Bili the Axe

4

Bili of Morguhn awoke early, despite the late hour at which he had sought his bed and the long period of sleeplessness thereafter. Immediately the prince and his two gentlemen had broken their fast, Bili approached him.

“My lord prince, I would have words with you in private, if it be your pleasure.”

The prince smiled jovially and boomed, “Why so solemn, young cousin? Sit you down and break your fast, ere we all hie us down to the tower keep to ascertain how many of your folk will fight for me in the north.”

Bili did not answer the prince’s smile in kind, and his speech was utterly flat, emotionless. “Thank you, no, my lord. I hunger not, this morn. As for the temper of the men and women of my squadron, I already know the gist of what they all will say, having mindspoken Pah-Elmuh in the night just past. Now will my lord deign to receive me in private audience?”

In Count Sandee’s narrow, windowless little office, with the thick oaken door shut and bolted securely, Bili and the prince faced each other across the width of the age-darkened table. Prince Byruhn strove to proffer the impression of utter relaxation, but Bili could sense that the huge, hulking royal personage was every bit as tense as was he.

Byruhn shoved his ever-present goblet across the board, and Bili obligingly filled it from the ewer, then returned it before half-filling one of the other goblets. But although the prince quickly quaffed a large measure from his own vessel, Bili barely sipped the sweet honey-wine.

Then, without preamble, he said, “My lord prince, you have dealt neither honestly nor honorably with me and my folk, a fact that I had suspected for most of the year that we have served you. There is nothing that I can do to thwart your designs upon us, your ideas cunningly planted in the minds of my squadron so that they think them their own desires and aspirations, for the one individual who could help me in that regard, Pah-Elmuh, is your sworn liegeman and will not defy you, for all he knows mat it was dishonest, dishonorable and immoral to do your bidding in this regard.”

Byruhn raised one side of his bushy eyebrow and asked in a solicitous tone, “Are you quite well, young cousin? Mayhap you’re feverish. What on earth are you rambling on about?”

But Bili just regarded the prince levelly. “My lord prince, while I no longer feel that I can trust you, 1 still hold a modicum of respect for you, for your obvious valor, for your proven intelligence; please credit me, too, with some reasoning ability and perception. We two are alone in this chamber and I already have admitted to you that I am helpless to do aught to nullify the treachery which you had the Kleesahks wreak upon my followers. Can you not, therefore, be truthful with me in private if not in public?”

The prince drained his goblet and shoved it across for a refill. “Hmmph! You’ve never been aught save blunt, young cousin. So, yes, I have twice had the Kleesahks put all your folk lodged in the tower keep to sleep and then becloud their minds, giving them sensible, believable reasons to wish to fight for the Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn—once last spring and again last night.

“That I did not do the same to you—as I could easily have had Pah-Elmuh do—was partially out of my respect for you and partially out of the fact that I recognized your sense of loyalty to your subordinates, recognized that you would not willingly desert them but would continue to lead them until you and they were again east of the mountains.

“But you aver that you have known, or at least suspected, since spring. Tell me, what bred such suspicions, cousin?”

Bili shrugged. “To begin, just a gut feeling that you thought yourself and your house sufficiently hard pressed to lead you to have your will of us by fair means or foul. Then, that morning at the foot of the tower keep when every one of the Confederation nobles with me agreed that we should war on the Ganiks for you, I knew full well that they had been in some manner cozened by you or your agents, my lord.”

Byruhn regarded him quizzically. “But how, young cousin?”

Bili showed his teeth briefly, though his eyes remained cool and alert. “Simply that I never before that had seen or experienced the agreement of Kindred nobility on anything, any point, without endless, maddening discussion, often ending in personal insults if not near bloodletting. It just was riot natural for all those Kindred to so easily agree with each other, much less to be in full agreement with the Ehleenee, the Freefighters, the Ahrmehnee and even the Moon Maidens.”

“And last night… ?” the prince probed on.

Again, Bili shrugged. “I tried to mindspeak some of my officers and my hornman, but I found all to be in very deep sleep. There again, it was unnatural for all of them to have been so soundly asleep at the same time without some form of soporific having been administered them.

“I knew better than to try to glean the truth from your mind, lord prince, for mindspeaker or no, you have an exceedingly powerful shield—Pah-Elmuh or whoever schooled you well in that regard. Therefore, in the best interests of those who depend upon me, I did that which I knew to be wrong and did delve into the sleeping mind of a man I deem friend. And that is yet another thing for which I deem you culpable, my lord, that your misdeeds made it necessary for me to do so loathsome a thing to a friend.

“Then, later, whilst I mused upon the truths now confirming all which I had formerly only suspected of you, Pah-Elmuh mindspoke me. When he admitted all that he and the other Kleesahks had wrought on the sleeping minds of my folk for you, I begged him to reverse his cozenings, but he sadly refused me, citing his allegiance to you and your house.”

His elbows set on the tabletop, Byruhn steepled his fingers and regarded Bili over their summits, his square chin resting on his thumbs. “So, now that you are privy to this knowledge, young cousin, what intend you to do with it? 1 warn you, I have good and, to me, sufficient reasons for all that I have done—or, rather, have ordered done—and so I would never admit in public that which I have admitted in private.”

