The Navigator of Rhada (22 page)

“I have a loyalty, priest,” Kynan said scornfully. “But not one that you and your colleagues would understand.”

The Tactician seemed to notice Janessa for the first time. His voice was steely. “This girl will have to be conditioned. She can’t be allowed to remember what she is hearing here.”

Kynan said, “Janessa won’t be touched. Not by you. Not by anyone. I say it.”

“You
say it?” The prince Navigator gave a barking laugh. “Do you think you are a
real
king, then?”

Kynan’s teeth bared in a grim smile. “I am what you have made me, Father.”

The Tactician threw up his hands. “We’ve made you mad. We--the Vulk--all of us. We’ve driven you insane.”

“Perhaps you have. But it’s a useful madness, Father. Now let me tell you what you are going to do.”

“You
are giving orders to
me?”

Kynan nodded grimly. “And you are going to obey them. Let me tell you why.”

“Oh, yes. Do that, little priest.”

“Not
little priest, father. Galacton. King. Commander of the Starfleets.”

“Madness!”

“Hear me.”

The Tactician subsided into uneasy silence.

“What does the Grand Master know of your precious plan? Very little, I’ll venture to guess. Perhaps nothing at all. Like so many power-elites in our history, you and your friends have decided
you
know what is best for the Order, for the Empire. Am I right?” The Tactician did not reply, and Kynan went on, with growing savagery and anger. “Do you know what would happen if I were to step outside this moment and tell the army what you have done?”

Alarm leapt into the old priest’s eyes. “They would tear you to pieces,” he exclaimed.

“Probably. But they would destroy the Order, too. They would storm every sanctuary, murder every priest-Navigator, take over the starships themselves-- And what if they knew that there is a nuclear weapon on board your starship? And that others are probably being constructed in this very sanctuary, now, at this moment?”

“You really are insane,” the Tactician said hoarsely. “Would you bring the Dark Time again?”

Kynan’s eyes were cold. “Then do we understand one another?”

“But you
couldn’t”
the old priest said. “You are a
Navigator.”

“I am also a man--a man who has been tampered with, pushed, driven, and stripped of everything I was taught to live by.”

“Your bond-father was proud of his part in the plan,” the Tactician said desperately. “He was a religious man, he knew--”

Kynan cut him off with a gesture. “Kreon was my bond-father. My
father
was Torquas,
the
Star King. Do you deny that?”

“Of course I don’t deny that. Yours is the blood of Glamiss--”

Kynan’s smile was not pleasant. “Then I am King.”

The Tactician rubbed his beard. His eyes had suddenly become haunted. “You were the second son. I was there. I saw it--”

“Prove it, priest,” Kynan said icily.

The Tactician shook his head slowly. “I--cannot.”

“Then I am King,” Kynan said again.

“You--are--King.”

“Better,” Kynan said.

“What will you do?” the old man asked slowly.

“First I will tell you what
you
will do.”

The prince Navigator nodded painfully.

“You will send orders to the sanctuary that all production of energy weapons will stop
at once.
We have no need for such things. Those weapons already assembled will be dismantled.”

“You cannot wipe out knowledge,” the Navigator said pleadingly.

Kynan gave a harsh laugh. “No, I cannot. But isn’t that what the Order has been doing for the last two hundred years? Slowing discoveries, guarding dangerous scientific developments? If I am wrong, then the Order is wrong. If I am right, then the Order has meaning--in spite of men like you and your planners. I cannot stop Navigators from thinking about weapons--but I
can
stop them from building them. For now, for this time, that is all one man can do. But it
shall be
as I say, priest.”

The Tactician understood power, even in the hands of another. “It shall be done,” he said, low.

Kynan touched his temples again with fingers trembling with anger and loathing. “This thing you did to me. Can it be undone?”

“No. It cannot.”

“Very well. If the machines attempt once more to control me, I may not be able to stand it. I have given orders to the Vegans that if I am taken with a sickness of the mind, they are to hold you responsible and attack the sanctuaries.”

Fear flared into the Tactician’s eyes.

