The Younger Gods

by David Eddings

  Veltan shuddered. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.”

  “If I gather those beginner priests together and warn them that there are spiders in those hallways that are almost as big as horses and then describe what happened to Jalkan and the Trogite priest down in your territory, Alcevan’s going to have a lot of trouble hiring killers, I think.” Then Rabbit squinted at Zelana’s younger brother. “You can make just about anything you want to, can’t you, Veltan?” he asked.

  “What exactly do you think you’ll need?”

  “Bones, mostly—but not just random bones scattered around. I think complete skeletons would be best. That way anybody who comes across one of them will know that he’s looking at a dead person rather than a fox or a cow, and it might be useful if the skeleton has a few rags attached as well—rags that look like they used to be those robes all of Aracia’s priests wear.”

  “And maybe a brief image of a very large spider—or ten—scampering around in those corridors?” Veltan suggested.

  “You can do that, can’t you?” Rabbit said. “I’d forgotten about that. If we have a few sightings of spiders that are ten feet across, human skeletons wearing bits and pieces of priest robes, and spiderwebs as thick as anchor ropes, nobody with his head on straight will go anywhere near those corridors.”

  “I like it!” Veltan declared with a wicked grin. “Go back to the south side of the temple and start telling stories, Rabbit. I’ll make sure that anybody who ventures into one of those corridors sees things so terrible that he’ll never go back again.”

  “I think we just sank Alcevan’s boat,” Rabbit said with a broad grin.

  “I’m fairly sure that she’ll never be able to give those halfwit young priests what she’s promising,” Rabbit told the two Maags, Gimpy and Squint-Eye, “but around here, a promotion is worth more than gold. I’m going to need some verification, though. If it’s not too much trouble, put on long, worried faces and talk about some of your sailors who went along one of those corridors and never came back.”

  “You’re a nasty little fellow, Rabbit,” Captain Squint-Eye said. Then he assumed the facial expression that had given him his name. “Maybe if we had one of those imitation skeletons you were telling us about dressed in Maag clothes and armed with Maag weapons, the limp-brained priests will get your point.”

  “And maybe put up some danger signs at this end of those hallways,” Captain Gimpy added. “You know, a red sign with a big picture of a spider painted on it. If we pile up enough awfuls for those halfwits to see, not one of them will even consider going back to the main temple, no matter what the little lady priest offers them. It’s a lot like that old Maag saying that has to do with gold, wouldn’t you say? ‘You’ve got to be alive to spend it’ gets right to the point, doesn’t it?”

  “And Gimpy and I’ll announce that we want all those priests to come to an ‘emergency conference,’ and then you can dump awful-awful all over them,” Captain Squint-Eye added. Then he laughed. “You know, something like this is even more fun than a war.”

  “Of course,” Rabbit agreed. “Deception is always more fun than war, and, if you do it right, you don’t even have to bleed.”

  2

  No, Rabbit,” Captain Hook-Beak said. “I think you’d better do it. You and Torl and several others have been passing on stories about your encounters with imaginary bug-people ever since we first got here. I’ll back you up, of course, but the lazy priests would believe you a lot sooner than they’d ever believe me.” He paused, staring out across the berm his men had built out to the front of the west wall. “Don’t go too far, though. When you get right down to it, all you’re really going to do down by the south wall is set things up for the appearance of those imitation skeletons wearing priest robes that Veltan’s going to conjure up. Keep your description of what the spider-bugs have been doing to the local priests those imitation skeletons are going to represent pretty much accurate. Don’t get too creative. The real thing down in Veltan’s Domain was awful enough, so you won’t have to take it much farther.”

  “That’s the way we’ll do ’er, Cap’n,” Rabbit agreed. “I’ll start out by telling them that the spider-bugs slipped past us before we even started building walls and that they’re hiding in most of those hallways. Then I’ll move on into a description of what happened to Jalkan and Adnari Estarg. That should set things up for Cap’n Gimpy to uncover those imitation skeletons.”

  “You’re very good at this sort of thing, Rabbit,” Sorgan said admiringly.