Bili nodded curtly. “Which is why I bearded you in private, my lord prince, to get solid answers for my own mind, not an open admission of guilt. I lack the power to elicit such as that and I know it full well.

“No, as I told my lord in the beginning, I know what has been done to my squadron and, through them, to me in the past; I also know that under present circumstances, I am helpless to do aught with the secrets I now hold. But I wish my lord to be fully aware that I do know what I know. In return for my continued silence on these matters, I wish to exact an oath—a firm and solemn Sword Oath—from my lord.”

Byruhn frowned. “What sort of oath, sir duke? Beware—I do not take threats lightly.”

“Nor, I would hope,” replied Bili, “would my lord take his sworn Sword Oath lightly. What I want is your oath that you never again, no matter what the circumstances, will make of me and my squadron military slaves bound by mental fetters and set to prosecute the wars of your kingdom. Will my lord so swear?”

Byruhn smiled coldly, briefly. “Words are cheap; they are only air, after all. If you so distrust me and my motives, feel me to be without honor, what makes you think that I will abide by any oath, even a Sword Oath?”

“You are without doubt a noble Sword Brother, my lord prince, an Initiate. You know and I know that no outside compunction is necessary to keep an Initiate of the Sword faithful to a solemnly sworn Sword Oath; for, if you should break the oath, that oath will kill you—the honor of pure Steel is not lightly cast aside, not by any Initiate, reasons or rank- notwithstanding.”

The gaze of the blue-green eyes wavered momentarily and the prince shifted in his armchair, appearing suddenly a bit uncomfortable. “You and all your followers are within New Kuhmbuhluhn, within one of the strongest strongholds of New Kuhmbuhluhn, sir duke. All of you are within my power. Only a bare word from me would see all of you slain, while you I, myself, could kill within this very chamber, and none to upbraid me for that act. So how, then, do you think to bring to bear such pressure upon me as to compel me to an oath which might be my death should I decide its terms to be contradictory to the good of the kingdom?”

Bili replied, “Yes, we all are in New Kuhmbuhluhn, but we did not enter into your lands by choice, and you have but just admitted to having held us here, far beyond the time we would otherwise have departed, by way of a dishonorable strategem. Oh, aye, we’re in your power, right enough, but you’ll not have any of my squadron murdered, not when you need them to help you fight these Skohshuns of whom you speak.

“As for your veiled threat against me personally, my lord prince, you are surely aware that I do not fear you as a man, as a warrior. I will be happy to meet you either for a blood match or to the death, here in this chamber or at any other time or place, with any weapons or with none. Yes, you are a bit bigger and, mayhap, somewhat stronger, but I am both younger and faster, probably more agile, and of a certainty possess other talents of which you could not be aware.

“But, at one and the same time, my lord prince, I know full well that I have nothing of that nature to fear from you or any of your liegemen, not so long as you have need of the Kleesahks, who one and all hail me as their Champion of the Last Battle—whatever that really means. You and I both know that your killing of me—whether done or ordered, whether forthright and open or made to appear a ‘regrettable accident’—would be the one certain way to alienate the Kleesahks from you, your house, your kingdom and your schemes.

“So let us two cease to tensely stalk about one another, hackles erect, snarling through our bared fangs like a brace of strange hounds. I’ll unbar the door and have one of your gentlemen fetch down your sword when you speak the word. You can then swear your oath upon your Sacred Steel. That done, we two can proceed down to witness that farce at the tower keep, then you and Count Steev together with me and my officers can get down to the serious business of planning this next campaign against these Skohshuns.”

For long minutes, Prince Byruhn spoke no word. He simply sat, glaring at Bili from beneath his white-flecked red eyebrow. One at a time, he cracked the scarred knuckles of his big hands. Next, he brought up his goblet and drained it, his throat working rapidly.

At last, he rasped out, “By my steel, your impertinences are hard to swallow passively, young cousin! But you’re correct, of course, in your assumption that I’d fear to kill you even did I feel it necessary for New Kuhmbuhluhn. And I suppose that if I refuse to swear your wretched Sword Oath, you’ll hotfoot it down to the tower keep and set about the partial wrecking of the Kleesahks’ night’s work on your men and women. Am I right?”

Bili just nodded.

“To stop you, for sure, I would have to kill you or have others do it, and that takes us back to the sorry fact that I dare not bring about your death… yet.”

The prince gusted a long, exasperated sigh, stood up with a crackling of joints, leaned to reach across the table and secure the ewer, the dregs of which he emptied into his goblet.

“Allright, sir duke, you may have my sword fetched back to me, here; I’ll swear your oath on it. But whilst you’re about that matter out there, find yoi* one of the Sandee servants and tell the oaf to refill that ewer and bring it to me… and tell him that it damned well better be full, this time round!”

