The Reavers of Skaith-Volume III of The Book of Skaith Read online

  Volume Three of The Book of Skaith

  REAVERS OF SKAITH

  Leigh Brackett

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  The Reavers of Skaith: Copyright ©1976 Leigh Brackett Hamilton First Edition: August 1976 Del Rey books

  A Baen Ebook

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 0-3453-1829-3

  ISBN 13: 978-0-3453-1829-9

  Cover art by Doug Chaffee

  Maps by Michael Young

  First ebook, February 2008

  Electronic version by WebWrights

  www.webwrights.com

  To L. Sprague de Camp

  and

  Lin Carter:

  Swordsmen and sorcerers

  Sans peur et sans reproche

  1

  Strong bindings held N'Chaka fast to the flat, hard surface whereon he lay.

  There was too much light above him. He could barely make out the face that leaned and looked down into his own. It moved and pulsed and swam with the movement of his blood, a handsome face cut from burnished gold, with a crest of hair like curled wires. There were other faces, dim in the shadows at the sides, but only that one mattered. He could not remember whose face it was. Only that it mattered.

  There was pain again, the hollow jab of a needle.

  N'Chaka snarled, and fought the straps.

  The golden face asked a question.

  N'Chaka heard. He did not wish to answer, but he had no choice. The poison running in him forced him to answer.

  He spoke, in the clicks and grunts of a language so primitive that it was only a little more complex than the speech of apes.

  Penkawr-Che, the golden man, said, "He reverts to that every time. Interesting. Bring Ashton."

  Ashton was brought.

  The question was repeated, and the answer.

  "You're his foster-father. Do you know what language he is speaking?"

  "The aboriginals of Sol One speak that tongue. He was reared by them after his own parents were killed. Until he came into my care—at fourteen, or thereabouts—that was the only speech he knew."

  "Can you translate?"

  "I was one of the administrators of Sol One. Part of my duty was to protect the abos from the miners. I wasn't always successful. But I knew them well." He translated meticulously, and smiled. "There are no words in that vocabulary for the things you want to know about."

  "Ah," said Penkawr-Che. "Well, then. Let me think."

  2

  The million little bells of Ged Darod chimed softly from the roofs and spires of the Lower City, where the warm wind rocked them. It was a cheerful sound, speaking of love and kindness. But in the packed streets—among the temples to Old Sun, to Skaith-Mother and Sea-Mother, and to my lord Darkness and his lady Cold and their daughter Hunger, the deadly trinity who already possessed almost half the planet—the people were silent and dismayed.

  The temples held many suppliants, asking the gods to protect their own; but the larger portion of the crowd looked elsewhere. Farers in the thousands filled the parks and the pleasure gardens; made up of all the races of the Fertile Belt, dressed, painted, and adorned in every conceivable manner, these free, careless, and perpetually itinerant children of the Lords Protector—who saw, through their servants, the Wandsmen, that the hungry were always fed and the needy succored—turned their faces to the Upper City. The Wandsmen had never failed them. Surely they would somehow manage to turn aside the alien menace that still threatened them from out the sky, even after the burning of the starport.

  One ship had gone from Skaith carrying traitors who wished to overturn the rule of the Wandsmen and replace it with that of a foreign power. If this should be accomplished, the Farers knew that they, and the way of life that sustained them, would be swept away.

  They milled in the vast square below the Wandsmen's Gate and waited in the hope of salvation.

  High in the Upper City, which housed the heart and center of the Wandsmen's power, the Lord Protector Ferdias stood at a window in the Palace of the Twelve, looking down at the splendor of flashing domes and glittering peacock tiles. Ferdias was an old man, but age had not bowed his unyielding back nor dimmed the harsh fire of his eye. He wore the white robes of his rank, and not the slightest shadow of humility betrayed the fact that Ferdias had come back to Ged Darod as a fugitive.

  Yet he was keenly aware of that fact. Very keenly. Especially upon this day.

