The Sage Read online

  The Sage

  Star Stone Book 2

  Christopher Stasheff

  1996

  This e-book created with a scan by Highroller

  With thanks to

  Peter D'Alessio

  Chapter 1

  The first stone struck Culaehra in the ribs; something cracked. He cried out as he doubled over in pain—and wrapped his arms around his head. The rest of the stones came thick and fast. He ran, his clan chasing, howling obscenities and throwing rocks. Culaehra cursed them back, even though the sound was muffled by his forearms as stones struck them, the hurt coming through to his head. He ran in among the trees, whose branches took the stones and even threw them back. But one tree caught a rock and dropped it onto his arm, half striking his skull.

  Culaehra went sick for a moment, stomach pressing upward and feet staggering as the world swung about him. He blundered into a tree trunk, but he had taken many such blows before, ever since Ruckhose had slapped him for his interfering—but Culaehra had come back at him then, kicking him where a blow would disable any man; and he came back now. His head cleared; he gathered himself, pushing off from the tree to go lurching on through the forest.

  Most of the voices dwindled behind him, but a few came on—Ruckhose's sons, ever eager to avenge their father. That by itself would have been only right, but they might have given a thought to their sister—many thoughts, since it had been eleven years before! One of their stones caught Culaehra squarely atop the head, between his upraised arms. It was small, so he only staggered, stomach-sick and dizzy again—but long enough this time for them to catch up and kick him in the rear. He shouted in anger and pain and turned on them, dizzy as a newly wakened bear, and as dangerous. He blundered into them, his fist cracking into Gornil's head, Nirgol's belly. But the third cousin fetched him a blow with a cudgel on the back of the head, and Culaehra went down, almost unconscious, darkness folding about him. He struggled against it, enough to hear old Dabalsh's voice coming closer. “Enough! You know you can't use any weapons but one-hand stones in an out-casting!”

  “Bastard swung at us,” Gornil groaned.

  “The more fool you, to get so close! No, leave him—no killing!”

  “He killed our father!” Nirgol grunted from his sore belly— for the hundredth time, as he ever had for eleven years, and Dabalsh's answer was the same as always.

  “He killed him to save himself, killed him in the middle of an act even the gods abhor!”

  “Whore indeed,” Gornil snapped. “What's the crime in whoring? Culaehra has made a new whore, and you don't kill him for it!”

  “A woman jilted isn't a whore, and Tambat has already betrothed her, pregnant or not!”

  “The more fool he,” Nirgol muttered, but without conviction—what was one wife more or less to Tambat?

  “And the more fool you if you slay a man for a jilting!” Dabalsh's voice began to fade as he hauled the young men away. “Be off with you now, or you'll bring down the gods' anger on the whole village! It's for them to say if Culaehra lives or dies! Be off!”

  The young men bleated protest, but their voices faded as Dabalsh drove them away. Culaehra lay panting—and hurting. He breathed carefully against the pain in his ribs—and his head, his arms, his legs, his chest, and his back. He assuaged his hurts by reflecting with vindictive satisfaction that he had, at least, stolen and hidden the village treasury, and they would be livid when they discovered it missing. Hard on that thought, though, came the realization of what the brothers would do if they came back and found him lying as he was, and unconscious. The thought shot enough strength into his arms and legs to pull him in under the low-lying bushes. There he burrowed into the forest mold, found one last bit of strength to lift a leaden arm and pull leaves down to hide his body, then lay, trying desperately to cling to consciousness . . .

  And failing.

  * * *

  Ohaern moved a hand in a slow and languid caress, and Rahani shuddered, gasping, “Enough!”

  “Never enough,” Ohaern breathed, still caressing.

  This time her answer was a moan. “I thought you had forgotten that game.”

  “I have never forgotten any game you have taught me, my goddess.”

  “But I teach you a new one every day, and it has been decades since we played that... Ohhhh! Ohaern ... !”

  “Decades? Can it really have been so long?” Ohaern kissed the rounded flesh so gently that his lips might have been butterfly's wings, so gently as to wring another groan from her.

  “It has been five hundred years!”