A voracious flea biting hard into a very sensitive portion of her body awakened Dr. Erica Arenstein. Grumbling curses and wishing for the umpteenth time that the nearby brook would thaw so that she might have herself a thorough wash and chide Merle Bowley and the other surviving Ganik bullies into doing likewise, she clawed at her crotch. Finally managing to dislodge the pesky parasite, she drew her legs up tight once more, snuggled against Bowley’s warm back and sought the sleep from which the pain of the fleabite had torn her.

As the wind howled around the rocks of the mountain, she reflected that she and the small party of survivors of the once-huge main bunch of Ganiks had been lucky as sin to chance across this smallish, low-ceilinged cave; although even the shortest of them could only enter and proceed about it at a crouch, while most of them were required to do so on all fours, those same circumstances made it—the fore part of it, anyway—possible to heat to somewhere barely above freezing with a trench fire and slate reflectors. With a higher roof and - consequently more space to absorb the heat, they all would likely have long since frozen to death of a frigid night, despite huddling together like a litter of puppies under the blankets and the ill-cured, smelly bearskins.

Their escape itself had been a very close thing, with the vanguard of the Kuhmbuhluhn force to be heard entering the outer section of the caverns even as she and the twenty-odd men clambered up the makeshift ladder in the narrow airshaft which those ancients who had enlarged and improved upon the natural caverns had bored through the living rock. They had emerged from their climb upon the north face of the mountain, well enough armed and supplied, but all afoot in a country that was now the undisputed domain of their enemies.

But the resourceful woods- and mountain-wise Ganiks had not stayed long afoot. By the time Erica had slyly guided them to the westernmost edge of the ruin of shattered rocks, splintered trees and shifted earth that once had been a plateau called the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn—a period of some four days and nights—all were mounted bareback on small mountain ponies.

Although the body that Erica inhabited was that of an Ahrmehnee woman in the mid-twenties—shapely, vibrant and rather toothsome—it was not the body in which her consciousness had been first born. Erica had often had to think very hard to recall just what that first husk that had contained her had looked like, for it had been dust for almost a millennium now.

She was one of a group of scientists which had, a bare two years before the man-made catastrophe which almost exterminated mankind and plunged most of the survivors back into barbarism and savagery, developed and perfected a device for the transference of minds between bodies. While radiation and plagues extirpated whole populations and races of mankind, while roving mobs of maddened, starving people scoured the face of the earth, Erica and the others had sealed themselves within the main complex of the J&R Kennedy Memorial Research Center—a large proportion of which had been built underground anyway—situated between Gainesville and Tallahassee, Florida, and carried on their various projects.

Via powerful transceivers, the group had kept abreast of the rampant insanities afoot across the rest of the continent and world as long as anyone continued to transmit. Blindly, the men and women listened to the destruction and death of city after city, country after country, as hunger and violence and disease brought civilization first to its knees, then to its death. After a short while, the steadily dwindling number of broadcasters were widely scattered and were located mostly in out-of-the-way places.

The majority of the residents of the Center were multilingual, and this fact was of great help in communication, for signals sometimes came, toward the last, in obscure 4an-guages and dialects.

For a few weeks, they were in daily contact with the captain of a Russian trawler in the North Atlantic, until lack of fuel and supplies and a near mutiny of his crew forced him to seek his home port; then they never heard from him again. Another Russian station, this one somewhere in the Caucasus region, stayed on the air sporadically for almost a year, broadcasting in Russ, Armenian, Farsi, Turkish and Georgian; from the natures of the final transmissions, the Center personnel assumed that one or more of the plagues had finally wiped out the distant facility.

This was what assuredly happened at their last U.S. contact—a military installation of so hush-hush a nature that they never knew its exact location. The last North American contact was with a field biologist in far-northern Canada; that one ceased suddenly in the midst of a sentence and could never again be raised.

Another such contact—a Japanese whaler and its factory ship, cruising in Antarctic waters—announced its intention of essaying a passage of the Straits of Magellan and never again broadcasted or acknowledged a transmission.

At the end of the second year, only three stations were still broadcasting on any sort of regular schedule—one in Uppington, Union of South Africa, one in southeastern Siberia and one in Queensland, Australia. By the end of the third year after the Center had been sealed, even these few were becoming unrelievedly silent.

After five years, the director, Dr. David Sternheimer, had unsealed the Center and sent out well-armed patrols into the surrounding areas. Their mission was not only to reconnoiter but, if possible, to bring back prisoners—young, healthy men and women, boys and girls, who had survived the plagues. The teams had met with notable success, and it was into these plague-proof younger bodies that Sternheimer and the rest had transferred their minds, driving out and away from the Center all of the confused or insane consciousnesses now in occupancy of much older bodies which mostly were dying of one or more of the plagues.

As time bore on, Center patrols brought in more and more of the scattered pockets of survivors to settle around the Center, engaging in farming and stock-breeding and unaware that they were, themselves, breeding stock of a sort… not at first, not in the beginning.

Slowly, as their strength of numbers waxed, as their shops and small manufactories repaired or refurbished garnered firearms, fabricated ammunition and explosives, the folk of the Center were able to vastly expand their holdings of land and to bring many more subjects under their suzerainty. Within less than two hundred years, Sternheimer and his fellows felt that they were strong enough to push on northward and eastward into the rich agricultural lands of what had been the state of Georgia.

