Into a Dark Realm: Book Two of the Darkwar Saga
Page 31
Magnus nodded. His father didn’t have to finish the thought. If they can do this, how would we ever stand against them? For as powerful as Pug and Magnus might be, together, along with every student in Stardock and Sorcerer’s Isle, they could never build a thing on the scale of this Star Bridge. The idea that somehow it spanned the space between worlds was even more impossible for Pug to fathom than the concept of rifts tearing holes in the fabric of space.
They reached a low fence of iron or some other dark metal, and a very ornate gate through which a long line of people moved in an orderly fashion. This was the only time Pug had witnessed warriors and their ladies standing behind Lessers, for it was clear that everyone was lined up in order of arrival. Martuch put Bek and the others in line and walked to the gate where he presented a parchment to a pair of men in black robes, with a golden eye embroidered on their chests. Hierophants: those Deathpriests who were responsible for the secrets and mysteries of the order. Pug sensed that meant they were the Lesser Paths, so to speak, of these people, for this Star Bridge was a great engine, no matter how fantastic it looked.
Nakor whispered, “This is a very impressive trick.”
Pug touched him lightly on the shoulder to remind him to be silent. Martuch returned and spoke as if only to Bek, but loud enough that the others could hear. “Everything is in order. We leave now.”
They followed the line in front of them. When they reached the gate, Pug noticed that the two Hierophants were making each person pause for a moment. As Martuch and then Bek walked to the base of the column of light, Pug was held a moment, then heard one of the two dark-robed priests say, “Step on quickly, step off quickly.” Then with a firm push they sent him along.
Pug hurried to keep the same interval with Bek he had before, and saw the young warrior step into the light. As Pug reached the boundary he hesitated for only an instant, but in that moment he reached out with his senses and caressed the Star Bridge.
He staggered a step, and only managed not to fall by an act of will he had not been forced to utilize in years. This thing, this Star Bridge…He could not encompass it. His mind rebelled.
Then he was inside. For an instant it were as if he was once more in the void, for his senses were taken from him, then abruptly he was speeding through another place, a dimension of alien beauty and unnameable sensations.
For a brief moment, Pug felt a part of this plane of reality, and felt there was an order to it, a system that he might understand if he could but linger and ponder it. Then, suddenly he was standing on solid ground, looking at Bek’s retreating back. He remembered the warning to step off quickly and did so, and wondered what would happen had he waited until Nakor appeared after him. Probably something unpleasant.
He heard his two companions walking behind him. He wanted to glance back, but the images that flooded his senses now made him not just cautious, but fearful. For if Delecordia hadn’t fully prepared him for the shock of going to Kosridi, then Kosridi had done nothing to prepare him for what was now before his eyes on Omadrabar.
Miranda regained consciousness to find that her arms and legs were still bound, but not as tightly as before. She appeared to be in a bedchamber, tied by cords to four posts of a bed. A Dasati sat upon a stool near the bed, regarding her with cold, black eyes.
“Can you understand me?” he asked, and Miranda’s mind wrestled with his words, for while she didn’t understand the words, the meaning came to her. He was employing a magic unknown to her, but it was effective.
“Yes,” she said, and found she could barely speak. Her lips were parched and her throat dry. “Could I have some water?” she asked, too sick and tired to display what would have been appropriate rage. Her head pounded and her body throbbed, and try as she might, using every mind skill and incantation she knew, she could not focus her thoughts or find any sense of energy around her. The entire flow of magic was alien. It was impossible for her to come to grips with it.
The Dasati on the stool wore a black robe with a red death’s head on the chest and an ornate purple trim around the hem, sleeves, and hood. The hood was back, so Miranda could see his face.
She had no frame of reference for what Dasati were supposed to look like. She studied his features and found that they were not too unlike a human’s, with two eyes, a nose and mouth where she would have expected them to be. The chin was long, the cheekbones high, and the skull thin, but apart from the grey cast to this man’s skin, he was not that alien in appearance. Certainly he looked a great deal more like her than the Cho-ja magicians at Chaka-hal did. But she knew for a fact that the Cho-ja magicians were far more like her than this creature.
“Varen says you are dangerous,” said the Dasati, and again Miranda felt his words in her mind as much as heard them. “I do know how you could be, but I will not underestimate the possibility.” He stood up and towered over her as she lay helpless on the pallet. “We shall study you, for if you are dangerous, and there are more like you on the world of Kelewan, we need to prepare for encountering such as you.
“It is His Darkness’s pleasure that we take your world from you.”
Without another word the Dasati left the chamber, closing the door behind him. Miranda’s mind raced; for while she had difficulty focusing, she knew Pug’s worst fears were being realized: the Dasati were invading, and soon. If not Midkemia, it would be Kelewan; and she had no doubt they would not stop there. She examined her surroundings as best she could. She was in a room without windows. There was a torch in a sconce in the wall, no table or chair, one bed and one stool.
And she was tied firmly. Every time she tried to focus her energies, to use any of a number of spells to free her bonds or move to another location, her mind felt numb, as if something were interfering with her abilities. Perhaps they had drugged her.
She was considering what might be causing her lack of focus when she drifted off to unconsciousness again.