  “They have flown like swifts,” Ohaern breathed, and his breath made her shiver. “Five hundred, and every day in Paradise! But how could they be else, when my beloved is my goddess?”

  “Foolish boy.” She caressed under his chin, lifting his face to kiss his forehead tenderly, gazing adoringly down at his face. “How many times must I tell you that we Ulin are no gods, but only an older and more powerful race than your own?”

  “As many times as you wish,” he murmured, “for then I hear your voice.” And he made to move his hand again. But she caught his wrist and held it firmly.

  “Enough, impetuous mortal! Is it not enough indeed? Have I only minutes ago given you satisfaction, a transport of ecstasy? And you must move me to crave more?”

  “Yes, if I can—for how can any mere man be satisfied, with so infinitely desirable a woman beside him?”

  He spoke only truth, for Rahani was the most voluptuous of the Ulin, and had been even when there had been as many of her kind as there now were of humans—and the least of the Ulin women had been a queen of beauty, in human terms. But if she had felt the need to choose a human mate—which she had not needed, but had only desired—surely Ohaern was just such a one as a goddess would have chosen. Tall and broad-shouldered, with mighty muscles and a face with the strength of granite but so well-featured that he might even have been called beautiful, with jet-black hair and golden skin, large eyes and sensuous lips, he was all that a woman might desire, except that, on earth, he had been straitlaced—but with Rahani, he was quite otherwise, was unlaced indeed.

  “Now, stop!” She tightened her hand again, but not in time— his caress drew a shiver from her breast and a writhing from her body. “Nay, my love! I must speak to you of serious things, and I cannot, if you stimulate desire in me again!”

  “What can be more serious than love?”

  “Life and death!” She would not let his hand go, but lifted her head to look straight into his eyes, a commanding glance, then a pleading one.

  “Death?” Ohaern stilled. “Have I ceased to please you, then?”

  “Never that.” She softened, and the hand that held his wrist loosed it and lifted to sweep his hair back from his forehead. “Never could you bore me, Ohaern.”

  “You promised me that if you began to tire of me, you would tell me instantly!”

  “Only because you demanded it of me—for I knew very well that I would never weary of your company, any more than you would weary of mine.”

  “But you are a goddess, and a woman of infinite variety! Whenever I might begin to grow accustomed to you, I discover something new about you, some aspect of your being that I had never suspected before, and fall in love with you anew!”

  “And do you not see that the same is true of yourself?” She caught his chin, holding his head still so that he could not look away from her eyes—as if he might wish to!

  “There was never as much to my soul as there is to yours,” Ohaern protested.

  “But daily there is more, for under my tutelage you constantly grow and change, though you remain forever the same dear, sweet boy I chose of all your kind to aid Lomallin in destroying Ulahane, thereby serving also me.” S
he leaned down to kiss him again. “No, never will I tire of you, Ohaern, for there is ever new depth to you, even though it is I who must show it.”

  “It is you who make it!”

  But she shook her head. “Learning makes the soul grow, and you have daily learned more and more of magic from me, yes, and more and more of the way the world and the universe turn and grow and churn about us.”

  “And daily learned a new facet of Rahani, and a new love-game!” Ohaern smiled and moved his hand again. She gasped and clasped his wrist. “I have learned how to please a goddess—but how can there be more of me for you to discover?”

  “It is there within you, and ever was, for you alone of your generation were both shaman and warrior by nature—and it is both the shaman and the chieftain who must see what the future holds unless he changes it.”

  Ohaern groaned. “Must we think of the world, then?”

  “It has been five centuries since I bade you do so,” she reproved, and rose, gathering robes about her out of the very air itself. She stood, gesturing to clothe Ohaern's loins in a breech-cloth. “Come,” she said, “and look upon the world as it was, and as it may be.”

  He followed her to the edge of a precipice, knowing it was not real, telling himself desperately that what he gazed upon was only illusion. Where Rahani dwelled with him, he did not know, and had come to realize that it was not a place so much as a state of mind, a dream-realm like that of the shamans, a dwelling place for the soul—but the world that she chose to show him now was quite real, and he knew it.

