Jack Chalker - Lilith - A Snake in the Grass

“They’re transmitting through her!” I gasped. “They’re channeling their fear and hatred into O’Higgins!”

A number of missiles from the enemy were loosed and some reached their targets. A few women were struck and fell, bleeding, unconscious, or perhaps dead, but the rest never wavered, never even looked at their fallen sisters. The concentration was absolute.

One by one, as her invisible touch reached them, the soldiers of Zeis Keep were fried to dust in their saddles, or in some cases knocked completely out of the air. I saw that Artur himself had fallen back and was now shouting for the others to break rank and join him. It was all of three or four minutes since the attack had started, and less than half of his company remained.

“All right, witch!” he shouted. “As I said, might is all, and right now it is on your side! But when word of this reaches the Keeps, the force raised against you will be more powerful than this world has ever known! Enjoy your victory—for what it is worth!” And with that he was gone.

The witch-queen’s arms came down and made another sign; then the spell or whatever was broken.

Women staggered, some fell, and others now bent down to attend to their fallen comrades.

O’Higgins snapped out of her trance in an instant and was all command. “See to the wounded!” she shouted. “I want a fatality count as quick as possible!” She turned and stalked over toward the hut in which Ti and I were hidden.

“Wow!” Ti breathed. “I never saw or heard anything like that before.” She giggled. “That look on Artur’s face was worth all of it, too! Many’s the pawn at Zeis would’ve given his life to see this whippin’!”

“Don’t sell him short,” I told her. “He’s lost a battle, not a war. He came up against a weapon he didn’t know existed and he paid the price, but he’s not licked by any means. He wasn’t kidding when he threatened to come back with a super-army •. They have to stamp out power like this or they’ll never sleep easy again in their castles.”

I saw Father Bronz emerge from a nearby hut looking suitably impressed. He and Sumiko O’Higgins quickly joined us in the hut.

“How many did you get?” she asked the priest.

“Six, maybe,” he responded. “The rest had to be destroyed. Is it enough?”

“Hardly,” she snapped. “But it’ll have to do.”

“Don’t blame me,” he retorted. “ You shot ’em down. All I did was pick ’em back up.”

I looked at the two in confusion. “What the hell are you two talking about?” I wanted to know. “Where were you during the battle, Father?”

He laughed. “Picking up the pieces. We needed besils. So while Sumiko and her witchy friends got the riders, I was able to grab control of six of them.”

O’Higgins nodded. “That’s what this was all about That’s why I permitted Artur to find the village in the first place. I’d hoped for more, though—at least a dozen.”

“You’d’ve had a dozen if you hadn’t fried or smacked down some,” Bronz responded. “That was an amazing sight. Sumiko, I really underestimated you. Even when you told me last night I still couldn’t believe that what you said was true, not in that way. Accumulated broadcasted Warden power! Incredible!”

She shrugged. “There’s nothing in the rules against it. The Wardens don’t really know the difference between a human cell, a plant cell, and a copper molecule, except that their genetic code or whatever they use for one acts on what they’re in to keep it that way. If we can ‘talk,’ so to speak, to the Warden organism inside anything and tell it to do something it doesn’t like to do—-reprogram it, as it were—we can tell it to do other things, too. It’s just like a computer, Augie. You can program it to do anything if you can figure out how.”

“You’re too modest,” he replied sincerely, obviously not just flattering her. “It’s a monumental discovery. Something entirely new, entirely different. It’ll do for Lilith what the Industrial Revolution did for primitive man!”

She gave what I can only describe as a derisive snigger. “Perhaps,” she responded, “ if I decide to give it to people, and if it can be handled and managed on a planetary scale.”

I was awestruck by the implications, which made Bronz’s arguments against social revolution on Lilith obsolete. “But you have the means here to destroy the hierarchy! The pawns can have the power to run then-own affairs!”

She sniffed. “And what makes you think they’ll do the job any better than the ones doing it now? Maybe worse.”

I shrugged off her cynicism as darker thoughts intruded. “He’ll be back, you know. Artur, I mean. With a hell of a force. What are you going to do?”

“Nothing, dear boy,” she responded. “Absolutely nothing. That surprises you? Well, would you believe that this place can’t even be detected unless I wish it? Oh, they’ll come back, of course. Maybe even with a couple of knights or even the old Duke himself. They’ll fly around and around and they’ll comb the ground with troops and they’ll simply not see us. It will drive them mad, but they can land right in the middle of the heath out there and they won’t see the village. How do you think we survived this long?”

Bronz himself shook his head in amazement “Sumiko, the consolidation of Warden power I’m willing to accept, since my mind can at least explain it, but that’s impossible!”

She laughed wickedly and tweaked his cheek. “Augie, you’re a fine little fellow even if you are everything I can’t stand, but keep believing that, won’t you? It’ll make life a lot simpler.”

“But how, Sumiko?” he demanded to know. “ How?”

She just smiled and said, “Well, the only thing I can tell you that’ll get you thinking is that the Warden organism is in every single molecule of every cell in your body, the brain included. I haven’t discovered any miracle formula here, Augie! All I did was sit down with the little beastie and learn how to talk to it properly.”

“Father Bronz!” Ti shouted; he turned, then IH up as he saw her. She ran to him and gave him a big hug, which he returned, smiling. “Well, well, well!” he responded. “So we have our little Ti back with us once again!”

“And that points up the urgency of our getting a move on,” Sumiko put in. “I’m going to go check the casualties and see what can be done. You air better • get some rest—the defenses are already all reset. We have a long night’s ride ahead of us, the first of many, and everybody should be well-rested.”

Bronz stared at her. “We?”

She nodded. “I’ve been meaning for some time to find out what those old fools at Moab know that maybe I don’t,” she told us. “I think that now the cat’s out of the bag about us here I had better find out all I can. Besides, I better be along to see that there are no relapses.” -

I glanced over at Father Bronz. “You’re coming too, I hope. I’m not sure I want to face ten days with just the witches for protection.”

He chuckled. “Sure. I intended to, in any event. It’s been a great many years since I was at Moab, and my curiosity is aroused. But don’t expect miracles down there. They know more about the Warden organisms than anybody except maybe Sumiko—now that I’ve seen her in action—but they are not selfless scientists. There have been some, uh, unfortunate changes over the years down there.”

The worst part of the journey was riding the besils themselves. The creatures were ugly, they stank, and they oozed a really nasty glue like ichor when under stress—not to mention occasionally giving out with one of those ear-splitting shrieks that seemed to come from somewhere deep within them. We were all inexperienced riders, too, and the sensation was much like getting whipped in all directions at once, that apparently seamless, fluid motion of theirs feeling quite different if you were actually on a besil back.