Betrayals (41 page)

Wasting any further time would be completely nonproductive, so the entity began to put its ploy into effect at once. Moving itself to the nearest groups of links, the entity began to convince those links that the enemy was not ahead, but advancing through the woods and fields on the far side of their position. The links had to be touched one at a time, but soon the entire group of them had turned their attention to the real enemy. And the enemy was extremely dangerous, so it had to be attacked at once.

Sounds of aspect battle erupted behind the entity as it floated swiftly back to where its own people were. Those with Earth magic tore up sections of the landscape, those with Fire magic set fire to it, those with Water magic drowned or desiccated it, and those with Air magic made breathing difficult. Only a single link had been capable of Spirit magic, and they worked to convince their enemies that resisting was unnecessary and undesirable.

The entity managed to station itself before its flesh forms just in time. The links which had circled around behind the houses on the left had no idea why battle raged on the far side of the barn, nor did they care. Their objective lay before them, and they clearly believed that those who actually attained it would surely be rewarded while the others might be penalized instead. So they came ahead, and suddenly four of the five aspects were attacking at once.

Those who protected the entity’s flesh forms were ordered to link, which produced a protective wall of sorts consisting of all of the aspects. This … separation of the aspects disturbed the entity in some strange and unexplained way, but there was scarcely time to dwell on the matter. Defense does nothing to halt an attack, and halting it was the only thing which would save them all. Therefore the entity moved forward, and began to oppose what was being sent. Countering each aspect separately was obviously a poor tactic, so the entity used a more effective ploy. The wall of flame produced by the Fire link was redirected toward the Earth link, which quickly eliminated the Earth link. The envelope of airlessness from the Air link was forced around those with Fire magic, and they clawed at their throats and died while those with Water magic produced the globes of water which began to drown those with Air magic. That left those with Water magic to be seen to, and the entity didn’t hesitate.

Removing all the moisture from the bodies of those men allowed them to scream only briefly before they were no longer able to scream. Then the powdered remains of their former bodies sifted down to the ground, and that part of the attack was over.

But only that part. More than half the attacking force fought against itself and another segment had just been wiped out, but that still left the final portion of the hunters. Another four link groups came from behind the houses on the right, and they, too, cared nothing about the battle going on in the distance. The idea of gaining an advantage over their fellows brought them eagerly forward, ready to destroy anything in their path to success.

And as they advanced the entity paused for a moment, assessing its own strength—which suddenly seemed much less than it had been. Quite a lot of effort had been expended, and its automatic reaching for more of the power was halted in mid stride, so to speak. To take in more of the power was certainly possible, but for some reason was less than desirable. Could it be … was it possible … Yes, that was it. The strain on its flesh forms had been too great, and if the entity took in more of the power it would simply damage its own components, possibly beyond repair.

And that realization left the entity in something of a quandary. The coming attack needed to be countered if its group was to survive, and yet a counterattack could well cause the destruction of its flesh forms. One choice was equally as bad as the other, and yet one of them must be accepted. There were no other choices … it seemed as though there were no other choices…Wait, a faint and distant memory … Not its memory, and yet available and unmistakably relevant. Yes, that was what had to be done!

With the speed of thought, the entity gathered in the linked talents ranged about its flesh forms. Those talents tapped the raw power directly, and the entity tapped them. It was the third choice it had been seeking, a way to gain strength without endangering itself. And what strength! Linked High talents, all pouring their ability and mettle into the entity, who knew exactly what to do with the gifts.

The four attacking links, poor, pitiful creatures that they were, died together almost in mid stride. Their hearts were stopped, their lungs denied air, their flesh denied moisture, and their remains vaporized in a funeral pyre so intense that to look upon it was to lose bodily vision for a time. In the next heartbeat the entity turned that incredible ferocity on the rest of the attacking force, touching those who still lived and snuffing out those lives. The last to die was the leader of the horde, ending his howl of agony at the realization that his irresistible force had been defeated.

A quick sweep which ranged across miles showed that no other of the enemy remained, and that was definitely that.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“What do you mean, Captain Althers has disappeared?” Kambil demanded of the brawny, stolid guardsman who had come with the news. “He was supposed to be getting information for us, important information!”

“Don’t know nothin’ about it, Excellency,” the guardsman repeated, just as he’d been repeating those same words ever since he got there. “All they told me was t’tell ya— oh, an’ give ya this here batch a papers. Almos’ forgot.”

The brawny man reached into the scrip at his waist and awkwardly drew out a sheaf of papers which had obviously been stuffed into the scrip. He offered them as though they were so much straw to be thrown into a stall, and all Kambil could do was grab the papers with a curse. The man who had been sent to give them the news about Althers knew nothing about the entire affair, so striking him dead would have done nothing more than set a bad precedent. Aside from how good it would have made Kambil feel.

“You go back to your superiors now and give them a message from the five of us,” Kambil said as he worked to straighten the papers into some semblance of neatness. “Tell them that the next time someone like you is sent in place of one of them, being at a distance from us won’t save them. I want Althers’s replacement here tomorrow without fail, along with his two immediate commanding officers. Do you understand all that well enough to repeat it to the people who have to hear it?”

“Sure, Excellency, I’m real good at rememberin’ stuff like that,” the brawny man acknowledged with a nod. “I’ll tell ’em just what you said.”

Rather than bowing, the brawny man came to attention, threw his arm across his chest in a salute, then turned and marched out. Kambil felt the urge to close his eyes and scream, but that would have done as much good as trying to tell the fool of a guardsman what he’d done wrong.

