The Younger Gods

by David Eddings

  “You missed your chance, Torl,” Sorgan said with a faint smile. Then he peered through Torl’s small opening. He was just a bit startled when he saw fat Takal Bersla sitting on Aracia’s gold throne. “Isn’t that pushing things just a bit?” he asked Torl. “Aracia’s only been gone for a week or so, and now the Fat Man has sort of usurped her throne.”

  Torl shrugged. “At least it protects his back if somebody tries to kill him. Then, too, he almost certainly believes that he’s going to come out the winner in this skirmish he’s having with Alcevan.”

  “My fellow priests,” Bersla declared in his oratorical voice, “dear Holy Aracia has gone forth to look upon the creatures who are currently invading this most holy of the four Domains of the Land of Dhrall. It is by her command that I have taken her place here. She has spoken to me, and only I know what she wants.”

  “Over there, Sorgan,” Torl whispered, pointing toward the far side of the throne room.

  Sorgan peered across the room and saw a sizeable party of hooded priests coming through the main door of Aracia’s throne room. They crossed the oversized room to the throne Bersla had usurped, and then they knelt down in seeming adoration—all of them except one. That one came forward with a tray heaped with exotic food.

  “That’s one way to get the Fat Man’s attention,” Torl whispered.

  “The best way,” Sorgan agreed softly.

  Takal Bersla looked very pleased, and he eagerly reached out to take the overloaded tray. Then he began to take large bites of the assorted food heaped on the tray, and he wasn’t paying much attention to the hooded ones kneeling before him.

  Then the one who had given Bersla the tray pushed back the hood, and Sorgan was startled to see the small priestess Alcevan. With a look of triumph she opened her robe and pulled a broad dagger that was obviously of Maag origin out of her waist sash.

  “Where did she get one of our daggers?” Torl exclaimed.

  “Stole it, most likely,” Sorgan replied. “She is a bug, after all, and the bugs steal everything they can put their claws on.”

  Then Alcevan stood up and lunged directly at Fat Bersla, driving the dagger all the way to the hilt into the Fat Man’s belly.

  Bersla dropped the food he’d been wolfing down and screamed as he tried to wrest the dagger from the little priestess. Alcevan was obviously much stronger than she appeared to be. She pushed Bersla’s hands out of her way and slowly ripped him up the middle with that very sharp dagger.

  Bersla screamed, trying to hold in his intestines, which were spilling out of Alcevan’s gash.

  Several dozen of Bersla’s followers rushed toward the throne, but the hooded ones who’d accompanied Alcevan met them with swords and spears. The followers of Bersla died by the dozens as Bersla, still screaming, clutched at his surging-out innards.

  Alcevan had already moved on, however. She seized Bersla by the hair at the back of his head, pulled it, and then began to saw at his throat with the sharp dagger.

  Bersla’s screams suddenly stopped and huge amounts of blood came squirting out of the gash in his throat.

  That should have finished it, Sorgan believed, but Alcevan wasn’t through yet. She continued to slash and saw at Bersla’s neck until his head finally came free. Then Alcevan lifted Bersla’s detached head by the hair. “Behold Divine Bersla!” she shouted. “Follow him if you choose, and you shall soon go with him to the house of the dead! Truly I say to you, I now rule here in the holy temple.”

  “Now that’s something I never expected,” Torl declared. “That little one’s a savage, isn’t she?”

  “No, cousin,” Sorgan disagreed. “Actually, she’s a bug, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she ate all the remains of poor old Bersla.”

  “That might take her quite a while,” Torl observed. “She’s not very big, and there’s a whole lot of Bersla sprawled out on that throne.”

  Sorgan shrugged. “Maybe she’ll just have a banquet for all the assorted priests who supported her.”

  “And kill any of them who refuse to eat their share?”

  “That’s possible, I suppose,” Sorgan said. “Right now, though, you and I had better come up with some way to get all the gold building blocks out of this throne room and then haul them down to the harbor. I’ve got a hunch that ‘take the money and run’ might just go on for quite a long time.”

