The Warlock of Rhada (23 page)

Tamil stood crestfallen. “These are bad times, Shana,” he muttered.

“Then herd the weyr inside and let me be. Or times will get worse.” She turned away and hurried on past the warmen and the crowding villagers.

When she reached the tunnel mouth and could look down the slope of the moraine, she was appalled by what she saw. Dead and wounded men and horses clogged the stony defile. Two kilometers away she could see the humped back of the great starship. Its immense weight had made a depression in the meadow and men on war mares milled about the mystical shape in seemingly confused excitement.

A number of warmen were returning to the concrete platform from the moraine after a sharp skirmish that had, apparently, sent still another detachment of Lord Ulm’s men retreating down the mountain toward the village. At the head of the battle-stained and weary troop walked the young man they called Glamiss. His reddened, naked sword was in his hands, and his bare arms were stained below the edge of his mailed sleeves.

Somehow, in spite of her antagonism, she was strangely stirred by the sight of him. He carried himself like a lord, even though her woman’s eye told her that he was sore and very weary.

He caught sight of her and essayed a grim smile that seemed to light up his grimy face. “Have you come to see the fighting, then, Shana, daughter of Shevaughn Six-fingers?”

“This is stupid,” the girl said smartly.

“Oh?” He was on the platform now, looking down on her. She could see that he was unwounded, and for some reason it eased her mind that he had not been hurt.

“Yes,” she said. “Ulm’s men can’t get in. But we can’t get out, either. Nothing gained and nothing lost--except men. How many have been killed?” Her voice was edged with bitterness, because she understood that killing was the business of soldiers, yet it was horrible that it must always be so.

Glamiss’s expression became somber. “I have lost a dozen good warriors.”

“And Ulm?”

His voice was steely. “Three times that.”

“Half a hundred dead or wounded.” Shana shivered. “They would have been better born to herd weyr or to plant grain.”

Glamiss sheathed his great sword and put his hands heavily on Shana’s narrow shoulders. “That is the Star’s truth, girl. I wish no man’s death in battle. It’s an empty business.”

“You believe that?” she asked, surprised.

“I believe it,” he said heavily. “But until
all
men believe it, you must have order. And most men want order imposed only on others. It is the way of the world, Shana-the-hetman’s-daughter,” he finished, almost tenderly rallying her.

For a moment her senses reeled with the sudden warmth and power of his personality. She had the crazy notion that she, if he would only ask it of her, would follow him willingly across the Great Sky. Part of it was that he was an attractive and virile young man--really not so much older than herself. But there was more: Glamiss was obviously gifted with the power to command loyalty--even from those who had no notion of his purposes, who might actually lose by his attainment of them.

She drew a quick breath and remembered why she had sought him out. “Your friend, the Navigator,” she said, “you should go to him.”

“Emeric? Why? I’m needed here.”

“How can I say this?” she asked, perplexed. “I know that you must stop what the Warlock is going to do to him--”

“The old man, Shana? Why he’s dying, girl. And in any case, Emeric could snuff him out like a candle-flame.”

Shana shook her head stubbornly. “I stood by the door and listened. The old man--” she did not think of him as “lord” any longer--”is tricking him. He’s promising him strange
knowledge--”
She caught at Glamiss’s wrist, feeling the strength of it under her hand. “There are terrible machines in this place, Glamiss, I
know.
I’m an adept. I’ve glimpsed things in the old man’s mind. He does not mean to be evil, but he comes from a different world--a different
time.
He could twist your priest into something--different, strange. He will do it--”

Glamiss was moving and he pulled the girl along with him. “Take me to them,” he said, filled with a sudden cold premonition. Turning briefly, he gave orders to his men and then followed the girl into the deepening gloom of the mountain.

Emeric had, with Asa’s meager help, carried Lord Ophir--at his instructions--into a room lined with bays and racks of equipment. Row upon row of lighted tabs surrounded the two dull-metal pedestal tables that rose from the insulated floor. Above the tables, two slabs of the same metal hung from the low ceiling, creating the grisly impression that this was some strange press.

The old man’s voice was very thin. Death was stalking him, the Navigator thought. Death was coming to steal the millennia of history that lay compressed in the cells of the ancient brain.

Ophir said, “Place me on the far table.”

Emeric did as he was bidden, glad to be free of the frail weight and the musty smell of encroaching death.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“Not now . . . don’t question now. You will know . . . everything.”

Emeric felt a surging thrill of--what? Intellectual hunger, perhaps. His swift and probing mind was constricted by the age. Was this moment, this old man, and this machine the construct of chance or destiny? he wondered. Could they set him free of feudalism, superstition, and barbarism? He murmured an Ave Stella, praying to God that he was doing His work, and not that of the Adversaries.

But do it he must, he knew with every fiber of his being.

“On the console facing the doorway,” the old man whispered. “A control... marked
Power.
Press the stud
...”

Emeric did as he was told, almost brushing Asa aside in his anxiousness to activate this magical work of ancient man’s hand. The room began to hum with a soft insistence. The air smelled of thunderstorms.

The Warlock rasped through the countdown. “Activate the bar marked
Auto-time sequence
... set the red numbers for your body-mass. . . engage the studs that should be winking yellow now ...
hurry, priest...
there isn’t much
time....”

