“With energy drained from youths and maidens?” Tafas was a youth himself, or close enough to take it personally. “I will not lead an army with such a force!”
Nirobus shrugged. “You must take power where you can find it, Lord Tafas, or you will never truly be the Mahdi, never conquer Europe for Allah!”
“You do not deny that you strengthened my army with stolen lives?” Tafas cried, paling. “What if I did conquer Europe? What then?”
“Why, you would rule it under my guidance, and the wild horsemen from the steppe would conquer all of Asia and rule it.”
“They are not Muslims!”
“They can become so,” Nirobus said agreeably.
“Must we fight them, too?”
“No,” Nirobus lectured, “for if you did, neither of you would win; you are both too strong, and would only chew one another to bits. You would rule Europe, and their khan would rule Asia.”
“Under whose guidance?” Tafas demanded.
“Why, mine, of course,” Nirobus said mildly.
“Then you do seek to conquer the world!”
“How else may all the world surrender to Allah?” Nirobus returned.
“There’re an awful lot of souls in Africa,” Matt reminded him. “You haven’t started work there yet.”
Nirobus turned to him, and his mild smile was chilling. “What makes you think that?”
For a moment, Matt’s head reeled with the enormity of it. He wondered if the kingdom of Benin had mounted a campaign of conquest into the interior. He had a vision of warriors floating down the Congo River on barges, then coming ashore to burn villages and towns.
He forced himself to pay attention to the here and now… and found Nirobus gazing at him shrewdly. He shook himself, summoning a glare… the sorcerer could have slain him with a single spell while he was distracted.
“You care,” Nirobus murmured, in tones of incredulity. “You actually care! You care about people whom you have never seen, of whom you have scarcely even heard!”
“Of course I care,” Matt said, glowering to hide how the words had shaken him. “They’re human, aren’t they?”
“And you care for all who are human.”
“Yes, I do!” Matt snapped. “Don’t you?”
“Oh, I do, Lord Wizard,” Nirobus said softly. “I definitely do… very much.”
Matt stared. “Then why are you trying to conquer us all?”
“To keep you from fighting one another,” Nirobus explained, “to establish a fair and rational system of laws that will restrain the strong and wealthy, protecting the poor and weak.”
“You’ve brought down all this misery, all the bloodshed and pain of war, in the name of peace?” Matt cried.
“It is nothing compared to the centuries of security, happiness, and prosperity that a world order will bring,” Nirobus returned.
The hell of it was that he very obviously believed what he was saying.
“And the junkies?” Matt asked. “The kids, even grade-school kids in New Jersey? Can the peace of your empire make up for leaching their lives away?”
“They were nothing,” Nirobus said impatiently. “They had become slaves of the poppy already, and would have died young in any case. Why not put to use the life force they were squandering?”
“Because they might have been saved!” Matt snapped.
“Saved?” Finally Nirobus’s lip curled in scorn. “I became a physician to save lives and alleviate suffering, then had to watch people die because my knowledge was not enough to save them. That, I could accept… but seeing people whose lives I had saved come to blows over a woman, a purse, a horse, to see them wound one another and come back to me to heal those wounds, to see them slay one another wasting the lives I had given back to them… it was enough to make me disgusted with all of humankind!
I nearly despaired of our breed! But I finally did despair when I saved a young king from a flux that would have killed him, then saw him march off to make war upon his neighbor… and because I had healed him, a thousand peasants died, two thousand soldiers expired in agony!”
In spite of himself, Matt’s heart twisted. “The guilt wasn’t yours, Doctor.”
“But it was! From that time forth I vowed to save only those who were worthy… then despaired of finding any way to detect them! Muslim, Christian, or Jew, there were good people and bad people of each religion, of every country! I thought that good people were weak and exploited, evil people wealthy and grasping… until I helped poor people become rich and gain power, then saw them turn on their weaker neighbors to gouge them of every penny they could find!”
“Didn’t any of them give money to the poor?”
“Oh, yes, a few here and there!” Nirobus said angrily. “A few Muslims remembered their obligation to give alms, a few Christians remembered that their Savior had commanded them to feed the poor, a few
Jews remembered that their Talmud told them to care for widows and orphans… but so few, so few, and for each of them, there was another who used those poor and defenseless as a woodcutter uses trees!”
“But that’s why we have to try to persuade people to be good,” Matt objected.
“I stopped believing in Good and Evil, Lord Wizard.” Nirobus shook his head, eyes glittering. “You are an educated man who has read accounts telling how people have used one another and betrayed one another down through the centuries. You are a man who has traveled widely, you must have seen such abuse with your own eyes!” Nirobus shook his head slowly, gaze locked with Matt’s. “I began to see that there is good in some people, evil in many, some good and some evil in most! I began to see that good and evil exist only within living beings, in people most of all! I saw that the good often remain poor and oppressed and are rarely rewarded, the evil rarely punished and often prosperous!”
He gasped for breath, a little wild-eyed now, and Matt took advantage of the pause to comment. “So you stopped believing in divine punishment or reward, and set out to dispense both yourself.”
“Who else would do it?” The question was a challenge as well as a defense. “Mind you, at first I only exploited people who were themselves exploiters, rewarded the virtuous a little but not enough to make them able to hurt others… but so few, so very few! I began to realize that I would never be able to reward or punish on a scale that meant anything if I were only myself, Nirobus the physician, a man alone. I saw that to make any difference worth making, I would have to have power, be able to govern a nation… and if I sought to avoid war, I would have to govern many nations!”
“So to achieve peace, you declared war,” Matt interpreted.
“Do not mock me, Lord Wizard! You shall discover my meaning all too soon, if you live a few years longer and truly watch the people around you! Yes, I delved through my books and discovered a way to gain enough power to conquer; yes, I set up a channel for bringing that power from the mean-spirited and doomed! Yes, I found a man who could conquer the world, then found sorcerers so self-seeking as to be completely predictable, sorcerers who would help my Mahdi by channeling the energy I’d found into his troops, his victories! But think how few people have died in this war, how few atrocities Tafas has permitted! As to those youths in your homeland, can you honestly say that even one of them would not have bullied or beaten or raped or exploited his fellows, if he could have?”
Matt’s mouth went dry. “I didn’t know them all. Only a handful.”