The Warlock of Rhada Read online

  And so Vulk Asa, resting quietly within the dark corridor of an Imperial Cryonics Hospital, surrounded by savage, ignorant warriors, touched minds gently with his sister-wife Rahel--who would live indefinitely unless some political overthrow changed the ways of Vara-Vyka, in the stone keep of a barbarian warlord.

  I long for the sunlight, Asa, and the starry night.

  Patience, Sister. It will come.

  I am half-blind without a Third for Triad, Brother. Are you stronger? Can you look ahead?

  A little way, Rahel. And the signs are good. Dangerous and strange, but good. Glamiss grows in heart and mind.

  He is young--even for a man. Very young.

  The young will lead the young, Rahel. The knowledge he needs is here, though he does not know it. He hopes for things--for weapons. But perhaps--

  Will we ever be free, Asa?

  Believe it, beloved.

  In their intimacy, their thoughts became stranger, more alien, beyond the understanding of any man. And they contained a thin bright thread of hope. The only two Vulk on the planet discussed Glamiss no more, but both began to hope that he might be the one to strike the spark that would, in the far future, flare into a light of civilization once again--for both Vulk and Man.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It is my hope, Majesty, that it will soon be possible to “record” personality and impress undifferentiated protein molecules with the patterns I have recorded. Should this be, as I have reason to believe, possible, the medical and sociological ramifications will be immense for our people. The learning of great men need not be lost to clinical death. The teaching process may be made infinitely more efficient. And even the notion of cyborg replicas of human beings is not too outré to be considered.

  For these reasons, and for others too technical to present to you in this form, I beg Your Majesty to continue your most gracious support of the research being conducted by the Committee on Personality Transfer of the Imperial Medical Services Authority.

  --Fragment of a petition requesting the continuation of an Imperial Research Grant.

  From the Imperial Archives of Nyor, Golden Age period

  In that place in the mountain, beneath the glacier called Trama, the minds of men were stolen from them and sometimes placed in iron boxes. If this were all, it would be bad enough. But there is no limit to the wickedness of the Adversaries. They sometimes released these captive minds in the heads of golem, which we call Cyb, and (may the Star punish them!) even in the minds of other men.

  --From the Interregnal legends of Vyka

  Glamiss and the girl, Shana, discovered the folk cowering in the shadowy cavern that once had been the exercise area of the ancient hospital. Glamiss’s quick mind divined the purpose of the great hall almost immediately, for though many of the therapy machines were incomprehensible to him, much of the old games equipment was still intact, still racked up along the featureless walls.

  The lighting was poor, for only a half dozen of the scores of glow-globes in the distant overhead still functioned. The effect was to cast long shadows and increase the sense of open space. The hall was very large. It was, perhaps, the largest single room Glamiss had ever seen: far bigger than the keep of Ulm’s donjon by the sea. The ceiling could not have been reached by fifty men standing on one another’s shoulders, and the freeform floor was a full three hundred meters across its narrowest part.

  The place held all the folk of Trama easily. They huddled in the shadows at the rounded end of the great room, and as Glamiss and the girl appeared from a corridor, a moan of despair rose from the villagers.

  Glamiss marched across the wide floor and faced them, his hands on his hips, face stern under his helmet. “I have not come to harm you,” he said harshly.

  A stocky man in weyr skins, one of those who had been on the platform with the devil-machines, Glamiss noted, came reluctantly forward.

  Shana pushed past the warleader and ran to the Traman. “Shevil,” she said, “tell the folk not to fear.”

  The villagers muttered among themselves, and Glamiss impatiently heard the word “Inquisition” again and again. He raised his weaponless hands to show them his intent.

  “You do not need to fear the Inquisition,” he said. “There will be no burnings in Trama.”

  The hetman Shevil inched forward, his head dipping with a villager’s sullen courtesy. “There is a Navigator with you, Lord. The people do not believe there will be no burnings.” Glamiss’s eyes glittered contemptuously. “Are you so wicked as all that, then?”

  Shana turned on him angrily, “Do not use that tone to my father. He is hetman here.”

  Glamiss inclined his head with mock politeness. These people were peasants, weyrherders, the nearest thing to animals in all the Great Sky. He could not regard them as anything else. Yet the girl-adept had courage. As a warman, he could at least accept that. And if these creatures were to be useless, at least they must not be a hindrance when Ulm’s levy tried to force the tunnel mouth as they surely would--and soon.

  “Hetman of Trama,” he said formally, “I say there will be no burnings. The Nav is my close friend. He does not really believe in burning sinners anyway--”

  “He wears the Fist,” one of the villagers said fearfully, and the others took up the complaint. “The Fist. The Red Fist of the Inquisition.”

  “Not by his choice, good people,” Glamiss said. And he thought, good people, indeed--I sound like a politician. “I am Glamiss Warleader--and it’s true I came into this valley to take your weyr to Ulm. You could have spared yourself this by obeying the laws, you know. No one would ever have known about your Warlock or this place if you had sent your tribute as custom commands--”

  “We were hungry, Warleader. Ulm is--”

  Glamiss interrupted the hetman sharply. “I know what Ulm is. Better than you. You saw him attack me, man. You saw him drop the stones from the starship. I break my pledge to Ulm. I break it now.”

