He suspected the lords of the Dread Empire themselves could not encompass the size and strength of what they had wrought.
“Deliverer!”
He gave her his attention. She was exasperated with him. “Will you liberate us?”
He shrugged.
Angry, the woman faced the darkness between the stone beast’s legs. Her stance shriekedI told you so!
“Show him, Sahmanan.”
“Show me what?”
“Yesterday. A yesterday dear to you,” the woman replied. She cast a tremulous glance at the stone beast. “The day your father died.”
“Time it well, Sahmanan. Err, and you face my wrath. And my wrath can be eternal.”
She told Ethrian, “The Great One wants me to take you back to your father’s death, that you might know the revenges at your command.”
“Close your eyes. Concentrate on staying beside me.”
“I’d rather see my mother. Is she alive?”
The woman started singing. Something tugged at the folded-in corners of Ethrian’s soul, tenderly pulling him free. He was returning to his out-of-body state. He settled onto his pallet and let go.
But he made Sahmanan work. He had made one decision. No matter what they got, they would work for it. He would hold back. He would make them underestimate him.
He was free. Sahmanan took his hand. They drifted up into an afternoon sky, above the terrible desert. The will and power of the stone beast carried them, higher and higher, farther and farther from the lonely mountain.
A barren Cordillera passed below. The range was but the parched bones of what had been. Not a lichen discolored its shades of grey.
Beyond, fifty, a hundred miles, they reached land where life still flourished. It seemed to leap up and tickle Ethrian’s soul with joyful chlorophyl fingers. A surge of happiness swept through him. The desert was not all the world.
Sahmanan murmured, “This, too, was part of Nawami.” She sent a vision. For an instant he saw the bustling cities, the endless miles of farms and fields and country carefully tamed. Now wilderness ruled. The descendants of Nawami were savages using stone tools, hunting and eating one another.
Their speed increased. They whipped over a thousand miles of Dread Empire before Ethrian recognized it, and another thousand before he could make Sahmanan understand that this was the land of his enemies.
They passed over another thousand miles, and another, and yet another, before reaching the Pillars of Heaven and Pillars of Ivory, the great twin barrier ranges marking Shinsan’s traditional western frontier. “Do you begin to see?” Ethrian called.
The woman’s response darkened her face. Nawami could not have matched a tenth of this.
They fluttered across the vastnesses of the Roe Basin, rapidly outpacing the sun. They crossed the mighty Mountains of M’Hand, drifted down on the little green kingdom of Kavelin. Down to its capital, Vorgreberg, which had seemed such a huge city to a younger Ethrian. He observed that it had not changed.
“Be quiet. Don’t distract me. I have to reach back and find the right moment.” Sahmanan’s face became intent.
Down they dropped, gently, till they were among the towers of Castle Krief. Reality began to flicker. Ethrian thought of the quick flashing of distant lightning.
“Now,” Sahmanan told him. She squinted with her eyes closed. “Follow me.” She drifted toward a wall.
And into that wall and out of sight. “Eh?” Ethrian murmured. Then, “Why not? I don’t have a body to stop me.” He willed himself to follow.
Two men were fighting on the far side of the wall. One was a big man. The other was short and fat. They tumbled across a bed. The big man was unarmed. The smaller had a knife. The bigger had a wound across his back.
“Father!” Ethrian shrieked at the fat man. And at the big, “Uncle Bragi!”
They did not hear him. Sahmanan reached out, gently drew Ethrian into a corner.
Ragnarson smashed his opponent’s knife hand against a bedpost. The blade skittered under a wardrobe.
Mocker, the boy’s father, bit and gouged. So did Ragnarson. Ragnarson was doing a lot of yelling, but Ethrian could not hear what he said. The only voice in this dead zone was that of Sahmanan.
Ragnarson seemed to be weakening. His wound was bleeding freely. He stopped blocking the smaller man’s blows, tried for an unbreakable hold. He got behind Mocker and slipped an arm around his throat. He forced his hand up behind his own head. He arched his back and pulled.
