The Younger Gods

by David Eddings

  Lord Dahlaine laughed. “That, all by itself, makes these attempted invasions by the servants of the Vlagh worth more than anything else that’s happened in the last four or five centuries.”

  Then Commander Narasan and Ekial came down from Gunda’s fort at the head of the pass. “It looks like we’ve got company coming,” Commander Narasan reported. “The Wasteland off to the west isn’t empty anymore.”

  “How many would you say there are?” Lord Dahlaine asked.

  “I wouldn’t even want to try to make a guess, My Lord,” the commander replied. “They seem to stretch from horizon to horizon as far off to the west as I can see.”

  THE

  DEFENDERS

  OF THE

  FAITH

  1

  Torl had been greatly impressed by Veltan’s imaginary bug-men. The images had looked so real that several of the Maags standing on top of the berm had turned and fled when the images had briefly appeared.

  Of course that had added a sense of reality to the incident, and Lady Zelana’s sister now totally believed everything cousin Sorgan told her. Just hearing the word “invasion” was one thing but actually seeing what had appeared to be real, live bugs was something entirely different. That single incident had turned Lady Aracia into a true believer.

  That was definitely causing some problems for her priests. Lady Aracia’s priests had scoffed at the notion that the bug-people were anything but a hoax cousin Sorgan had come up with as a way to get his hands on all the gold in the temple. But now the priests had been sent to the rudimentary south wall of the temple, where several bulky, bad-tempered Maags worked the poor fat priests as hard as they could for ten or twelve hours a day on a diet of nothing but beans. That generated a lot of sniveling, which amused Torl no end.

  “Just keep an eye on them, Torl,” Sorgan instructed. “I don’t think they’ll try anything violent. Priests aren’t notorious for that sort of behavior, but desperate people do desperate things every so often.”

  “I’ll watch them, cousin,” Torl promised. “It’ll probably bore me to tears, but not as much as building this imitation fort does.”

  “It’s not that bad a fort, is it?” Sorgan objected.

  “Watch out for mice, Sorgan,” Torl advised. “If a mouse happened to bump your fort with his shoulder, the whole thing might tumble down around your ears.”

  “Very funny, Torl. Go watch those fat priests, but stay out of sight. You’re supposed to be fighting off the invasion of the bug-people. Let’s not stir up any suspicions in Lady Aracia.”

  “It shall be as thou hast commanded, mighty leader.”

  “Do you really have to do that, Torl?” Sorgan asked.

  “It’s good for you, cousin,” Torl replied. “I’ll go watch those fat priests get skinny, and I’ll keep you advised.”

  “Do that.” Then cousin Sorgan went back to his imitation fort.

  Torl had been exploring the somewhat makeshift temple Lady Aracia’s priests (or their younger relatives) had been building (badly) for the last several centuries. As Torl had reported to Sorgan, most of the temple consisted of empty rooms and wandering corridors that didn’t really go anyplace. Torl was fairly certain that Lady Aracia believed with all her heart that there were thousands of priests living here so that they could adore her in groups. As closely as Torl had been able to verify, however, there were probably no more than a couple hundred of them. The “thousands and thousands of priests” hoax obliged the ordinary farmers of Lady Aracia’s Domain to deliver enormous amounts of food to the temple. Her brave priests sacrificed themselves by eating at least ten times more food than was really good for them.

  As Torl moved through the empty temple, he wondered just who had done all this meaningless construction. It occurred to him that in all probability assorted relatives of the established priests had realized that the life of a priest of Aracia was a life of luxury unmarred by honest work, but their relatives of high rank had most likely put a price on the aspirations of their younger relatives, and the price was most likely six or seven rooms or a hundred feet of corridor. Quite probably, Fat Bersla escorted Lady Aracia on periodic tours of these empty corridors and vacant rooms to show her how her temple was expanding. He assumed there was a lot of scrambling around by lesser priests to make all this empty space appear to be occupied. When he got right down to it, Torl viewed the whole thing as pathetic—and Aracia herself was probably the most pathetic.

  Then, from some distance off, he heard some people talking. Torl recognized the voices of Fat Bersla and the tiny priestess Alcevan. Torl moved quietly along the corridor to see if he could get close enough to hear what they were saying. Whatever it was that they were discussing didn’t seem to be making them happy.

  Fat Bersla was speaking in a whining kind of voice that definitely set Torl’s teeth on edge. “I have spent most of my life praising that simple-minded woman, and I’d finally reached the point where she was almost totally under my control. Then that pirate came out of nowhere with his absurd story and snatched her out of my grasp. Now she’ll do almost anything he tells her to do without even consulting me.”

  “We have a matter of greater concern, Takal Bersla.” The strange-sounding voice of priestess Alcevan cut in to Bersla’s sniveling. “If there’s any truth to the legends of this land, ancient Aracia is right on the verge of drifting off to sleep.”

  “She never sleeps!” Bersla declared.

  “You mean that you’ve never seen her sleep, mighty Takal. No one living has, because she’s been awake for twenty-five thousand years. There weren’t even any people around when she woke up this time. The legend still tells us that she will sleep—soon—and she will be replaced by another divinity who goes by the name of Enalla.”

