The Elder Gods (21 page)

“I thought you might like the idea. For right now, though, let’s go find Zelana. Don’t make
too
much noise when we cross Mother Sea, though. We don’t want to irritate her, now, do we?”

The thunderbolt rattled her agreement, Veltan mounted, and they were off.

It was the dead of winter, and the face of Mother Sea was clouded and stormy. Veltan shuddered. Mother Sea’s face was as dreary as it had been on that awful day when she’d banished him to the moon. He’d probably be there still if the friendly moon hadn’t interceded for him.

His thunderbolt reached the coast of a land far to the west of the Land of Dhrall much earlier in the day than it had been back in Dhrall. That was one of the advantages of going westward. If a traveler moved right along, he could pick up hours of extra time.

“Set me down here, baby,” Veltan told his pet when they were a mile or so out from the coast. “I’ll walk on in from this point. Let’s not disturb the aliens if we don’t have to.”

She muttered something.

“I won’t be long, dear. Stop all your grumbling.” He smiled then. “As soon as we find Zelana and tell her what’s going on, you and I can go home and amuse ourselves by smashing that floating ice. Won’t that be fun?”

She crackled enthusiastically. Lightning was a simple natural force, and it wasn’t too hard to entertain her.

She set Veltan down on the stormy face of Mother Sea, and he walked the rest of the way to shore. He was just a little surprised when Mother Sea calmed her surface to make the going easier for him. Either she’d recovered from her bout of bad temper, or she realized just how serious the present situation really was. He stepped right along and reached rocky shore in short order. “Thank you, Mother,” he said politely to the source of all life.

“Don’t mention it,” she replied silently within his mind. “Zelana and Eleria are farther south,” she added helpfully.

“Ah. Could you give me some sort of landmark?”

“The coast along here’s fairly level, Veltan, so there isn’t anything that really stands out. Just go on south until you come to a place where there are quite a few floating trees gathered near the shore. The man-things call them ‘ships,’ and they ride on them when they visit me.”

“I’ve seen a few of those, yes.” Veltan squinted at the alien land he’d just reached. “I think I’ll nose around a bit, Mother. The people here won’t know that Zelana’s my sister, so they might tell me things they wouldn’t mention to her. If we can come here, it’s possible that the creatures of the Wasteland can as well, and if they do happen to be here, I think we should know about it.” He hesitated. “There’s something you should probably be aware of, Mother,” he added. “Before very long, I’m going to have to open a channel through Aracia’s ice zone that lies off the south coast of Dhrall. I’m sure that Aracia received your approval before she put it there, but now I’ll need to push it aside so I’ll be able to move the army I just hired to our homeland. Is that going to offend you?”

“Not particularly, no. Aracia didn’t bother to ask me before she put it in place, so it only seems fair for you to brush it aside without her permission as well. Actually I could do it for you, you know. All you had to do was ask.”

“I didn’t want to bother you, Mother. I learned quite some time ago that it’s not a good idea to offend you.”

“I’d forgotten all that silly ‘stripes’ business a long time ago, Veltan. I thought you’d realized that by now.” She paused. “Why did you remain on the moon for so long?” she asked.

“The moon told me that you were still angry with me.”

“And you actually
believed
her? Oh, Veltan, you should know me better than that by now. You could have come home after a month or so. You didn’t really have to remain on the moon for ten thousand years.”

A dark suspicion intruded on Veltan’s awareness. “Evidently the moon was feeling just a bit lonely,” he muttered. “She kept telling me that you hated me.”

“She lied. Everybody knows that you can’t trust the moon.”

“
I
didn’t. She seemed so sincere.”

“Oh, Veltan, what am I going to have to do with you to make you grow up? You’re so gullible sometimes. The moon enjoyed your company, so she lied to you to keep you there. Your responsibilities are
here,
not out there.”

“When all this business with the Vlagh and the creatures of the Wasteland is over, I think I’ll go have a nice long chat with the moon,” he said darkly.