  “I’ve had lots of practice, Cap’n,” Rabbit replied. “All I had to do to keep Ox and Ham-Hand from putting me to doing real work was to stand there tapping on my anvil with a hammer. I’m a natural-born expert when it comes to deception.”

  “Except that Longbow saw right through you the first time he ever met you,” Sorgan added.

  “Longbow don’t count, Cap’n,” Rabbit replied. “He sees through everything.”

  Rabbit was almost certain that Takal Bersla would not be present during Captain Squint-Eye’s “emergency conference.” He was too well-known, for one thing, and, since he’d gained his position in the temple by making speeches, he probably wouldn’t care to listen to speeches delivered by someone else. The priestess Alcevan would almost certainly want to be present, though, since the term “emergency” strongly suggested that something had come up that would make her hired assassins very reluctant to do what she wanted them to do. Rabbit was very well acquainted with all the tricks a small person could use to watch and listen without being seen, so he ran his eyes carefully over the gathered crowd of priests to see if he could locate her.

  Then a brief flicker of movement caught his eye, and there was Alcevan, crouched low among the ruins of the poorly constructed wall along the south side of the temple. She was in the shadows, so nobody would even know that she was there—if she stayed still and didn’t move. Either she didn’t know that, or she was positive that nobody would be looking for her. Rabbit, however, had been searching, and he’d just found what he wanted. “I don’t think she’s going to like this very much,” he murmured to himself as Captain Gimpy climbed up onto a large stone block to speak to the gathered priests.

  “Captain Squint-Eye and me decided that there’s something you priests really ought to know about, since your lives could very well depend on your knowing what it is,” Gimpy declared. “To keep it short, our scouts saw quite a few bug-people sneaking through the bushes toward this south wall, and that’s why you’re here to lend us a hand. There was something that’d happened earlier, though, that our scouts didn’t know about.” He put his hand on Rabbit’s shoulder. “This little fellow has actually seen a certain variety of bugs in the corridors that lead to the main temple, so he can tell you what they look like and just how dangerous they are.”

  “I’ll do my best, Cap’n Gimpy,” Rabbit said. Then he looked out at the not really too interested priests. “This will be the fourth war we’ve had with the bug-people since last spring, and I’ve managed to live through all four of them—so far, anyway. There are dozens and dozens of different kinds of bug-people. Most of them are fairly stupid, so we’ve been able to outsmart them three times already. An entirely different kind of bug showed up in the second war last summer, and that’s the bug that somehow got into these corridors. Most bugs have six legs, but these ones we’ve seen in these corridors have eight. Now, most bugs chase things—or people—that they want to eat. The eight-legged ones set traps, though.”

  “That’s absurd,” one of the priests declared.

  “Not really,” Rabbit disagreed. “Most of the corridors here in the temple have spiderwebs all over the walls and hanging down from the ceiling. The spider-bug we encountered last summer was fifty or a hundred times bigger than any other spider I’ve ever seen. We had two different enemies in that war off to the south. One of the enemies was the bug-people, of course, but the other one came from Trog-land, and they came here to look for gold, and t
hey thought that they saw more gold than they’d ever seen before lying out there in the Wasteland.”

  Rabbit smiled then. “We had two enemies, and they were running toward each other. It wouldn’t have been very polite to interfere with either one of them, so we just got out of the way. The Trog-landers encountered bug-people with poisonous fangs, and that eliminated quite a few of them. But then the Trogs came up against the spider-bugs we’ve been talking about here. The huge spider-bugs had spun out their webs, and a fair number of Trogs got snared in those webs. Then the spider-bugs came out of their hiding places and bit the snared up Trogs. The venom of the ordinary bug-people is so poisonous that it kills people instantly. The venom of the spider-bug works differently, though. It dissolves the innards—hearts, livers, lungs, and so on—so the person caught in the web has had most of his insides turned into a liquid. A spider doesn’t have to chew its food. It drinks it instead. The Trogs were snared in those webs, so they couldn’t move. Then, any time the spider got hungry again, it’d just tiptoe along the web, bite a hole in one of the Trogs, and then drink a gallon or so of the liquid that used to be the insides of the trapped Trog. The screaming when that happened isn’t the kind of screaming you really want to hear.”