Jommy lay against a slight rise in the woods to the north of the encampment, watching while the hours dragged on. The Salmater sentries were alert and posted far enough away from the campfires that Jommy couldn’t see what, if anything, was occurring around the fires. The sounds that carried through the night were of men talking, at their ease, not worried in the least about being discovered.
Jommy glanced over to where Godfrey was hiding behind a tree. In the predawn darkness, he could barely make him out. Jommy sniffed, his nose starting to run with the damp and cold. It would be a steam bath when the sun came up, but right now he was shivering. He wondered how Grandy was doing. Then he wondered, again, what Grandy was doing here.
“What are any of us doing here?” he whispered to himself. Since meeting Tad and Zane in Kesh, Jommy had found himself more or less adopted into a family that had its share of adventures and wonders—which included magicians living on an island, fighting assassins, travel everywhere in the world—but some of the things he was asked to do just didn’t make much sense.
Still, it was better than farming, or working a teamster’s wagon, and he knew what they were doing was important, even if he didn’t understand half of what it was. He really liked Tad and Zane, as much as if they were his brothers—although remembering his older brothers and how they used to regularly smack him around, he amended that to, he liked them better than his brothers; and while Caleb wasn’t his dad, he treated Jommy the same as he did the others.
But what were they doing in the south of Olasko playing at soldiers? And why send a boy like Grandy along?
He was sure there was a reason, and he thought it had to do with Kaspar’s remark the other day: that soon everyone would be going to war. Even so, they were not Roldemish, so why this army? Why now?
Jommy put aside his concerns for the moment, as dawn was on its way, and with it, he hoped, General Devrees along with about sixty regular soldiers. Jommy glanced eastward, hoping for a sign of the rising sun. He had no idea of the time, and he wondered how much longer they’d be forced to wait.
He found one of the men Servan had detailed to go with Grandy standing behind him, a sword pointed at him. Glancing over at Godfrey, he saw another soldier had him at sword’s point as well. The soldier held out his left hand and Jommy slowly handed him his sword. When the man had it, he tossed it aside. “Move,” he instructed.
Slowly Jommy moved from out of the trees and saw about sixteen men walking toward the camp with Grandy being escorted by two men with hands clamped firmly on his shoulders. “Hello, the camp!” one shouted.
Instantly guards from Salmater were shouting alarm, and the Roldem soldier who had shouted, said, “We’re seeking parley!”
By the time Jommy and Godfrey reached the campsite, the full contingency of two hundred men were up, armed, and ready for a fight. Servan and Zane were herded in from the south. The leader of the Salmater force looked around and said, “What is this, then?” He was a tall, dark-haired soldier, experienced from his appearance and an officer from his bearing.
The soldier who was leading the Roldemish contingency said, “Look, I’ll be quick. There’s a Roldem general with a strong force heading down this way to thump you. We want no part of it. We’re all Olasko men and hate having to serve in their army. We fought them at Opardum and we’re not going to put up with wearing these Roldem monkey jackets any more.” As if to demonstrate, he started stripping his tunic. He was a stocky, blond-haired man with a couple of days of grey whiskers and a sunburned, leathery face.
“You’ve got an army heading this way?”
“Yes,” said the soldier, throwing his jacket on the ground. “We want to go to Salmater with you.”
“Why would we take you with us? We’re going to be lucky to keep our heads once I report this raid as a total failure.”
“Not a failure,” said the soldier. He motioned and Grandy was pushed forward. “This here is the son of the King, Prince Grandprey, out larking about, learning to soldier. Think of the ransom.”
“Prince?” said the officer. “You expect me to believe that the son of the King of Roldem is mucking about in these islands?”
“Look,” said the Olaskan soldier. “What have you to lose? If I’m lying, cut my head off back in Salmater. If I’m telling the truth, you’re a hero and your king gets to dictate terms to Roldem.”
“Or bring the entire Roldem fleet down on us,” said the officer.
“But that’s for your court and the court of Roldem to argue, isn’t it? Here’s what I know. They’re expecting something big and the army is being pulled back to Roldem. That’s why they haven’t replenished the depleted Olasko divisions. My lads and I want nothing to do with that bit. We’re Olasko men and we’ll stay hidden in these islands if we have to, but if Roldem is expecting a war with Kesh or someone else, let someone else fight it. But if a big war is coming, the King of Roldem will just pay the ransom and be done with it, right?”
“What about the rest of these boys?”
“Officers, so they say. Might be worth something. These two”—he pointed to Zane and Jommy—“got something to do with the court down in Kesh, and this other one”—he pointed at Servan—“is the Prince’s cousin. The other lad’s his friend.”
“Bring them all,” said the officer. “I’ll let the generals sort it out back in Micel’s Station.”
“You’ll take us, then?” asked the blond soldier.
The Salmater officer said, “What would I do with traitors? Kill them!”
Before the soldiers from Roldem could react, the Salmater raiders were on them, cutting throats and running them through with swords. When twenty dead or dying men lay in the sand, the officer shouted, “Break camp! I want everyone back across the border by sunrise!” To Grandy and the others he said, “Nobles or not, if you give me any trouble you’ll end up like them.”