Kynan regarded him bitterly. “I see that you have ordered the Technician to try the machines once more.”

The man’s fear was answer enough.

“Then you had better send word.”

“And if I do all these things?” The old priest had courage enough to bargain, even now.

“The Order will be safe.”

“And you will be King,” the old Navigator said in a dead voice.

“That need no longer concern you,” Kynan said in a tone of dismissal.

The sun stood high in the pale Auroran sky as the Galacton stepped out of his tent to review the assembled Imperial power.

As Imperial armies went in that time, the force was formidable. The Vegan division, less only those men who had died in the crash of the starship, was drawn up on the seaward flank of the sanctuary. The thirty Vyk regiments, the personal troops of the Vykan Galactons, formed an assault force commanding the landward approaches to the plain.

The Vegan horses glittered in the sunlight, their scaly carapaces silvery under the massed lances and banners of the heavy cavalry corps. The Vykan regiments stood dismounted, their Rhadan mounts murmuring to one another in ragged ranks behind the armed men.

On the walls of the sanctuary, black-clad Navigators surveyed the Imperial force uneasily. From within the complex of laboratories and monastery buildings, they could hear the scurry of activity as the scientist-Navigators, furiously complaining but disciplined, went about the business of dismantling a number of devices, the purpose of which the junior Navigators on the walls could only guess.

A delegation of Navigators had entered the enclave less than an hour before, led by a prince of the Order. Now the junior priests and novices on the battlements stood to their weapons and regarded the massed Imperial forces on the plain, wondering if they would soon face an attack.

The meson screen that had brought the starship down still shimmered in the morning air; but it was a useless defense against an old-style assault by armed men.

To the east, the Great Inland Sea lay placid and blue to the horizon. No movement of any kind stirred the surface of the water. The sunlight reflected from the mirror surface, and it seemed that all the massed men and the priests on the sanctuary walls waited for the decision of the King.

Kynan, alone now, walked slowly through the ranks of fighting men to the hollow square of the staff, where the legendary General Veg Tran and the leaders of the Gonlani invasion force waited under discreet Vykan guard.

Though Kynan had never seen Tran, he recognized him instantly. The man’s bearing and honors made him unmistakable. Tran, on the other hand, thinking that he had a poet suddenly gone mad to deal with, waited, furiously impatient, amid his officers.

His mind was a seething mass of angry thoughts. The Navigators--always the
priests.
They had dared to bring the foolish Torquas to this place, dared to check momentarily the great scheme he, the Empire’s greatest general, had set into motion. By the Star, someone would pay for this--!

He saw the Galacton approaching and felt a thrill of uncertainty. It was Torquas, surely. But a Torquas unlike the foolish, hemp-smoking King he had left in Nyor.

There was a strength in the young face that he had never seen before, a sense of purpose in the blue Vykan eyes. Tran’s confidence faltered infinitesimally. But no, it would take more than a cutting of hair and a cleanshaven face, more than a voyage with the Navigators, to make Torquas the Fool into a real king. Tran knew where the real power resided: in the troops, in the army--and soon, in the AbasNavs and in himself.

He drew himself up and spoke to his sovereign. “I thought I had left you safe in Nyor, King.”

The reply was stunning, cold and unyielding as a sword blade on flesh.
“I thought I had a loyal general. We were both wrong, Alain Veg Tran.”

Tran’s face suffused with the blood of sudden fury.
Torquas the Fool--speaking like this--to me,
he thought, raging.

He laid his hand on his sword hilt in an instinctive gesture, and the Vykans gave an angry growl, the ranks moving forward. The Galacton stopped them with a gesture. He spoke to Tran in clear, deliberate tones. “You came on the pretense of keeping the peace among the Gonlani-Rhad and the Aurori. Yet you sent my troops
here.
Now a starship has been lost and my soldiers with it.” Kynan fixed the general with a cold, angry stare. He was feeling the intoxication of power and the anger that only great power could indulge.
“I know why you came, Tran.
But the Star King is father to his people. I arrived before you. What you seek is being destroyed at this very moment--”

General Veg Tran felt his great design crumbling around him. To be defeated was bad enough. But to be frustrated by one he had thought a weakling and a fool was almost more than the proud Vegan could bear.

