The Treasured One

‘What do you need a date for, Gunda?’ Padan asked curiously.

‘I was talking with Andar back in Castano a while back, and we both agreed that Jalkan’s deathday should be a national holiday in the Empire.’

‘Deathday?’ Padan asked curiously.

‘That’s like a birthday, but when it involves Jalkan “deathday” is a lot nicer than “birthday”, wouldn’t you say?’

‘You won’t get any arguments from me there, Gunda.’

Jalkan helped his grossly fat companion over the barricade, and then he numbly followed - for almost three feet. Then he abruptly stopped and began to claw at the fine-spun web that had just snared him. His gross companion ignored his cries for help and rushed on toward the gleaming desert of imitation gold reaching out to the horizon from no more than a few feet ahead of him.

Then he too came to an abrupt stop as the silken web snared him as well.

‘Is that webbing really that strong?’ Gunda asked.

‘Very strong,’ I assured him, ‘and it stretches. The more those two struggle, the more they’ll become snarled up in that webbing.’

Then the hard-shelled spider came scampering out from what appeared to be a hastily constructed hiding-place just beyond the barricade and quickly spun more and more webbing to hold its two captives more securely.

‘Why’s the spider wasting all that time spinning webs?’ Gunda asked curiously. ‘Why doesn’t it just kill them and have done with it?’

‘I don’t think you really want to know, Gunda,’ I advised him.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,’ he said stubbornly.

‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘Spiders spin webs to snare creatures to eat, but spiders don’t have mandibles like other insects do, so spider-venom contains a very powerful digestive fluid that liquefies the internal organs - and the flesh - of its victim. Then the spider sucks that liquid out of the victim.’

‘The venom kills them though, doesn’t it?’

‘It paralyzes them, but it’s not instantly lethal like snake-venom is. The spider uses its web and the paralyzing venom as a means to store food for later.’

‘That’s horrible!’ Gunda exclaimed.

‘It’s very practical, though,’ I told him. ‘If a spider has its web in the right place, it almost always has a supply of food available.’

Jalkan and his gross companion, now completely wrapped in the spider’s webbing, were screaming for help, but their soldiers ignored them and continued their mindless charge down the slope, drawn by the vast desert of glittering yellow sand far below.

Then there came yet another of those loud rumbling sounds from deep within the earth and an even more violent earthquake.

‘Move back!’ I sharply warned Narasan and his men. ‘It’s about to break loose!’

We all scurried along the top of Gunda’s remaining wall toward the eastern end and - we hoped - safety.

The thundering sound from far below us continued, but it seemed to be rising up through the shuddering rock.

And then, perhaps a hundreds yards on down the slope, there came a thunderous eruption that was not molten rock.

It was water, and it gushed forth in a vast wave that swept the church soldiers and the servants of the Vlagh away indiscriminately.

From far, far out in the Wasteland there came a shriek of frustration that rapidly faded off into the distance as the servants of the Vlagh rushed to carry our enemy off to safety.

Several things came together for me at that point, and I was shaken to my very core by what Longbow’s unknown friend had just achieved. This was why the geyser that had been the source of the River Vash had suddenly gone dry. Unknown Friend had moved it from the center of the basin to the upper end of the north slope to eradicate the servants of the Vlagh and the five church armies with a single stroke. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a steadily rising body of water down on the floor of the Wasteland. Unknown Friend had just replaced her ‘sea of gold’ with a sea of water that would permanently block off my brother’s Domain from any further attacks by the creatures of the Wasteland.

The now-horizontal geyser produced a great deal of mist, naturally, and the sun was high above, so the sudden rainbow that appeared over the growing sea down in the Wasteland could, of course, have been nothing but a natural phenomenon, but I chose not to believe that it was something that simple. Unknown Friend, it appeared, was very pleased with her pretty invention, and a rainbow is a sort of blessing, after all.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ I said to our friends with feigned casualness, ‘I guess that pretty much takes care of everything up here. I suppose we might as well pack up and go on back down the hill.’

It was about two weeks later when we gathered again in Veltan’s map-room. My brother’s map was now seriously out of date, and there was no real reason for us to be there rather than in some other part of the house, but for some reason, we all seemed more comfortable there.

There was quite a bit of storytelling at first. Our friends had been widely scattered during the actual war - if what had happened up there had really been a war. To my way of looking at things, our contributions this time had been minimal at best. Longbow’s Unknown Friend had done most of the work. Of course, Ashad’s dream had produced the flood, but the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that Unknown Friend had been tampering with Ashad since the very beginning. The ‘second invasion’ in Ashad’s first dream had provided a huge force that had met the invasion of the servants of the Vlagh with enough force to hold them in place until the flood destroyed both enemies.

‘Let me tell you, old friend,’ Sorgan was saying to Narasan, ‘we ran on up out of that basin like a fox with his tail on fire. Those earthquakes that set everything to bouncing around raised a lot of memories about the fire mountains back in the ravine, and the notion of getting cooked alive can make a man run about twice as fast as he ever thought he could.’

‘It was a sensible thing to do, Sorgan,’ Narasan said. ‘None of us knew exactly what was going to happen, so getting out of the way made a lot of sense.’

‘I seem to remember that “get out of the way” was something Longbow’s dream lady told him forty or fifty times every time he closed his eyes,’ Rabbit added. ‘She knew what she was talking about, all right.’ The little man squinted slightly. ‘Whatever happened to that greedy one who started that second invasion. Did he get drowned like all the other church people did?’