Four guards stood watch over the five boys while the raiders got ready to leave. Jommy looked at Servan and saw that bravado had gone out of him. Godfrey and Zane looked frightened, and Grandy was shivering from fear as much as from the cold.
All he could hope for was that Tad had got through and was leading the General and men from Roldem down the river right now, and they’d get here before the Salmater raiders got back across the border. He glanced to the east and saw the sky was lightening.
Pug tried not to gawk, as it was clear that most Lessers kept their eyes down and attended to their own business. Nakor didn’t seem to care, looking up at the lofty towers that rose hundreds of feet into the air. “How do they climb those?” he asked.
Magnus said, “Probably they have some device inside to lift and lower you.”
Omadrabar City was impossible to make sense of in human terms, thought Pug. There were no slums, no run-down sections of the city, no poor quarters, nothing remotely to indicate the class of citizen that one would find in every human city on two worlds.
Here, every building was connected by bridges that arched over wide boulevards or canals, or streets that went through tunnels in the middle of massive structures. Pug could only estimate, but in human terms it would probably take thousands of years to build a city like this, and he thought that no one in human history could ever have imagined a city as a single, interconnected structure.
They rode past one of the few open park areas, which was simply a plot of land left undeveloped, where trees and what appeared to be short ferns rather than true grass grew. Pug realized this passion for single, related structures was probably triggered by the same drive that linked all social and political structures together within this culture.
Pug turned to his companions and said softly, “Will we ever understand these beings?”
Nakor grinned, and even with his Dasati glamour on, it was clear to see he was delighted. “Probably not, but we should be able to reach a mutually beneficial accommodation if we can contact the right people.”
“And who are they?” whispered Magnus.
Nakor shrugged. “The ones we are with now, we must hope.”
From the Star Bridge they had walked to where a wagon had waited, escorted by four handpicked warriors of Martuch’s society, the Sadharin. Even in this alien world Pug didn’t have to be told something momentous was taking place.
Everywhere they went large numbers of armed men, Deathpriests, and wagons were on the move. It was as if this city were making ready for an invasion, but that was impossible. This was the Dasati homeworld and no enemy existed within any imaginable distance.
Yes, Pug knew from his experiences during the Riftwar and the Serpentwar that invaders could reach anywhere with the right magic, but to attempt to invade this world…This wasn’t a world of millions, like Kelewan; it was a world of billions. Moreover they were Dasati, a race where the warrior class was made up of survivors, the toughest, most dangerous men on this world; each had been tested repeatedly by the time he was fifteen years of age, and there were so many of them. This city alone was home to seven million people, according to Martuch, over a million of them warriors, members of a thousand battle societies. That was more than the entire population of the Kingdom of the Isles, and almost as many souls as resided in all of Great Kesh.
Souls? wondered Pug. Do these Dasati have them? If it hadn’t been for the letters he had sent to tell himself to come here, Pug would have felt completely overwhelmed. He was riding in a wagon with his son and Nakor, on a world populated by billions of beings who would happily kill him as a minor part of their day’s business, and he had no idea what he was doing here. Somewhere on this world was an answer, even if Pug didn’t know the question at this moment.
One thing he would like to know, however, was why such a level of mobilization was apparently under way on Omadrabar. From what Pug had been told and what he had seen of the Twelve Worlds, the Dasati had no enemies left. One of the mandates the TeKarana had given the Order of Hierophants was to find more worlds to conquer. Martu
ch and Pug had spoken several times of the conditions within the Dasati realm, and yet nothing had been said about plans for mass travel beyond it.
They entered through a large gate into a relatively small yard above which rose a building—or another section of wall and bridges as Pug thought of them—that was Martuch’s home on Omadrabar.
Pug waited as Martuch instructed his men to secure the house, though he wasn’t sure if “house” was the proper term. It was more a series of large apartments that were embedded into the wall of the city. Or rather, one of many walls in the city.
Pug’s senses were reeling. Of all the worlds he had visited, none were as alien as Omadrabar. Delecordia had some elements in common with the first plane of reality, and the people were more pacific. Kosridi was an echo of Midkemia, and that had given him a sense of the familiar.
This place, though, was a different matter. The scale of things, the pace of life, the complete lack of anything familiar: he had no frame of reference for any of it. He had thought his introduction to the Tsurani culture, including the slave camps in the Great Swamp of Szetac Province, had been difficult. At least the Tsurani were human, and had families they loved. They prized heroism, loyalty, and sacrifice. He didn’t even know if the words the Dasati used for these concepts existed. He searched to express the concepts in a different way, and could only come up with bravery, fidelity, and selflessness.
Pug, Nakor, and Magnus were given a single room in which to wait, and Martuch made it clear to the Lessers in his household that they were to be ignored. No one was to speak to them, nor were they to be given any tasks.
Hours dragged by and finally they were summoned to Martuch’s private quarters, a huge series of rooms overlooking the central plaza of this region of the city.
They entered a room and found Martuch waiting with three others. Narueen and Valko stood near the door; the young warrior looked different from how Pug had seen him before: tentative, unsure, perhaps even intimidated.