  THE

  BLIZZARD

  1

  Tlantar Two-Hands wasn’t particularly surprised when a sudden blizzard came sweeping in out of the north. Dahlaine had held the normal snowstorms back while the various armies had come down along the mountain range to the mouth of Long-Pass, but now that they were all in place, that was no longer necessary. It appeared that winter had much resented being cut off from her normal entertainments, and now that she was free, she seemed to want to unleash at the same time all the previous storms that Dahlaine had prohibited before.

  Tlantar had no problems with that. He and his friends had the fort of Gunda the Trogite for shelter, but the Creatures of the Wasteland were all right out in the open where winter could bury them all under twenty-foot snowdrifts.

  On about the third day of the screaming blizzard, Longbow the archer suggested that a few of them should probably go up to the top of Gunda’s wall and see just exactly what was going on down on the slope leading up from the Wasteland to the mouth of Long-Pass.

  “How long would you say this is likely to continue?” Gunda asked Tlantar after Longbow had led them to the top.

  Two-Hands shrugged. “A week or so at least,” he replied. “Dahlaine has held winter back for quite some time, so it’s likely to take her a while to get over her frustration. I’ve noticed that winter is like that. She hates it when she’s not permitted to play with her toys. I wouldn’t say that we’ve got much to worry about. Your fort here will give us all the protection we’re likely to need. The bug-people are right out in the open, though, so this won’t be a very pleasant time for them.”

  “Oh, the poor, poor babies,” Gunda said with a wicked sort of grin. “Dear old Mama Vlagh will probably lose a lot of her children before this snowstorm goes away.”

  “It’s not impossible,” Two-Hands agreed. “They won’t be able to see for more than a few feet, and there’s nothing on that slope for them to see anyway, and nothing to shelter them. Most of them will probably be frozen solid by the time spring arrives.”

  Gunda pulled his bison-hide cloak tighter about him. “Have you seen all that you need to see, Longbow?” he asked the tall archer. “I’d really like to get back inside where it’s warm. My feet are starting to get very cold.”

  “Let’s go back inside, then,” Longbow agreed.

  They went on back down the narrow stairway to the lower part of the fort and rejoined Sleeps-With-Dogs and the farmer Omago from Veltan’s Domain in a sizeable room with a solid stove standing against one of the rock walls. Two-Hands had noticed that the Trogites were very fond of stoves, in spite of the fact that their homeland almost never received much snow.

  “Is that snowstorm out there letting up at all?” Sleeps-With-Dogs asked.

  “I’d say that it’s getting worse,” Longbow told his friend.

  “Ah, well,” Sleeps-With-Dogs said, “this lodge made of stone should hold it off. Are the bug-people up to anything?”

  “That’s just a bit hard to say,” Longbow replied. “The snow’s so thick that we couldn’t see more than a few feet.”

  “How cold would you say it is out there?” Omago asked.

  Gunda laughed. “I didn’t try it, but I’d say that if a man happened to spit anyplace out there, the spit would turn into ice before it hit the ground.” He looked around. “This is a very good fort, I guess, but if it keeps snowing and getting colder every minute, we might not need it at all. The bug-people will all freeze to death before they even get up here.” He gave Tlantar a speculative look. “This blizzard is Lord Dahlaine’s way to stop the bug-people right in their tracks, isn’t
it? I mean, he can do that, can’t he?”

  Two-Hands shook his head. “Dahlaine’s not permitted to kill things. We can kill them, but he can’t. I’d say that this blizzard is just a natural reaction of winter to Dahlaine’s decision to hold the weather back until we all got here. As soon as Dahlaine loosened his grip on her, she threw all the storms down this way at the same time. The seasons get very cranky when somebody interferes with their personal entertainment.”

  “Are you saying that the seasons can actually think?”

  “I wouldn’t call it thinking, friend Gunda.” Longbow stepped in. “Things build up as time passes, and winter things build up more than things in the other seasons. This particular storm probably didn’t originate in winter, though. I took a quick look down Long-Pass when we started to come back down from the top of the wall. It’s snowing very hard on the slope that comes up out of the Wasteland, but it’s hardly snowing at all down in Long-Pass. I’d say that somebody’s tampering.”

