The Younger Gods (The Dreamers 4)

Gunda laughed. "I didn't try it, but I'd say that if a man happened to spit anyplace out there, the spit would turn into ice before it hit the ground." He looked around. "This is a very good fort, I guess, but if it keeps snowing and getting colder every minute, we might not need it at all. The bug-people will all freeze to death before they even get up here." He gave Tlantar a speculative look. "This blizzard is Lord Dahlaine's way to stop the bug-people right in their tracks, isn't it? I mean, he can do that, can't he?"

Two-Hands shook his head. "Dahlaine's not permitted to kill things. We can kill them, but he can't. I'd say that this blizzard is just a natural reaction of winter to Dahlaine's decision to hold the weather back until we all got here. As soon as Dahlaine loosened his grip on her, she threw all the storms down this way at the same time. The seasons get very cranky when somebody interferes with their personal entertainment."

"Are you saying that the seasons can actually think?"

"I wouldn't call it thinking, friend Gunda." Longbow stepped in. "Things build up as time passes, and winter things build up more than things in the other seasons. This particular storm probably didn't originate in winter, though. I took a quick look down Long-Pass when we started to come back down from the top of the wall. It's snowing very hard on the slope that comes up out of the Wasteland, but it's hardly snowing at all down in Long-Pass. I'd say that somebody's tampering."

"Your 'unknown friend' maybe?" Gunda asked.

"It's altogether possible, wouldn't you say? She is on our side, after all, and every bug the blizzard kills is one less that we'll have to kill."

"That takes a lot of the fun out of this war, Longbow," Gunda complained.

"I suppose you could scold her if you're feeling cheated," Longbow replied mildly.

"Ah—no, I don't think I'll do that," Gunda said. "I definitely don't want to irritate that one."

"Sound thinking," Two-Hands noted.

Narasan, the chief of the Trogites, had been conferring with Gunda's friend Andar in the fort that was about a mile down the pass from this one, and he came up to Gunda's fort the next morning with his constant companion, the warrior queen Trenicia. "Is somebody tampering again?" he asked when he joined Gunda and his friends in the central room of the fort. "All we were getting down in Andar's fort were a few random snowflakes, but that's a serious snowstorm off to the west."

"Longbow here thinks that it might be his unknown friend again," Gunda replied. "After some of the things she did down in Veltan-land last summer and what she did a month or so ago in Dahlaine-land, this snowstorm is the sort of thing she seems to like. She's got the bug-people all pinned down on that slope that comes up out of the Wasteland, and they're probably all very busy freezing to death."

"I just wish that our friend out there could come up with a way to eliminate the Vlagh," Narasan said. "Once the Vlagh is gone, we'll all be able to go back home."

The farmer Omago smiled. "We'll miss you terribly, Commander," he said, "but you have things that need to be done when you return to your homeland, don't you?"

"I'm sure that we do," Narasan replied. "I think I'd like to get to know our new emperor a little better. He's pretty much destroyed the Trogite Church, but there are some other things he might want to consider. Selling the higher-ranking members of the clergy as slaves was most appropriate, but I think it's about time to take a hard look at the whole idea of slavery."

"I don't know about that," Gunda said. "If he tries to abolish slavery, the people who own slaves and the rascals who sell them will put a sizeable price on his head."

"Now there's a thought," Narasan said. "If we hired on to protect him, we could ask just about any price, wouldn't you say?"

"The Palvanum would come unraveled if we stuck our hands that deep into the imperial treasury," Gunda replied.

"Maybe it's time to take a hard look at the Palvanum as well, Gunda," Narasan suggested. Then he looked around at the others in the room. "This is an internal matter in the Empire, and I don't think our friends here would be very interested. Right now we'll need to concentrate on what we'll need to do here when it stops snowing."

Two-Hands was catching a strong odor of ambition. When Narasan returned to his homeland again, he'd probably become extremely important in the Trogite Empire, and sooner or later he could very well take the imperial throne for himself. Two-Hands smiled. If that did happen, he was fairly sure that he knew exactly who would be the empress in the Land of Trog.

It was about mid-morning on the following day when the young Trogite soldier Keselo rode up to the back of Gunda's fort. The blizzard had subsided a bit during the night, but the snow was still piling up on the slope below the fort.

Keselo climbed down off his horse and came on into the fort. He touched one hand to his forehead in what the Trogites called a salute when Narasan joined him.

"Is there a problem of some kind?" Narasan asked him.

"There's no easy way to say this, sir," Keselo replied. "It seems that Lady Zelana's sister doesn't exist anymore."

"You said what?" Narasan exclaimed.

"I didn't see it personally, sir, but Captain Sorgan told me to get up here as fast as I could and let you know what happened. If I understood him correctly, Lady Aracia ordered the little Dreamer Lillabeth to vanish—or die—or something like that."

"She killed that baby?" Narasan exclaimed.

"She might have been trying, sir," Keselo replied, "but that's not what happened. As soon as she said it, she just disintegrated. At least that's what Eleria told Sorgan. Her body turned into little speckles of light. Then the lights all faded, and Lady Aracia wasn't there anymore. Captain Sorgan had spoken with Veltan, and Veltan told him that his sister had tried to do something that's prohibited, and when she attempted to do that, she was obliterated."

"Dear Gods!" Narasan exclaimed. "Who's in charge down there now?"

"I suppose you could say that it's the child Lillabeth, sir," Keselo replied, "but Captain Sorgan has seen her a time or two, and she's no longer a child, and her name is Enalla now."

"Are all those fat priests worshiping this Enalla now?" Gunda asked.

Keselo shook his head. "Captain Hook-Beak told me that she ordered them not to, and then she sent word out to the local farmers that they didn't need to deliver food to the temple anymore."