The Treasured One

‘It’ll cost you a kiss-kiss, Longbow,’ she said with a sly little smirk.

They gathered near the back side of Gunda’s black basalt wall late that afternoon as the sun neared the ridge-line to the west. Narasan and most of his officers were there, and Rabbit and Torl sort of represented Sorgan.

‘Just to make sure that we all know what this is all about, why don’t you tell us what you saw near that waterfall, Longbow?’

‘There’s not really too much to tell, Narasan,’ Longbow replied. ‘The church armies seem to have finally realized that trying to come up here through those various stream-beds wasn’t going to work for them, since we had archers in place to shower arrows on them every time they tried that. Now they’re all gathered just below the falls, and they’re building a ramp up along one side of that gorge.’

‘That’s stupid, Longbow,’ Rabbit declared. ‘Your bowmen can rain arrows down on them all day long if they do that.’

Longbow shook his head. ‘They’re roofing it over, little friend. From what I was able to see, the roofs not very substantial, but it’s good enough to hide them, and an archer has to be able to see what he’s shooting arrows at.’ He paused, squinting off toward the rosy sunset. ‘Their ramp isn’t really all that wide, though,’ he added. ‘I suppose we could put a sizeable number of archers in place to kill them as they came out into the open. We’ll need a lot of arrows, though.’

‘You’re on your own this time, Longbow,’ Rabbit said with a sly grin. ‘My forge and my anvil are still on board the Seagull, so I won’t be able to help you very much.’ Then he frowned. ‘This is starting to have a very familiar smell, Longbow. The thought of all that gold on board the Seagull turned Kajak’s head off back in the harbor at Kweta, and now we’ve got several Trogite armies that seem to be having the same problem.’

‘That’s something we might want to consider, Veltan,’ Zelana said to her brother. ‘When you came looking for me in the Land of Maag, you picked up a few hints in Weros that the Vlagh had servants in the Land of Maag, and they’d been tampering with Kajak.’

‘Picking up a few Maag pirates is one thing, dear sister,’ Veltan replied dubiously, ‘but we’re talking about five Trogite armies and half of the priesthood of the Amarite church here. I think you might be stretching things more than a little bit.’

‘It’s not impossible, little brother. The Vlagh had servants watching us - even when we were a long way from the Land of Dhrall - and that means that it’s aware of just how big an impact gold has on the outlanders. In a very real sense, we’ve been using gold as bait. I caught Sorgan, and you caught Narasan. Wouldn’t you say that the Vlagh might very well have realized just how good our bait really is? If it’s had servants out there waving gold at those Amarite priests - and all those church armies - it’s entirely possible that it’s managed to catch more than a few of them, and now they’re blindly rushing up from the south, overcome with greed and totally unaware of just exactly what will happen to them if they win.’

‘And just what might that be?’ Gunda asked her with a puzzled look on his face.

Longbow stepped in at that point. ‘After they’ve rushed up here and destroyed you and all of our other Trogite friends, the Vlagh won’t really need them any more,’ he explained. ‘If that’s the case, it’s quite possible that the servants of the Vlagh will invite their newfound friends to dinner, where the friends will be the main course.’

‘That’s terrible!’ Gunda exclaimed in horror.

‘Oh, I don’t know, Gunda,’ Andar said. ‘When you’ve got two enemies and one of them eats the other one, it solves quite a few problems, wouldn’t you say?’

‘All right, then,’ Narasan said in a crisp tone, ‘we might not like this very much, but we are going to have to deal with it. If anybody has any ideas, now’s the time to let the rest of us know about them.’

‘We do have the advantage of higher ground,’ Danal mused. ‘That roof the church soldiers are building over their ramp might protect them from arrows, but I don’t think it’s sturdy enough to stay in place if we start dropping boulders on it.’

‘Particularly when we’re dropping them from two hundred feet up,’ Andar added in his deep voice. ‘That ramp of theirs is an interesting idea, but it’s got a few holes in it - or it will have after we’ve dropped some five-ton boulders on it.’ He frowned. ‘They should have realized that, shouldn’t they? The commanders of the church armies aren’t really all that bright, but even an idiot would be able to see that, wouldn’t he?’

‘Their brains have gone to sleep,’ Sorgan’s cousin Torl said bluntly. ‘That’s what I was telling you before. Just as soon as one of the farmers down south recited that fairy tale about oceans of gold up here, the soldiers started to run in this direction as if their very lives depended on it. They aren’t thinking any more, so they can’t see any holes in a plan that some halfwit scrapes off the wall. Somebody’s tampering with them somehow.’

‘It is the sort of thing the Vlagh might try, little brother,’ Zelana suggested to Veltan.

‘I have to admit that it smells a bit Vlaghish,’ Veltan agreed, ‘but as closely as we’ve been able to determine, there are five church armies down there. That’s a half-million men, Zelana! Some of those men should be at least partially awake, wouldn’t you say?’

Zelana shook her head. ‘The Vlagh’s accustomed to dealing with large numbers of servants, and there’s no such thing as independent thought among its creatures.’ She paused. ‘If the level of thought among those church soldiers has been reduced to that of insects, the only thing that concerns them right now is the possibility that others might reach the gold before they do.’

‘You could be right, dear sister,’ Veltan agreed glumly.

‘They’ll have to get up past the waterfall before they give us much trouble,’ Narasan said firmly as he adjusted his iron breastplate. Then he looked at Padan. ‘Why don’t you gather up a few thousand men and go on down to the south end of this basin, old friend? Let’s find out how much church soldiers enjoy a sudden downpour of five-ton boulders.’