  “Your ‘unknown friend’ maybe?” Gunda asked.

  “It’s altogether possible, wouldn’t you say? She is on our side, after all, and every bug the blizzard kills is one less that we’ll have to kill.”

  “That takes a lot of the fun out of this war, Longbow,” Gunda complained.

  “I suppose you could scold her if you’re feeling cheated,” Longbow replied mildly.

  “Ah—no, I don’t think I’ll do that,” Gunda said. “I definitely don’t want to irritate that one.”

  “Sound thinking,” Two-Hands noted.

  Narasan, the chief of the Trogites, had been conferring with Gunda’s friend Andar in the fort that was about a mile down the pass from this one, and he came up to Gunda’s fort the next morning with his constant companion, the warrior queen Trenicia. “Is somebody tampering again?” he asked when he joined Gunda and his friends in the central room of the fort. “All we were getting down in Andar’s fort were a few random snowflakes, but that’s a serious snowstorm off to the west.”

  “Longbow here thinks that it might be his unknown friend again,” Gunda replied. “After some of the things she did down in Veltan-land last summer and what she did a month or so ago in Dahlaine-land, this snowstorm is the sort of thing she seems to like. She’s got the bug-people all pinned down on that slope that comes up out of the Wasteland, and they’re probably all very busy freezing to death.”

  “I just wish that our friend out there could come up with a way to eliminate the Vlagh,” Narasan said. “Once the Vlagh is gone, we’ll all be able to go back home.”

  The farmer Omago smiled. “We’ll miss you terribly, Com-mander,” he said, “but you have things that need to be done when you return to your homeland, don’t you?”

  “I’m sure that we do,” Narasan replied. “I think I’d like to get to know our new emperor a little better. He’s pretty much destroyed the Trogite Church, but there are some other things he might want to consider. Selling the higher-ranking members of the clergy as slaves was most appropriate, but I think it’s about time to take a hard look at the whole idea of slavery.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Gunda said. “If he tries to abolish slavery, the people who own slaves and the rascals who sell them will put a sizeable price on his head.”

  “Now there’s a thought,” Narasan said. “If we hired on to protect him, we could ask just about any price, wouldn’t you say?”

  “The Palvanum would come unraveled if we stuck our hands that deep into the imperial treasury,” Gunda replied.

  “Maybe it’s time to take a hard look at the Palvanum as well, Gunda,” Narasan suggested. Then he looked around at the others in the room. “This is an internal matter in the Empire, and I don’t think our friends here would be very interested. Right now we’ll need to concentrate on what we’ll need to do here when it stops snowing.”

  Two-Hands was catching a strong odor of ambition. When Narasan returned to his homeland again, he’d probably become extremely important in the Trogite Empire, and sooner or later he could very well take the imperial throne for himself. Two-Hands smiled. If that did happen, he was fairly sure that he knew exactly who would be the empress in the Land of Trog.

  It was about mid-morning on the following day when the young Trogite soldier Keselo rode up to the back of Gunda’s fort. The blizzard had subsided a bit during the night, but the snow was still piling up on the slope below the fort.

  Keselo climbed down off his horse and came on into the fort. He touched one hand to his forehead in what the Trogites called a salute when Narasan joined him.

  “Is there a problem of some kind?” Narasan asked him.

  “There’s no easy way to say this, sir,” Keselo replied. “It seems that Lady Zelana’s sister doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “You said what?” Narasan exclaimed.

  “I didn’t see it personally, sir, but Captain Sorgan told me to get up here as fast as I could and let you know what happened. If I understood him correctly, Lady Aracia ordered the little Dreamer Lillabeth to vanish—or die—or something like that.”

  “She killed that baby?” Narasan exclaimed.

  “She might have been trying, sir,” Keselo replied, “but that’s not what happened. As soon as she said it, she just disintegrated. At least that’s what Eleria told Sorgan. Her body turned into little speckles of light. Then the lights all faded, and Lady Aracia wasn’t there anymore. Captain Sorgan had spoken with Veltan, and Veltan told him that his sister had tried to do something that’s prohibited, and when she attempted to do that, she was obliterated.”