“Whatever entertains you, Veltan. She won’t listen, of course, but if scolding her will make you feel better, I suppose it’s all right. Don’t hurt her, though, and don’t offend her
too
much. My tides depend on her, so step around her rather carefully. If you think that silly business about stripes made me angry, you’ll come face to face with
real
anger if something disrupts my tides.”

“I’ll be careful, Mother,” Veltan promised.

Veltan modified his clothing and quickly pushed out his scanty facial hair to make himself look much like an ordinary Maag, and then he went on into a coastal town the Maags called Weros. He drifted unobtrusively around the narrow, muddy streets near the waterfront, listening but saying very little. Since he was listening to thought rather than speech, he could hear whispered conversations from a long way away.

He soon discovered that the Maags were a noisy, rowdy kind of people who spent much of their time in taverns, soaking up beer and grog by the gallons. Fights seemed to break out very often in the area near the waterfront, and it was not uncommon to see a Maag peacefully sleeping in the gutter in that part of Weros.

Veltan strolled along, occasionally looking into taverns as if he might just be looking for some friend or acquaintance. Such conversations as he happened to overhear were usually garbled, since most of the Maags in this part of town were far gone in drink.

He wasn’t really accomplishing very much, but then he heard someone off to his left speaking in a voice that seemed uncontaminated by strong drink.

“It was a good enough plan, I guess,” the speaker was saying to someone else, “but it went all to pieces when Kajak and his men tried to set fire to the ships Hook-Beak had anchored around the
Seagull.
”

“Exactly what went wrong?” The voice that asked the question chilled Veltan all the way to his core. It was a rasping sort of voice that could not have come from a human mouth.

“I wasn’t there to see it personally,” the first speaker replied. “My hive-mate had been controlling Kajak from the very beginning, but I guess just the thought of all that killing excited it more than it should have, so it was down on the beach—far too close, as it turned out. One of the man-creatures killed it from a great distance away. By the time I got there, most of the survivors had scattered to the winds. I nosed around in Kweta and managed to pick up the gist of the story from various Maags who’d spoken with the survivors before they fled back into the surrounding countryside. It’s fairly obvious that Sorgan—or someone in his crew—knew about Kajak’s entire scheme. As soon as the men in those little rowboats threw torches onto the decks of the ships that were guarding the
Seagull,
a rainstorm came out of nowhere and doused the fires before they could spread. Then long arrows began to come out of the dark with unbelievable accuracy. I managed to get my hands on the arrow that killed my hive-mate, and the arrowhead was made of stone—like the ones we’ve encountered back in the Land of Dhrall—
and
it’d been dipped in venom in the same way. That sort of says that the Dhrall who’s been killing my hive-mates for all these years is here, and he’s still killing us. The arrows he used to kill the Maags had iron arrowheads, though. As we’ve come to expect, he’s extremely clever. He disabled Kajak’s ships by killing the steersmen, and he terrorized everybody on the ships by driving his arrows through the head of anyone who went near the tiller. Kajak’s men panicked and went over the sides of their ships. Kajak was screaming at them to come back when
he
took an arrow right between the eyes, and the whole thing ended right then and there.”

The one with the chilling voice began to swear.

“I feel the same way,” the first speaker agreed. “I think you’d better go advise the Vlagh that your scheme didn’t work. The Maag fleet’s on the way to Dhrall, and there’s nothing we can do now to stop it. Our war in the west won’t be as easy as we thought, I’m afraid.”

“I am not foolish enough to be the one who takes that message to the Vlagh,” the one with the rasping voice replied. “Bad news angers the Vlagh, and those who tell it things it does not wish to hear seldom live long enough to watch the sun go down.”

“I’ve noticed that. I’d say that you’ve got a bit of a problem. Your scheme was clever enough, but Kajak was a poor choice to carry it off.”

Veltan sauntered past the muddy little alleyway where the two had been speaking, and they both tried to shrink back into the shadows to stay out of sight, but Veltan had already seen enough. The one who’d brought the news looked much like any other Maag on the streets of Weros—fur-clad, hooded, bearded, and dirty—but he was much smaller than an ordinary Maag. The other one was also wrapped in a hooded cloak, and Veltan caught a single glimpse of a face with huge, bulging eyes, a mouth surrounded by mandibles, and two long antennae sprouting from the top of an oval head.