  A massive door opened somewhere behind him. Voices sounded, subdued and distant in the cavernous room. Ferdias remained as he was. There was no longer any urgency.

  He had begun his life of service as a gray apprentice within these mighty walls. He had not known then that Old Sun, the ginger star that ruled his heaven, had been recorded as a number on the galactic charts of a civilization he had never heard of. He had not known that he dwelt, along with his sun and his planet, in a remote sector of something these people had named the Orion Spur. He had not known that the galaxy, out beyond his lonely little sky, contained a vast and busy complex of worlds and men known as the Galactic Union.

  How happy he had been without that knowledge! How happy he would have remained had it never been vouchsafed him. But knowledge had dropped unbidden, in flame and thunder, out of the clouds, and innocence was forever lost.

  In a little more than a dozen years, the starships had brought many benefits to the sad old world of Ferdias' birth, starved for the metals and minerals it no longer possessed. So the foreign men had been allowed to come and go, carefully watched and supervised, from the single starport at Skeg. But the ships had brought less welcome things: heresies, treasons, rebellions, war—and, at the end, a mad stranger out of the stars, who had set the all-powerful Lords Protector fleeing down the roads of Skaith away from their burning rooftree, homeless as any Farers.

  Ferdias set his hands on the massive stone of the windowsill and felt the solidity of it. He smiled. He saw the light of Old Sun shining upon the streets below, upon the mass of humanity that waited there, and his heart opened with a physical pang, sending a flooding warmth throughout his body so that he caught his breath and his sight became blurred with tears. These were his people, to whose welfare he had devoted his life—the poor, the weak, the homeless, the hungry. His children, his beloved children.

  Because of my error, he said to them in the silence of his mind, you were almost destroyed. But the gods of Skaith have not forsaken you. And, he added humbly, Nor me.

  In the room behind him, someone coughed. It was neither a hastening nor an impatient cough.

  Ferdias sighed and turned.

  "My lord Gorrel," he said, "get you back to your bed. You have no business here."

  "No," said Gorrel, and shook his gaunt old head "I shall remain."

  He sat in a large chair that was a cocoon of wrappings and cushions; he had not yet recovered from the journey south. Ferdias thought that Gorrel was not likely to recover, and that it was less the hardships of travel than the shattering shock of what had happened at the Citadel that had broken Gorrel's health.

  "Well, then," he said gently, "perhaps you may find fresh strength in what I have to tell you."

  Besides Gorrel, in the room now stood five other old men in the same white robes that Ferdias wore, making up the seven Lords Protector. Behind them were the Twelve, the council of senior Wandsmen in tunics of somber red, with gold-tipped
wands of office in their hands. Standing a little apart from the Twelve was another red-clad Wandsman, on whose proud and bitter face Ferdias' gaze rested for a long moment.

  "This has been a cruel time," Ferdias began, "a time of tribulation, when it seemed as if the very fabric of our society was being rent. Tregad joined the revolt against us, and we suffered a crushing defeat at Irnan. We were betrayed, here at Ged Darod, by one of our own, the Wandsman Pedrallon, who caused a starship to land in defiance of our decree and take on passengers—men and women, including Pedrallon himself, who wished to deliver Holy Mother Skaith to the Galactic Union as a member planet, thus putting an end to our rule. It has been a time when we could foresee the destruction of twenty centuries of work and devotion in the service of mankind, a service which has endured since the Wandering."

  He paused, aware of their intent faces all turned toward him. He smiled again, with a kind of ferocious benevolence.

  "I have called you together here," he said, "to tell you that that time has ended."

  Out of the sudden shocked confusion of voices, one rose strong and clear, the voice of an orator. It was Jal Bartha, who would not be chosen from among the Twelve to take old Gorrel's place among the Lords Protector when it fell vacant, though Ferdias knew that he hoped to be. Jal Bartha's lack of judgment might have been borne, but his conceit never.