  “Dear Gods!” Narasan exclaimed. “Who’s in charge down there now?”

  “I suppose you could say that it’s the child Lillabeth, sir,” Keselo replied, “but Captain Sorgan has seen her a time or two, and she’s no longer a child, and her name is Enalla now.”

  “Are all those fat priests worshiping this Enalla now?” Gunda asked.

  Keselo shook his head. “Captain Hook-Beak told me that she ordered them not to, and then she sent word out to the local farmers that they didn’t need to deliver food to the temple anymore.”

  “My goodness,” Narasan said mildly. “What are the priests supposed to eat now?”

  “Their shoes, probably, sir.”

  “What moved Lady Aracia to try to do something that’s absolutely forbidden?” Gunda demanded.

  “Captain Sorgan told me that it was the same thing that caused those problems in the Tonthakan Nation in Lord Dahlaine’s part of the Land of Dhrall, sir. There was a tiny little priestess called Alcevan who was able to control Lady Aracia with an odor—in much the same way that those two controlled the chief up in Tonthakan—up until the Maag called Ox brained the both of them with his axe.”

  “It would seem that the Vlagh is playing games again,” Gunda growled.

  “So it would seem, sir,” Keselo agreed. “Oh, one other thing. Captain Hook-Beak asked me to advise you that his men are going to take all the gold they can get their hands on down there, and then they’ll come on up here to lend us a hand—and to share the gold with us.”

  Narasan blinked in astonishment, and then he started to laugh.

  2

  It took several more days for the lopsided blizzard to move off to the south, and when the pale winter sun returned, it more or less confirmed Longbow’s assessment of the storm. The slope leading up from the Wasteland was covered with deep snow, but it appeared that very little snow had fallen into Long-Pass. Two-Hands now agreed that something very unusual had conjured up this particular blizzard.

  As soon as the weather cleared, Gunda put most of his men to work clearing the snow off the top of the wall while the young Trogite called Keselo gathered the catapult crews near the back side of the fort, where they all carefully mixed several liquids together to produce the fire-missiles that had proved to be extremely useful during the war in Crystal Gorge.

  That might have disturbed Two-Hands more than just a little. Arrows and spears were one
thing, but balls of liquid fire were quite another. Had their enemies in this war and the previous one been people-people, Two-Hands would have protested quite extensively. But bug-people were quite a different matter. Setting fire to bugs didn’t bother Two-Hands at all.

  The Trogite soldiers were still busily clearing away the snow piled high on the top of the wall when Longbow’s friend, Sleeps-With-Dogs, came up to join them. He peered down the slope for a few moments, and then pointed out a sizeable number of snow-piles down there. “Shouldn’t the wind have blown those away?”

  “That would sort of depend upon how tightly those snow-piles are packed,” Two-Hands replied. Then he gave it some thought. “Now that you mention it, though, those piles shouldn’t really be there. The wind should have carried them away quite some time ago.”

  “Doesn’t that sort of suggest that those piles aren’t natural?” Sleeps-With-Dogs suggested.

  “Indeed it does,” Two-Hands agreed. “I’d say that the bug-people sort of improvised shelters to protect themselves from the weather, and we weren’t able to see what they were doing because the blizzard was hiding everything down there. It’s a good thing that one of us still had his eyes open.”

  “If we’re at all close to being right, before too much longer a bug will show up down there—unless they’re going to try to burrow their way up here under the snow,” Sleeps-With-Dogs said.

  “If any of them try that, they won’t live very long,” Gunda declared. “There are a thousand or so poisoned stakes down under all that snow, and one little scratch from one of those stakes will kill anything that tries to come up here—either on top of the snow or down underneath. One-Who-Heals gave us that idea, and those stakes have probably killed more bug-people than all the rest of us put together have.”

  “One-Who-Heals was probably the wisest man in all the Land of Dhrall,” Sleeps-With-Dogs said proudly.