Future Indefinite (19 page)

“Where are we?” he squeaked.

“Damned if I know,” D’ward said cheerily. “Watch out!”

Dosh sensed a very large place, a hall. The only light was a faint glow from up ahead, and D’ward released his grip to lead the way along the narrow path, twisting through a maze, a forest of miscellaneous objects, curved or angular, some very large, others small and heaped on top of one another—statues, tables, huge jars, candelabra, chairs, cauldrons, musical instruments, rolls of fabric, piles of what might be clothes, suits of armor, and thousands of other things, all pushed in together in no sort of order and in many places stacked higher than head height. The air was dry and musty. It was a gigantic storeroom, a junk merchant’s cellar run riot.

“What is this?”

“Damned if I know that, either. A museum? A kleptomaniac’s hoard? Offerings, I suppose. People keep bringing things, one must collect a lot of stuff over the centuries.”

Trying not to whimper, poor Dosh followed his guide. Why had he ever let himself get involved in whatever this was he was involved in? He needed to pee.

The light came from a wide doorway. D’ward walked through it. Dosh crept in behind him, trying to be inconspicuous. D’ward stopped.

Dosh peeked over his shoulder. The light would be too dim to read by. It cast no shadows and he could not see its source. The room was large, as big as Bandrops Advocate’s study, and just as cluttered and heaped as the antechamber. The only clear space was roughly triangular, its corners being D’ward himself and two huge chairs, angled toward each other. Everywhere else was packed with the same mindless jumble as the antechamber: furniture, figurines, boxes, pottery, birdcages, crystal, scrolls, weapons, and just about anything else a man could think of or ever want. Gold and gems glittered dimly under layers of dust. The air was stuffy, with the stale, acrid smell of a tomb.

The chairs were occupied. One held a man, the other a woman, both lying back motionless, with their hands folded in their laps. Their hair fell in frozen white waves to lap on their shoulders, their skin was as smooth as vellum, and their robes had long since faded to an indeterminate gray. The man’s beard reached to his waist. He rested his chin on his chest, seeming to stare at the woman’s feet, while she had her head back, gazing fixedly into space above him. Neither was heeding the visitors at all.

Silence. Dosh shivered violently. These could not be real people, of course, merely more images of the Father and the Mother, representations of the same dual god. They must have lain there for years, gathering dust, although they seemed to have escaped the film of cobweb that coated all the hodgepodge and bric-a-brac. Yet what sculptor could shape so convincingly and in what medium? Hair rose on the nape of his neck.

“Who is it?” muttered the man, not looking up, moving nothing but his mustache. His voice creaked, as if it had dried up from disuse.

After a long moment, the woman muttered, “A stranger. Come looking for a job, I expect.” She continued to stare blankly at nothing.

Pause. “Have we any vacant aspects now?”

Longer pause. “Don’t remember.” Very slowly she turned her head to stare at D’ward. Her face was unwrinkled, yet it conveyed a sense of age beyond imagining. Her eyes were dull—not filmed with cataracts, as old people’s often were, just lifeless glass. “Go away…. We are busy…. Come back in a hundred years.”

“I am D’ward Liberator, the one foretold in the
Filoby Testament
.”

The woman’s head drifted back to its original position.

Even D’ward seemed nonplussed. When nothing more was said, he bristled, putting his fists on his hips. “I am the Liberator! It is prophesied that I shall bring death to Death.”

“A reformer,” the woman muttered.

“Another? It never works. Send him away.”

Dosh’s teeth were trying to chatter. He took hold of his jaw with both hands and held his mouth open. His bladder felt as if was about to burst from sheer terror.

“I am D’ward Liberator. You two are Visek? How long have you been sitting there?”

“Go away,” the woman murmured.

“You are dying of boredom! I offer you a little excitement for a change, something new. I am going to slay Zath.”

The man sighed, stirring the silver hairs of his mustache again. “Who?”

“Zath!” D’ward was not even trying to hide his exasperation. “The one who calls himself the god of death. He sucks mana from human sacrifices. He is evil, a blot upon the Vales and your religion.”

Long pause. With glacial slowness the man looked up, his eyes showing the same dead indifference as the woman’s. “Then go and do it and stop bothering us.”

