Debt of Ages (27 page)

She was thinking about it when, with flesh-prickling shrieks, the Irish rose from concealment in the brush around them.

They swarmed in from both sides, cutting Tiraena off. These proto-Celtic people, the Fomorians, belonged to an earlier ethnic stratum than the Gaelic-speakers who had taken over most of Ireland. But they were equipped much like them: unarmored save for small leather shields, and armed with short poor-quality iron swords or the kind of club which would one day be known as a shillelagh. Gwenhwyvaer's troops would have eaten them alive in a stand-up fight—a fact that wasn't much comfort as one of them seized Tiraena's reins near the bit and jerked upward. Her horse reared, throwing her. She managed to land with a roll to minimize the impact, and was on her feet before the Fomorians had reached her.

Looking beyond them, she saw Peredur and Cynric trying to cut their way through to her. But the press of raiders around them prevented them from building up the momentum that would have ridden their foes down; it was all they could do to stay on their horses, striking downward with their
spathas
, as the barbarians crowded around and tried to dismount them. And, off to one side, she could see more of the Fomorians running up to cut the two horsemen off.

"Peredur!" she shouted over the barbarians' cries. "Get away—you'll be surrounded! Go to Chester and get help."

Their eyes met. This was no knight-errant, and his eyes told her he knew he was looking at no damsel in distress but at a fellow soldier, and his on-scene commander. He gave a quick nod. "Cynric! Let's go!"

"No!"
The young voice caught on a sob.

Peredur's voice was like a whip-crack. "I said get moving,
boy
!"

It was just what the doctor ordered for getting Cynric moving. His eyes flashed blue fire at the one imputation that no adolescent male can endure, and he took it out on his attackers, splitting the skull of one and kicking another in the face as he turned his horse's head around and broke free of the press. Tiraena had time to see him and Peredur get away before a big Fomorian crashed into her.

She went over, pulling her attacker with her, and brought a knee up into his groin. As he doubled over with a gasp, she scrambled to her feet, upended the nearest Fomorian with a sweeping circular kick, and ran in the only direction open to her: up a slope toward thick woods.
Good
, she thought.
If I can get in among the trees maybe I can lose them. . . .

Then her legs stopped pumping as they were tackled from behind, and she fell heavily to the ground. Half-stunned, she kicked out at the cluster of Fomorians who piled onto her. She saw a warrior raise his shillelagh two-handed above his head and bring it sweeping down. Then the world dissolved in pain and swirling lights before being swallowed up by darkness.

* * *

She wasn't sure at first that she'd awakened, for the sickening pain and the scene around her seemed but a continuation of her evil dreams.

It was night, and the torchlight revealed the ruins of a village. It also revealed other things . . . and for an instant, reality wavered.
Are they right after all?
flashed through her reeling mind.
Am I dead and in the hell the Christians believe in?
Her consciousness focused on one detail of the scene: a little girl, no more than four, her lifeless face frozen in a mask of transcendent agony and her naked childish body in a position as grotesque as any of the other impaled forms. Then the spasms began, and after everything was gone from her stomach Tiraena kept trying to retch, as her entire being sought to reject what she was seeing.

When she finally looked up, a man was standing before her, dressed in a hooded robe of coarsely woven fabric. He regarded her for a moment, then turned to the left and spoke two words. At first they didn't register on Tiraena, not so much because of their mangled pronunciation as because of their sheer impossibility.

There could be no doubt, though. The words had been:
"Her awake."
This fifth century Irish savage had spoken in a crude parody of twenty-third century Standard International English.

"Good." This was pronounced clearly, but in a tinny, mechanical voice. A vast shadow fell across her, cast by the monstrous figure that trod into her range of vision and blocked out the torchlight.

Tiraena looked up at the Interrogator and knew she was not in the Christian hell after all. She wished she could have taken refuge there.

"You," she finally breathed.