“I can’t understand why they sent that thing rather than coming to us themselves,” Homin said once the door of the meeting room had closed behind the guardsman. “It really isn’t their fault that Althers decided on an informal, permanent leave, after all, so why would they—”

“Chaos take them!” Kambil snarled, interrupting Homin with no more than a passing awareness of having done it. He’d glanced through the pages given him, bothered by what he didn’t see, and then he’d come to the final message. “I don’t believe this! No wonder Althers decided to disappear. He must have thought he would never survive the delivering of this message, and he was probably right!”

“Why?” Bron asked, clearly speaking for all of the others. “What does it say?”

“It says that the command sent after those five peasants has completely disappeared,” Kambil replied, looking bleakly from one face to the next. “The group leader sent one of his men ahead to Quellin with orders to collect any messages sent to them, and to pass on the word that a definite trail left by the fugitives had been found. When the man returned to where the command should have been, he found them and all traces of them gone.”

“Then they must still be following that trail,” Selendi said with a frown. “What else could have happened to that many men?”

“Our erstwhile opponents happened to them,” Kambil stated, having not the least doubt that he spoke the truth. “If the command was simply following a trail, they would have left signs for the man sent to Quellin. The absence of those signs leaves only the other possibility.”

“But how could they have defeated a hundred men?” Bron demanded, and Kambil was able to feel how rattled the man was. “Even using our Blending entity, I’d hate to have to do the same thing! Tell me how they could have done it!”

“How am I supposed to know that?” Kambil countered, feeling more than a bit unbalanced himself. “I’m just certain that they did, and now I have a more disturbing question than ‘how.’ Tell me what they intend to do next.”

Bron parted his lips, but nothing in the way of words came out. His complexion had gone almost as pale as Selendi’s and Homin’s, and those two had nothing in the way of an answer either.

“So you see our most pressing dilemma,” Kambil said, glancing at the ever-silent Delin. The man was just as disturbed as the rest of the^Five, but he’d been forbidden to speak unless spoken to. “Does anyone think it’s possible that they’ll be returning here? Or should I have said likely? Everything is possible, but how likely is their immediate return?”

“I’d say very likely,” Selendi put forward when the two men remained as silent as Delin, stirring where she sat. “If it were me and I’d found a way to destroy a hundred men without leaving a sign of them, I’d turn right around and march back to the place I’d just run away from.”

“I’m not sure I would,” Homin ventured, giving Selendi a small shrug of apology for disagreeing with her. “I’d probably prefer to find a place of my own to get comfortable, and would spend my strength defending that place. After all, what is there here for them?”

“Do you mean aside from this palace and our places on the Fivefold Throne?” Bron said with heavy sarcasm. “Not a thing that I can think of. How about you, Kambil?”

“Let’s not start to bicker among ourselves,” Kambil said sharply, blaming himself for losing control to so great an extent. “The problem is that all of you are right, since your views depend on your own way of looking at things. The peasants are also individuals, and they may not find it possible to agree on a course of action. That would be completely to our benefit, but we can’t count on it. We’ll have to set up outposts along the road to the city, so that if the peasants do decide to return we’ll know about it before they get here.”

“And meanwhile we’ll have to try to figure out what they did,” Bron muttered, less emotional now after having been rebuked. “If we don’t, we won’t dare to face them.”

“We’d be fools to face them anyway,” Homin said with a headshake. “We can’t afford to forget that they’re stronger than we are, and not only because of whatever they just learned to do.”

“I want all of you to understand one thing very clearly,” Kambil said, giving his groupmates a taste of his unbending resolve along with the words. “I did not go through all that trouble to gain the Throne just to lose it again to a bunch of peasants. And we don’t have to face them again, not when everyone believes that we bested them the first time. If necessary we’ll throw a thousand guardsmen in their path, and then we’ll see how well they do. In the meanwhile, I don’t want to hear another word about how strong they are or how afraid we are of them. Is that clear?”

The three nodded, with Delin simply sitting and staring as always. Kambil stared at the man in return, finding a good deal less pleasure in his awakened presence than he had. Delin often raged inwardly over his captivity, but there was also something disturbing inside him. It was probably the man’s insanity, which meant Kambil could ignore it and concentrate on more important matters.

“Let’s spend the rest of this morning thinking, and this afternoon we’ll have a meeting and make suggestions,” Kambil said after a brief pause. “And let’s bear in mind that the peasants may have left the city by the west road, but they don’t necessarily have to use it to return. I’ll want lists of everything you can think of that we can do to protect ourselves, as well as suggestions as to how we can do it all without letting people know what’s happening. If anyone finds out the details of what’s going on, we’ll have to eliminate them before they can tell anyone else.”

Kambil began to leave the room as he spoke, and Bron and Selendi and Homin immediately walked along with him. Delin trailed along behind, of course, but Delin no longer mattered. What did matter was those peasants, and a way to make very sure that they stopped being a problem ever again….

Delin walked behind the others, his mind mulling over everything he’d heard. On the one hand he was delighted that Kambil was having difficulty, but on the other he, Delin, was in that difficulty with him. But at least they couldn’t blame this on him, not that they wouldn’t try. It would probably turn out that he’d done something that caused something else to happen and that something else caused this. In a distant way, of course, but without the least doubt.

Delin snorted to himself, realizing he was in the process of losing every scrap of the small amount of respect he’d ever had for Kambil. Things around them got worse with every passing day, and all their supposed leader could do was send threatening messages. He should have sent that guardsman back with his throat opened, to show how displeased they were with the ploy the man’s superiors had used. He should also have given orders to have those superiors put down, and then their replacements would have done the job properly right from the first.

But the high-and-mighty leader of the Seated Five was too softhearted to do what he should, so things would continue to go from bad to worse. Kambil had been just as frightened as the others had obviously been, and because of that he’d made a bad mistake. He’d told everyone what he wanted them to do, and he hadn’t excluded Delin from the command. That meant he had to obey, and for the first time he truly looked forward to doing it. That tiny part of his mind …