“I do not yet have the power. I need more mana. I go from node to node, recruiting followers, preaching my purpose, but I need help. Will you aid me? Will you lend me mana?”

Another sigh. “No.”

“Will you at least grant me protection while I am here in Niolvale, so that Zath’s minions cannot—”

“No. You are intruding. Play the Game like the others or pay the penalty. Begone.” The man closed his eyes and lowered his chin again.

“Strewth!” D’ward said angrily. “Play the Game? Zath has more mana than you do! He has more power, probably, than the whole Pentatheon together! What if he decides he would like to be Visek? He’ll kill you and take your place! What do you think of that move? Or don’t you cafe anymore?”

The awful, stuffy room swayed around Dosh. His blood hammered in his ears. These talking mummies could never be divine, so D’ward had been right all along, and the gods were merely human enchanters who had stretched out their lives for untold centuries. Spiders caught in their own web, dying of boredom! Everything he had ever believed was totally false, criminal rubbish. His stomach heaved.

It was the woman who reacted first to D’ward’s taunts, although reluctantly and with irritation. She peered at him. “You blaspheme against Visek.”

“It is the truth! Talk to Karzon or Eltiana or Astina! Damn, talk to crazy Tion if you trust him! Every night more people die so that Zath can suck mana from their deaths. Prylis told me that it was Visek, three thousand years ago, who banned human sacrifice in all the Vales—was that you or one of your predecessors?”

“It was us, I think,” the man mumbled, with the first hint of interest that he had shown. “Wasn’t it, dear?”

D’ward snorted. “Then Zath defies your edict! He is evil and deadly and dangerous to you. The prophecy—”

“We are god of prophecy. Among other things.”

“Others also prophesy. The prophecy says that I will bring death to Death. If the one who calls himself Zath were to become Visek, then he wouldn’t be Death anymore and he would be safe, wouldn’t he?”

“Blasphemy!” the woman quavered. Both of them were looking at D’ward now. Both were showing signs of anger, or at least disapproval.

“Astina will confirm what I say.”

“We must talk with the Maiden one day, dear,” the man mumbled.

“Yes, darling, we must.”

They would never get around to it….

D’ward thumped his fists against his hipbones. “I ask from you only what Astina granted me: first, that she would defend me from his reapers within her domain, second, that she would issue a revelation to her priests to hold back the civil—”

“No,” said the man, closing his eyes again.

The woman uttered a creaky chuckle. “If you can’t defend yourself from those, how can you hope to handle a god?”

“But it will waste mana! You know that the more I have, the faster I will be able to garner more. I need help to build my—”

“Revolution?” The man yawned. “It doesn’t work. We built too well.”

D’ward swore under his breath, words Dosh did not know. “No one has ever managed to preach rebellion in more than two vales, so Prylis says.”

The woman moved her lips for a moment. “True.”

“I am in my fourth! I have lasted almost two fortnights already. I am something new, do you hear? Something you have never seen before! I am foretold by a chain of prophecy Zath has not broken in thirty years of trying. If you won’t guard me in Niolvale, will you at least watch my efforts? Will you watch to see how far I get, when and how I die?”

With glacial slowness, the man raised a hand and scratched at his beard with nails like small horn daggers. “That might be amusing,” he conceded.

“Haven’t seen anything new in a thousand years,” the woman muttered.

D’ward released a deep breath, as if he had won a victory. “Astina promised me one more thing. If I do survive to confront Zath on his node, then she will lend me some mana for the final—”

“Oh, no!” snapped the woman, and this time she actually stirred in her chair. “How could we ever trust you to pay it back? You say that Zath is a threat to us, but if you won, you would be stronger than he.”

“I gave my solemn word that—”

“Dragonshit.” Her pebbly eyes shifted to stare at Dosh, peering around the Liberator, and they seemed to come to life. “Who’s he?” Her voice rose to a screech: “You brought a native into our sanctum?”

The man heaved himself erect in his chair to glare at Dosh, and his robe crumbled away to dust.

Without turning, D’ward whispered, “Go!”

Dosh spun around and shot out of the chamber.