The Galacton spoke more to the army than to him. “This is my judgment, Alain Veg Tran. In recognition of your services to the Empire in the past, you will retain your rank. But in punishment for treachery, treason, and high crimes against the Empire, you are banished to your estates in Vega. There you will spend the rest of your days under Vykan guard without the power to command any but your personal servants--”

Tran’s fury seemed to choke him.
This fool, this drug- addled fop--was acting the great King--banishing Tran, the victor of Eridanus--the unquestioned leader of the AbasNavs--the army
--

A cry, rage-driven, burst from him.
“Vegans! To me! I am your general--!”

The Vegan troops stood unmoving, humiliation on the faces of their officers. Auden Veg Novens, the Vegan officer who had brought Crespus and LaRoss in arrest to this place before the sanctuary, could bear the disgrace no more. He stepped forward and struck Veg Tran across the face. “You are addressing the
King,
warman!”

“The King!”
cried a derisive voice.
“The great Star King!”

Kynan saw the ranks of Tran’s officers part and a familiar figure step forward, arrogant and proud.

It was Karston.

He pointed a finger at Kynan and shouted to the war- men. “Is
that
your Galacton? Your King of the Universe?”

Kynan felt a sick despair. It was done, over. He had risked everything on one bold stroke, and out of nowhere Karston had appeared to strip the royal robes from him and expose him naked before the nobles.

“Let
me
tell you about this dazzling king of yours--”

The words were blotted out by a sharp explosion. Karston’s face crinkled into an expression of startled amazement. He pressed his hand to his mailed chest and blood flowed, bright red in the sunlight, between his fingers.

Kynan, too surprised to move, watched his bond-brother sink first to his knees, then, slowly, onto his face in the sandy ground. He turned to see behind him the Tactician, a smoking flintlock pistol in his hand.

The prince Navigator let fall the weapon and made the sign of the Star. “Blasphemy,” he said to the stunned assemblage. “He spoke blasphemy against the anointed King.” His old eyes sought Kynan’s, and the young Navigator saw there the worldly priest’s unspoken plea to understand that what he had done was a thing that must be.

Kynan understood the dreadful ache, the price of power. Understanding, he was sickened.

He raised his eyes to the sanctuary, remembering the stillness of the cloisters, the sense of purpose and goodness that he had once felt in his call to the way of the Navigator.

That was all done now. The Order would go on, of course, but the way was no longer open--not for him.
A priest of God must be innocent,
he thought.
To serve the Star, a man must be sure of goodness.
And he knew with deep sadness that he could never be so sure again.

He stepped forward and knelt at Karston’s side. Gently, he rolled the dead man over and drew the sign of the Star on his forehead. The silent soldiers watched, wondering. But Kynan was studying the dead face and remembering his childhood on the sea cliffs of Melissande.
We did not love one another, Karston,
he thought,
but we were brothers
--

And then it came to him that he had, in truth, a brother --that another shared with him the blood of the Vykan herdsman kings.

He stood and said to the Tactician, “Is all done in the sanctuary?”

“Yes, King.” The old priest seemed almost spent now, done with a lifetime of plotting and politics. And what had it come to? A dead starship, dead men, and a false King--

“I think it best that all leave this place now,” Kynan said.

“Let it be so,” the Tactician said, defeated.

In the stillness of the tent, Kynan could hear the sounds of the army quietly embarking. There was still a smell of death in the air from the wreckage of the shattered starship. It was a bitter tang, redolent of the centuries the mighty vessel had served men and of its shameful death.

Kynan said to Baltus, “Leave us. I would speak to my brother.”

The warlock, sensing Kynan’s sadness, departed silently.

Kynan approached the hunched figure in homespun cowl and plain soldier’s mail. “Torquas,” he said.

The Galacton stirred but did not speak. He seemed still crushed by the tumultuous mishaps of the last days.