  The villagers murmured and Glamiss pretended not to hear the fear-tinged voices that said: “Oathbreaker.“

  A heavy business, the abandonment of serious oaths. The villagers knew it and Glamiss knew it even better than they. And, he wondered, how thin have I worn my honor by this? It was true that Ulm had attacked--but hadn’t he, Glamiss, decided to break his pledge to the Lord of Vara-Vyka before the attack? Last night? Or, in the Star’s truth, long, long ago?

  Glamiss put aside these dark thoughts and spoke again. “Ulm is in the valley now--savaging your houses most probably, though you don’t have anything worth stealing. But he’ll tire of that soon and come up here to the mountain for me--for you, for all of us.”

  A younger Traman dared to speak up. He said bitterly, “You have killed us, then. There are Navigators in the starship--maybe hundreds of them ...”

  “No more than three--possibly four,” Glamiss said dryly. “And if they never get into this place, what will they know of your witch worship? Nothing at all.” He hurried on before they could find fault with that statement, or remember the presence in the mountain of Nav Emeric. “I can keep them out. With my troop I can keep them out of this place until Vyka freezes. But we will need food and water and fare for the horses if we are to withstand a siege. You must provide them.” He fixed them with a cold and appraising stare. “Is there another entrance to these caves?”

  “If there is, we do not know of it, Warleader,” the hetman said hopelessly.

  “Is there food and drink here, then? The old Warlock doesn’t look starved.”

  “He eats magical foods, Warleader,” Shana said. “Pills and worms from tubes. We could not eat such things, nor could you or your mares.”

  “Then there’s nothing for it but a foraging party,” Glamiss said bluntly. “You, hetman. What’s your name again?”

  “Shevil Lar is his name, Leader of Brigands,” Shana said angrily. “Shevil Lar, Hetman of Trama.”

  Glamiss suppressed an impulse to grin at her anger. “I think the wrong person is h
etman of Trama,” he said. “But never mind. Shevil Lar, then. You must make up a foraging party to go out and drive in some weyr and bring water from the river. Ulm’s men will still be in the village looting for a time. If you hurry, you might make it before he scrapes a siege plan from the empty bowl of his head.”

  “But, lord--we are only herdsmen--we--“

  Glamiss silenced him with a gesture of angry contempt. “Don’t tell me what you are. I know what you are. I am offering you a chance to be men.” He looked down at Shana’s thin, dark, and intense face. “Organize this, witch woman. Do it now. I’ll see to it that a party of a dozen men is let through the tunnel to the outside. But you had better hurry. Even Ulm won’t keep rooting around in your weyr-sty forever. There is a Bishop-Nav with him and he will want to break in here at any cost. Move now, girl.”

  “Yes. At once, oh, leader of bandits and robbers,” Shana said tartly.

  “Use your eagles to scout Ulm’s movements,” Glamiss said.

  “I know what to do, Lord,” the girl said and went to her father.

  Glamiss considered saying something more to the huddling villagers; perhaps mapping out a plan for them, or even arming them. But he decided against it. They were herdsmen, as Shevil Lar said, and they knew how to catch their own weyr. They were not warriors and he hadn’t time or the inclination to make them into fighting men. All that could come later--if they survived the next days. Meanwhile, he must work with Emeric, who was the only learned man among them all, to unravel some of the mysteries of this imperial place. On that, their ultimate survival might presently depend.

  Without further comment, he turned on his heel and went back the way he had come, leaving Shana to deal with the panicky folk of Trama to whom he had bound, all quite inadvertently, his own destiny.

  He found the Navigator in a long room at the end of a branching corridor. It was a room such as Glamiss and, he was sure, Emeric had never before seen.

  All the lights functioned properly here, so that the place was brightly lit. And never had Glamiss seen such strange and gloriously decorated luxury. Walls and partitions had been painted with strange pictures that were curiously three-dimensional. The scenes depicted were of richly garbed people in gardens, working at incomprehensible tasks with strange yet graceful machines, of starships under construction, of a dozen or more activities he could not guess at. Imperial light-paintings these were. Glamiss had heard of such art treasures, but not one man in a hundred thousand on the Rimworlds had ever actually seen any.

  Many of the paintings along the fifty-meter walls were of strange abstractions: patterns of light and color that seemed to suggest the shape of many things and yet could not be pinned down to represent anything familiar. Like many a barbarian before him, Glamiss felt curiously unsettled by these works. They created a disturbing craving for a sophistication he did not possess and he looked away from them to the end of the gallery, where Emeric sat gingerly on the edge of a chair--one of a half dozen forming a semicircle within a translucent shell shaped like half of a huge egg.

  The Navigator was studying a narrow panel of toggles and broad, shallow buttons that glowed like jewels, lit from within by some mysterious source. As Glamiss approached him, he looked up, his face alight with excitement.

  “Come look, Glamiss Warleader! I’ll show you wonders!”