And they had done so, not moving as rapidly as they might have done with their disciplined troops and superior arms and the coordination of long-distance communications, preferring rather to consolidate their gains as they advanced, which was the method proved through their earlier, Florida conquests.

Their way took time, a great deal of time. Cities, towns, hamlets, even the larger farms, when once conquered or taken over had to be carefully searched for still-usable artifacts, for books of any description, for the thousands of minutiae for want of which the Center industries might one day grind to a halt. Once found, these items must be sifted by experts, packed and sent back south along with the hostages. For their hostages, they took as first choices skilled craftsmen and/or persons capable of reading and writing. Sometimes they removed entire populations to Florida, replacing them with an equal number of folk whose preceding generations had all lived and died under the sway of the Center.

For this reason, they had not advanced far when the invaders—thousands of them—landed at points all along the Atlantic Seaboard, established strong beachheads and began to fight their way inland. Where possible, the aliens pro-ceeded up rivers, supported and supplied by their shallow-draft ships and boats.

Although the invaders were no better armed than their indigenous opponents and, in the beginning, suffered from a complete dearth of mounted troops, they were all veteran warriors, well organized and with a firm, mutual purpose. Moreover, they often benefited from the more than willing help of certain of their erstwhile opponents.

This last factor—the fact that many of the Americans hated and despised their own American kin with far more venom and vehemence than they did the foreign invaders—was what gave victory after victory to the aliens, as well as adding to their numbers. Forces which had consisted of no more than two or three thousand warriors upon landing often had tripled or quadrupled or even quintupled their strength by the time they were compelled to leave their boats at the fall line and move out of the tidewater lands and into the rich piedmont.

It was also another facet of this situation that defeated the forces of the Center when finally they came face to face with a sizable number of the invaders and their indigenous allies. Thanks to their firepower, the battalion-sized force wreaked bloody havoc in the initial stages of the contest, but then the ammunition ran low and radio contact with the bases within the newly conquered areas ceased to exist.

Not until the tattered, battered survivors of that doomed battalion had fought their way back to the environs of the very Center itself did they become fully aware of just how great a calamity had occurred in the areas to their immediate rear. Not until then had anyone realized just how deep and strong ran the hatred of the conquered for the Center conquerors.

In town after town, village and hamlet and farm, the people rose up to butcher Center personnel and the native satraps, smashing into ruin anything that smacked of the Center, burning buildings and vehicles. Nor had the risings been confined solely to the new-conquered, for Georgian areas now populated principally by folk brought from Florida had joined in the rising as wholeheartedly as their new neighbors. And these former Floridians it was who had coined the hate-filled battle-cry of the risen people—“Witchmen!”

Within bare weeks of the first contact between Center forces and the oncoming invaders, risings within Florida had shrunken the holdings of the Center to a mere shadow of its former glory; and these few remaining square miles were under constant and heavy siege by former subjects now allied with the invaders. But that siege never succeeded, and eventually the besiegers gave it up as a useless waste of time and wandered back home to fight among themselves.

More time rolled on. Generations were born and lived and died. The horrifying stories of the Witchmen to the south devolved from memory to legend to mere myth, believed by the few—the very young or the very superstitious—but doubted by most. Few adults would have believed that these deathless creatures, these Witchmen, moved among them… but they did.

The processes of mind transference had been vastly refined over the centuries, so that machinery, equipment, even a laboratory environment no longer were necessary to a man or woman experienced in the techniques. Witchmen and Witch-women inhabiting the bodies of well-known locals made the very best, the least detectable spies, and within a century or so their slender network stretched out north and east and west throughout almost all of what had once been the eastern half of the United States of America.

The Greek-speaking invaders had interbred with the native Americans and had slowly coalesced into a good-sized state comprising most of what had once been New England and parts of eastern Canada, in the north. To their immediate south lay the sprawling ruins of New York City, virtually deserted, but a veritable treasure trove of metals and other valuable loot and therefore hotly and frequently fought over by the invaders. Then there were several small but exceedingly aggressive black states scattered along the banks of the Hudson, and the huge and acquisitive Kingdom of Pennsylvania—which comprised all of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland along with parts of West Virginia, Virginia, Delaware, Ohio and New York State.

And the only thing which had checked the southerly expansion of the mighty kingdom was an even larger and more populous kingdom, this one another Greek-speaking state, the Kingdom of Kehnooryos Ehlas—or, in English, New Greece. This kingdom stretched from coast through tidewater and piedmont and highlands and, in places, into the mountains of what had been the states of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and part of Louisiana, plus a generous scoop of northern and eastern Florida, along with almost all of the northwestern panhandle of that former state.

But years and generations of comparative peac£ and relatively easy living had served to dull the cutting edges of the former invaders, to dim their martial fires. They were no longer expanding their territories in most places, and many of their borders were held by hired mercenaries who, quite naturally for their ilk, fought as little as possible and then only when forced to it.

