Robert Adams - Bili the Axe

Not that this threat had stopped Stemheimer from implanting his agents in Morai’s Confederation or from continuing his attempts to disrupt and weaken the newer and the older states and principalities. When, a few years after the death of Dr. Landor, Morai had commenced a campaign which ended in generally discrediting the Greek church and weakening its hold on its former adherents, the Director thought that he had seen a way to strike this Confederation hard enough to possibly fragment it.

Gradually, over a period of years, Center agents had worked their way up in the hierarchy of the weakened, impoverished and much-demoralized church. From the still-faithful laity, they had carefully earmarked the fanatics, the perpetual malcontents, the manageable lunatics, rabble-rousers, incurable romantics and violence-prone elements.

From this societal flotsam and jetsam, agent-clerics in certain carefully chosen areas had formed sinister and highly secret societies, the announced purpose of which was to kill, drive out or bring to the True Faith all men and women of the Confederation, as well as to return ownership of all land to the descendants of the original Greek-speakers. Once sworn by terrible oaths, the members were sent out to prostelytize amongst all classes.

In most places they had been highly successful in their efforts, and the plan might well have created considerable havoc had it been carried out as planned, but it was not. A single small city in southern Karaleenos had, for reasons unknown and now forever unknowable, risen and butchered most of the ruling nobility, but then had fallen to Confederation forces, with most of its leaders—including the Center’s agent—taken alive. Apparently, this agent had been tortured into revealing most of the plot, for when the two western Karaleenos duchies arose more or less on schedule—their successes were to trigger all other risings—Confederation troops were ready and waiting within easy marching distance to crush the second before it had well started and to then march against and so bottle up the first that those waiting elsewhere for the word never received it at all.

Two more Center agents were captured and carted off to the Confederation capital to have additional details of the Center’s plans agonizingly wrung from their suffering bodies by Morai’s skillful and dedicated torturers. One of the nuggets of information had been a second facet of Sternheimer’s plan.

One of the largest and fiercest tribes in the mountains to the west of Karaleenos was the Ahrmehnee—descendants of Americans of Armenian extraction. Formerly resident in the foothills rather than the mountains, they had conducted bloody and productive raids against the Greeks for hundreds of years. When the Greeks were mostly displaced by the horse nomads, the like was practiced upon them until Morai came with his armies and drove them off their ancestral hills and up into the mountains. Though they still raided after that, they suffered much for those raids, finding the Horseclansmen and their get as tough and feisty as any Ahrmehnee.

With the Confederation armies spread out, fragmented, in the process of putting down a score of rebellions in distant, isolated areas, Sternheimer had thought that a full-scale invasion of blood-hungry mountaineers might very well be just the thing to utterly dismember this troublesome Confederation.

To effect this, he had had Drs. Erica Arenstein and Harry Braun and Major Jay Corbett transfer into the bodies of captured Ahrmehnee, after having been hypno-taped in the oral and written language of the tribesmen, their religious practices, superstitions and folk ways. Then they three and a few Broomtown men had established a camp just south of Ahrmehnee territory where the Broomtowners stayed while the three agents rode on in search of the nahkhahrah , the paramount chief of the Ahrmehnee stahn , with most of the functions of a priest-king.

When found, the old man—at least eighty, though still strong, erect, active and appearing twenty years younger— showed himself to be shrewd, intelligent and anything but ingenuous. However, his hatred of all lowlanders ran deep, and these People of Powers, as he soon came to call them, were saying things that he had prayed to one day hear.

He sent out word for all warriors of the stahn to gather around the village that he called his home, then sent Erica, a wise woman from his tribe and an honor guard of warriors to the Hold of the Maidens of the Moon—fierce, man-hating amazons who were distantly related to the Ahrmehnee and who sometimes allied with them on larger raids.

Within the sprawling, natural fortress of the Moon Maidens, Erica discovered not only a few hundred of the hard-muscled, lithe and savage female warriors ready to join with the Ahrmehnee against the western marches of the Confederation, but a true treasure trove of artifacts and printed matter from the long-vanished twentieth-century world. Such had been her elation that she had hardly been able to wait to get back to the nahkhahrah’s village to confer with Corbett and Braun.

Their task of arousing the fierce Ahrmehnee accomplished, the three agents had ridden south, but only as far as their base camp and its long-range, battery-powered transceiver. Sternheimer’s response to notification of the find—the books and manuals, the various well-preserved machines and devices, the spare parts and rare metals and, most especially, the vast assortment of transistors—had been prompt and lavish.

The Director had personally supervised the immediate assembly of every pack animal upon which his people could quickly lay hands at Broomtown, loaded a few of them with the special supplies requested by Dr. Arenstein and Major Corbett, then dispatched them north escorted by a troop and a half of Broomtown dragoons under the command of Sergeant Major Vance, an experienced and highly respected Broomtown Regular.

Fast as Vance had marched his column—and in view of the general conditions, he had marched them fast indeed—by the time he and the column had reached the camp of the waiting agents, conferred with them, and trailed them at a discreet distance back up to the Hold of the Maidens, the marshaling of the Ahrmehnee host was well underway. No men of fighting age remained in the Ahrmehnee villages through which they rode, and all three hundred-odd of the young Moon Maidens had ridden forth behind their hereditary war leader, the brahbehrnuh , leaving the near-impregnable hold guarded by girls and women under fifteen and over thirty; the men of the hold were not allowed to bear weapons or know the proper use of them.

With the Broomtown riflemen hidden within range of her small, personal transceiver, Erica reentered the Hold of the Moon Maidens, trailed by a couple of laden pack mules and her two male “slaves”—-Dr. Braun and Major Corbett. Despite the frigidity of the mountain winter outside the hold, within lay a warmth that was almost oppressive in its intensity. But it was this continuous warmth that enabled the folk of the hold to grow two and three crops per year and thereby become wealthy through trading their constant surplus.

None of the women paid much attention to the curious pokings about of a brace of unarmed men, slaves at that, and so Dr. Braun was not long in confirming Erica’s estimate of the great value of her finds within the warren of natural and man-made caves honeycombing the mountain. He also confirmed her other assumption.

The hot, sometimes boiling, mineral springs which fed the shallow lakes and helped to heat the hold, the unnatural warmth of the very rocks and soil of the place, and in particular a crescent-shaped crack near the entrance to the caverns—called by the inhabitants the Sacred Hoofprint of the Lady’s Steed— all indicated that the hold was sitting squarely atop a barely quiescent volcano.