  “Gaze upon the clouds,” she told him, and Ohaern did, watching the mist swirl and thicken. Its motion held him; his eyes lost focus and seemed to see only a gray, featureless wash of formlessness. It began to thin, to clear, first as a hole in the center, then as a widening area of clarity.

  He stared at the face of a stranger, with black hair held back by a copper band, black moustaches, and a close-cropped black beard. The eyes glittered, and the mouth opened in a shout as the warrior raised a spear, shaking it. He grew smaller, and as he did, Ohaern saw that from the waist down he was—a horse! Instead of neck and head, this horse wore the torso, arms, and head of a human! And not just one—as the first grew smaller, he saw more and more about him, all half man and half horse, all shaking spears or bows and shouting! Smaller and smaller they grew, and as they shrank, Ohaern saw even more of them—and more, and more! Finally they were so small that they seemed like a field of pebbles, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction.

  “How many are they?” Ohaern whispered, awed.

  “More than thirty thousand,” Rahani answered, subdued, and Ohaern stared in shock.

  He had never seen so many men gathered together, never even heard of it! “How?”

  “How do they come to be so many?” Rahani's lips thinned. “Bolenkar came among them, when they were few and starving, and showed one tribe how to gain food by killing another tribe, taking all their stores and weapons, and killing the best of the victims as a sacrifice of thanks to Bolenkar. He gave their chieftains Ulin weapons, which they copied in bronze, and they took him for their god and worshiped him. He commanded them to go forth and conquer whomever they found, and to rape their captured women, both centaur and human, again and again, to bring forth babies to rear to do his fell work. He bade them also take as many wives as they wished, siring as many babes as they could upon them, and if they died in the bearing, or died because their poor bodies wore out, what matter? Women were nothing to Bolenkar.”

  Ohaern shuddered, remembering. There had been many, many Ulin at one time, but the cruelest and most vicious of them had been Ulahane.

  When the Creator had brought forth new and younger races, Ulahane, in jealousy, had gathered a troop of Ulin about him to torment, enslave, and exterminate humankind, elfinkind, dwarf-kind, gnomekind, and the others. Lomallin, incensed, had gathered those who were outraged by Ulahane's cruelty, and a war between Ulin had resulted, with most of their number being killed—for, though the Ulin never died of old age or disease, they could be slain, and were: by one another. His army depleted, Ulahane swayed human beings to do his work against their fellows, posing as a god and demanding worship by battle. Few Ulin wished to fight the Scarlet One anymore, so Lomallin had gone among men while Rahani worked within their dreams and their hearts, and between them they chose Ohaern to gather a force from the younger races to fight Ulahane's corrupted human armies—the cruel soldiers of cities whom Ulahane had seduced, and the Vanyar, chariot-riding barbarians who came driving in from the steppe to conquer the free hunters of the land, then to pounce upon those cities that Ulahane had not yet corrupted. Ulahane had slain Lomallin, but the Green One's spirit had strengthened Ohaern and his nomad armies. Then Lomallin's ghost had slain Ulahane, and ghost had fought ghost among the stars. Below, Ohaern led the armies of Life against those dedicated to Death, and as Lomallin extinguished Ulahane's spirit, Ohaern had won. He had claimed his reward— five centuries in the arms of Rahani. But now he felt his spirit stir within him, and knew that he could no longer remain in bliss with her, for he read danger in the horde below him.

  The centaurs began to move. As they ran, they shrank even smaller in his vision, until the whole army was only a roughening of a map showing mountains and rivers that bordered a vast land to the south. Into that land flowed the roughening that was the army of centaurs, like ripples in a pond driven before a storm, moving at the speed of running horses, not the slower pace of walking men. Southward those ripples sped until they struck a darker region, like deeper water. The turbulence swelled, growing larger and larger, until it resolved into clashing armies, then grew farther still, until Ohaern could see the two sides for himself. The centaurs fought tanned men with eyes of flint, men who fought from horse-drawn chariots with double-bitted axes and swords.

  “The Vanyar!” Ohaern recognized his old enemies. “They who took Ulahane for their god!”