  Glamiss touched the smooth, milky substance of the half-egg curiously. Though he had seen very few artifacts made of plastics, he knew in a general way, what the material was. The men of the Empire had made use of it in many ways, and since it was almost indestructible, it had survived the Dark Age in many places. But here it was perfectly preserved, unstained and unmarked. Glamiss wondered how strong it really was. He was tempted to try his sword against it.

  Emeric, he could see, was filled with a barely controlled enthusiasm for whatever it was he had found. There were times, Glamiss thought, when he envied the priest his ecclesiastical education. Whatever there was of science (forbidden word!) remaining in the Great Sky was centered in the teaching universities of the Navigators in the Algol system. But it was not Glamiss’s nature to allow another’s enthusiasm to control his own. “Peace, Nav,” he said. “First things first. Where is the Warlock?”

  Emeric made an impatient gesture. “Asa found his rooms and has taken him there. At first the troopers balked at carrying the old man, but you know how Asa can persuade.”

  “Better than most,” Glamiss said thoughtfully.

  “Now, please, look at this. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  Glamiss stepped into the shelter of the half-egg and sat down in one of the chairs beside the Navigator. The contours seemed to enfold him, accommodating themselves to his body. It startled him, but his face remained impassive. He removed his helmet and ran a hand over his rumpled hair. He felt suddenly very tired. He thought of the forces gathered outside the mountain against him. A thousand men or more. A starship. Priests who outranked his own young chaplain. And somehow he felt that he was being maneuvered, manipulated. He knew that the idea of revolt against his bond-lord Ulm had been in his mind for a long while. But was this the proper time to move? He didn’t know--he could not even be certain that the choice had been made in his own mind. It could have been made for him. He could be, he thought, as much captive of unknown forces as those shadowy warriors they had encountered in the marketplace of Trama--

  “--that I should actually see something like this!” Emeric was saying excitedly. “I never would have believed it.”

  “What is it?” Glamiss asked wearily. “What is this thing?”

  “You haven’t been listening,” the Navigator said reproachfully.

  “I’m sorry. Tell me about your wonders.”

  “It’s a computer terminal. At least, I think it is. It’s not exactly like the--” He broke off, reluctant to speak of the machine in Algol. But, then, he thought, I am already damned if what I have agreed to do is displeasing to the Star. He said, “There is a device similar to this one in Algol. The Order uses it as--well, as an oracle of sorts. It answers questions, solves problems.”

  Glamiss felt a stirring of interest. He knew that he should move along, inspect the guard at the tunnel mouth, see the foraging party of villagers off. There were many things that needed doing, but this room and what it might contain could be far more important. “A witch device? Built by the Adversaries?”

  The Navigator shook his head impatiently, wishing that his Order’s prohibitions against scientific inquiry had not resulted in such widespread ignorance and superstition. “Built by men, Glamiss. Imperials.”

  “How long ago?”

  “I don’t know,” the Navigator said. “No one does.”

  Glamiss’s eyes narrowed speculatively. “It answers questions?”

  “I think it does much more. But it does give answers--”

  “To those who know how to ask, is that it?” Glamiss was studying the lightened panel before them. “You say there is a thing like this in the Cloister?”

  “Something like it.”

  “Did you ever speak to it?”

  “I’m only a priest-Nav, a starship pilot. No one below the rank of Bishop ever got near the thing.”

  “But you know the theory?”

  “All Navigators do. It’s part of the third year’s teaching of the Way.”

  “Then ask it how old it is,” Glamiss said.

  The Rhadan flexed his fingers and looked hard at the panel. Below the lighted buttons was a keyboard. The symbols were Imperial Anglic--the holy language. If God in the Star had not wanted a Navigator to deal with this device, surely he would not have written the keyboard in the holy script?

  He pressed the query key.

  Nothing happened.

  “What’s the matter?” Glamiss asked.

  Emeric shook his head impatiently. “Let me think.” He studied the panel again, more carefully. At the head of the column of keys were two oddly shaped rocker switches. They were marked Stand
by and Activate. The standby rocker was depressed. He touched the mate and the standby switch popped to the neutral position. A series of lights appeared across the border of the panel and a section of the wall in front of the egg retracted, exposing a blue-lighted screen. Emeric’s mouth felt dry. The screen was like the dead screens in the bridge of a starship.

  Again he pressed the query button and this time a light stylus seemed to write across the screen. The word was simply: Ready.

  “The thing recognizes you,” Glamiss said, hiding his own rising excitement behind ironic words.

  Emeric, pecking slowly at the keyboard, posed a question: “When were you built?”

  Instantly the reply appeared on the screen, and simultaneously on a strip of plastic tape that extruded from a slit in the panel like a white tongue. A date: 2920 GE. A pause, then two more dates appeared below the original light inscription: 9520 AD and 611 P.

  The two young men stared at the glowing numbers. The Galactic Era had begun with the foundation of the Empire. This machine had been built 2,920 years later, when the Empire was already in decline. The thought was awesome. The accepted date used now for the current year, Emeric thought, was 3946 GE. But there was no one who could say with certainty that it was a correct date, relative to the founding of the Empire, because no one was certain how long the time of troubles and the Dark Age had lasted. Navigator astronomers were prohibited from making the necessary observations by the Inquisition.