There was a long pause. Then the Korvaasha motioned to the robed man to depart, which he did with no apparent good grace. Once he was out of earshot, the translating voder pendant hanging around the alien long thick neck began producing the human-range sounds its breathing/vocalizing slits could not. The artificial voice was as horribly inflectionless as she remembered, but with a new scratchiness.

"So you speak Standard International English. I could tell from your physical appearance that you do not belong to the same ethnic type as the inferior beings native to these islands. But since the language does not currently exist, you must be a time traveller, as I now know to be possible."

"You don't remember me, do you?" Tiraena stared up into the single eye—huge, faceted, even more disturbing to humans than everything else about the Korvaasha. She was trained to see past alienness and recognize individual members of nonhuman races, and this was definitely the Interrogator, though he was twenty-plus years older and his thick, wrinkled hide showed an unpleasant looseness. Not that there had ever been any doubt as to his identity, for there could be no other Korvaasha on this planet in this century. "You captured me on Danu—just before my people's fleet arrived and smashed yours," she added pointedly. "Afterwards, your ship overhauled mine and captured me and my companions again. Then we were all taken by . . ."

"Yes, I remember you now. In my subsequent imprisonment, I had time to reflect. I came to the conclusion that your male companion had been right, impossible though it seemed: our ship had somehow travelled back in time. After I escaped and my captured gravitic vehicle crashed, my observations confirmed this. The planet was inhabited by your species, in a primitive state of technology, and therefore could only be pre-spaceflight Earth."

Tiraena found herself thinking with odd clarity in the midst of pain and horror. The Korvaasha, she knew, was being positively garrulous for one of his race.
Naturally,
she reflected.
He's had nobody to tell his story to for twenty years! So I ought to be able to keep him going. . . .
"So," she said aloud, "you must have terrorized the locals at first. But later, some of them tried to make contact with you, and you decided it might be to your advantage to reciprocate. But of course your translator is only programmed for Standard International English, so you had to teach them an elementary version of the language."

"It was a laborious process, as they were primitives as well as belonging to your contemptible species. But I cultivated certain ones who were teachable, and who were prepared to do my bidding in all things in exchange for power over their fellows." He indicated the man Tiraena had first seen, who was standing with a small group of others, similarly robed, in the torchlight. "They became my . . ."

"Priesthood," Tiraena supplied.

There was a moment's pause while the Korvaasha digested the pendant's interpretation of this. "Most perceptive of you. Through them, I was able to mold their originally useless tribe to my purposes."

"Like this?" Tiraena looked around.

"Yes, I have introduced certain refinements. My priests have taken to them most enthusiastically. There has been some reluctance in other quarters. But after the local Druids were exterminated and their gods degraded, the warriors mostly recognized that following me was the way to victories and plunder. Their rudimentary minds are incapable of thinking further."

Yes,
she thought, with a sickness that had nothing to do with the pain in her head. She glanced at the robed figures.
The Fomorians were just an ordinary, clean sort of savages before. Is there any limit to the degradation some humans—the power-junkies—will undergo for a promise of control over other humans? And must that particular sort of scum
always
float to the top?
Then an obvious question occurred to her. "How is it that your voder still works?"

"It is powered by a photoelectric cell, and was designed to last under primitive conditions. Nevertheless, it is showing signs of deterioration. I am developing a form of written language for communicating with the priests after it finally ceases to function."

Tiraena nodded slowly. Even that caused her head to hurt. "It sounds like you've done very nicely where you were. So why have you led your followers here?"

"When the imperial agents arrived and the priests explained their purpose to me, I saw at once that my opportunity had arrived. I will establish myself here, after this island is conquered. Later, I will widen my power base. Eventually, I will take over this empire, clearly a more advanced society than the mud-squatting primitives with whom I currently have to work. Then I will force the development of a technology capable of space flight and displacement-point transit . . ."

What is this?
Tiraena thought.
He
can't
be joking. No Korvaasha has a sense of humor—the very concept is incomprehensible to them. But he must know that this is all nonsense! All the Fomorians have going for them is the terror of his appearance, and that's bound to wear off. But even if they
could
conquer Rome, and even if he was a walking compendium of technical knowledge, an Iron Age culture simply couldn't be made to jump so many intervening developmental stages in whatever's left of his lifetime.