It was a terrible hold. It could break a man’s neck, Ethrian knew. His father had taught it to him when he was five.
Mocker kicked savagely. He wriggled like a snake with a broken back. He slapped and pounded with his free hand, and clawed for the dagger beneath the wardrobe. Bragi held on. Mocker produced another knife, scarred Ragnarson’s side repeatedly.
“Why are they doing this?” Ethrian whined. “They’ve been friends longer than I’ve been alive.”
Sahmanan did not answer. Her lips shaped a weak little smile.
“Father!”
Mocker’s struggles were weakening. Ragnarson slowly dragged him to his feet...
The smaller man exploded. He had been faking.
Ethrian foresaw the inevitable. He threw himself forward, shrieking, pounding both men with his fists. He might have been battering ghosts. He felt no impact at all.
Ragnarson leaned forward till Mocker was almost able to throw him. Ethrian begged him to stop. He snapped back with all the strength and leverage he could apply.
“No!” the boy shrieked.
He could almost hear his father’s neck breaking.
Sahmanan seized his arm. “Come!”
He fought. “No! I won’t! My father... “
Fear filled her eyes. “We have to leave now!” She dragged him into the wall.
The door of the bedchamber burst inward. Bragi’s brother Haaken, the wizard Varthlokkur, and several soldiers charged in. Light flooded the bedroom. Ragnarson let his old friend slide to the floor.
Ethrian struggled, but could not break the woman’s grip. She tugged him through the wall. He kept pulling back toward that room, but she lifted him into the approaching dawn and carried him back to the east. After a while he stopped fighting.
“Now you have seen your father slain,” she said. “You have seen your enemy. Will you deliver us now?”
“Why were they fighting?”
Waves of anger beat at him. “We used the last of our power to show you this. Will you persist in refusing us? Have we destroyed ourselves over you? I warned him... “
Ethrian answered anger with anger. “Enough. I may loosen the ties a little. Let me think.”
He had seen his father slain by his best friend, true, but there had been something askew there. The something, perhaps, behind Sahmanan’s eagerness to depart before the piece was complete.
He relived that moment of breaking bone... A flash of hatred hit him. It stabbed toward Bragi Ragnarson, then recoiled, twisted, speared toward those who ruled the island in the east. They had choreographed that bitter scene. The old man had hinted at it... Those tools of the Dread Empire...
“All right. I’ll free you. A little.”
He was sure the woman and stone beast were more than they pretended. They were hiding from him. He was afraid they represented a deadly trap. He had heard all the tales of deals with devils.
The hatred remained with him, twisting his thoughts, telling him to take what they offered. The stone beast had known, and had sent him where the black emotion would be triggered. It had placed its bet well. The hating was too strong to deny.
He would loose them slowly, shaping them to his will. Forcing their cooperation.
Sahmanan brought him through the long eastern day, into the twilight, over the desert, and down to his place between the stone beast’s paws. She was now but a ghost of the ghost she had been. The monster’s voice was the whisper of a petulant child when it questioned her. It hadn’t the strength for anger
.
Ethrian decided to release them a little more, for his own sake. He went down inside himself and found the key to it, and tried to replenish them.
The will of the stone beast smashed against him. He staggered, fought back. It had deceived him. It was not as weak as it pretended.
He controlled his panic, used his will. Gradually, the flood rushing to that mighty thing failed.
Stopping it completely was as hard as slamming a vault door. He did it, and lent the closure a deep-throated finality. He tried following through with a bolt of anger, but there was nothing left to throw. He was exhausted.
He collapsed in his sleeping place.
The monster alternately cursed its failure and crowed over its success. It had stolen ten times the strength Ethrian would have delivered willingly.
The boy slept. Time lumbered along. The woman came to him in dreams, again arguing for deliverance. He ignored her, and nurtured his hatreds.
He would shatter the island in the east. He would carry fire and sword through the Dread Empire. His armies would feed on the enemy fallen, and grow fat. They would become invincible. He would take them across the world, to his former homeland, and would avenge his father...