  "How can that be, my lord?" Jal Bartha demanded. "These traitors you speak of are well on their way to Pax, the man Stark moves among the city-states preaching the gospel of starflight, our Wandsmen are driven out or slain—"

  "If your silver tongue can be stilled for a moment," said Ferdias quietly, "I shall make all things clear."

  Jal Bartha flushed, and inclined his head stiffly.

  Ferdias glanced once again at the thirteenth Wandsman, and clapped his hands.

  A small door opened at the side of the great chamber. Two men in green tunics entered, with a third between them. He wore blue, marking his lesser rank, and he was young and utterly distressed.

  "This man's name is Llandric," said Ferdias. "One of Pedrallon's creatures, a small serpent in our midst. He has something to say to you." Llandric stammered.

  Ferdias commanded, on a note of chilled steel, "Say it, Llandric, as you said it to me."

  "Yes," he began, "I—I serve Pedrallon." He seemed to find his courage, facing their hostility with a sort of quiet defiance. "I believe that the peoples of Skaith must be free to emigrate, if only for one reason—that the planet's livable areas grow smaller each year and room must be made."

  "We do not require a lecture on Pedrallon's heresies," said Jal Bartha. "We understand them well enough."

  "I don't think you understand them at all," said Llandric, "but that's beside the point. After Pedrallon went away, we have continued to monitor the transceiver which he secured from the Antarean, Penkawr-Che, and which was Pedrallon's secret means of communication with the off-worlders. Because of that monitoring, I am able to tell you what has happened, and that is why I am here. I myself have heard the talking of the starships."

  The thirteenth Wandsman stepped forward. "What starships? I drove them all from Skeg, with the flames of the burning behind them. What starships?"

  "There are three," said Llandric. "One is the ship of Penkawr-Che, the off-worlder who agreed with Pedrallon and the man Stark to take our delegations to Galactic Center, at Pax. Penkawr-Che has betrayed us. He has not gone to Pax. He has returned to Skaith with the two other ships in company, and all his passengers."

  Ferdias quelled the outburst that followed. "My lords, please! Let him continue."

  "I first knew of this," Llandric said, "when word was brought to me that three ships had met in orbit above Skaith. I went at once to the hidden place where the transceiver is kept and listened, myself. Penkawr-Che had transferred three of his passengers—Pedrallon into one ship, Lady Sanghalain of Iubar and the person Morn into the other. This latter ship was to land at Iubar in the far south and demand payment for the Lady. The other ship was to go to Andapell, Pedrallon's country, where he is a prince and would bring a high ransom. Penkawr-Che himself was to land at Tregad and sell them back their elders, and then at Irnan for the same purpose. That has been done."

  There was a silence in the room—the silence of men digesting unlooked-for news, sucking the juices from it, tasting to see if it be truth.

  The thirteenth Wandsman spoke in a strange dry voice. "Irnan, you said."

  "Yes."

  "The man Stark was at Irnan. What of him?"

  "Tell them," said Ferdias. "They are much interested in the man Stark."

  "Penkawr-Che demanded Stark as part of the ransom. He has knowledge of some treasure in the High North that Penkawr-Che wants. The Antarean also took back the flying thing that he had left with Stark."

  The thirteenth Wandsman reached out and grasped Llandric's tunic at the throat. "Speak plainly," he said. "To demand is not necessarily to receive. What of the man Stark?"

  "He is taken. He is Penkawr-Che's prisoner."

  "Taken!"

  The Lords Protector savored that word. Lord Gorrel repeated it several times, rolling it between his skeletal jaws.

  "Taken," said the thirteenth Wandsman, "but not dead."

