where am I?

  You’ve driven about ten leagues from the site.

  In how long?

  The clock time on this internal simulation is ten point three seven minutes
. Of course, barely an eyeblink has passed externally.

  I could circle the Redlands in a day, he thought in amazement.

  People frequently did. It was considered a fine holiday outing. There were waypoints with vistas or with eating and drinking establishments. There were inns where visitors could stay for an evening before returning to the Valley. This was the parking lot of such an establishment. The edifice itself is under a nearby sand drift. And, as I mentioned, some of the more affluent built houses in the Redlands for recreational use.

  Like a garden plot or a steam house.

  Precisely.

  But a hundred leagues away.

  More, if they wished to fly. There are self-contained dwellings—vacation homes—scattered all over the planet. Most were merely a patch of remains on the landscape at the time I completed my orbital survey. Duisberg has a harsh environment by human standards. It has a comparatively large iron-nickel core that is highly magnetized and extremely active plate tectonics. This is another reason that Zentrum’s plans are erroneous. He is incapable of integrating the entire range of facts simply because he is not a fast enough, big enough computer.

  And you are?

  Yes. I am a generation past Zentrum, and my capacity is based on quantum gravitational physics. His is a spin-physics-based mind. Highly serviceable for the tasks he was intended for: planetary defense, traffic direction, weather calculations, and such. But not amenable to the Seldonian calculus and its subsequent application in psychodynamic topography. But this is academic.

  Abel had hardly been listening, but was coursing down a hillside at the fastest speed he felt he could safely muster, flying over shrubs and pricklebushes, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake, tearing forward, hugging the landscape—and completely exhilarated.

  We’ll get this back? Driving? When the Republic shows up?

  Rapid individual conveyance is a building block of technological civilization.

  So this or something like it?

  Yes.

  But this is as close as I will ever get. Simulation.

  Yes.

  Then, thrice-damn it all, take me back. Set me free from this dream, or I’ll want to drive forever.

  He was back in the valley of execution. The wind touched his face again, and the sun-baked skin of the dead flapped in the breeze.

  He went to the end of one of the execution stones and kicked it, hard. Dust fell away, a few stones. He kicked it again.

  The shine of chrome glinted through.

  Silver knife.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said to no one in particular.

  The expedition moved on. Abel debated routing most of his squads around the area but in the end decided to bring them through it. He doubted these men would take fright. It was more likely the case that such a site would create only more resolve in them to get the job done and get home with the information.

  They avoided fighting whenever possible, but they could not avoid the fact that half the desert dwellers knew that they were there, somewhere out there, even if they didn’t know precisely where the Scouts were at any given moment. This meant that they had to keep moving at all times and must take a circuitous trail that had subterfuge as its object as much as reconnaissance.

  They had brought along enough food, but there was the constant need to find water. The men of the Delta proved to be the better of the water finders. Some of them used dowsing rods to lead them, but the best of them merely looked at the landscape and predicted where they would find a sink, a tanaja, or even the occasional slow burbling spring.

  The Delta men possess this particular skill because they spent childhood around water, said Center. There is, for example, water everywhere in the tendrils of the River’s final journey into the Braun Sea. Some have been sailors and fishermen, or knew people who were.

  The only fishermen that Abel had ever met were the stock fish growers who tended the carp pens on the far side of Lake Treville.

  For food, they had hardtack and pickled dakbelly for almost every meal. Occasionally they slaughtered a weaker dak from the train to divide among themselves. This proved very useful in both feeding them and reducing their footprint across the land.

  Abel had to admit that this was far from the lightweight expeditions the Scouts usually engaged in. It was more like the movement of an army, and Abel was learning valuable lessons every day about what a packtrain could and could not be made to do.

  Mostly, it could not be made to leave no sign of its passing. While he drove his Scouts onward at what would have been a breakneck pace for an army, he could not help but feel that a malevolent eye was upon him, that someone was slowly working out from sightings here, spoor left there and there, his exact location—or at least a fix on his position that was close enough to permit attack.

  He was determined to see it coming, if so, and disbursed the Scouts to the farthest limits he believed advisable, communicating by one-flag wigwag the simple instructions they would need for the day.