". . . and then I will go looking for my race, which must now be expanding through this spiral arm under the aegis of the old Unity, but which has not yet reached this galactic neighborhood. I will lead them here, and we will exterminate the human race long before it can become our nemesis. I will personally oversee the slaughter, on a vast scale. I will . . ."

He's mad.
The belated realization burst on Tiraena.
His brain has turned to onion dip.
The flat, expressionless machine-voice of the voder had disguised it at first—the thing simply
couldn't
rave.
And besides,
she thought, teetering so close to the edge of hysteria that she had to suppress a giggle,
it's like a bad joke. "An insane Korvaasha? How can you tell?"

But these megalomaniac fantasies left no doubt. The years of loneliness and squalor, among a race he hated but on which he depended for survival, had worn the Interrogator's sanity away. She wondered how much the "priests" even bothered communicating with him any more, except when the tribe was at war.

"This is why I ordered you spared." Tiraena's awareness of the metallic drone returned. "Your distinctive appearance suggested foreign—and possibly more advanced—origins. In fact, you are something even better: a time traveller from my own era. With your advanced technical knowledge, you will play a useful role in my plan. Thus you will have the opportunity to earn a quick, humane death. Of course you realize that you cannot be left alive, any more than can any of your species—this must be self-evident even to inferior beings. But by helping to implement my plan you will be serving a higher purpose than any to which vermin like yourself could ever have realistically aspired. For by aiding in your race's extirpation, you will be helping it atone for its great crime: hindering the eventual Korvaasha-directed unification toward which all galactic life, unless perverse, unconsciously strives. . . ."

Tiraena no longer tried to restrain herself. She threw back her head, heedless of pain, and loosed a peal of laughter that was a defiant clarion in that scene out of hell. "You fucking lunatic! 'Hindered' you my ass! In my grandparents' day we kicked you off my homeworld of Raehan and were getting ready to rid the cosmos of your perverse Unity, just before the great realignment of the displacement network. And in my own time, the time you came from, we've crushed your Realm of Tarzhgul out of existence. Oh, a few of its worlds are left—genocide would lower us to your level, if possible. But orbital stations keep them under surveillance and vaporize anything more advanced than black-powder artillery and coal-burning steam pumps. And as for you personally . . ." She laughed again and staggered to her feet. "I've got news for you: your 'escape' was orchestrated by the time travellers who'd brought us to this era—
human
time travellers, from an age when the Korvaasha aren't even a bad memory. They let you go because their job is to preserve the past—including the 'Balor' of the Irish legends. So you've spent the last twenty-one years making sure a certain body of Terran myth turns out the way future human history books say it did! How's
that
for 'serving a higher purpose,' dipshit?"

She felt her arms being grasped from behind by two unseen guards, but she hardly noticed. For she had, in the past, seen the Interrogator in what she had sworn was the grip of an intense emotion of some kind—and that paled beside what she saw now. The massive frame shook, and the neck-slits practically rippled as they vocalized below the human auditory range. But no sound came from the voder, which could only translate coherent verbalizations with Standard English counterparts. Finally he subsided, and the mechanical voice came with its unvarying expressionlessness.

"You will not be suitable for the role I had in mind. In the morning you will be used for a different purpose: a reward for the warriors. If you survive, the priests will use your body as a medium for honing their skills at techniques I have taught them to appreciate. In fact, they have already become quite expert at prolonging death."

The guards jerked on her arms and began to haul her away. But for an instant she twisted herself around and faced the Interrogator again. "Oh, I almost forgot to tell you: this is a parallel reality and you're nothing but a quantum-shadow of your counterpart in the universe from which you and I both come. There, you'll eventually be killed by some Gaelic hero, and your crazy plan will come to nothing. As it will in this universe, regardless of who kills you here!"