Veltan strolled on past the alley as if he hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary, but he was quickly revising a few preconceptions. Given the general tone of what he’d just heard, it was fairly obvious that the insect outranked the human in the social structure of the Wasteland. They were both far more intelligent than Veltan had expected, however. The term “hive-mate” hinted at an insectlike mentality, and that raised the possibility that That-Called-the-Vlagh might just be “the queen bee of the Wasteland.”

The intelligence of the two in the alley sort of confirmed a notion that Veltan had reached during his sojourn on the moon. It had seemed to him that intelligence might just be a characteristic driven by necessity. If your enemy was large, size would be very important, so each generation would be larger than the preceding one. That had suggested to Veltan that a clever enemy would virtually demand the expansion of one’s mind in response. The alternative would be extinction.

“Enough,” he muttered, walking purposefully through the rest of Weros to the edge of the town. He crossed the stump-dotted field to the west of Weros, and once he was in the woods, he called out to his thunderbolt. “Let’s get out of here, dear one. I’ve heard and seen enough. It’s time for me to have a talk with my sister.”

It didn’t take Veltan very long to find Sorgan’s fleet. There were a few ships in the harbor of each village he and his pet passed as they flew south along the coast of Maag, but Mother Sea had implied that there would be many ships at the place where Zelana was. The difference between “few” and “many” wasn’t too precise, but Veltan was fairly certain that two or three didn’t exactly qualify as many, so he kept going south.

Then his pet carried him to a shabby village far to the south of Weros, where dozens of Maag ships were anchored. “I think this is the place, dear,” he told his pet. “Put me down a little ways out, and I’ll walk on in. You’re lovely beyond words, but we don’t want to attract attention. You’ll be able to crash and boom to your heart’s content when we go back to Dhrall and start smashing ice.”

She flickered affectionately at his cheek and then set him down at the edge of a large grove of trees a little way to the west of the village.

Since Zelana had come to Maag to recruit an army, Veltan was fairly certain that the one the aliens had called Sorgan was the one he should try to find, and that his sister would probably be on board the ship called the
Seagull.

The weather was unpleasant as Veltan walked down across the open field toward the shabby village. A gusty wind swept in from the east, and a steady drizzle of rain swirled in from the harbor, wreathing like fog and half obscuring the shabby buildings.

When he reached the village, he found it teeming with sailors despite the chill drizzle. It didn’t take him long to locate a small group of men who served on board the
Seagull,
since every seagoing man he spoke with pointed them out to him. They were down near the waterfront, loading barrels and big, bulky sacks into several small boats. A large fellow with a neck like a bull seemed to be in charge.

“Excuse me,” Veltan said politely to the big man, “I’m looking for a lady named Zelana. Do you happen to know where I might find her?”

“She’s on board the
Seagull,
” the sailor replied. “Is it important?”

“I believe it is. She’s my sister, and I’ve got some information for her that’s probably quite significant. Things are heating up in the Land of Dhrall, so it’s time for her to come home.”

“Rabbit!” the big man barked. “This is Lady Zelana’s brother, and he needs to talk with her. Row him out to the
Seagull.”

“But it’s raining,” the small sailor whined.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Couldn’t we wait a bit? It could clear up before long.”

“Almost any day now, but you’re not going to wait, Rabbit. You’re going right now.” The big man’s voice was hard, and the look he gave the smaller man was threatening.

“All right, all right. Don’t get excited. I’m going.” The little man grumbled as he led Veltan out onto a rickety dock, and he continued to mutter as the two of them climbed down into one of the small boats.

“How’s my sister been lately?” Veltan asked as the little man rowed them out into the rain-swept harbor.

“She was sort of worried up until a few days ago,” the little fellow replied. “Things brightened up for her after me and Longbow killed a whole bunch of people who were planning to cause trouble.”

“The one you call Longbow’s the archer, isn’t he?”

“That he is, and he’s the best there is in the whole wide world. Me and him are real close friends.” The little man stopped rowing and wiped the accumulated water off his nose with his sleeve.