The Treasured One

‘Not as far as I know, they aren’t,’ Andar agreed.

The introduction of fire-missiles hurled by Trogite catapults elevated the sometimes stodgy Trogites quite noticeably in Longbow’s opinion. Naptha, pitch, and tar in the proper proportions most definitely disturbed not only the larger bug-men, but also the heavily-shelled spiders. So far as Longbow was able to determine, setting fire to any creature got its immediate attention. Being on fire probably would be just a little distracting.

The only problem lay in the indiscriminate launching of the fire-missiles into the ranks of the approaching enemies. Longbow dropped several dozen hard-shelled spiders with venom-tipped arrows planted in their eyes, but the bodies he wanted to retrieve in an intact condition inevitably were at least partially consumed by the indiscriminate distribution of fire.

‘Andar!’ he finally shouted. ‘Would you please stop throwing fire out there? You’re burning everything in sight.’

‘That was sort of what we had in mind, Longbow. If something works, don’t change it, I always say.’

‘That’s the problem. It doesn’t work - not for me, anyway. I want a raw turtle, not a cooked one.’

‘Oh, maybe I overlooked that. How long do you think it’s going to take you to kill one of them and retrieve the carcass?’

Longbow swept his eyes across the stake-dotted slope between this third barricade and the one perhaps a hundred paces on down below. There were several hundred dead enemies - mostly already burned to a crisp - lying between the two barricades, but none that were intact. ‘Why don’t you tell your men to relax for a while?’ he suggested. ‘They’re probably a bit tired after all this hard work, anyway. Let a few enemies get close to us. I’ll decide which one I want, kill it, and retrieve the body. Then your men can go back to cooking everything in sight.’

He looked out over the top of the barrier and saw several of the oversized bug-men tentatively advancing, but the hard-shelled spiders seemed to be holding back. It was quite obvious that the Trogite fire-missiles were making the servants of the Vlagh a bit nervous.

When the advancing bug-men reached the center of the open space between the two barricades without being showered with fire, however, the spider servants grew more bold and began to come spilling over the barricade on down the slope.

‘Not the best decision there,’ Longbow muttered under his breath as he carefully drew another arrow from his quiver.

The newer servants of the Vlagh were obviously more intelligent than the ones Longbow and his friends had encountered in the Ravine above Lattash, but their expanded intelligence seemed to have been limited to the introduction of a certain amount of caution. Of course fire would get the immediate attention of almost any creature in the whole world.

Longbow waited until one of the hard-shelled spiders was no more than a few yards from the front of the barricade, and then he loosed his arrow directly at one of the large eyes at the front of the creature’s head. The creature collapsed instantly, and several Trogite soldiers vaulted over the barricade and dragged the dead enemy back behind the protective wall.

‘That’s all we need, Andar!’ Longbow shouted. ‘Build up the fire again!’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ Andar bellowed. Then the catapults lashed forward again, raining fire down on the servants of the Vlagh once more.

Dahlaine spent most of that afternoon carefully examining the Vlagh’s most recent experiment. ‘That thing out there never ceases to amaze me,’ he told Longbow, Veltan, and Zelana after he’d finished. ‘This particular creation isn’t what it seems to be. There’s no hint of reptile here. This thing’s nothing more than a modified spider.’

‘That shell doesn’t look very spider-like to me, big brother,’ Veltan disagreed, as Rabbit and Narasan joined them.

‘The shell’s nothing more than a modification of an ordinary spider’s outer skeleton, Veltan. Evidently, the Vlagh saw the value of the Trogite breastplate, and then it looked around in the animal world until it found something that closely resembled it - the turtle shell, of course. Then it altered a spider to add that defensive shell to ward off the arrows that eliminated so many of its servants during the war in our sister’s Domain. The thing that troubles me the most here lies in the Vlagh’s experimentation with spiders. There’s no real connection between spiders and the Vlagh’s usual servants. The average spider lives on a steady diet of creatures that closely resemble the standard servant of the Vlagh. What we’ve got here is something on the order of what you’d get if you crossed a cat with a mouse.’

‘That’s absurd, Dahlaine!’ Zelana protested.

‘The Vlagh is an absurdity, dear sister. Hadn’t you noticed that? What baffles me the most here is just why the Vlagh chose spiders to serve as its armored servants. There are several varieties of beetles that would probably have worked just as well, and beetles are much closer to the Vlagh’s species than spiders are. Spiders are solitary creatures, and the original servants of the Vlagh cluster up.’

‘The world of bugs is awfully complicated, isn’t it?’ Rabbit observed.

‘Indeed it is,’ Dahlaine agreed.

‘Wilt thou not hear me, brave warrior?’ the soft voice half roused Longbow from his sleep. ‘The victory is mine, if thou wilt but stand aside. Though they know it not, the armies that come up from the south are mine, and they come here at my bidding. I command thee to stand aside and impede them no more. Go from this place. Stand no more between me and my victory.’

Longbow came up with his eyes wide open as a number of things came together all at once. Torl’s account of the ridiculous fairy tale the farmers far to the south in Veltan’s Domain had automatically repeated each time they heard the word ‘gold’, and the Trogite soldiers’ obsessive response to the tale suddenly began to make sense. Somebody - some woman, evidently - had picked up the idea of using gold for bait, and she’d just nearly caught about a half-million church soldiers.

But why?

The more Longbow thought about it, the more certain he became that the voice in his dream’s continual repetition of’get out of the way’ meant exactly that. And the instruction was clearly not meant for Longbow alone. His friends were also supposed to stand aside so that the two distinctly separate enemies could fall upon each other in a war of mutual extinction.

‘Good boy,’ the now-familiar voice murmured fondly. ‘I was sure that you’d get my point - eventually.’