The Treasured One

Sorgan shrugged. ‘I’m sure we’ll be able to keep busy in the meantime. Veltan’s map is just a bit on the teenie-weenie side, so I’ll feel a bit more confident after Skell’s looked at the real thing.’

‘Teenie-weenie?’ Narasan sounded a bit amused.

‘I think I might have spent too much time in the vicinity of Eleria up in the ravine,’ Sorgan said, shaking his head.

‘All right, then,’ Skell said. ‘We don’t really have to wait for Gunda to get here. Torl and I’ll go on ahead and scout things out. Give us a couple of days and we’ll have a fair idea of where we should set up the forts. Then the rest of the men can come on up and start laying down the bases for those forts. By the time Gunda gets here, the bases will be in place and Gunda’s men can take it from there.’

‘What do you think, Narasan?’ Sorgan asked.

‘It sounds good to me,’ Narasan agreed.

‘You’ll probably need about five ship-crews when you go on up there, wouldn’t you say?’ Sorgan asked Skell.

‘Get serious, cousin,’ Skell growled. ‘Torl’s crew and mine are already too many men. I’m not leading an invasion, you know. I’m just going up there to have a look around, and the fewer men I’ve got trailing behind me, the faster I’ll be able to move. I know what needs to be done, Sorgan, so just stay out of my way and let me do it.’

Skell and Torl set sail at first light the following morning, primarily to get clear of the bay before cousin Sorgan woke up and started adding more and more ships to the advance party. For some reason, Sorgan always seemed to believe that ‘more is better’. They’d argued about that quite often when they were younger men.

Skell and his brother thought that it would take about two days to reach the mouth of the River Vash, and Skell spent most of his time getting better acquainted with the archer called Longbow. A number of things had happened in the ravine leading down to the village of Lattash that had demonstrated that Longbow knew more about their enemies than anybody else, and that made him extremely valuable.

It was late in the afternoon on their first day out when Skell joined Longbow at the bow of the Shark. ‘I spent most of my time building that fort when we were trying to block off that ravine,’ Skell said, ‘so I don’t really know all that much about the people we’re fighting. I’ve heard that you know more about them than anybody else, so I think you might be the one I should talk with. Is there anything I should know?’

‘The most important thing you should know about the creatures of the Wasteland is that they have no sense of fear,’ Longbow replied.

‘They’re brave, you mean?’

‘I wouldn’t think of it as “brave”, Skell. “Stupid” might come closer, but that’s not quite correct either. As individuals, they don’t have anything at all that we’d call intelligence. They just do exactly what the Vlagh wants them to do - even if it’s impossible.’

‘I’d say that “stupid” comes pretty close, then.’

Longbow shrugged. ‘Their minds don’t work the way ours do -probably because they don’t have separate minds. What one of them knows, they all know, and their decisions are made by that group awareness. The center of that awareness is “That-Called-the-Vlagh”. The Vlagh makes the decisions, and a servant of the Vlagh will keep trying to carry out those decisions, even when it’s the only one left alive.’

‘That gets right back to “stupid”, doesn’t it?’

‘We might look at it that way, but they don’t. Of course, they don’t know that they can die. As far as they know, they’ll live forever, and nothing can possibly kill them.’

‘How did you manage to figure all this out, Longbow?’

‘I’m a hunter, Skell, and the first thing a hunter learns is to think the way whatever he’s hunting thinks. If he can’t, he doesn’t eat very often.’ Longbow looked out over the choppy water ahead of the Shark’s bow. ‘You spend most of your time out here on the face of Mother Sea, don’t you?’

‘That’s what sailors do, Longbow.’

‘Have you spent very much of your time fishing?’

‘Some, yes. Why?’

‘When you’re fishing, you bait your fishhook with something you think the fish will want to eat, don’t you?’

‘If I want to catch any, yes.’

‘Then a good fisherman has learned to think like a fish, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I’d never thought of it exactly like that, but you’re probably right,’ Skell conceded. ‘What sort of bait works best when you’re fishing for snake-men?’

‘I’ve had fairly good luck with people,’ Longbow replied with a faint smile.

‘People?’ Skell said sharply.

‘Don’t get excited, Skell. If you put people out in front of the creatures of the Wasteland, they’ll rush out into the open to try to kill them, and that makes it easy to hit them with arrows. The servants of the Vlagh don’t have any idea of what an arrow is, so they don’t understand why all of their friends are falling down. There are other ways to do it, but using people for bait seems to work best. Floods and volcanos work fairly well, but waking them up can get a little complicated. It’s better to keep things simple.’

They reached the mouth of the River Vash late in the afternoon of the following day, and Omago’s bearded friend, Nanton, was waiting on the beach just to the north of the river mouth. Skell and Omago went ashore in one of the Shark’s skiffs, and Omago introduced Skell to their guide.

‘Are all the men on both boats going to come with us?’ Nanton asked Skell.

‘Ships,’ Skell corrected absently.

‘What?’

‘We call them ships, not boats.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘I’m not really sure,’ Skell admitted. ‘I was sort of thinking about this when we were sailing up here from Veltan’s place, and it seems to me that a dozen or so men might be enough for our first run on up to the top. All we’re really going up there for is to take a quick look around. The thing that’s really important will be marking the trail so that the armies that’ll be coming along later will know how to get up there. Have you come across any enemies yet?’

‘None so far this summer,’ the shepherd said. ‘There were some of them nosing around early last spring asking questions, but I haven’t encountered any up on top yet.’