The Treasured One

Sometimes, though, the Dreamers had run off on their own, and that irritated Ara to no end.

Then she remembered something that had happened in the Land of the Maags. Eleria’s dream in the harbor of Kweta had been more in the nature of a warning than an announcement of an absolute certainty, and that warning had given Zelana’s archer all that he’d needed to meet the threat of an unscrupulous Maag named Kajak. Could it possibly be that Ashad’s dream of a second invasion of Veltan’s Domain had also been a warning? If that were the case, the second invasion might never come to pass in the real world.

For right now, Ara needed much more information about the people of the land to the south. Once she understood them, she might very well be able to stop that second invasion before it ever took place.

It was on a beautiful morning in early summer when Veltan advised Omago and Ara that the hired armies would be arriving that very day, and that Yaltar was still very disturbed by the disastrous results of his dream about exploding mountains. Ara was quite sure she’d be able to ease the little boy’s sense of guilt, so she decided to go on down to the beach with Veltan and her mate.

Even before the outlander ships reached the shore, Ara felt suddenly awash with the jumbled thoughts of the various men who were on board those ships. Curiosity was foremost in their thoughts, of course. The outlanders had been totally unaware of the existence of the Land of Dhrall before the previous winter, so it was only natural for them to be curious. There was also a certain amount of apprehension. The creatures of the Wasteland had been so altered by the Vlagh that they were unlike anything else in all the world, and that disturbed the outlanders to no small degree.

The name of Zelana’s archer Longbow kept cropping up. With only a few exceptions, the outlanders had been awed by that icy man. Ara tentatively reached out and touched the mind of the archer, and she found that he was not, as many on the ships believed, some kind of inhuman monster. He was coldly practical when a situation required that of him, but he did have normal emotions.

Then she very briefly brushed across an awareness so foul that she shuddered back in horror and disgust. One of the soldiers in the Trogite army was the most corrupt man Ara had ever encountered, and he was driven by a towering greed. So far as that particular soldier was concerned, the war with the servants of the Vlagh was of no particular significance. What he really wanted was every speck of gold in the entirety of the Land of Dhrall. Then several things came together all at once, and Ara realized that she’d just found the source of the second part of the dream of Ashad. ‘Well, now,’ she murmured, ‘isn’t that interesting?’

‘What was that again, Ara?’ Omago asked her.

‘Nothing, dear heart,’ she replied. ‘Just thinking out loud is all.’

Ara braced herself and reached out to touch the filthy mind of the outlander called Jalkan, and she found nothing even remotely redeeming there. There was arrogance aplenty, and greed, cruelty, cowardice, and, perhaps more important, a towering lust.

‘Now that might be the answer to the whole problem,’ Ara mused. ‘If this beast isn’t around any more, Ashad’s second invasion won’t happen at all.’

A number of very interesting possibilities came to Ara at that point. If she could stir Jalkan’s lust enough to push him over certain lines, she was almost positive that dear Omago would respond appropriately. She’d be obliged to take things down to the most primitive level, of course, and that troubled her more than a little. The end result, however, would fully justify what she’d have to do.

After a brief discussion on the beach, Veltan took a goodly number of the outlanders and a couple of the hunters from Zelana’s Domain to his house to show them a room where he’d set up a miniaturized duplicate of the terrain in the vicinity of the Falls of Vash. Ara began to prepare dinner for Veltan’s guests while Zelana, Eleria, and Yaltar watched. Ara was not really concentrating on the cooking however. Pushing her sense of revulsion aside, she turned her senses backward in time to the point where she could unleash the overwhelming urge to mate in any living male, and, as was the case in all warm-blooded creatures, that involved a specific scent. The scent would unleash Jalkan’s lust most certainly, but it should also drive Omago into raw violence, and that would immediately eliminate Ashad’s second invasion.

When Ara went to Veltan’s map-room to tell the men assembled there that dinner was ready, she was exuding that most primitive of scents, and Jalkan, as she’d anticipated, responded with a few off-color remarks that clearly indicated that he expected things to go much further. Omago responded to those comments quite appropriately, but unfortunately didn’t take it quite far enough. At the last moment, his innate decency pulled him back. Despite the urges of his primal instincts, Omago did not kill their enemy.

Ara suppressed her own primitive urge to scream at that point. She’d just discovered that raw instincts are almost impossible to control, and in a situation where the desired result did not come to pass, screaming would be instinctive.

Veltan’s Trogite friend, Commander Narasan, had been stunned by Jalkan’s remarks, and Ara hoped that he’d take the appropriate steps, but for some reason he did not reach for his sword.

What was the matter with these people? At great personal expense, Ara had given everybody in that round room all the excuse they’d ever need to exterminate the filthy Jalkan, but they’d all just passed it up. Why wouldn’t anybody do what he was supposed to do?

Narasan ordered the Trogite Padan to put Jalkan in chains and imprison him in one of the Trogite ships standing just off the beach. That was something, Ara conceded, but for some reason, nobody seemed to realize that there’d been a much simpler answer.

It took Ara the rest of the day and most of the night to clear away the last of her primeval instincts and she felt a bit wrung-out the following day. Instincts sometimes accomplished things when nothing else would work, but they were absolutely exhausting -particularly when they didn’t achieve the desired goal.

It came as no real surprise a week or so later that word of Jalkan’s escape reached the house of Veltan. It seemed to Ara that every time she turned around, Ashad’s silly dream was ahead of her. No matter what she tried to do to prevent the second invasion, the dream thwarted her. For some reason that she could not even begin to understand, that second invasion was absolutely necessary. ‘I give up,’ she said, throwing her hands in the air.