  “And now take his son Bolenkar,” Rahani said, her voice hard.

  Ulahane had bred up his own war-leaders by the expedient of raping human women, making them swell almost to bursting, then die in the bearing of huge babies—half-human, half-Ulin children: the Ulharl, eldest and most vicious of whom was Bolenkar. First and most lonely of his kind, he both hated and revered his father—revered him as any son will a strong and providing father; hated him for his cruelty and for the malice of the other Ulin folk who despised Bolenkar for being a hybrid. That anger and bitterness found its outlet now, in turning human against human, army against army—and the revering of his father, the constant craving for praise never given, found its outlet in continuing Ulahane's work of trying to eliminate the younger races by inducing them to kill one another. But Bolenkar had bade the Vanyar, too, to get as many babies as they could, and the two forces that clashed were almost equal in size.

  The centaurs outfought the Vanyar, though, for chariots were no match for the quickness and agility of their tough pony bodies. The charioteers fled, leaving thousands dead and dying on the battlefield. Those survivors who managed to find their ways home packed up their families and fled—those who found their families still alive. They sent word, and families farther also packed and fled, leaving behind a rearguard of Vanyar who fought, retreating and dying, until their folk were all escaped or enslaved or dead. Then the survivors of the rearguard turned and fled, too, while the centaurs took their tents and their slaves and settled down to the task of learning to follow the great herds that had been the source of Vanyar life, and the survivors of which were now the core of the herds the Vanyar would tend, not follow.

  For the Vanyar were boiling out of the vast grasslands toward the west and south—but not toward the east, for other tribes of centaurs were invading those lands. They set upon people weaker than themselves, looting and slaying and burning and enslaving; they attacked shouting the name of the god who led their conquest: Bolenkar. Aghast, Ohaern watched the fall and sacking of the glorious cities of the
southern subcontinent and the slaughter of their people. Then the Vanyar drove on, leaving the glorious cities deserted, to crumble back into dust or be engulfed by the jungle.

  They grew smaller in Rahani's magic cloud-circle, became again only ripples in a pond, ripples that stretched out toward...

  “The Land Between the Rivers!” Ohaern cried.

  The ripples engulfed that land in their flowing tide—a land in which Ohaern had walked and fought, in which he had saved cities and made friends. Loss chilled his soul as he realized they were dead now, those friends—long dead, and probably their descendants, too.

  Rahani sensed his sudden desolation and wrapped him in her arms. “Peace, beloved. This is not what has happened or even what must happen, but only what may.”

  She knew that was not the true cause of the chill that had touched Ohaern's soul, and he knew she knew—but was grateful all the same. For the first time, he began to understand how Rahani herself felt, dwelling apart from the other Ulin—as she must, with so many of her race dead, and the few that remained sunken into hermitage. He felt some shred of her desolation, her loneliness . . .

  Enough to make her console herself with a man of a lesser race?

  He embraced her fiercely, determined to console her indeed—but his gaze dwelled still on the devastation before him. The rippling tide of Vanyar had engulfed all of the Land Between the Rivers and onward, all around the shores of the Middle Sea and even upward into the lands of the north and west, where Ohaern's home had been. Dizziness claimed him for a moment, as he wondered if there was still anything left of his tribe, his bloodline. With Rahani's aid, he had watched his son grow, fall in love, father children, nurture them and their mother—and, sadly, grow old and die. He had not had the heart to watch his grandchildren long, but had reached down to them with help now and then—by Rahani's aid. It had been many generations since he had watched his descendants, though, and wondered if he had the courage to do so again.

  But it was so far to the west, his homeland! He had always thought of the Land Between the Rivers as being to the south and east—but here it was, southerly, yes, but very much to the west of the steppes overrun by the centaurs! Very far west indeed, but the rippling tide of charioteers had flowed through the great mountains to the south of the vast grasslands to engulf all the lands to their west, stopped only by the western ocean. Everywhere, the teeming horde of the Vanyar triumphed—and slaughtered, raped, and burned, plunging the world into darkness and barbarism.