  "The last talk I heard between the ships was last night. Iubar had paid Sanghalain's ransom; Pedrallon had been redeemed in Andapell. They spoke about the temples and other places they would loot. Penkawr-Che had landed at a place the other captains knew of, and would begin to plunder the tlun villages in the jungles between the uplands and the sea. He was questioning Stark, he said, and hoped for results soon. Then he said he would kill both the Earthmen, though there was small chance they could ever testify about what the star-captains had done."

  Llandric shook his head angrily. "Stark is neither here nor there. These outlaw captains have come to rob and kill our people. That is why I made the decision to give myself up to you, so that you would know all this while there was yet time to stop them. And they must be stopped!"

  His voice had risen until he was all but shouting. "I know where some of them are," Llandric continued. "Where some of them intend to strike. They don't know that they were overheard. I didn't speak to them. It would have been useless, and I was afraid they might send one of the flying things to destroy the transceiver. But the ships are at rest now, while the flying things do the raiding, and if you move swiftly . . ."

  Ferdias said, "Enough, Llandric. My lords, you see how matters have turned out for us, how well Mother Skaith guards her own. The traitors have been made to pay for their folly. The man Stark is a prisoner and will die, along with Ashton. All the dangers that threatened us are swept away at a single stroke by one man's action. Shall we grudge that man his just reward?"

  There was noise enough in the room then, voices raised all at cross purposes like the sharp waves in a riptide.

  Llandric stared at Ferdias, not believing. "I thought perhaps Pedrallon was mistaken about you. I thought perhaps you honestly did not see where your policies were leading. But this is not a matter of opinion, this is fact. This is murder. And you speak of reward?"

  "My young fool," said Ferdias, not unkindly, "your people brought this scourge about, not we. Do not expect us to relieve you of your guilt." He held up his hands. "Please, my lords! Let us be tranquil and apply our minds."

  He moved back to the window, where he could see the flash of Old Sun's light on the golden domes and hear the chiming of the bells.

  "Because of us, our world was able to survive the chaos of the Wandering and reshape itself into a new and stable order that has endured for centuries and that will continue to endure as long as we control the forces of disruption. With the passing of the opportunity to escape by starship, those forces would seem to be controlled, since the disaffected no longer have any hope of evading their responsibilities.

  "But can we be sure that the threat will not come again? Other starships may seek us out as the earlier ones did. Other folk may
be tempted as the people of Irnan were tempted."

  He paused, and the others waited: his six white-robed colleagues; the Twelve in red, with their gold-tipped wands; the thirteenth Wandsman with the bitter face; Llandric between his guards.

  Ferdias said, "I wish this lesson to be so well learned that it will never be forgotten. I wish the name of foreigner to be anathema. I wish the people of Skaith to learn, in pain and terror, to hate everything that may come to them from beyond the sky. I wish no one ever again to desire foreign rule."

  He looked down upon the crowded streets of the Lower City. "A few innocents will suffer, and that is to be regretted. But it is for the good of all. My lords, are we in agreement that no steps shall be taken against these star-captains?"

  Only Jal Bartha raised a question. "The depredations may not be so harsh or so widespread as to cause such a feeling among the people."

  "Great trees need only little seeds to spring from. We shall see to it that the news travels." Ferdias went and stood in front of Llandric. "Do you understand now?"

  "I understand that I've offered up my life for nothing." Llandric's young face had taken on a totally unfamiliar sternness. It seemed to have aged ten years. "This is how you do good. You allow your children—the children you claim to love so dearly—to be slaughtered out-of-hand as a cold matter of policy."

  "That is why you could never be a Lord Protector," said Ferdias. "You have not the long view." He shrugged. "Not many will be slaughtered, after all. And in any case, how could we hope to stand against the weapons of these foreigners?"

  Llandric said cruelly, "You are an old man, Ferdias, and your long view is all of the past. When the starving hordes close in on you from north and south, and there is no escape for anyone, remember who it was that barred the roads of space." The guards took him out. Ferdias spoke to the thirteenth Wandsman. "A day of triumph, Gelmar, after long adversity. I wished you to share it."