“I think,” Rod said slowly, “that this is one little virus that had better be quarantined and eliminated, but fast.”
“Fear not that,” Tuan growled. “Sir Maris hath even now dispatched men throughout the kingdom to listen for word of this monster. When we find him he will be in our dungeons ere the sun sets.”
The words sent a cold chill down Rod’s spine. Sure, when he said it, it sounded okay—but when it came from the King, it had the full iron ring of censorship in its worst form. For the best of reasons, of course—but it was still censorship.
That was about when he began to realize that the real danger here was Gramarye’s reaction to attack, not the raids themselves.
“I’m not so sure it’d do much good to lock up just one man,” he said slowly.
“ ‘Just one’?” Catharine looked up, her eyes wild. “What dost thou say?”
“There could be several.” Rod chose his words carefully. “When you have beastmen attacking from the outside, and you suddenly discover enemies inside…”
“Aye, I should have thought!” Tuan’s fist clenched. “They would be in league, would they not?”
“We call them ‘fifth columnists,’ where I come from.” Rod stared at the flames. “And now that you mention it, Tuan, the thought occurs to me…”
“The enemy behind the enemy again?” Tuan breathed.
Rod nodded. “Why couldn’t it be the same villain behind both enemies?”
“Of what dost thou speak?” Catharine demanded.
“The beastmen’s king be o’erthrown, sweet chuck.” Tuan stepped up behind her, clasping her shoulder. “Their king, whom they call the Eagle. He hath been ousted by one whom they name Mughorck the shaman. Mughorck is his name; and by ‘shaman,’ they mean some mixture of priest, physician, and wizard.”
“A priest again!” Catharine glared up at her husband. “Methinks there is too much of the religious in this.”
“They can be very powerful tools,” Rod said slowly.
“They can indeed. Yet, who wields these tools?”
“Nice question. And we may need the answer FESSter then we can get it.”
Behind his ear, Fess’s voice murmured, “Data cannot yet support an accurate inference.”
Well, Rod had to admit the truth of it; there wasn’t any real evidence of collusion. On the way back north, he’d pretty much decided that the shaman was probably backed by the futurian totalitarians. Might even be one himself; never ignore the wonders of plastic surgery. What he’d effected was, essentially, a palace revolt with popular support, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, back on old Terra.
But that was quite another breed from the witch-hunt the Gramaryan preachers were mounting, which wasn’t the kind of movement that lent itself well to any really effective central control. A single voice could start it, but it tended to get out of hand very quickly. A central power could direct its broad course but couldn’t determine the details. It was an anarchist’s technique, destroying the bonds of mutual trust that bound people together into a society—and it could lay the groundwork for a warlord.
Of course, if a warlord took over a whole nation, the distinction between warlord and dictator became rather blurry; but the anarchist’s technique was to keep several warlords fighting, and increase their number as much as possible.
“Dost thou truly believe,” Tuan asked, “that both are prongs of one single attack?”
Rod shook his head. “Can’t be sure; they could just as easily be two independent efforts, each trying to take advantage of the other. But for all practical purposes, we’re fighting two separate enemies, and have to split our forces.”
“Then,” said Tuan with decision, “the wisest course is to carry the fight to one enemy, and maintain a guard against the other.” He looked down at Catharine. “We must double the size of our army, at least, my love; for, some must stay here to guard whilst some go overseas to the beastmen’s domain.”
“Thou dost speak of war, mine husband—of war full and bloody.”
Tuan nodded gravely.
Catharine squeezed her eyes shut. “I had feared it would come to this pass. Eh, but I have seen men in battle ere now—and the sight did not please me.”
That, Rod decided, was another huge improvement.
Catharine looked up at Tuan again. “Is there no other way?”
He shook his head heavily. “There cannot be, sweet chuck. Therefore must we gather soldiers—and shipwrights.”
Tuan, Rod guessed, was about to invent a navy.
All Rod had said was, “Take me to the beastmen.” He hadn’t asked for a tour of the dungeons.
On second thought, maybe he had.
The sentry who guided him turned him over to a fat warder with a bunch of huge keys at his belt. Then the soldier turned to go. Rod reached out and caught his arm. “Hold on. The beastmen’re supposed to be our guests, not our captives. What’re they doing down here?”
The sentry’s face hardened. “I know not, Lord Warlock. ‘Tis as Sir Maris commanded.”
Rod frowned; that didn’t sound like the old knight. “Fetch me Sir Maris forthwith—uh, that is, give him my compliments and tell him I request his presence down here.” Then he turned to follow the warder while the sentry clattered off angrily.
Rod lost track of his whereabouts very quickly; the dungeon was a virtual maze. Probably intentionally…
Finally the warder stopped, jammed a one-pound key into a porthole lock in a door that was scarcely wider than he was. He turned it with both hands, and the key grated through a year or two’s worth of rust. Then the warder kicked the door open, revealing a twenty-foot-square chamber with a twelve-foot ceiling and five glowering beastmen who leaped to their feet, hands reaching for daggers that weren’t there any more. Then the flickering light of the warder’s torch showed them who their visitor was, and they relaxed—or at least Yorick did, and the others followed suit.
Rod took a breath to start talking, then had to shove his face back into the hall for a second one. Braced against aroma, he stepped through the doorway, looking around him, his nose wrinkling. “What in the name of Heaven do you call this?”
“A dungeon,” Yorick said brightly. “I thought that’s where we were.”
“This is an insult!”
Yorick nodded slowly. “Yeah… I’d say that was a good guess…”
Rod spun about, glaring at the warder. “These men are supposed to be our guests!‘’
“Men?” the warder snorted. Then he squelched his feelings under an occupational deadpan. “I but do as I am bid, Lord Warlock.”
“And what’s this?” Rod reached out a foot to nudge a wooden bowl next to Yorick’s foot.
“Gruel,” Yorick answered.
Rod felt his gorge rise. “What’s in it?”
“They didn’t bother telling us,” Yorick said. “But let me guess—an assortment of grains from the bottom of the bin. You know—the ones that fell out of the bag and spilled on the floor…”
“I hope you didn’t eat any of it!”
“Not really.” Yorick looked around. “To tell you the truth, it’s not what’s in it that bothers me. It’s how old it is.”
Rod scowled. “I thought that was a trick of the light.”
“No.” Yorick jerked his head up at a window set high in the wall—barred, of course. “We took it over into the sunshine while there still was some. It really is green. Made great bait, though.”
“Bait?” Rod looked up with foreboding.
“Yeah. We’ve been holding a rat-killing contest.” Yorick shrugged. “Not much else to do with the time.” He jerked his head toward a pile of foot-long corpses. “So far, Kroligh’s ahead, seven to four.”