These aren’t my thoughts, he told himself. Something is shaping my dreams.
The something left him. His dreams became his own. His strange companions were preoccupied elsewhere.
Often, it seemed, he touched distant minds and unconsciously took from them, adding to his own knowledge and strength. He began to follow his desert companions more exactly.
At first they were delighted with their new strength. As time passed, though, there was a change to consternation which threatened to become fear. Then:
“Deliverer! Wake up!”
A hand rocked his shoulder violently. He ignored it. He clung to his twilight state and drifted out of himself, surveying his surroundings.
The pool had grown again. Water poured out of it now. The moisture ran down into the desert, where it quickly vanished. Plants and creatures crowded the short brook in a dense, intense little life-patch. Life had launched its counterattack against desolation.
This was Sahmanan’s doing. She was devoted to restoring her homeland. Her master simply wanted to extend his rule, to find himself new worshippers.
The shaking became gentler. Ethrian shifted his attention to the body lying between the beast’s paws.
It had grown. It was about to become that of a man. A man who would be tall and powerful and dark, like his mother’s brothers. The sleeper’s face resembled that of his uncle Valther, the one who had married the Shinsaner sorceress. Ethrian and his mother had been living with Valther when Lord Chin’s agents had spirited them away.
He considered the woman trying to waken him. She had substance now. She appeared to be in her late teens, and of promising beauty.
Only in her eyes was the past of her, the time-depth of her, obvious. Her eyes were older and deader than the desert.
Ethrian permitted himself to be wakened.
“Deliverer! You have to free us, or we’re doomed.”
What had they contrived now? “Show it to me.”
The woman tried to drag him past the pond.
“I gave you power. Reach back. Show me from the beginning.”
She made excuses. That would require intercession by the Great One. He was preoccupied.
“Unpreoccupy him. Tell him to make time.” How can I have aged in dreams? he wondered.
He had, by drawing on those minds he was not entirely aware of having tapped. He was not the boy who had swum the strait and walked the beaches of Nawami. He was no longer the youth who had flown to witness his father’s passing. He had become someone else. Someone more sure of himself and more determined to remain his own creature. He had developed an arrogant face. He now had eyes like a snake.
“Please!”
“Show me. From the beginning.”
A savage bellow raged across his mind as the stone beast responded. It flung images at him like a barrage of angry spears.
They were coming. Shinsan was in the desert. The stone beast was animating a handful of its soldiers in waiting. They were out there now, overwhelming Shinsan’s reconnaissance parties.
Ethrian saw it through, to the moment, and wondered if anything could stop the Dread Empire. What drove it so? Did it feel compelled to conquer even lifeless lands?
He yielded no more power. The beast was trying to panic him.
Its soldiers obliterated a half dozen patrols. The explorers stopped coming.
“Deliver us!” the woman begged, her soft eyes filled with water. “They’ll come again, and they’ll destroy us.”
“They might. That’s their nature. Who is master here?”
“The Great One.”
“Then you get no help from me. I won’t bend the knee to him.” Ethrian turned away, stripped himself, waded into the cool of the pool. Fish brushed his legs. Waterfowl chivied their young into the reeds. Sahmanan pursued him along the pond’s edge, begging from beyond the vegetation.
“You’ve made a work of art of this,” he told her. “Why not confine yourself to this? The patrols are gone.”
Would they give up? Of course not. Shinsan did not accept defeat. Her soldiers would try an alternate approach. It would have more weight behind it.
What would they do if they caught him?
A slow smile crossed his lips. Shinsan might provide the leverage needed to best the stone beast. He would play the wronged prisoner welcoming liberation. Why should they know whom he was...? If he did not free it, the Tervola would dispatch this trifling godlet before noticing an ordinary boy.
He was living on borrowed time anyway. He could lay his bet with little to lose. The beast would accept his demands or perish.
