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He touched the huge sword leaning up against the table beside him, and one or two hands twitched as if their owners wanted to make signs of warding. He'd demonstrated his ability to summon the sword to prove his champion status. Most of his volunteers had been impressed, but many had remained skeptical, so he'd laid the blade down and invited any who wished to try to pick it up. Several of them—including Hurthang—had accepted the challenge... and almost ruptured themselves straining to lift it. When he'd picked it up effortlessly and extended it to Kaeritha, who took it from him easily, even the most doubtful had been forced to conclude that he truly was a champion of Toman?k.
What they still didn't know was why, after twelve centuries, Toman?k should suddenly decide he gave a copper kormak for what happened to hradani, but that was less important for the moment than the news that Sharn? was at work among the Navahkans. Whatever Toman?k might or might not want of them, they knew only too well what Sharn? desired, and they had no intention of letting him have it. For his part, Bahzell knew there was one other point he had not as yet mentioned that would be much more important to them than even Sharn?'s plans... once he got around to telling them about it. But he hadn't found quite the right time to bring it up. It was as though something—or, he thought darkly, someone —was holding him back until exactly the right moment.
"Aye, well, I can be seeing the sword, Bahzell," Hurthang said almost apologetically, "but this other business—this notion of 'feeling' things—" He twitched his shoulders in a shrug, and Bahzell smiled bleakly.
"It wasn't so very easy for me to be accepting, so I'll not say I'm surprised to hear as how others find it a mite difficult. Yet it's true enough. Kerry?" He looked at Kaeritha for support, and she frowned down into her own ale.
"Bahzell's probably right, Hurthang," she said finally. "No two champions are precisely alike, and none of us do things exactly the same way. This particular task was laid on Bahzell, and I have no idea just how he'll be guided or helped—or if he'll be guided or helped—in its completion, and there are limits on the knowledge we can be given, as well. I suppose the best way to put it is that Tomanāk can usually confirm things for us, but He won't reach down and lead us by the hand when we're trying to figure them out in the first place. That's our job, not His, and as a rule, I think that's how it ought to be. He's forging us to be His blades and to think and act for ourselves, after all, not to be His helpless suppliants... or slaves."
She paused, and Hurthang nodded slowly. However little use most hradani might have for deities, that, at least, was an outlook they understood. Their own harsh lives taught them to stand on their own, and the one thing for which every hradani felt contempt was weakness. Among their folk, physical strength could be taken almost for granted, but internal strength was another matter... and a much more important one.
"In my own case," Kaeritha went on, "it's something I see , like an aura or a light that guides me once I come close enough. For Bahzell, it would probably be something else, and I wouldn't presume to try to put it into words for him. But if he says he'll 'feel' something, then I'd have to say he will. When the time comes."
"Umph." Hurthang shoved himself back in his chair, scratching his nose, then shrugged once more. "All right, then, Bahzell. I suppose I've done dafter things in my time than follow a man as says he'll 'feel' the enemy when he gets close enough to 'em. Not that I can be calling any of them to mind just now, you understand, but if you'll be giving me a few days to think, I've no doubt at least one will be coming to me."
"No doubt," Bahzell agreed politely, and laughter rumbled about the map room. But then it died as one of the others spoke up in a voice which held no humor at all.
"Well, aye, I'd have to be agreeing with Hurthang so far as Sharnā's concerned," he said, "but as for this business of other gods and demons and such—!"
Bahzell turned to look at the speaker, but the young man refused to look away. Instead, he met Bahzell's eyes and shook his head with dogged hradani stubbor
"It's grateful I am to you for warning us what's toward, and no mistake. Aye, and that Tomanāk will help kick Sharnā's arse out of our business, as well. But I'm thinking as how he's his own reasons for wanting Demon Breath gone, and meaning no disrespect, Bahzell, I'm not so very inclined to be welcoming Scale Balancer in in his place."
No one spoke up in agreement, but Bahzell felt it in the others' silence.
"I'll not speak a word against your own choice," the critic went on, "but this I'll tell you plain, I've seen no reason at all, at all, to be welcoming any god in as my lord and master, and it just might be that one reason Tomanāk's so all-fired eager to help us is to be changing our minds about that. But the fact is there's not a one among all the 'Gods of Light' whose been after doing a single damned thing for hradani since the Fall."
