The Heretic

by David Drake

  “No, I—” He cut himself off by slapping his own throat with a quick jab of his palm.

  Everything inside him screamed. So close, and to have it yanked back so cruelly! There must be a way, some way to discover, cadge, beg—

  And then he saw Rostov smiling broadly, those thin, white teeth, so like quartz stones, flashing, and Gaspar knew.

  He knows. Maybe he doesn’t know who I am precisely, but he knows. He knows what I am asking for, what I am truly asking for—

  “No?” said Rostov. “What do you mean, wastelander? Tell me.”

  “It’s just, I—” And he found he could say the words, must say them. “I beg you, great sheik. I wish—”

  Gaspar bent low. He had already been sitting, and now he placed himself on his belly, his legs hunched below him, his hands outstretched in supplication. “I humbly beg to see the boy. Just to know he lives.”

  “Who is this slave?” Rostov said. He chuckled, and those around him laughed with him. “Don’t tell me, wastelander. He is your only son? The only one remaining after we cut you down like dakgrass when you did not yield? And is he the last? Did we kill the others, the strong sons of the Remlaps?”

  “And the daughters,” whimpered Gaspar. “My eldest daughter.”

  “And you come here believing you can . . . trade,” said Rostov. He was no longer smiling. “As if I were a common barterer in a market stall.”

  “No, great sheik,” Gaspar said.

  “Then what, wastelander?”

  “I—”

  “Sit up so I can hear you!”

  “Yes, great sheik.” But he found his arms would not move, his back would not pull him erect. Finally the two bodyguards moved to his side and pulled him back to a crouching posture.

  “I know where they are,” Gaspar said. “The Farmers. Scouts. Many of them. A two-day ride from here. I came with their maps, and to tell you, show you . . . in hope . . . in fear . . . not for mercy, for I know you have none . . . but that you would find me useful. And let me have him.”

  “The boy.”

  “Yes.” Gaspar nodded, looked down.

  “The Farmers are nearby?”

  “Yes. About ten-tens strong. They are of Treville. The ones you hate.”

  Rostov nodded. “I do hate those fuckers of daks. You have heard right about me in that regard. And now you have dangled your bait. Let us see if I will take it.”

  “They are truly there, great sheik,” said Gaspar despondently. “I offer no trick. You can take the Farmers unaware. Wipe them from the red face of Father Desert. As you have wiped away others who oppose you.”

  Rostov said nothing for a space, but considered Gaspar.

  “Give me these maps,” he said. “Now.”

  Gaspar stretched out the case, but couldn’t seem to loosen his grip on it, even when he was willing his fingers to do so. Rostov pulled it roughly from his hands.

  Rostov opened the case and unrolled the scrolled maps, glancing at both in turn. Then he had a longer look. “Not bad,” he said. “This is . . . who made this?”

  “A slave of Treville. He works for the commander there.”

  “Dashian?”

  “Yes.”

  Rostov smiled, shook his head. He rolled the map carefully back into a scroll, and looked at the other.

  Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, the ferocious, toothy smile spread over his face. After what seemed an eternity to Gaspar, Rostov shook his head, plainly impressed.

  “This may prove . . . useful.”

  “It shows fortifications. Troop dispositions. Even approximate numbers.”

  “I will have it read.”

  Gaspar had not considered that Rostov was not literate, although he kicked himself for not expecting it. He himself had only learned to read because his parents had been under the mistaken impression when he was a child that he might make a lore-keep someday.

  Rostov looked back down at him.

  “Now, as to these Scouts,” he said. “Where?”

  “I—am very thirsty,” Gaspar said. “And I have not eaten in two days. Since I escaped.”

  “Yes, all right,” Rostov replied. Then he paused and broke into another carnadon smile. “Meat for this man, and drink,” he called out. Gaspar wasn’t sure to whom Rostov was speaking but evidently he was heard and obeyed, for he shortly called after further instructions. “And bring it not from the common kitchen, either. Let it be Rostov provender. Let my house slaves bring it.”