Then came another catastrophe, this one natural but no less awe-inspiring. Tremendous earthquakes rocked and racked and wrecked the entirety of the known regions. In the mountains, volcanos dormant for millions of years spewed forth suddenly, rivers changed their courses overnight, lakes tilted and emptied and became dry land, while other lands subsided to become lakes or swamps or, on the seacoasts, dank salt fens. Then, before any could barely recover from the slackening quakes, a series of mammoth tsunamis smashed onto the length of the Atlantic Seaboard—highest and most destructive in the south, less so toward the north—drowning cities already half ruined, ripping up forests and crops, fouling with salt the rich soil it did not strip away. No one was ever able to accurately enumerate the total loss of human life due to the quakes and tidal waves, but none disputed that it had been tremendous.

When at last the land ceased to tremble and began to dry out, it became clear that the entire shape of this section of the continent was forever changed. The changes had been especially traumatic in and around the Center, for almost all of the peninsula of Florida had sunk to almost or below sea level, leaving the Center itself now surrounded by a single vast swamp.

Few of the Center buildings had suffered damage, luckily, but long months and years of unremitting toil were required to boat in rocks and gravel and soil to raise the area above the encroaching swamp, and even after this herculean task was accomplished, it was readily apparent to all that the complex and its man-made island could only house and support an absolute minimum of personnel and that, consequently, higher ground somewhere to the north or west must quickly be found and settled.

Fortunately, this last was not at all difficult during the chaotic years that immediately succeeded the seismic disturbances, for all order had broken down over vast stretches of the mainland, roads and bridges and even mountain passes had been obliterated, armies and fleets destroyed, and large cities were become mere rubble where traces of them existed at all above the lapping, muddy waters of the sunken coasts.

On a sizable island in the shallow inland gulf now covering portions of southwestern Alabama and southeastern Mississippi with its brackish waters, the first of what was to eventually be a series of “advance bases” was set up. But Base One proved tenable for only about fifty years, then steadily rising waters forced movement onto the true mainland.

Base Two was established near the overgrown ruins of the area known centuries before as Birmingham, and that one lasted for over a century and a half. Then a mysterious and almost always deadly epidemic took off eight or nine out of every ten inhabitants, and the few survivors owed their lives to the last-minute discovery of a vaccine by the feverishly working Center medical laboratories.

At that juncture, Dr. Sternheimer ordered the inland base completely stripped and abandoned, withdrawing all surviving folk to the main Center complex or to another base on the much-shrunken and almost uninhabited island of Cuba, to the south.

Not for two centuries did they try to establish another base to the north, and when at last they did, it was in a very different way. Choosing a particular small tribe of the distant descendants of Americans in an isolated area of the Southern Mountains, they sent in a cadre to teach these illiterate near savages, who were scratching a bare subsistence out of the rocky soil while fighting off attacks by wild beasts and stronger neighbors. Within a couple of generations, thanks to more and better foods, carefully monitored and controlled reproduction, improved housing, sanitation and medical care, and the subsequent decline in deaths and impairment due to disease, the stunted, brutish primitives became a tribe of tall, strong, well-proportioned men and women, most of them clearly possessed of a high degree of native intelligence.

It had been then that Dr. Sternheimer had had schools begun to teach young and old alike elementary subjects, advancing those who seemed to own the potential into more involved education. When he felt the time to be ripe, the Director brought in Major Jay Corbett—one of the original, many-times-transferred minds—from his previous assignment and set him to molding the men and boys of Broomtown into a body of well-trained, disciplined soldiers. For Sternheimer knew that sooner or later he would likely have real need of a corps of dependable troops, units capable of moving fast and striking hard. For the Center and its plans were now faced by several minor threats and a single major one.

The seismic disturbances of centuries past had not only shaken and reformed lands and lakes and seas, but they had shaken apart and destroyed states and governments and all existing order.

Of what had been before, only Kehnooryos Mahkedohnya— the northernmost Greek-speaking state was still more or less the same, with few of its high, rocky coasts submerged and its people still ruled by an aristocracy.

The neighboring Black Kingdoms had mostly ceased to exist; almost all had been swallowed up by the present Caliphate of Zahrtohgah, which occupied almost all of New York State not now underwater. The handful of smaller, weaker Black Kingdoms that were still extant were so only by the sufferance of the Caliphate.

The vast Middle Kingdom, with large areas of its eastern lands now submerged or, at best, become salt fens, now consisted of three large states and scores of smaller ones, constantly shifting alliances and consequently constantly warring.

The even vaster kingdom of the southern Greek-speakers had likewise sundered, though not so thoroughly as had the Middle Kingdom. Despite multitudinous rebellions, invasions by the indigenous mountaineers and war bands from the southerly portions of the Middle Kingdom, and the simultaneous outbreak of a hot, deadly and involved dynastic squabble, the ruling house of the Southern Greek-speakers had managed to hold on to something over a sixth of their former lands, all just south of the Middle Kingdom lands.

