The Elder Gods (The Dreamers 1)

“What if they don’t all get drowned?” Sorgan asked.

“We might have to just go up as far as your cousin’s fort and stop there. If we start getting involved in little hand-to-hand skirmishes, we could lose half of our men, and neither of us would like that very much, would we?”

“Not even a little bit,” Sorgan agreed. He scratched at his cheek. “Now that I’ve had a bit of time to digest this business of the snake-men, I don’t know that it really changes all that much. All we really have to do is stay a little ways away from them. If we do most of our fighting with long spears, the snake-people won’t get close enough to bite us, and since they don’t have any weapons except their teeth and those stingers along the sides of their arms, they should be fairly easy to defeat, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’ve got a point there, Sorgan,” Narasan conceded. “And if we can gather up enough of the venom to poison all of our spear tips, all that our people really need to do is scratch a charging enemy or give him a little poke with the spear to kill him right there in his tracks. He’ll be too busy dying to come any closer. This might just turn out to be an easy war after all.”

“And the nice part of it is that the enemy supplies us with the poison we’ll use to defeat him,” Sorgan added.

“I know,” Narasan said with a broad grin. “I think that’s terribly generous of him, don’t you?”

“Wake up, Bunny. It’s time to toot.”

Rabbit struggled up out of sleep to stare at the strange chubby little girl who’d just roused him. “You’re Lillabeth, aren’t you?” he asked. “The little girl who came here with Zelana’s sister, Aracia?”

“That’s me,” the dark-haired little girl replied. “Zelana asked me to wake you. You’re supposed to go outside and blow your horn.”

“I don’t understand.” Rabbit was still only about half awake, and his mind seemed a little foggy.

“It’s very simple, Bunny. Take up your horn, go outside, pucker up, and blow.” She pointed at the cave mouth. “Go! Now!”

Rabbit didn’t care much for her attitude, but he struggled to his feet, took up his horn, and went out into the night. He was getting a little tired of having everybody tell him what to do.

The wind blowing in from the bay was quite warm, and it seemed that every Maag with a horn in the fleet out there in the bay was responding to a signal from farther out. This was obviously the day they’d all been waiting for. Rabbit climbed up to the shoulder of the hill above the cave’s mouth to make sure that the sound of his horn would carry up to the rim of the ravine. Then he raised his horn and blew a long, mellow-sounding note. He stood listening intently for a response. After a few moments, a mournful-sounding reply came down from out of the mountains above Lattash. The reply was coming from some distance off, and the echoes resounded from the nearby hills and crags. A few moments later, Rabbit heard yet another reply, which was much fainter but nonetheless stirred its own echoes. Fainter and fainter responses, each trailing echoes, faded back up into the mountains. “That should do it,” Rabbit muttered to himself. “I hope somebody’s awake in Skell’s fort.” He turned and went on back down the hill.

When he reentered the cave, he found that Zelana’s relatives and the children were all there. The young Trogite, Keselo, was standing somewhat behind Veltan with a look of absolute bafflement on his face.

Everybody in the cave was watching Eleria intently as she lay sleeping on a fur robe near the fire with what appeared to be a pink ball in her hand.

“Did the warning reach Sorgan’s cousin?” Zelana’s elder brother, Dahlaine, asked.

“They were passing it along,” Rabbit replied. “I listened for a while, and the sounds of the horns were getting fainter and fainter as they moved up the ravine. I’d say that the word’s reached Skell by now.”

“How warm is the wind?” Zelana’s sister asked him.

“Warm enough, I’d say. If it’s still that warm when it reaches the head of the ravine, the snow up there—and in the surrounding mountains—won’t last very long. Why are we all watching Eleria like this? Is she sick or something?”

“She’s dreaming, Bunny,” the stout little girl who’d awakened him replied.

“Everybody has dreams. What’s so unusual about hers?”

“How much does this one know, Zelana?” Dahlaine asked in a quiet voice.

“Probably quite a bit more than he’s supposed to,” Zelana replied. “He’s a member of the crew of Sorgan’s ship, and Longbow found him to be very useful. He’s caught me tampering with things on several occasions already. I don’t think we’ll be able to hide very much from him. Eleria’s very fond of him, and Longbow’s his friend.”

“Does he know enough not to tell everybody he encounters just who and what we are?”

“I think so, yes.”

“What about this other one?” Dahlaine asked, pointing at the young Trogite Keselo.

“He’s young and inexperienced,” Veltan replied, “but Commander Narasan believes that he has a great deal of potential—assuming that we don’t get him killed.”

A sharp sense of apprehension came over Rabbit. He was almost positive that Dahlaine was about to tell him and the young Trogite some things that they didn’t really want to know.

“All right, then,” Dahlaine said, turning a stern eye on the pair of them. “We’d take it as a kindness if the two of you keep what I’m about to tell you strictly to yourselves. Of course, nobody from the outlands would believe you anyway, but let’s not start circulating rumors and exaggerations if we can avoid it. As you heard last night, there’s trouble in the wind here in my sister Zelana’s Domain, and Eleria’s currently dealing with it.”

“Baby sister?” Rabbit exclaimed. “Why don’t you or Lady Zelana take care of it?”

“That’s not permitted,” Dahlaine told him.

“Lady Zelana tampers with things all the time,” Rabbit protested. “She can do anything.”

“Not anything that kills people,” Dahlaine disagreed. “That’s one of the things that we aren’t permitted to do.”

“But Eleria is? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“She isn’t doing it. It’s her dream that kills. The dream brings natural forces into play. In this case, it’s going to be a very warm wind, I think—probably quite a bit warmer than is usually the case. Mother Sea controls the weather, but Eleria’s dream can override Mother Sea’s preferences. It gets just a bit complicated. To put it in the simplest of terms, Mother Sea wants to preserve all life—even the lives of the monstrous slaves of That-Called-the-Vlagh. Eleria’s dream will unleash a very hot wind that will cause a flood that’s going to be much more savage than the usual spring flood, and that flood will do most of your job here. It will kill most of the enemy creatures who are currently in the ravine above Lattash, so That-Called-the-Vlagh will be obliged to gather up more of its servants and command them to invade Zelana’s Domain again. That will take time, and we hope that extra time will give you outlanders the chance to occupy the ravine and hold back that second incursion.”