  They waited. Rostov unrolled the map again and studied it while all around him, including Gaspar, who dared hardly breathe, kept silent. Rostov was still gazing at the map when the pitcher of wine and the platter of food arrived. Gaspar took a clay cup from the slave girl who brought it. She was rather young for such a task—not yet a maiden—but she handled the pouring well enough. Something odd about her, though. Her eyes not turned down enough, somehow. Emotion showed in them, even hurt. They were not the eyes of a slave.

  Her forehead cut was fresh, still healing. It had been made higher up than normal to preserve her visage. She was rather pretty. Rostov probably had other uses in mind for the girl when she grew older.

  But then the food was placed before him, and he lost all thought of the slave girl. The stack of meat was surrounded by figs, and both figs and meat had the aroma of fresh roasting. Gaspar immediately felt the saliva form in his arid mouth. Or he felt his mouth attempt to salivate, at least. His swallow remained dry. He reached toward the meat, toward a protruding bone that might serve as a handle. These were ribs of some beast, not a dak. He didn’t care. He was so hungry.

  He glanced up and met the eyes of the slave boy proffering the platter.

  It was Frel. It was his son.

  Gaspar moved back, left the rib where it was. He looked into his boy’s eyes, and now the tears that would not come before, that could not, found a way, and flowed.

  “What?” said Rostov. “I thought you were hungry, wastelander? Why do you not eat?”

  Gaspar couldn’t take his eyes off Frel.

  Alive, alive, he thought. I hadn’t dared to hope.

  “Answer me, wastelander.”

  “Frel,” he said. “Your sister Besda lives. She remembers you. We never forget you and pray for you every lamplighting,” he said.

  “Wastelander!” said Rostov, more loudly. “Answer me!”

  Gaspar forced himself to tear his gaze away from the boy. “Great sheik,” he said. “I will do whatever you ask of me.”

  “Was that ever a question?”

  Gaspar didn’t answer. There was no way to answer that would not mean doom.

  Rostov laughed lowly, and stepped beside Gaspar, stepped toward the slaves. They must have seen something forbidding in his countenance—Gaspar was too busy taking in, drinking in, Frel, to notice—for they both stepped back.

  And then he let the map unroll again, the Redlands map. He held it up like a dividing curtain between Gaspar and the food, the boy, cutting off his view.

  “Now,” said Rostov. “Show me. Show me where.”

  Gaspar slowly raised his hand. He looked at the map. He would locate it, the hilltop within the surrounding mountains where the Scouts were camped, he would point to it. But no. He would be killing ninety men.

  He stared at the map. And, after a moment, Gaspar let out a stifled whimper, like the last breath of a dak that you had to put down for its own good.

  “What?”

  “I—” he whimpered. I am not an evil man.

  “What are you mumbling about, wastelander? Speak up!”

  The bastards! Bastards to put him in such a position. They deserved what was coming.

  The bastard Weldletter, making the theft so easy.

  In a way it will be Weldletter’s own fault.

  And the lieutenant. The Dashian spawn. Taking him hostage, leaving him no choice.

  My child, my child!

  He wanted to run, to grab Frel and run, but he knew the bodyguards would c
ut him down at the first move.

  Instead, his finger moved toward the map, found the curve of the contour line he was looking for. The bastard Weldletter had shown him how these worked, what they represented.

  “Here,” he heard his voice croak. “In this dry run, near a blackstone cliff.”

  Over. Now there was only hope. Only—

  Gaspar looked up into the shining, black eyes of Rostov, and felt that hope crinkle, like the skin of one of the Schlusels, strapped to those strange, uniformly shaped stones.

  He’s not going to let Frel go.

  A part of him, a small rational voice, echoed quietly within him that it had been a forlorn hope all along.

  Rostov didn’t have to say anything. The same voice said it for him.

  You fooled yourself, great chief. You were never going to save your son.

  A shot rang out. One of the bodyguard crumpled. Another, and the second man, who had drawn a blunderbuss pistol with almost supernatural alacrity, also grabbed at his chest just under the neck as it exploded and bled. He fell also, writhing and kicking in a pool of his own blood, his limbs out of his motor control and seemingly full of crawling insects.