Emeric, starship trained, followed the old man’s instructions swiftly.

“Priest . . . there will be a visible aura ... for some hours . . . after the transfer. Don’t be afraid . . He showed his yellowed teeth in a terrible, sick parody of a smile.
“It.
. . will impress . . . your savages . . . with your holiness.
...”
He wheezed heavily, his breath coming harder with the effort of speech. “Now ... set the timer code--the clock face . . . above my head ... to six. No more than that . . . too much knowledge is a bad thing
...”
Again that skull-smile.
“Is it done?”

“Yes.”

“Tell that
--thing
with you ... to get out. It could be . . . dangerous to him ...
it...
whatever.
Out...
now.”

Emeric signaled Asa out of the humming room. He wondered what the Vulk made of all this. He had said nothing at all, but then, that was the Vulkish way.

“Now,” the Warlock said thinly, “lie on the table next to mine and wait for the timer to take control of the transfer.
...”

Emeric removed his cowl and mailed shirt and reclined on the dull metal surface. It was strangely warm to the touch. He could hear the old man’s rasping breathing over the humming of the air. The smell of thunderstorms grew stronger and the sound rose in pitch. He felt a rapidly increasing stiffness in his limbs, arid his vision seemed to grow dimmer.

A sudden leaping panic clutched at him.
Great Star, what had he done to himself?
What dreadful thing had he brought upon himself in his greed for
knowing
?

He would have rolled from the table to the floor, but he was too weak, seemingly, to move the weight of his body. It was as though his muscles had grown
old.

Beside him he could hear a deeper breathing from Ophir. It was as though his own youth were being drained out of him, being poured into the ancient body of the Warlock.

In terror, Emeric began to pray to the Star, to the Spirit of the Universe.

“Don’t--fear,” Ophir said. His voice was much stronger,
younger.

“What are you doing to me?”
The Navigator did not recognize his own voice. He raised his hand and stared at it. His flesh was glowing with a blue-green fire, cold, insubstantial, ghostly.

Ophir said steadily, “There is a transference both ways, in the beginning. Great God, I haven’t felt this strong since--” he laughed with a wild delight--”since when? How can a man count the years I have been drugged, and old?”

Emeric felt his sight deteriorating. Darkness flickered at his eyes, like a bat. “You’ve tricked me,” he gasped feebly. “You are sucking my life out!”

Now, in almost total blackness, he could hear the Warlock’s voice. “I wish I could, sir priest! If it were possible, I wouldn’t spare you. But the transference is only temporary--that is true and you must believe it--you can’t accept a personality imprint if you block it with panic, you fool! Don’t fight me . . .
now!”

The voice was young and powerful, but suddenly Emeric was unaware of it. It had become unimportant, as unimportant as the clamor he could faintly hear outside the room. Glamiss’s voice shouting? Asa saying something? It didn’t matter
--nothing
mattered--

A passageway between his mind and that of Lord Ophir ben Rigell ibn Sol alt Messier was opening. A dark vein first, but swiftly widening to contain more and more memories, sights, sounds. He knew instantly the sight of the night sky of Nyor, the sound of ancient music, the feel of Dihanna alt Aldrin’s lovemaking, the majesty of his uncle’s appearance on the Star Throne, the familiar (to them both, it seemed) tang of Rhada’s northern seacoasts--

Then, as suddenly as the opening had appeared, it began to contract, pulsate with jagged impressions: some terrible, some terrible in their pleasure, some indescribable to a brain not addicted to trilaudid--

Emeric’s mind, unprepared by anything in his life as simple starship priest and warrior, tottered as he looked into the dark jaws of hell: the shared mind of a drug-addicted paranoid.

The Navigator’s scream was shocking in the small room, and it did not stop, but went on and on as Ophir’s sophisticated madness slashed daintily at his sanity.

The sight that met Glamiss’s eyes as he entered the Personality Exchange Therapy Room both frightened and infuriated him. Shana’s warning, and the spectacle of his closest friend writhing in seeming agony on the gray metal slab jolted him into action. Had the apparent victim been someone other than Emeric, the ghostly glow that covered his figure and that of the old Warlock would have stopped him. But the sound of Emeric’s animal cries was in his ears, piercing his caution like a sharp quarrel piercing armor to the flesh underneath.

He reacted. Thrusting both Vulk Asa and the girl aside, he bolted toward the Navigator. The machines meant nothing to Glamiss. In fact they resembled nothing more in his experience than the devices found in the deepest parts of Ulm’s keeps and used for torture.

The warning shout from Asa was ignored; Glamiss could think only of removing his friend from the torturing slab. His hands closed on Emeric’s arm and Shana screamed in terror.

The Navigator’s writhings stopped as the fields of the device spread from his nervous system into the axons and dendrites of this new body.

Glamiss seemed frozen, lying half across the slab, his hands welded to his friend’s arm by some invisible power. Swiftly, the ghostly blue Saint Elmo’s fire spread over him until he seemed to be blazing with cold, flickering flames.

Shana screamed again and sank to her knees, sobbing with superstitious fear. But Vulk Asa, more aware than the human girl of what was happening, began the mental disciplines that would prepare him to intervene if the life-force in the Navigator and warman began to shatter under the pressure of the electronically induced form of Triad.