  “Are you saying that those men were still alive after their insides were dissolved?” an older, chubby priest demanded skeptically.

  “I’ve never heard a dead man scream,” Rabbit replied. “I’d guess that the spider wants fresh food, so its venom dissolves things, but doesn’t kill. That’s what you’ll be coming up against if you try to go back through those corridors to the main temple.”

  “We have managed to recover what was left of several of the victims of those overgrown spiders.” Captain Gimpy smoothly stepped in. “There wasn’t really very much of them left—except for their bones. It looks to me like spider venom doesn’t dissolve bones, so we can show you what condition you’re likely to be in after one of the spiders eats most of you.” Then he pulled back a tarp to reveal four skeletons. Gimpy tapped one of the skeletons with his foot. “This one was probably a Maag before the spider ate most of him. He was wearing fairly standard Maag clothes, though, so that sort of identifies him. The other three . . . ?” Gimpy shrugged. “Maybe one of you can identify the clothing on those others. Clothes are about all we’ve got to work with. Bones are bones, and they all look pretty much the same.”

  The priests all shrank back from Gimpy’s suggestion. Rabbit was fairly sure that none of them had ever seen a human skeleton before. Finally, one of the older priests ordered a novice to go look. The young man turned pale and hesitantly approached Veltan’s recently manufactured skeletons. “It’s sort of hard to tell, Your Reverence,” he said in a trembling voice. “There are only a few rags attached to any one of these three.”

  “What color are the rags?” the old man demanded.

  “Black, Your Reverence.”

  “I’d say that sort of answers the question,” Gimpy declared. “Maags don’t wear black clothes. It’s considered to be unlucky. You priests here all wear black robes, though, so those three skeletons are—or were—almost certainly priests who served Lady Aracia. I want all of you to take a good hard look at those three skeletons. If you happen to get some kind of urge to go back to the main temple, you’ll almost certainly end up looking exactly like these three do. Of course, dead people don’t really care what they look like, do they? They’re too busy being dead to worry about their appearance. It’s entirely up to you men, though. I’m not going to make staying out of those hallways an order. You might have very important things to do back in the main temple, and your chances of actually reaching the main temple aren’t very good, but that’s up to you. I won’t interfere with anybody’s religious obligations.”

  Rabbit rather casually looked at the tumbled-down wall where Alcevan had been hiding, and he saw that the look she was giving Cap’n Gimpy was filled with frustration and hatred.

  “I’d say that poor ‘Teenie-Weenie’ just got cut off at the pockets,” Rabbit murmured, doing his very best to avoid laughing out loud.

  THE

  TRIBE

  OF

  OLD-BEAR

  1

  The weather had turned bitterly cold as Red-Beard, mounted on the horse he called “Seven,” led Skell and the archers of Old-Bear’s tribe south along a worn-down mountain range toward the upper end of Long-Pass. The Matans of Tlantar Two-Hands had given Skell and the other Maag seamen those densely furred bison-hide cloaks, but the chill was still brutal.

  The archers of Old-Bear’s tribe were very interested in Red-Beard’s horse, and Longbow’s friend described the “slash and run” tactics of the Malavi in some detail.

  “That might be all right in open country,” an archer called Sleeps-With-Dogs said, “but I don’t think it’d work out too well in the forest.”

  “You’re probably right,” Red-Beard admitted, “but most of the country here in the North or off to the East is open. If I remember right, you were with us down in Veltan’s Domain, and the country above the Falls of Vash didn’t have very many trees. A forest is good for hunting, but when you get into open country, the distance between here and there seems to go on forever. That’s when a horse becomes very useful. You don’t have to do your own walking—or running—if you’ve got a horse.” Then he gave the archer from Longbow’s tribe a curious look. “How in the world did you come up with a name like ‘Sleeps-With-Dogs’?” he asked.