  From the edge of the tent two men stepped forward. Both were in Blaskoye garb, but they wore the garments loosely, in an unkempt fashion a Blaskoye would not have been caught dead in.

  Both held composite bows notched with arrow.

  And those arrows were pointing straight at Rostov.

  Amazingly, Rostov only smiled the broader. The more terribly.

  “You’ve killed my cousins,” he said. “This is not something we take lightly here in the Redlands.”

  He nodded toward the wine slave.

  “You’ve come for the girl, I suppose,” he said. “There she is. Take her.”

  The lieutenant held his bow steady. “You get her, Kruso,” he said to the other man. The other man quickly moved over, put an hand on the slave girl’s arm, and pulled the wine pitcher toward him. He gently took it from her grasp, set it on a nearby pedestal that had been designed for such a purpose, the delivery of spent dishes. Then he pulled the girl toward himself and into his arm.

  “Her ah gotten, Lieutenant,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Rostov shook his head. “Lieutenant,” he said. “That’s not a name. It’s a thing, like carpenter or potter. One who carries out the orders of others, and has no will of his own.”

  “My name is Dashian,” the other replied.

  “Dashian is the commander,” said Rostov. “You are a lieutenant, not a Dashian.”

  “We’re leaving now,” the lieutenant said.

  “And how will you do so?”

  “Through the entrance,” said the other.

  “Unlikely.”

  “Maybe you are right,” said the lieutenant. He turned to the other Scout. “Ready, Kruso?”

  “Aye, Lieutenant.”

  “No!” shouted Gaspar. “You can’t go. Not like this. Not now.”

  “Goodbye, Gaspar,” said the lieutenant.

  “Take the boy,” Gaspar said. “You must!”

  “You broke our deal.”

  “Take him,” Gaspar pleaded. “He’s dead if you don’t.”

  Dashian glanced quickly to the other, the one called Kruso. Kruso shook his head. “Na good, thet many toh carry,” he said.

  Rostov began to laugh. “This is the chatter of walking corpses,” he said. “Wind over rocks. Nothing. Lower your bows.” He motioned to them impatiently, pointing downward with a finger. “Lower your bows and the slaves will die quickly, cleanly.”

  “I saw the Schlusels,” said Dashian.

  Rostov growled impatiently.

  “Then you saw how this has to end. You will live, in a manner of speaking. I will trade you to your father,” he said. “Perhaps a little worse for wear, perhaps no longer quite the man you were. The others . . . well, I have my cousins to avenge, so I’m afraid I cannot promise to make it quick. This one”—he nodded toward Gaspar—“must watch the boy die, of course.”

  Gaspar felt himself shaking. So much he had risked. Now to have it all yanked from his hands.

  I’m a coward, after all, he thought. I do not want to watch him die. I would want to go before. I would beg to go before if I thought Rostov would listen.

  “Enough,” said Dashian. Gaspar looked up, ready for the end to come. But the lieutenant was not speaking to Rostov. He was speaking to the other, the sergeant. “Kruso?”

  Together they raised their bows and loosed the arrows. The string sang out and the arrows shot upward, toward the ceiling. Then past the ceiling and through the great venting hole at the very apex of the structure. Upward and out into daylight.

  Rostov reached for the knife in his belt, ignoring the pistol stuffed in beside it. He was moving toward the boy.

  I would beg, but he wouldn’t listen.

  And then the sky began to rain arrows.

  * * *

  Split-awareness interpolation complete to ninety-three point two seven degrees of accuracy, said Center. The tracking and location purposes are served. My recommendation is that you return to single-channel awareness with extreme alacrity.

  Hell, yes, said Abel. We’re here.

  6

  Abel and Rostov moved toward the boy at the same instant, but Abel got there first. Abel realized that this wasn’t because he was faster. No, the Blaskoye had moved to snatch not the boy, but the wooden platter which had moments before held a stack of meat.

  A shield for arrows, thought Abel. He adapts quickly.