In panic, he fought his way through darkness, finding the tunnel by ricocheting off furniture, bouncing against tall urns, stumbling over chests, tripping on goblets and vases, knocking down giant candelabras and suits of armor. Debris cascaded to the floor behind him, and his flight must have sounded like an earthquake. He had no idea what sort of a door he would find, or if he would be able to open it. In the end there was no door—he flailed out into moonlight and rolled head over heels down the steps.

That was not the last of his troubles. Evidently the trespassers’ violation of the sanctuary had been observed and all the available clergy had assembled to beseech Visek’s forgiveness. At least forty white-robed priests and priestesses were on their knees there, chanting a lament. Dosh plowed into them like a runaway snowball, bowling over seven or eight before he came to a stop.

The green moon whirled in the sky above him, accompanied by flashes of flame and more stars than he had ever seen before. Three or four men threw themselves on top of him to restrain him, although he would not have been capable of even sitting up, let alone making a run for it.

The singing ended. People shouted. Order of a sort was restored.

Dosh found himself lying on the floor, with his arms and legs pinned. A burning agony in his nose was spraying blood. He peered up groggily at a ring of irate faces. Several tried to speak at once before one elderly man established his seniority.

“Where is your accomplice?” he screeched. He was standing between Dosh’s widespread legs and looked dangerously liable to start kicking if he did not receive a satisfactory answer.

Dosh licked his lips, choking on blood from his nose. His left ankle throbbed. “With Holy Visek, of course.” The old man hesitated, considering the implications.

Poor Dosh had been in tight spots before, although probably none tighter than this. He groped for self-confidence, which was not readily accessible in his present condition. “He will be along shortly. Is this how you normally treat the Great One’s guests?”

Amazingly, it worked—or at least the old man did not lash out with his feet, which was the most immediate danger. He scowled uncertainly and then stepped back. “Get him up!”

The hands holding Dosh’s legs were removed. Those on his arms heaved him erect. The whole temple swayed vertiginously and a spasm of agony shot through his ankle. He stumbled and was held upright, balancing on one foot, nauseated by the battering and the blood he had swallowed.

“Who are you?”

That was a very good question, but it did not seem to have a suitable reply. “Tion,” came to mind. No one would question a god’s right to come calling on another, but a god would not fall down a flight of steps; a god would not arrive cut, bruised, and unable to put any weight on his left foot.

“A friend of the Liberator’s,” was another possibility. It had the advantage of being the truth, but it would lead to extremely unpleasant consequences.

“I am not at liberty to answer that,” Dosh said.

Someone struck him and the temple rocked again. This time he did throw up, which at least made the senior priest back away and held off further questioning for a moment.

But not for long.

“Guards!” squealed the old man, almost gibbering in his fury.

The cordon of priests and priestesses parted to admit a squad of armed men, moonlight glittering on blades and armor and reptilian eyes.

“Interrogate this criminal!” the high priest quavered. “Find out who he is and what he is doing. Get the truth out of him.”

The shiniest guard looked around uneasily. “Here, Venerable One?”

“Yes, here! Now! Immediately!”

As soldiers replaced the priests holding his arms, Dosh braced himself for unpleasant experiences. Oh, poor, poor Dosh!

“What are you doing?” demanded a voice from the throne. D’ward came striding down the steps. “Release that man!”

He wore nothing but a peasant’s loincloth, but his voice rang with the brazen prestige of bugles. The crowd opened, men and women and even soldiers backing away. Dosh swayed and steadied, teetering on one leg.

Blue eyes seared the onlookers. “Stand back!” They all retreated one more step. “Farther!” The clearing widened. Then D’ward turned to Dosh and pulled a face at what he saw. He reached out and touched his throbbing, burning nose. The pain stopped instantly. Dosh wiped off the blood with his arm.

“And what’s wrong with your foot?”

Dosh felt better already. This breather might not last, but every minute he was not being questioned by those thugs was an improvement. “I broke my ankle.” He thought it was only sprained, but that was a mere quibble.

“Who are you?” The high priest had lost much of his screech.

D’ward turned and studied him for a moment. “Who do you say is the god of prophecy?”

The old man twitched in indignation. “Holy Visek in their avatar of Waatuun.”