  The archer shrugged. “I found out quite some time ago that having dogs in your lodge in the wintertime means that you’re not going to need very much firewood. If you bed down with three or four dogs, you’ll stay nice and warm. The fleas are sort of troublesome, but not as much as ice is.”

  “I might give that a try myself,” Red-Beard said. “I’m sure that Seven here gives off heat when he sleeps, but he sleeps standing up.”

  “What made you decide to call him ‘Seven’?” the archer asked.

  Red-Beard laughed. “That wasn’t my idea at all. His original owner was a gambler, and he just loved to play dice-games. As I understand it, seven’s a very important number when you’re playing dice-games. When the Malavi were sailing north on board quite a few Trogite ships, they didn’t really have much to do, so they gambled, just to pass the time. I’ve heard that Seven’s original owner won a lot of money in those dice-games—right up until the other Malavi found out that he’d been cheating. They threw him off the ship into deep water, and since he’d never learned how to swim, he sank like a rock.”

  “Drowned?”

  “You couldn’t prove that by me, Sleeps-With-Dogs,” Red-Beard replied, “but after he’d been under water for an hour or so the other Malavi divided up what he’d left behind, and they gave me old Seven here. He’s a sensible old horse, and he and I get along very well. I don’t have to walk much now, and I don’t force him to run. It works out fairly well for the both of us.”

  “How much farther would you say it is to this Long-Pass place?” Skell asked Red-Beard.

  “Dahlaine’s map said that it’s about a hundred and sixty miles from where we started down along this mountain range,” Red-Beard replied. “I’d say that we’re about halfway there, Captain Skell. Since it took us four days to get this far, it’ll probably take us another four days to get to where we’re going.”

  “I was sort of afraid that it might take that long,” Skell said sourly.

  “Have you heard anything at all about what cousin Sorgan’s up to down in Lady Aracia’s temple?” Skell asked Red-Beard as they set out the next morning.

  “Deception for the most part, I’ve been told,” Red-Beard replied.

  “Zelana’s big sister wants everybody in the world who owns a sword to run down there and defend her. I’ve heard that Sorgan told her that he could hold off the bug-people if she’d pay him a lot of gold.”

  “That’s Sorgan, all right,” Skell said with a faint smile. “My cousin is probably the greatest cheat
er in the world. Before I left to go fetch the archers from Old-Bear’s tribe, people were saying that the bugs would attack through Long-Pass, and that Aracia’s temple wasn’t in any danger at all, and that Aracia herself wasn’t either. How in the world did cousin Sorgan manage to squeeze any gold at all out of her?”

  “He lied, of course. You know how Sorgan is. From what I’ve heard, his plan was to send people who can lie with a straight face out into the farmland and come back with all kinds of horror stories about bug-people living on a steady diet of people-people. That’s supposed to keep Aracia’s holy-holies penned up inside the temple while the real warriors are fighting off the bugs in Long-Pass.” Then Red-Beard tugged at his whiskers. “If what I’ve heard about Zelana’s sister comes anywhere close to being true, she wants—even needs—to have the bug-people attack her holy temple. If they don’t bother to attack her, it would sort of mean that she’s not very important to them, wouldn’t it? She just couldn’t stand that, you know. She has to be important, and if the bugs just ignored her, she’d shrivel up and blow away. I think that’s what your cousin is counting on. Aracia will believe any lie he—or one of his paid liars—tells her, because she has to believe.”

  “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” Skell declared. “She’d rather die than be ignored.”

  “Except that she can’t die,” Red-Beard said. “In some ways that makes it even sadder, wouldn’t you say? She’ll live forever, but nobody’s ever going to pay any attention to her.”

  Skell shuddered and changed the subject. “Sorgan always manages to have all the fun,” he said sourly. “A war against an enemy who isn’t really there would be a lot easier than a real war.”

  “He took your brother Torl with him,” Red-Beard said. “From what I’ve heard, Torl’s probably one of the greatest liars in the whole world.”