Roger Taylor - The waking of Orthlund

He was silent for some time. Eldric waited.

‘Now, for some reason, he’s in a hurry to do battle,’ Yatsu began again, pensively. ‘He must be, to resort to such an atrocity.’

‘He might have done it just to blacken our names, as you put it,’ Eldric said, risking interrupting the Goraidin’s train of thought, in spite of himself. ‘He’s a master of calculated rumour.’

Yatsu shook the idea off casually. ‘No, it would be too risky. There’s still enough truth floating about in Vakloss to prevent something as bad as this being believed wholesale. It’s as likely to work against him as for him. No, he’s done it to draw us out quickly. He is in a hurry, yet he doesn’t use his power.’

His eyes widened slightly. ‘He can’t use it,’ he said slowly, as if carefully placing the centre stone of a delicate arch.

Eldric looked at him narrowly. ‘Guesswork, Goraidin,’ he said after a moment. ‘For all we know he may just be taunting us. Luring us out for some spectacular destruction in front of the City to demon-strate his power, his indisputable authority.’

Yatsu leaned back in his chair and looked at him, more relaxed. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Dan-Tor thinks as we do; the Goraidin. He takes no unnecessary risks. His whole progress through the last twenty years shows that. Painstaking, silent, hidden. No indication of his real nature amp;mdashhis real power. He’s an assassin, a poisoner, not a berserker. Look what he did to you at the accounting.’

It was an unexpected blow and it sent Eldric’s mind reeling back to that long, bitter and frustrating day. Dan-Tor could have seized him by force with the power he possessed, but he had chosen to wear him down relentlessly and then seize him when he was away from the crowd, by a combination of silent treachery and overwhelming armed force. That was Dan-Tor’s way without a doubt.

‘He wouldn’t choose open battle if he could choose any other way, would he?’ Yatsu continued. ‘He actively abetted the running down of the High Guards over the years, because he wanted no pool of battle skills waiting to face his Mathidrin when the time came. He even mooted disarming the people at one time, if you remember.’

Eldric started. It was a memory from long ago. Dan-Tor had slipped it into a debate in the Geadrol, but had retracted it hastily and with some ineffective humour in the ensuing icy silence. What kind of a person would even think in such terms and aspire to guide a free people? On reflection, Eldric identified this incident as the beginning of the slow suspicions that were to build against this tall, lank manipulator.

Yatsu concluded. ‘With his Mathidrin, this… Mili-tia… ’ amp;mdashhe curled his lip as he spoke the word amp;mdash‘and perhaps even a few High Guards, he has a substantial numerical advantage, but he knows that facing us would still be risky even in conventional fighting; we’re better trained than most of his troops, and nearly all our senior officers are battle-tried.’ He leaned forward. ‘And he must realize that we’d not come forward in conven-tional battle array, with closed ranks of infantry and cavalry ready to be scythed down like corn at a wave of his hand. He won’t know we’ve been training in small group formations, but he’ll know we’ll come some other way; some way that’s never been done before! How much greater the risk to his troops therefore when that initiative is ours? Yet he chooses it!’ Yatsu stabbed out his final words. ‘He would not willingly accept such odds, Lord. He needs to defeat us quickly, and he can’t use his power against us.’

Silence hung between the two men.

‘It sounds plausible,’ Eldric said reluctantly after a little while. ‘Even obvious.’

Yatsu shrugged. ‘The obvious is invariably the hard-est thing to see,’ he said.

‘And if you’re wrong?’ Eldric asked.

‘Harder decisions have been made on less informa-tion,’ Yatsu replied simply. ‘But we’ll all discuss it as usual. Perhaps someone else can arrange the facts differently. Not that it matters if they do. Independent of what we think Dan-Tor’s reasons were, he’s left us no alternative but to attack him in force, and soon.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Eldric said, seemingly surprised at this conclusion. ‘We could increase our patrols. Change from observation to active response and deal with his patrols one at a time as they appear.’

Yatsu walked over to a map hanging on the wall and, after a brief search, placed his finger on a small dot. ‘Ledvrin,’ he said, looking at Eldric. Then, sliding his finger to the edge of an area criss-crossed with coloured lines, ‘The limit of our effective patrol area.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s too far. And where would we stop?’ His finger danced from dot to dot across the map. ‘We’re stretched to defend our own borders, and he could move against any of these villages. There was nothing special about Ledvrin.’

Eldric sighed and looked down at his hands. ‘I know,’ he said resignedly. ‘I was just clinging to a few last moments of peace.’ He slapped his hands on his knees as he stood up to join Yatsu. ‘However, that, as you say, we must all discuss later. For now, you and I must send the news to the others and arrange for help to be sent to Ledvrin.’

None of the four Lords or the assembled Goraidin and senior High Guard officers found serious fault with Yatsu’s conclusions. The massacre at Ledvrin could only be a challenge to the Lords to march on Vakloss, but none could hazard why Dan-Tor was suddenly in such haste or why he was unable or at least unwilling to venture forth and use his appalling power against them.

‘We consider him still as a man just because he walked amongst us locked in that same fragile frame that houses us all,’ Darek said. ‘But he isn’t; or is scarcely so. He’s Oklar, the first of Sumeral’s Uhriel, the remains of a man who was corrupted eons ago by the gift of almost absolute power. His powers are beyond our comprehension, and so probably are his thoughts. Let’s keep our minds straightforward and open, and not burden ourselves with what will almost inevitably be futile speculation.’

‘It’ll help if we can understand… ’ Arinndier began.

Darek held out his hand, fingers extended. ‘I, above all, accept that, Arin,’ he said. ‘But how can we begin to understand how a single hand could contain power enough to destroy a city? For that matter, how can we even understand a… man who is unaffected by an arrow permanently embedded in his side; an arrow whose wound bleeds continuously and never heals? He isn’t a man, and we bind ourselves when we think of him as such. He’s a monstrous creation. Every facet of his existence is alien to us.’

‘It’s irrelevant, anyway,’ Eldric intruded brusquely before Arinndier could reply. ‘Human or otherwise, all we can concern ourselves with is his deeds. It seems reasonable to assume he’s constrained in some manner from using this… power of his, but if he isn’t, if indeed it’s some ghastly taunt, then at least our small forma-tions may save many of our men.’

‘These small formations may also cost us lives if we meet only conventional battle arrays of infantry and cavalry, and the men can’t re-form quickly enough to face them,’ Arinndier said, expressing the doubts that many of them held about the strange new fighting techniques they were trying to develop to protect themselves from Dan-Tor’s terrible power. ‘Part of me says we should be waiting until we know more, and until we’ve done some larger exercises to test our precious new theories.’

‘And if there’s another Ledvrin while we’re waiting, Arin?’ Darek asked.

‘He couldn’t do that again,’ Arinndier said, his face haunted and doubtful.