“And I am D’ward Liberator, the one foretold.”

Screech became scream. “The heretic?”

Without deigning to answer, D’ward dropped to one knee and took Dosh’s ankle in his hands. His fingers felt ice cold on the hot swelling. He pulled the foot down to the floor.

“Try that.”

Dosh put his weight on it and nothing nasty happened. “That’s fine now,” he said calmly. “Thank you.” He must have banged his head harder than he realized, for obviously this could not be happening. On the other hand, there was not a closed mouth in the audience.

D’ward rose and regarded the onlookers as a proud housewife might inspect cockroaches in her larder. He was taller than almost all of them, which helped. “I am the Liberator. I had business with Visek. Is that any concern of yours? It is prophesied that I shall bring death to Death. And it is written, ‘Hurt and sickness, yea death itself, shall he take from us. Oh rejoice!’”

The high priest’s knees began to buckle, but a younger, larger man beside him caught him by the elbow and held him upright. “The Liberator preaches foulest heresy against the Holy Gods!”

D’ward’s eyes spat contempt at him. “How often have you heard the Liberator preach?”

“I would not let his lies foul my ears!”

“Then let his deeds open your eyes! ‘Rejoice!’ the prophecy says. You have just seen a wonder. What does it take to save you from your ignorance and error? I tell you to rejoice!”

The man looked at Dosh’s nose, down at his ankle. Then he sank to his knees. The high priest followed more circumspectly, and all the rest also. Bronze helmets and white turbans dipped to the floor. Oh, that was much better!

“Rejoice!” D’ward snapped. “Rejoice until the sun rises to warm your cold and unbelieving hearts.” He nudged Dosh and strode away.

Amazingly, no one tried to stop them. Soldiers and clergy cowered on their faces and the most notorious heretic in the Vales walked away unchallenged, his companion at his side. As they trotted out between the pillars and down the steps, he remarked casually, “You know, that was a lot closer than it looked.”

But the priests were not the only ones troubled by ignorance and error. Dosh’s eyes also had just been opened. “I have been a fool!” he wailed. “Lord, forgive—”

“Never mind that now! Can you run? Because I haven’t got anything left! We’ll have to manage on honest sweat and muscle. Can you run?”

“Yes, master.”

“Good man. Then let’s get out of here before they change their minds.”

They ran. The way back was a thousand times longer than the way there had been. Trumb dipped to the west and duly eclipsed, becoming a black moon against a glory of stars, and only the cold blue glow of Ysh lit the road. Dosh should have worried about reapers then, but he was beyond such trivia. As the eclipse ended, clouds moved in; rain began to fall, slowing the pace even more.

He was tortured by both remorse and fury at his own blindness. He had known D’ward for years and identified him as the Liberator earlier than anyone else. He had seen him perform miracles before—they had all been unobtrusive, deniable miracles, but they should have been enough. Lack of morals never bothered him, but he hated to think of himself as lacking brains. In the last half fortnight he had heard D’ward preach about a dozen times, and yet he had let the words roll off his mind like water off a candle. Now he tried to recall all those words, to understand just how much he had missed.

What was D’ward, then? Was he a man sent by the gods, or was he a god himself? Surely only a god could have healed that ankle? Yet D’ward denied the gods. There was only one god, he said, a god Undivided, indivisible. The puzzle was too great to solve on a cold, wet night, jogging along in the mud. Fatigue blurred his mind until he could not think, could only slog along, following the pale glimmer of D’ward’s back in the darkness.

The first time they stopped at a stream to drink, even before he had washed off the dried blood, he tried to ask for guidance and forgiveness.

“Don’t worry about all that now,” D’ward said. “There is time yet to straighten it all out. How are your bruises?”

As the hours passed, Dosh began to stumble more and more often. D’ward would hear his steps falter and come back and help him up, plastered with mud, and get him moving again. And then even D’ward seemed to run out of strength—although his strength was much more strength of will than of body, for he too was reeling on his feet. And the rain was becoming a downpour.

