Robert Hughes - The Power and the Prophet

Dorlyth snorted.

“You don’t believe me?”

“You don’t believe you. You’ve summed up the odds in such a way that anyone but a fool would surrender immediately. But I know you, Pelmen, and that’s exactly what you are—a fool. A believing fool. Otherwise why would you be here? You know me, too, and I’m just as big a fool as you! We’ve a battle ahead, and by all reckoning we’ll lose it. But we’ll not quit it, will we?” Dorlyth paused, frowning with great ferocity. “Well, will we?”

Pelmen gazed at him. Then a smile spread across the wizard’s face. “Dorlyth, for all your frequent protests, I sometimes think you have greater faith than I.”

Dorlyth snorted again.

“No,” Pelmen went on. “We’ll not quit. But we’ll not be fools either.”

“As if we’could help it,” his grizzled companion muttered sourly.

“What?

“Never mind. Let’s plan how and where to hit them. What about assassination?”

“We’d be assassinating ourselves to attempt it. His castle’s alive, I told you.”

“Makes no sense,” Dorlyth muttered, but he was a Mari, and Maris did not question magic. “What about some kind of alliance?”

“That’s more practical. We have friends in Lamath—”

“I’m not talking about your silly little priests in their flapping robes! I’m talking about warriors! Other shapers! Mar-Yilot for example. We’ve done nothing to her—perhaps she’ll join us.”

“Convincing her may prove difficult.” Pelmen smiled, remembering frequent encounters with the thin, waif-faced witch. “Don’t disregard the bluefaithers. Your son was once one of them.”

“Yes, but he carried a sword under his robe, too! Didn’t you?” Dorlyth demanded of his son. “Well, didn’t you?” he repeated.

Rosha hadn’t been listening. “What? Oh, yes.” He frowned and looked at Pelmen. “If we could only communicate quickly with the others! I wonder about those other pyramids. Flayh has one—where’s the other?”

“Safely hidden away by Erri, I hope.”

“By Erri!” Rosha shouted.

“That’s right. It was entrusted to Erri by that unfortunate merchant who witnessed my battle with Flayh. I gave Erri the same advice I gave your wife: To hide it away from Flayh’s grasping hands and to forget it. I suggest you do the same. Those shards of crystal were never intended as devices for communication.

There is another possibility for contact, however. Bronwynn appears to be developing shaper powers.

She sought me, today, in her dreams, and found me on the Rock of Tombs.”

“Really?” Dorlyth asked enthusiastically. He pressed Pelmen for details. He saw every advantage to having a shaper in the family. But his son paid no attention.

Although the news concerned his wife, Rosha never heard it. Despite Pelmen’s injunction, he could not forget those crystalline objects that held such power. Bronwynn had one; now Erri had another. Rosha knew, now, why he’d come home.

“Not that way!” Pezi squealed, but he was too late. Riganlitha, a particularly clumsy tugolith, had walked through yet another fanner’s garden wall.

Pezi urged Chimolitha to carry him up to the puzzled Riganlitha’s side, then politely asked to be allowed down. He was standing between the two giant beasts with the rest of the herd clustered behind them when the irate farmer came boiling around the corner of his house. The man stopped short when he actually saw his uninvited guests. Riganlitha had a sheepish look of embarrassment on his huge face; but to the startled Lamathian, it looked like a monstrous snarl.

“We’re sorry,” Chimolitha announced solemnly, and the fanner’s jaw dropped open.

“It…it talks…” he whispered to his wife, who stood behind him, prudently using his body as a shield.

“I can talk, too!” Thuganlitha said belligerently from the back of the herd, and the fanner and wife beat a hasty retreat into their cottage. The remainder of the conversation took place through the garden window.

“What are those things?” the wife called to Pezi.

“I’m not a thing!” Thuganlitha snorted before Pezi could reply. His bellicosity couldn’t be mistaken. The wife disappeared from the window and was seen no more.

“These, ah, these are tugoliths,” Pezi explained. He said it in a loud whisper, as if all of this were some grand secret.

’Tugoliths? Really?” the farmer said, his interest perking up. “I’ve heard of them all my life but I never thought I’d actually see one!”

“There are more of us than that,” Chimolitha corrected.

“Than what?”

“Than one.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry about your wall,” Pezi explained hastily, pulling his purse from his pocket as he walked toward the window. “We

are, ah, trying to be inconspicuous, you see, so we’re, ah, keeping to the back roads—”

“Where are you taking them?” the farmer asked suspiciously.

“Taking? Them? Oh, I’m not taking them anywhere. No, no. No, we’re just out for a casual stroll—”

“Are they yours?”

“Well, actually—”

“We’re Dolna’s,” Chimolitha said flatly.

Riganlitha asked, “Where is Dolna?”

Thuganlitha had shouldered up next to a part of the wall that was still standing and now asked Riganlitha,

“Was it fun?”

“Was what fun?”

“To break the wall.”

“I think we’d better run along now.” Pezi smiled fearfully, and he counted gold coins into his hand.

“Would three suffice?”

The farmer was no longer looking at him. He was watching with horror as Thuganlitha gleefully demolished that section of wall that had survived Riganlitha’s clumsiness.

Pezi winced at the crash behind him, but he held his false smile in place as he said, “Perhaps six?”

A tool shed crumbled next. Rakes and pruning hooks flew into all corners of the garden.

“Why not twelve?” Pezi suggested.

“Can’t you stop the thing?” the farmer croaked.

“Care to suggest how?” Pezi asked.

“Why not hit it?”

Thuganlitha stopped chortling and frowned.

“I think he heard you,” Pezi said sorrowfully, just moments before the rampaging animal took off the end of the house. Pezi heard some terrified screams but he didn’t wait to investigate them. He waddled quickly back to the relative safety of Chimolitha’s side.

Ten minutes later, as Thuganlitha bragged to the others of the herd about how easily it all had fallen, Pezi stood in the rubble of the crumbled cottage counting gold coins into the hand of the dazed farmer: “…fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight. There now. That ought to be sufficient.”

“My house…” the man murmured.

“Maybe you’d been thinking of remodeling it anyway?”

“My garden…”

“By the way, let’s just keep this our little secret, shall we? My animals and I—we’d prefer not to be noticed.” With that, Pezi climbed up behind Chimolitha’s horn once again and told her to proceed. Soon the last pair of gigantic hindquarters had disappeared into the woods toward the south, but they could be heard for a half hour thereafter—uprooting every tree in their path.

Rosha guided his horse through the mists, moving cautiously but still maintaining a quick, steady pace.

He was certain his father had discovered his absence by now, and just as certain that Dorlyth would follow him. Doubtless Pelmen would come as well; thus there was a good chance they would catch him.

But he’d gambled that Dorlyth would think first of his responsibility to his other warriors and that that would delay them. That’s what made his father a good leader—and kept him from being a hero.

Not that he hadn’t been a hero in days gone by. Dorlyth’s exploits had given content to more ballads than Rosha could count. His father dismissed them all as the imaginations of ignorant songsters, but Rosha had heard enough different versions of the old stories to piece together the actual events. By any analysis, they were impressive. Rosha idolized his father and had consciously modeled his life after Dorlyth’s. He firmly believed that individual acts of courage could change the course of history, and he longed to find that crisis where he could play the pivotal role. He’d lost his chance to slay the dragon to the stumbling of his tongue. When Bronwynn had needed his strong arms to help her regain her throne, they’d been bound behind his back—due to his own dullness. Now he sensed a new opportunity, a chance to demonstrate his courage and his cunning once and for all to his father, his bride—and to himself. He would steal the third pyramid from Flayh’s own tower.