The Treasured One

‘Don’t get too happy about it, Torl,’ Sorgan said. ‘You do know that the Trogs are marching north and that they didn’t pay any attention at all to what we did to their ships, don’t you? That means that we just failed. We were all positive that burning their ships would stop them right in their tracks, but that idea just fell apart on us. I don’t think we can even catch up to those Trogs now. They’re too far ahead of us.’

‘I sort of thought so myself, cousin,’ Torl agreed. ‘What do we do now?’

‘You, Torl, not “we”,’ Sorgan said quite firmly. ‘Somebody’s going to have to go back up to that basin and tell Narasan – and Veltan – that we just failed. Burning all their ships didn’t mean a thing to the invaders. Then I want you to tell Veltan that somebody’s been tampering with these farmers. For all I know, he might even have done it himself, but that doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?’

‘Not to me, it doesn’t,’ Torl agreed.

‘I want you to put on full sail, Torl, and get up there just as fast as you can. Like it or not, we do have two invasions, and there’s nothing I can do to stop the one that’ll be coming at Narasan before many more days have passed.’

‘I’ll get the word to him just as quick as I can, cousin,’ Torl promised.

‘Even quicker would be better.’

4

As luck had it, there was a good following wind as the Lark . sailed up along the east coast of the Land of Dhrall, but Torl was fairly sure that luck probably had very little to do with it. Somebody in this part of the world had been doing a lot of tampering here lately. A fair number of events during the war in Lady Zelana’s Domain had made it quite clear that tampering was quite common in this part of the world, but Torl couldn’t for the life of him see just where this unknown tamperer was going. If he was on their side, he should have been trying to stop the second invasion, but it seemed that he was encouraging it instead. Nothing that’d happened down on the south coast made any sense.

On the off chance that Veltan might be in his house, Torl anchored the Lark just off the familiar beach a few days after he’d left the south coast, and walked on up to that peculiar building. When he reached it, the wife of Veltan’s friend Omago was waiting for him almost as if she had known that he was coming. Ara, the farmer’s wife, was almost certainly the most beautiful woman Torl had ever seen, and he could not for the life of him understand just why she’d chosen to marry the rather stodgy farmer, Omago. He was certain that she’d have had much better options.

‘I don’t suppose that Veltan’s here right now, is he?’ Torl asked her.

‘I’m afraid not,’ she replied in that rich voice of hers. ‘Did you want to see him?’

‘There’s something he needs to know, ma’am,’ Torl replied. ‘I was sort of hoping that I might be able to catch him here. My luck’s been running very well lately, but it looks like it might have gone sour on me.’ He shrugged. ‘It was worth a try, I guess. Have you heard anything about what’s going on up in the mountains?’

‘Nothing very specific. I don’t think the servants of the Vlagh have begun their attack yet.’

‘That’s something, I suppose. Narasan’s people need to finish building their wall to hold off the enemy, and building a wall a mile or so long is likely to take them a while.’

‘What was it that you thought Veltan should know about?’ she asked. ‘If he happens to stop by after you’ve moved on, I could pass it on to him. Did it have something to do with that invasion of the southern part of his Domain?’

‘It did indeed,’ Torl replied glumly. ‘Cousin Sorgan was positive that we’d be able to deal with it, but our scheme fell apart on us.’

‘Oh?’

‘We burned every Trogite ship down there,’ Torl said, ‘and that should have stopped the invasion dead cold, but it didn’t turn out that way at all.’

‘What happened?’

‘Somebody jerked our grand plan right out from under us. I know that Veltan, Lady Zelana, and their relatives can do all sorts of things that nobody else can do, but it seems that there’s somebody else running around here in the Land of Dhrall who can do even stranger things. That other somebody did something that I don’t think even Veltan could have pulled off.’

‘Really?’

‘The other somebody stuffed a ridiculous fairy tale into the mind of every single native down along the south coast, and they’ll all repeat that fairy story in exactly the same way any time they hear the word “gold”.’

‘How did you find out about this, Torl?’ Ara asked him rather sharply.

‘I was talking to one of the natives down there – Bolen, I think his name was – and I just happened to mention gold during our conversation. As soon as I said “gold”, his eyes glazed over and he told me this old story as if he was reciting something. I thought he’d just gone crazy, but after he’d finished, he seemed to wake up and go on as if nothing at all had happened.’

‘How curious,’ Ara said.

‘It gets even more curious. Right at first, it didn’t make any sense, but then I had a peculiar notion, and I walked around through several of those villages and said the word “gold” to every single native I met, and would you believe that every one of them did exactly the same thing Bolen had done. Their eyes went blank and each one told me exactly the same story. Somebody – or maybe something – is playing a very complicated game down there, and the fairy tale makes the Trogs go even crazier than the word “gold” makes the natives. They all started running off to the north as if somebody had just set fire to their tail feathers.’

She laughed then. ‘What an amusing way to put it,’ she said with a sly smile.

The majority of Commander Narasan’s ships were anchored in the bay at the mouth of the River Vash, so the river itself wasn’t as cluttered as it had been when cousin Sorgan’s men had come down out of the mountains. Torl left Iron-Fist in charge of the Lark, and hurried up Nanton’s stream-bed to advise Veltan that things in the south hadn’t turned out as they’d hoped.

It was about noon of the next day when Torl reached the top, and he saw that the Trogites had been busy at the north end of the basin building wall rather than a fort, and their growing wall was already more than ten feet high.