  He’d skirted the Redlands, stayed alive and relatively intact, and managed to roughly count concentrations and resources of ten nomad groups. The one consistency among them all: they were Blaskoye vassals now. They may be Tamers and Jackflits and Wei Weis and Miskowskis still, but within each encampment were a group of outsiders, men who were not Tamers or Jackflits or Wei Weis or Miskowskis. They wore the Blaskoye white, and in several instances Abel or his Scouts had observed these men beating, and even once dragging to death, a local tribesman.

  These were subjugated peoples, and the men in white were their overseers.

  And then it was time to use Gaspar to lead them to the Great Oasis, the prime watering hole, believed to be one of two or, perhaps, three, that the Redlanders possessed on the Eastern side of the Valley. On the western side, there were no oases at all, and precious little water to be had anywhere. So Center’s orbital survey had confirmed prior to the crashlanding of the capsule that had brought him and Raj to Duisberg.

  Which is why Redland strength has always concentrated in the west, Center said. We will confirm the specifics in Lindron when we get there.

  When are we going to Lindron? This was entirely news to Abel.

  I am waiting for a series of dependencies to resolve, said Center. I assure you, you will be the first to know, Abel Dashian.

  Thanks.

  I suggest you concentrate on resolving the most pressing of those dependencies at the moment.

  What would that be?

  When and where the Blood Winds will begin to blow. Every indication is that it will be sooner rather than later.

  5

  Observe:

  Gaspar was not truly sorry for what he was about to do, but he felt a tinge, a small tinge, of regret. It was the same regret a man might feel when he must run a dont through the Voidlands knowing there was no water for the animal, and that the trip would kill it, but dependent on that animal while within the those stinking reaches, and living with it day after day, long enough to form a bond, especially if it were only the two of you against the world. Yes, form a bond, but the man always knowing the water in his belly was the only water there was.

  That it, the dont, was a tool—a tool that had been bred a tool and nothing more.

  The Farmers of the Valley were no different than a dont or a dak, when you came down to it. The only difference is that they could be clever, and might figure out that here, in these lands, they were mere tools. And they might not be pleased when that realization dawned upon them.

  Better to keep them in the dark.

  And when he was tempted to think that they were men like him, that there might be some other way, he remembered his family clinging to life in that little defile with its uncertain seep, and the daks clustered in the huts with them, and all of them, the tribe, the last of the Remlaps, waking to the paltry milking, the feeble attempt at cheese-making, the rare quickening and birthing of calves. He remembered the endless hunt the men must engage in with only s
crawny beasts to show, and the perpetual scavenging of the children. Yes, the children, the ones that remained untaken, forced by circumstance, by hunger and the inability of their parents to provide, grubbing under rocks for the crawling beasts, the hard-shelled insect that at least provided a dollop of protein and fat. Yet they must always be careful, so careful, for everything in the Redlands cut, burnt, or stung—usually to the pain, but often enough to the death. An adult too, might die of such a hard life, but with a child something much more precious was lost, for the Remlaps were failing, forced into the Voidland, the last stretch of waste that a human being could theoretically live on—but more often than not couldn’t.

  Gaspar cursed the fact that he was born into days such as these.

  But here he was, and a man had to do what he had to do.

  Which was, at the moment, make his way stealthily out of the Farmer’s camp after the setting of the big moon, Churchill.

  It was not difficult. These Farmer Scouts were excellent desert travelers for Blacklanders, but they were not of the Redlands in the way he, Gaspar, was. He had escaped Blaskoye pursuers. He was confident he could throw these mere Farmer Scouts off his trail. In fact, they wouldn’t even realize he was gone.

  Well, not until they noticed the missing maps.

  He’d taken a scroll case with two of them rolled tightly inside. Of course he’d taken Weldletter’s prize, the evolving map of the Redlands. But also within was a far greater treasure. For Weldletter had let drop—casually, in passing, even!—that he carried with him as a matter of course a complete map of Treville District.

  A tactical, military map.

  And this was the second item Gaspar carried in the map case slung across his back.

  Gaspar had had to leave while almost two days out from Awul-alwaha. It would have been impossible to get any closer and still be able to carry out his plan. If they were closer, the Farmers would have seen the oasis and at least have an idea of its location, if not the best way in. He had not dared to steal a dont, but he still considered himself a good runner and did not expect to have any trouble making good time. He would not be eating on the way, but the problem was the water. If he ran through the night, which he intended to, he was going to be thirsty by sunup and delusional by daybreak. He would have to take necessary breaks along the way and rehydrate.