Perhaps it discerned the trend of his thoughts. It growled. It threatened him. It pleaded. He ignored it, except to say, “When you’re ready to pledge yourself my slave.”
Hellish laughter rolled across the desert. It was the great jest of the godling’s lifetime.
Question, Ethrian said to himself. How do you force a god to keep his word after you strongarm him into giving it?
He climbed out of the pool and returned to his resting place. The desert air dried him quickly. “Sahmanan, come here. Sit. Tell me about yourself.”
She started talking, and casting frightened glances upward.
“No. Tell me about the child. About the little girl who grew up to become a priestess. About her mother and father and sisters and brothers. Tell me what games she liked, and what songs her friends sang when they played.”
Black, brooding disapproval drifted down from above. The beast knew what seeds he was planting.
“Tell me your story. I’ll tell you mine.”
“Why?”
“Because we were all children before we became whatever we became. In the child is the understanding.”
“Where did you get that idea?”
“From an enemy. Lord Chin, of the Tervola. A man with a black heart, but brilliant even so. One of my grandfather’s master teachers.”
“Your grandfather?”
“Varthlokkur. They called him the Empire Destroyer. The most terrible wizard ever to tread this earth.”
“I don’t know the name.” She seemed taken aback.
“He’s one of the great old wickednesses of the world. You could’ve seen him if you’d waited a second longer out west. He showed up just after you charged into the wall.” Ethrian laughed a soft, wicked little laugh. “He might have seen you. I’m sure he saw me.”
Her eyes widened. She glanced up, momentarily worried.
The stone beast ignored her. It was too busy with its patrols.
Ethrian toyed with Sahmanan for weeks, prospecting for a vein of humanity. It was there. He knew it with a certainty that was absolute. It compelled her to “waste” her strength on her restoration hobby.
He had few successes. That vein lay
deep, like a diamond seam. Layers lay over its top. The meek, innocent ingenue with empty eyes. The creature older than the stone beast itself, that had built itself a heart of steel. The priestess...
Ethrian resumed a normal cycle of sleeps and waking, doing his sleeping during the fury of the day.
He wakened one afternoon, suddenly. Instinct made him leap into the air. Terror wriggled down into the core of him. The stone beast had flung out a tremendous bolt of power. The surge left a bleak, hungry vacuum behind. He shuffled this way, then that, moving aimlessly while trying to assemble his wits.
“They came back!” Sahmanan wailed. “They’re going to destroy us!”
He felt the stone beast’s fear. It had fought, and had lost, and in its despair had flung everything in one great black hammer stroke. If that blow failed, doom was upon Nawami.
Ethrian raced around the beast’s paw. He clambered up its back. Sahmanan followed. At the base of the thing’s neck, she gasped, “Get down! He failed!”
Ethrian flung himself against weathered stone. Something tortured the air. He heard the crackle of bacon frying magnified ten thousand times. A titan’s drumstick hammered out one mighty beat. Ethrian turned his head warily. He saw an iridescent dust tower hundreds of yards high, settling back to earth. A thousand diabolic faces leered out, laughed, faded as an unseasonal breeze dispersed the dust.
The stone beast whined. Sahmanan begged. Ethrian ignored them. He scrambled to the peak of the monster’s head, sat cross-legged, faced west. He let his being slip its moorings and drift toward the grey mountains.
He halted when he spied something atop a long, dusty dune, facing the stone beast. Another joined it, then another. Their shapes seemed to waver.
Ethrian drifted closer. It wasn’t just the heat making their edges raggedy. Their cloaks of office rippled in the breeze. There were six of them now. No: seven. The one in the middle was shorter and wider. They wore grotesque masks. Their jeweled eyepieces glistened in the desert sun.
Tervola, he thought. They’ve stopped playing. They’ve come to see for themselves.
Soldiers of the Dread Empire joined their captains. A dozen. A score. A hundred. They stared at the stone beast.
The short one spoke. He made a slight gesture, then descended the back of the dune. One Tervola and a handful of men started forward. The others settled down as if for a long wait.