Of the rest of the former kingdom, the northeastern portion had become the Kingdom of Karaleenos, while the southeast and southwest had called themselves by the name of the formerly united state, the Kingdom of Kehnooryos Ehlahs, briefly. Then they decided upon the Kingdom of the South, though they were not truly a kingdom under any name, merely a loose confederation of powerful noblemen—thoheeksee, or dukes—who customarily chose one of themselves to be king for life, or until he displeased enough of them to be violently deposed and replaced. David Stemheimer had slowly, over the years, decades and centuries, worked his agents— each always in a body of whatever race and class was appropriate—into sensitive positions and had been gradually jockeying the internal and external relations of the various states toward a position or alignment that might eventually be favorable to a takeover by the Center of the entire Eastern Seaboard, either covertly or overtly.

Then his painstakingly constructed house of cards had been dramatically tumbled. The wild card that effected this destruction was a human mutant, Milo Morai, who had led a horde of horse nomads on a two-decade trek from the high plains of the west to the east coast, where they quickly conquered both of the south-central Greek-speaking states— Kehnooryos Ehlahs and Karaleenos. Fifty-odd years later, this Morai and his forces had halted—if not actually defeated—a huge army of Southern Greeks led, supposedly, by their king, Zastros, but actually led by Dr. Lillian Landor, from the Center.

Dr. Landor had been killed, but not by Morai; however, he had slain several of Sternheimer’s agents—colleagues and friends—torturing most of them to death or near death. On the single occasion when the two had spoken—on a transceiver captured from Dr. Landor—Morai had flatly refused to cooperate in any way with the Center or its patriotic aims and had served notice that he would kill any Center personnel who entered lands ruled by him and his fellow mutants.

Not that this threat had stopped Stemheimer from implanting his agents in Morai’s Confederation or from continuing his attempts to disrupt and weaken the newer and the older states and principalities. When, a few years after the death of Dr. Landor, Morai had commenced a campaign which ended in generally discrediting the Greek church and weakening its hold on its former adherents, the Director thought that he had seen a way to strike this Confederation hard enough to possibly fragment it.

Gradually, over a period of years, Center agents had worked their way up in the hierarchy of the weakened, impoverished and much-demoralized church. From the still-faithful laity, they had carefully earmarked the fanatics, the perpetual malcontents, the manageable lunatics, rabble-rousers, incurable romantics and violence-prone elements.

From this societal flotsam and jetsam, agent-clerics in certain carefully chosen areas had formed sinister and highly secret societies, the announced purpose of which was to kill, drive out or bring to the True Faith all men and women of the Confederation, as well as to return ownership of all land to the descendants of the original Greek-speakers. Once sworn by terrible oaths, the members were sent out to prostelytize amongst all classes.

In most places they had been highly successful in their efforts, and the plan might well have created considerable havoc had it been carried out as planned, but it was not. A single small city in southern Karaleenos had, for reasons unknown and now forever unknowable, risen and butchered most of the ruling nobility, but then had fallen to Confederation forces, with most of its leaders—including the Center’s agent—taken alive. Apparently, this agent had been tortured into revealing most of the plot, for when the two western Karaleenos duchies arose more or less on schedule—their successes were to trigger all other risings—Confederation troops were ready and waiting within easy marching distance to crush the second before it had well started and to then march against and so bottle up the first that those waiting elsewhere for the word never received it at all.

Two more Center agents were captured and carted off to the Confederation capital to have additional details of the Center’s plans agonizingly wrung from their suffering bodies by Morai’s skillful and dedicated torturers. One of the nuggets of information had been a second facet of Sternheimer’s plan.

One of the largest and fiercest tribes in the mountains to the west of Karaleenos was the Ahrmehnee—descendants of Americans of Armenian extraction. Formerly resident in the foothills rather than the mountains, they had conducted bloody and productive raids against the Greeks for hundreds of years. When the Greeks were mostly displaced by the horse nomads, the like was practiced upon them until Morai came with his armies and drove them off their ancestral hills and up into the mountains. Though they still raided after that, they suffered much for those raids, finding the Horseclansmen and their get as tough and feisty as any Ahrmehnee.

With the Confederation armies spread out, fragmented, in the process of putting down a score of rebellions in distant, isolated areas, Sternheimer had thought that a full-scale invasion of blood-hungry mountaineers might very well be just the thing to utterly dismember this troublesome Confederation.

To effect this, he had had Drs. Erica Arenstein and Harry Braun and Major Jay Corbett transfer into the bodies of captured Ahrmehnee, after having been hypno-taped in the oral and written language of the tribesmen, their religious practices, superstitions and folk ways. Then they three and a few Broomtown men had established a camp just south of Ahrmehnee territory where the Broomtowners stayed while the three agents rode on in search of the nahkhahrah, the paramount chief of the Ahrmehnee stahn, with most of the functions of a priest-king.

When found, the old man—at least eighty, though still strong, erect, active and appearing twenty years younger— showed himself to be shrewd, intelligent and anything but ingenuous. However, his hatred of all lowlanders ran deep, and these People of Powers, as he soon came to call them, were saying things that he had prayed to one day hear.