  “I spoke with Holy Aracia on one occasion some years ago,” another man-priest with a rasping sort of voice declared, “and she told me that the child-Dreamer Lillabeth is in reality this Enalla who will succeed our beloved Aracia.”

  “That can’t be true!” Bersla exclaimed. “Child Lillabeth has no interest at all in the religion of Holy Aracia. On many occasions I have delivered masterful orations praising Holy Aracia whilst child Lillabeth was present, and she inevitably fell asleep before the end of the first hour of my praise. She has no interest in religion or priests or temples. If this Enalla is really the adult Lillabeth, she will have no need of priests or temples or hymns of praise. She will abandon the temple, and when the local people come to understand her disinterest, they will turn their backs on us, and we will surely perish.”

  “That couldn’t happen to a better group,” Torl muttered. Then he squinted at the ceiling. “I wonder just how long Fat Bersla could stay alive if nobody bothered to feed him. He could probably absorb his own fat for a while, but he’d run dry eventually.”

  “Holy Aracia advised me that child Lillabeth was what she called ‘a Dreamer,’” the raspy-voiced priest declared. “She said that Lillabeth could cause things to happen with her Dreams that were quite beyond anything Holy Aracia or her brothers or sister could ever bring to pass. These events, as I understood what Holy Aracia told me, are what are called ‘natural disasters’—floods, earthquakes, volcanos—and such. Have a care when you approach child Lillabeth, for she can—most certainly—cause the sky to fall down on you.”

  “That’s absurd,” Alcevan scoffed.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure, Alcevan,” Bersla disagreed. “Holy Aracia herself told me of several disasters other Dreamer-children had caused to happen—floods, volcanoes, and other events almost beyond human conception. It would appear that these innocent children are not innocent when they Dream. The gods live by a law that they will never kill anything. The Dreamers, however, have no such restriction.”

  Alcevan suddenly chuckled. “I’d say that we have a very simple solution to our problem, then. We know that there’s some kind of connection between Lillabeth and Enalla. Enalla will live forever, of course, but Lillabeth? I’m not so sure
about her. She eats food, and she goes to sleep. That suggests that she’s not an immortal, and that makes things very easy for us.”

  “I didn’t quite follow that, Alcevan,” Bersla said.

  “All we have to do is order some novice to kill her, you dunce. If Lillabeth’s dead, Enalla will be dead as well. They are the same person, after all.”

  “It wouldn’t work,” Bersla declared. “Aracia can hear our thoughts—particularly any thought that threatens the life of Lillabeth. Aracia loves that spoiled little brat.”

  “Let me deal with that, Takal Bersla,” Alcevan said then. “Since Lillabeth is really Enalla, she’ll be the one who’ll usurp Aracia’s throne once Aracia goes to sleep. Aracia, however, desperately wants to retain her position as the god of the East, and she’ll do anything to hold her throne.”

  Torl turned and walked as swiftly as he dared through the dimly lighted corridor that led to the west wall of the temple. As soon as he came out into the open area that was no longer closed in by stone blocks, he went looking for cousin Sorgan. “I think we’ve got a serious problem, cousin,” he said.

  “Another one?” Sorgan said. “What’s the world coming to?”

  “Are you about finished with the tired old jokes, Sorgan?” Torl demanded. “Why don’t you try to laugh at this one? I just heard that priestess called Alcevan come up with a plot to kill Aracia’s Dreamer.”

  “You said what?”

  “You heard me, cousin. Alcevan seems to think that if Lilglabeth died, Enalla would cease to exist. Those priests desperately want to keep Aracia in charge here, since she’s their only access to a life of luxury. They seem to believe that if Enalla dies—or just ceases to exist—Aracia will have to stay awake and continue providing them with everything they want.”

  Cousin Sorgan’s face hardened. “I think we’d better take this to Veltan,” he said.

  It didn’t take them very long to find Zelana’s baby brother. He was watching Sorgan’s men as they continued the construction of cousin Sorgan’s imitation fort, and he didn’t look very impressed.

  “We need to talk, Lord Veltan,” Sorgan said. “I think we might have an emergency of sorts coming before too long.”

  “Somebody’s going to sneeze, and your fort will collapse?” Veltan suggested.

  “The fort’s not really significant,” Sorgan replied. “It’s just there to make your big sister feel more secure. It’s not like there was going to be a real invasion. Cousin Torl here just overheard something that we’ll have to deal with—soon. Tell him what you heard, Torl.”

  “I was sort of wandering around in this badly-put-together temple a little while back, and I just happened to hear some of your sister’s priests talking. They’re very unhappy about Aracia’s approaching nap time. They know that when she drifts off, your granddaughter Enalla will take charge here.”

  “Granddaughter?” Veltan seemed a bit startled.

  “You and the rest of your family are related to the younger generation, aren’t you? I suppose we could call Enalla your niece, if that would be closer.”

  “We are related, Torl,” Veltan said with a faint smile, “but I doubt that any word you could come up with would explain the relationship.”