They took shelter under a bridge at a place where the road ran straight, a low causeway crossing marsh and lakes. At intervals it rose on timber bridges to let the wandering streams drain through, but at this time of year the water was low, exposing sand. The two of them crawled underneath and stretched out between the weed-furred piles with groans of contentment. Rain drummed on the planks only inches above them, but they were out of it.

Almost out of it—Dosh eased away from a dribble.

“Sleep awhile,” D’ward mumbled.

“One fortnight or two?”

“Just one. When Prat’han wakes up and finds I’m not there, he’s going to murder me.”

After a bemused moment, Dosh worked out why that sounded funny, and surprised himself with a chuckle.

“Mm?” D’ward said. “Oh, well, when I get back he will. He’ll have to manage somehow, won’t he? Trouble is, we have a long trek to do today.”

“Skip it,” Dosh murmured. The Liberator had told Visek that he went from node to node. He wondered what a node was. “Rest today, go tomorrow.”

D’ward began muttering about winter being due and the problem of finding enough food if the Free stayed in one place, but his voice came from a long way away….

“Watch it!” A warning hand caught Dosh’s head just before he jerked it up and cracked it against a beam.

He blinked in alarm, wondering where he was, why he was so confoundedly cold, wet, and sore, and who the bastard was who was sprinkling water on him. Then he heard the noise, and registered the vibration in the timbers above him that was shaking off the moisture. Green moonlight shone on the stream beyond the bridge, so they had not slept very long. An hour, perhaps, not as much as two. The rain had stopped.

“What…?”

“Soldiers!”

Many hooves tramping across the bridge.

Dosh heaved himself up on an elbow to peer over his companion and study the shadows on the water. He saw shapes of lancers on moas, heading west. He looked at D’ward, two eyes shining in the darkness, and asked, “They’re after us?”

“Not us two, I think. The Free. We’ll have to wait until they’re gone, and then go back and try to cut around the lakes.”

“No!” Dosh said. “Once they’re off the bridge, they’ll speed up again. We’ll never get there before them, no matter what way we go.”

D’ward groaned. “Suppose you’re right.”

The rear guard passed and the noise faded into the distance.

Why go on? If the Niolian cavalry was moving against the Free, then the Liberator would return to find his followers massacred, arrested, or scattered. But of course D’ward would go back. There would be no talking him into deserting. And if he were there, then he might work another miracle, even without the help of Irepit. He was the Liberator.

Dosh thought back to his servitude with Tarion, the Nagian cavalryleader. “It may be possible. They’ll bivouac before dawn to rest their mounts. We may get in front of them then.”

It sounded impossible. It was impossible, for two exhausted men on battered, bleeding feet. But they did it.

As dawn was painting rosy tints on Niolwall ahead of them, they trotted past a field where moas were grazing on stubble and men huddled around campfires. Those proud lancers showed no interest in two peasants going by on foot and did not challenge. As soon as they were out of sight, D’ward quickened the pace. Somehow Dosh kept up with him on his shorter legs.

The campsite of the Free was much less organized and covered a far greater area. The pilgrims were awake, most grouped along the riverbank, washing, rolling up bedding if they had any, singing hymns, or eating whatever scraps they had saved from the evening meal. Few of them noticed the two bedraggled, mud-splattered young men walking along the road, and probably none recognized their leader without his priestly gown.

On the other side of the trail, on the boulder-strewn slope with the Liberator’s tent near the pulpit rock, the Warband with shields and spears was moving over the ground like foraging ants, as if searching for bodies. Prat’han was the first to recognize the newcomers. The big man shouted and came leaping down the hill to greet them, looking ready to weep with relief—and also about ready to run his spear through Dosh for having abducted the Liberator. The rest of the warriors came running in to cluster around. Dosh flopped down on the grass.

D’ward remained standing, drooping with fatigue. “Water, please, food if there is any. I’ve got to clean up and dress. Pass the word that I will not preach this morning and get them moving. We’re going to have trouble.”

Teeth shone. “We can sharpen our spears now?” Gopaenum demanded.

“Yes. Yes, you can sharpen your spears. And I fear you may blunt them, too, before the day is out. A troop of lancers’ll be here very shortly.” D’ward rubbed his eyes wearily. “We mustn’t lie around here like fish on a slab. Get everyone moving.” He pointed.