He sent out word for all warriors of the stahn to gather around the village that he called his home, then sent Erica, a wise woman from his tribe and an honor guard of warriors to the Hold of the Maidens of the Moon—fierce, man-hating amazons who were distantly related to the Ahrmehnee and who sometimes allied with them on larger raids.

Within the sprawling, natural fortress of the Moon Maidens, Erica discovered not only a few hundred of the hard-muscled, lithe and savage female warriors ready to join with the Ahrmehnee against the western marches of the Confederation, but a true treasure trove of artifacts and printed matter from the long-vanished twentieth-century world. Such had been her elation that she had hardly been able to wait to get back to the nahkhahrah’s village to confer with Corbett and Braun.

Their task of arousing the fierce Ahrmehnee accomplished, the three agents had ridden south, but only as far as their base camp and its long-range, battery-powered transceiver. Sternheimer’s response to notification of the find—the books and manuals, the various well-preserved machines and devices, the spare parts and rare metals and, most especially, the vast assortment of transistors—had been prompt and lavish.

The Director had personally supervised the immediate assembly of every pack animal upon which his people could quickly lay hands at Broomtown, loaded a few of them with the special supplies requested by Dr. Arenstein and Major Corbett, then dispatched them north escorted by a troop and a half of Broomtown dragoons under the command of Sergeant Major Vance, an experienced and highly respected Broomtown Regular.

Fast as Vance had marched his column—and in view of the general conditions, he had marched them fast indeed—by the time he and the column had reached the camp of the waiting agents, conferred with them, and trailed them at a discreet distance back up to the Hold of the Maidens, the marshaling of the Ahrmehnee host was well underway. No men of fighting age remained in the Ahrmehnee villages through which they rode, and all three hundred-odd of the young Moon Maidens had ridden forth behind their hereditary war leader, the brahbehrnuh, leaving the near-impregnable hold guarded by girls and women under fifteen and over thirty; the men of the hold were not allowed to bear weapons or know the proper use of them.

With the Broomtown riflemen hidden within range of her small, personal transceiver, Erica reentered the Hold of the Moon Maidens, trailed by a couple of laden pack mules and her two male “slaves”—-Dr. Braun and Major Corbett. Despite the frigidity of the mountain winter outside the hold, within lay a warmth that was almost oppressive in its intensity. But it was this continuous warmth that enabled the folk of the hold to grow two and three crops per year and thereby become wealthy through trading their constant surplus.

None of the women paid much attention to the curious pokings about of a brace of unarmed men, slaves at that, and so Dr. Braun was not long in confirming Erica’s estimate of the great value of her finds within the warren of natural and man-made caves honeycombing the mountain. He also confirmed her other assumption.

The hot, sometimes boiling, mineral springs which fed the shallow lakes and helped to heat the hold, the unnatural warmth of the very rocks and soil of the place, and in particular a crescent-shaped crack near the entrance to the caverns—called by the inhabitants the Sacred Hoofprint of the Lady’s Steed— all indicated that the hold was sitting squarely atop a barely quiescent volcano.

Judging by its frequent forcible ejections of fumes and searing jets of gases, Braun and Corbett agreed that the Hoofprint was a large vent for the indescribable pressures beneath the hold and that were that vent to be plugged in some way, enough of an eruption might be triggered to cover any traces of their looting of the hold caverns after they had gassed most of the folk to sleep and slain the rest.

So it was decided, and, riding widely and seemingly aimlessly, Braun and Corbett emplaced their gas bombs, all set to be triggered by a single radio signal. Broomtown snipers were signaled to infiltrate closely enough to pick off the women manning the watchtowers and the single entry tunnel. When Erica felt the time was ripe, she coolly poisoned her hostesses, then she and the other two agents donned their masks, set off the gas bombs and radioed the snipers to begin their deadly task.

While the troopers and packers, all masked against the gas, bore manload after manload of the ancient artifacts and metals up from the labyrinthine caverns, across the central valley and through the tunnel to be loaded onto the pack animals waiting in the chill, clear air beyond, Dr. Braun, Major Corbett and a few selected Broomtown men fashioned an explosive device and positioned it on a ledge just below the lip of the Sacred Hoofprint, its timer set to give them all enough of a lead to be well away when its explosion sealed the vent.

Those few men and women of the hold who were not fully overcome by the gas were coldly shot, that there might be no living witnesses to the rape of the hold. When the last loads and last men were clear of the entry tunnel, it too was sealed by explosives. Then the agents, troopers and pack train began the long journey back south to Broomtown.

But, as Fate would have it, the agents and their Broomtowners had truly been hoisted by their own petard. The eruption, when at length it came, had affected far more than the area of the Hold of the Moon Maidens. The eruption had spawned and been preceded by terrific earthquakes, and one of the most intense of these had shaken down a plateau at the very time that the bulk of the pack train was passing down the section of trail that skirted it. Now, the corpses of the Broomtowners, their animals and the precious loads they had borne lay buried beneath the resultant rockslides.