  For a moment their eyes met, Abel’s and Rostov’s, and, though the other said nothing, Abel was as sure of the other’s thought as he was of the voices of Center and Raj. He was sure, because he had experienced exactly the same thought, and with it, a moment of complete understanding.

  One day, I will kill you.

  Then the Blaskoye snatched the wooden platter away, and Abel pulled the child toward himself.

  He had brought twenty Scouts with him on the trail of Gaspar and, donning the Blaskoye garments they’d come prepared with, had entered the oasis encampment and managed to follow the Remlap chief though the settlement undetected. It had not been difficult to blend in, since Awul-alwaha had become a stew of heretofore opposed Redlander tribes. The tents were as varied as the dress. Even if the others had been declared Blaskoye or this new species of tribe, the Redlander, they had not gotten new clothing or new tent-cloth. So they had answered the summons of their new masters bringing what they possessed.

  Trailing Gaspar had been difficult, but not the hardest tracking job he or the Scouts had undertaken by far. Like many Redlanders Abel encountered, Gaspar was not as good at fooling Scouts and covering his tracks as he believed himself to be. The desert took marks well, and, once written in scuffed ground or oddly broken twig, those telltales tended to last a long time. The Scouts had often used Redlander arrogance in this regard against them. Many others who had thought the soft Farmer Scouts incapable of tracking them had met their fates in surprised astonishment and disbelief. Abel’s greatest challenge had been finding a place to hold the donts, since he could not take them into the oasis proper. But Awul-alwaha had solved the problem for him, in a manner of speaking, for there were corrals already built ringing the encampment. These had probably been built by incoming warrior bands as temporary structures for donts and daks while they established more permanent quarters. Most were occupied, but some were vacant. Abel had left his Scouts’ donts in one of these. He tried to select the one closest in as possible. He’d left behind a guard of two to watch over them, and to keep them dressed and ready. He and the rest of the Scouts followed Gaspar into the encampment. Gaspar was feeling his way, moving slowly, and Abel and his men had not had any trouble catching up with him and shadowing him once again.

  Then, when he’d seen the chief slash his way into the smaller tent attached to the enormous central tent, he’d known this was the final destination.

&nb
sp; Abel’s two squads had scaled the sides of the structure from the outside, then infiltrated through the vents in the tent-cloth where roof met rounded tent walls. These vents had a curtain of fabric draping before them to discourage flitterdaks and insectoids from getting in, and the flaps had concealed the Scouts stationed in the vent openings.

  If they’d been noticed climbing the outside of the tent, no one had raised an alarm. Perhaps they were taken to be workers, repairing wind or sun damage. Perhaps this had been aided by the fact that each Scout had stopped and examined the ropes and stakes holding the tent erect just before they began their accent. Several of them were observed to have bent down to test the knots for weakness, one even producing a knife with which to probe the fibers of the rope here and there, no doubt for safety’s sake.

  It helped that on the ascent, their muskets weren’t showing, although bows and arrows were. Abel had ordered them to cover the rifles strapped across their backs beneath their Blaskoye robes, and to arm themselves with bows and arrows when in position. He wanted repetitive firepower. Attempting to reload a musket muzzle while balancing on a bit of fabric was a task beyond even most Scouts.

  Meanwhile Abel and Kruso had entered through the front door. When the doorguard questioned them, Kruso had put on his best South Redland’s accent and claimed they were Flanagans, the sea-coast scavengers feared by all in the Delta provinces, come in answer to the Blaskoye call to arms. Since no one had ever seen a Flanagan, they were shown through.

  The real lapse in security is the obvious Blaskoye belief that no one from the Valley could survive a trip to Awul-alwaha, said Raj, much less that some Valleyman could walk right into town and request an audience with the great sheik himself. This will probably be the last time they ever make that mistake, however.

  They’re letting me walk in with my rifle, Abel thought. This Rostov is either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid.

  It is a calculated gambit to shore up allegiance with so many recently conquered tribes, said Center. As we have witnessed, Rostov literally unmans those who resist. So he allows those who remain the illusion of self-determination, at least about their persons.