  “Don’t try to explain it to me, Lord Veltan,” Torl said. “I probably wouldn’t understand you anyway, and all it’d do would be to give me a headache. The priests I heard talking were trying to come up with some way to keep your sister awake. The little priestess Alcevan came up with a plan that the other priests seem to think might actually work.”

  “Oh?”

  “This gets just a little ugly, so brace yourself. Alcevan seems to have found out that the Dreamer Lillabeth is actually Enalla. Enalla, like the rest of you, doesn’t need to eat or sleep, but Lillabeth does. Alcevan told the other priests that Enalla might be immortal, but Lillabeth probably isn’t. Then she went on to suggest that if some novice priest just happened to murder Lillabeth, Enalla would just vanish. I don’t know if it would work that way, but the other priests seemed to think it might be worth a try.”

  “That’s horrible!” Veltan exclaimed.

  “The next question is, would it work?” Sorgan said.

  “I don’t think so,” Veltan replied, “but let’s not take any chances.” Then he frowned. “I didn’t know that my sister had any women priests,” he said.

  “As far as we know, this Alcevan’s the only one,” Sorgan said. “The other priests don’t seem to like her very much, but your sister spends a lot of time listening to her.” He smiled. “I think Eleria might refer to her as one of the ‘teenie-weenies,’” he said. “That particular term showed up fairly often in Zelana country. Eleria herself was a teenie-weenie, and so was Rabbit. Then, when we encountered the bug-snake-people, Eleria called them teenie-weenies as well.”

  Veltan shrugged. “There are small people here in Aracia’s Domain. From what you just told me, this Alcevan priestess throws a lot of weight around—quite possibly because Aracia told her to. Let’s go give Lillabeth some protection. We don’t want to take any chances here.”

  “She almost never comes here to spend any time with me,” the little girl complained. “I think she hates me because I had that Dream.”

  “No, Lillabeth,” Veltan replied. “It’s the war that’s bothering Aracia so much. It’ll be over soon, and then things should go back to the way they’re supposed to be.”

  “Do wars always take this long, Uncle Veltan?”

  “I really don’t know, child,” Veltan replied. “This is the first war we’ve ever had here in the Land of Dhrall. Torl here knows much, much more about wars than I do.”

  Lillabeth looked at Torl. “How long do the wars last in your part of the world?” she asked.

  Torl shrugged. “Sometimes they’re over in about half an hour,” he replied. “Others can go on for years and years. This one here is supposed to be over by springtime.”

  “And then everything will go back to the way it’s supposed to be?” the little girl asked.

  “Who knows?” Torl said. “The world changes all the time, and that means that nothing ever really stays the same.”

  “They get better, you mean?”

  “Sometimes they do, but sometimes they get worse.”

  Veltan winced, but he didn’t say anything.

  Then the door of Lillabeth’s room opened, and a young priest who couldn’t have been much older than fifteen or so came into the room. He was just a bit pale, and his hands were shaking. “What are you people doing here?” he demanded.

  “We just came by to visit my niece,” Veltan replied.

  “Your niece?”

  Veltan nodded. “I’m Aracia’s younger brother. We don’t get chances to visit very often. Did someone tell you to stop by for some reason?”

  “Ah—I was just supposed to look in to make sure that the little girl is all right and doesn’t need anything,” the young fellow replied just a bit too quickly.

  “I’m here now,” Veltan told him, “and I’ll take care of anything she needs. Was there anything else?”

  “Well—no, I guess not.”

  “Good. You can go now then. Tell whoever sent you that Lillabeth is just fine and that I’m here to make sure that she stays that way.”

  “I’ll do that,” the young fellow said, nervously backing toward the door.

  Veltan smiled. “You have a nice day,” he said blandly.

  The young man fled.

  “That was the one, Torl,” Veltan said. “Alcevan promised him a quick elevation in rank if he did what she wanted him to do.”

  “You can hear what people are thinking, can’t you, Veltan?” Torl asked.

  “Usually, yes. I don’t always want to, but it’s there if I need it. I’ll stay here with Lillabeth. Why don’t you follow that nervous young priest? He might be the only one Alcevan hired, but let’s make sure, if we can.”

  “I’ll get right on it, Lord Veltan,” Torl replied, going to the doo
r.

  2

  The pale young priest was trembling noticeably and not walking very fast as he moved along one of the dusty corridors of Aracia’s temple. Torl was quite sure that he knew why the young man was reluctant to report his failure to Alcevan. The little priestess was quite obviously not the sort who’d be willing to accept failure, so the young man was almost certainly moving toward a blistering reprimand.

  He finally reached one of those dusty, unoccupied rooms that didn’t even have a door, but, unlike the other chambers on both sides of the corridor, there was a dim light in this one. “I’m back, Holy Alcevan,” the young fellow said in a trembling voice. “I wasn’t able to do what you asked, though. The little girl wasn’t alone. There was a stranger who called himself Veltan there, along with one of those barbarians. I think I’ll have to wait a while before I try again.”

  “There’s no real problem, Aldas,” the priestess replied. “We have plenty of time, so try again some other day.”

  “Oh, I will, I will,” the young priest vowed. “Believe me, the time will come—sooner or later—when I’ll find the little girl alone, and then I’ll do that which you want me to do.”