None of the three agents had been killed, although Dr. Braun had suffered a badly broken leg when his big mule fell and pinned him against the rocky ground. Then, however, had come the actual eruption with rains of cinders and ash and white-hot rocks which had fired square miles of mountain forests and brush. But under the leadership of Jay Corbett and Erica, the survivors of the rockslides had survived the fiery holocaust, as well.

Because the large, long-range transceiver and almost all of their supplies lay buried with the rest of their original party under tons of rock, they had had no option but to press on southward as rapidly as possible, once Erica had used her surgical skills on Dr. Harry Braun.

During their first day’s march, another Broomtown noncom and a few troopers rejoined them after having been separated from the main column in the aftermath of the quakes and the fires. They brought with them a bound prisoner—a shaggy, unkempt and very filthy man who averred himself to be a “Ganik,” a term unfamiliar to any of the agents or the troopers.

Thorough questioning after drug injections had established that these Ganiks were a most unprepossessing race and were better avoided, being aggressive, vicious in the extreme and numerous in this part of the mountains. Among their common, everyday practices were the savage torture of prisoners, incest of every variety, bestiality and cannibalism.

Because of the danger of running into a large group of these barbarians, Corbett moved due west, into the mountains, then angled south, marching by compass bearing. In order to effect this, Braun had to be removed from his horse litter and strapped into the saddle of a riding mule. He was injected with drugs at regular intervals to prevent the pain from driving him into shock. He began to hallucinate that Erica was deliberately, sadistically torturing him, and nothing could then or later convince him of the baselessness of this charge.

Despite Corbett’s painstaking precautions, the presence of his party was detected by a large group of the Ganiks, who trailed them for days, made one abortive dawn attack against the camp, picked off several troopers along the route of the march and, finally, confronted the reduced column—several hundred strong, though very ill armed—at one of the rare open areas, where the track crossed a small valley.

Having expected just such a confrontation, Corbett had already split his command, giving Sergeant Gumpner one full squad and the responsibility for Erica, Braun and all of the other wounded.

Therefore, the full column formed a wedge and charged the strung-out mob of Ganiks, commencing a deadly fire at twenty-five yards, then continuing at full gallop up the farther slope to the high, narrow, rock-walled defile that split the mountain. Here they divided, with Gumpner’s people speeding on southward, while Corbett and the larger group prepared to hold back pursuit as long as possible.

The narrowness of the pass forced Gumpner’s group to string out in ones and twos, soon to be separated by the twists and turns and the difficult, rock-strewn footing. Erica found herself behind Braun. When she caught up to him, he begged her to check his girths, saying he feared that they were loosening. Against her better judgment, she had dismounted and done so, only to find them both tight and secure. But when she looked up to tell him so, it was to see a face twisted in hate, a wild look in his bloodshot eyes and the gaping black muzzle of his big pistol.

After raving for a few moments, he tried to shoot her but failed, so he kicked her viciously with his good leg, then slammed the heavy steel weapon down on the back of her unprotected head and rode on southward, even as she crumpled to the rocky ground.

She had been found by a brace of Ganiks, her rifle still slung diagonally across her back, and possession of it along with the fact that her female body was young and attractive had saved her from the stewpots. The leader of that small group of Ganiks had taken her for his own, raping her whenever the mood struck him and also making her available to his lieutenants, these latter called “bullies” in the Ganik “bunches.”

For many days, Erica’s mind was confused; except for her name and title, her memory was a blank. Then another, less forceful buffet by the Ganik leader brought all of her memories back in a rush at almost the same time that her principal rapist managed to kill himself through mishandling her rifle.

Securing the rifle and a supply of loaded magazines for it, she shot the cruel, slatternly Ganik woman who had been her jailer, then proceeded to shoot each of the bullies who had accepted the leader’s offer to abuse her, being aided and abetted by the only two bullies who had not raped her—a pair of incestuously homosexual brothers, Abner and Leeroy. After the executions, oddly enough, the remaining Ganiks of the bunch had freely accepted her as the new leader and the brothers had aided her in selecting new bullies to enforce her dictates.

Shortly after this, the new paramount leader of all the Ganik bunches had ridden in with his bullies and the man he had chosen to be their new leader. Erica had shot three of the newcomers dead and coldly offered the same to any others who tried to displace her from her new status. The surviving bullies of the dead paramount leader had conferred amongst themselves and elected Erica to replace him, so she and the rest of the small bunch had ridden back to the camp of the main bunch.

This had all taken place in early spring. Later that same spring, well-armed, well-mounted forces of the Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn—a group of misplaced natives of the Middle Kingdoms, or rather their descendants—had commenced a serious and successful attempt to either drive the entire Ganik race out of their kingdom or kill them all. And having lived with the Ganiks long enough to leam to really hate and despise the bulk of them, Erica had not been able to fault the Kuhmbuhluhners in their purpose.

As the summer was ending, the fortified camp of the main Ganik bunch fell to the Kuhmbuhluhners. Those of its defenders who had not deserted were butchered in a final battle. Then while the victorious Kuhmbuhluhners rode up into the empty camp, Erica and twenty-odd bullies made a narrow escape.