He fell silent, and someone coughed into a fist behind him. The silence hovered tensely, and Bahzell looked around the gathered members of his clan with level eyes. Then he nodded slowly, and stood. The two men closest behind him had to step back to make room, and he heard someone curse as a boot heel came down on an unsuspecting toe, but he didn't even turn to look. He simply reached down for his sword, the symbol of his champion's status, and held it up, hilt uppermost, and the crowd parted before him like water before a ship's prow as he made his way to the hearth. He put his back to the mantle, feeling the fire's heat on his back and calves, and faced them all, still holding his sword before him.
"I do be hearing you, Chavâk," he said then, addressing the young warrior who had spoken as formally as a chieftain in a clan's great conclave, "and you've my respect for speaking your mind plain and unvarnished. Aye, and so far as that goes, it wasn't so very long ago I'd've been saying the selfsame things. Come to that, I did say 'em, and a mite louder than you just have, when himself and I first stood face-to-face."
"And how did he answer you?" Chavâk asked.
"He didn't," Bahzell said simply. "Not then, for he'd seen plain enough as how it would take something stronger than words to be changing a hradani's mind." He smiled faintly. "We've a way of being on the stubborn side, from time to time, or so I've heard tell."
He twitched his ears, and several members of his audience chuckled. But then his own smile faded, and he went on quietly.
"Well, he found something stronger. Leastways, I'm thinking as how most folk might be seeing a demon in that wise. But there was a bribe he could have been offering me long before that, a secret he might've told, if it so happened he'd been minded to buy my oath. But himself wouldn't bribe me, Chavâk. He won't be bribing you either, come to that, yet I'm thinking there's something you should know—something himself gave me as a gift, with neither price nor strings attached—that all hradani should be knowing, Horse Stealer and Bloody Sword alike."
He smiled briefly at Brandark, surrounded by his hereditary enemies as he sat still by the map table, and then drew a deep breath.
"You see, lads, there was a reason himself was after choosing a hradani champion after twelve hundred mortal long years. Come to that, I've no doubt there are more things than one as he has it in mind for me to do, but telling you what himself told me is the task as will mean the most to all our folk, for it's about the Rage."
Sudden silence slammed down. The tiniest crackle of the hearth fire and the sigh of wind across the roof carried clearly in the stillness, and Bahzell smiled crookedly in bitter understanding.
"We're all knowing who we've to thank for the Rage," he told them, his deep voice sweeping over them like a quiet sea, "but there's something we none of us ever knew until himself told Brandark and me the truth. When the dark wizards in Kontovar set the Rage on us to make us fight and die for them, their spell went into the bone and blood of us. For twelve long centuries we've passed it, father to son to grandson to great-grandson, and it's the Rage as truly makes the other Races of Man hate and fear us. But the Rage we have now, it's not the one as the scum who gave it to us meant us to have."
Still no one spoke, but he saw ears rising and foreheads furrowing as his audience wondered where he meant to go, and he raised his sword higher.
"I swear this to you upon this sword," he said, and he didn't raise his voice, yet it carried like thunder to them all, and his eyes flashed. "The old Rage exists yet, and will for years to come, but it's after changing at last. When we call the Rage to us—when we summon it rather than let it be taking us against our will—then we control it ."
Most of the others looked confused, but he saw the start of understanding—and a wild, burning fire of hope—on some of the faces gazing back at him, and he nodded.
"Tomanāk himself has said it. The Rage can take and master us against our will only if we let it, but we can be taking it —aye, and using it—as we will and need from this day on. Not as a curse that makes animals and less of us, but as a tool, a weapon as answers to our hand and our will and makes us more than we are! That's the reason himself was after claiming a hradani champion—to be telling all hradani that after twelve hundred years, our fate lies in our hands again at last, and not the hands of the Phrobus-taken wizards who cursed us all!"
He stopped speaking, and the silence was deafening. No one spoke, as if each of them feared it was all a dream which his own voice might break, taking away the fleeting hope that the impossible might somehow be true. But then, at last, Hurthang Tharakson rose slowly. The others flowed aside to give him room, and he walked very slowly down the length of the map room to stand facing Bahzell.
"Is it true?" he whispered. "D'you swear to me it's true , Bahzell?"
"I do that," Bahzell told him quietly. "By my life, by my father's honor, by the clan blood we share, and by the Sword of Tomanāk Itself."
Hurthang stared at him, his face white and strained, and then steel whispered on leather as he took his axe from his back. He held it for a long, still moment, and then he knelt at his cousin's feet, laid the axe before him on the floor, and bent his head.