The Warlock of Rhada Read Online Free PDF

But if it did, I would then hope that my faith would be strong enough to let me serve God.”
    It seemed to Glamiss at such times that unless men were once again united, as they had been in the Golden Age, this struggling society of conflict and conflicting loyalties must surely sink into final barbarism.
     
    “You sent for me, Glamiss Warleader.”
    The speaker was Vulk Asa, a spindly creature no more than a meter and a half high, dressed in fool’s motley. The featureless face, eyeless, smoothly modeled from broad, flat cheekbones to a delicate and sensitive mouth, was remarkably mobile and expressive. Glamiss did not believe that men could not read the emotions of the Vulk in their faces. It was rather that men seldom understood what those emotions were, for beyond love and fear, the emotions of the aliens were not those felt by men.
    At this moment Glamiss could see that Asa was both weary and apprehensive.
    Glamiss said sternly, “Have the troopers been deviling you, Vulk?”
    Asa’s head, seemingly too large to be supported by his slender neck, wobbled in denial. “No, Warleader.”
    Emeric had opened his water-bottle. He passed it to the Vulk and said, “Drink, Asa. You look dry.”
    The Vulk took the flask gratefully and wet his lips.
    Glamiss regarded his friend and the Vulk and smiled covertly. The Order of Navigators taught that the Vulk were as they were, eyeless and feeble, because they denied God in the Star. In punishment for that great sin, the demon Cyb had shattered their homeworld in a great astronomical catastrophe, and since that time they had wandered, dispersed and homeless, among the planets of men. The Book of Warls claimed that Vulk lived for twenty thousand years or more, a special refinement of punishment bestowed upon them by Sin --scarcely a thing an educated man would credit, though Glamiss could not remember ever having seen a Vulk dead of old age. They were occasionally killed in pogroms, but natural death was rare.
    To the young captain, the disparity between the wicked, aggressive creatures described by The Warls and the Protocols, and the meek aliens he knew Vulk to be cast a certain doubt on the truthfulness of writers. The Vulk existed, after all, on man’s charity. In return they amused men--as fools, and served them in the field--as Talkers. Mentally linked to one another over anything less than planetary distances, the Vulk had a certain military value as communicators. But blasphemous, evil, and bloodthirsty as the Protocols claimed? Not likely, Glamiss thought.
    “Sit, Asa,” he said, less formally now. “Rest.”
    “I thank you, Glamiss Warleader.”
    “Look out there,” Glamiss said. “What do you see?” The Vulk did not see as men did, but their sensitive minds detected the shape of living things, often even the hidden structure of the inanimate.
    “There is a settlement, and beyond there is a bridge and a mill. There are fat herds in the meadows. Few men.” The Vulk hesitated and then went on. “There is an adept in the valley, Glamiss Warleader.”
    “A Vulk?”
    “No, Warleader. A human being. But--with a special mind. A rare thing now.”
    “Now?”
    The Vulk seemed deliberately vague, as all his kind were when they spoke of the distant past. “There were once many humans with a talent for the mind-touch, Glamiss Warleader. Many died in the killings of the Dark Time.”
    “The eagles,” Glamiss, ever practical, prompted. “Are they under mental control?”
    “Partially. Sometimes.”
    Glamiss made an impatient gesture. “What sort of answer is that, Vulk? I want to know if we must fight the birds as well as the men in the valley.”
    “I cannot tell you, Warleader. The adept is weak. I think perhaps it is a child. But there is other danger. Beyond the valley--near it--above--an old man--” The words became slurred and jumbled as they often did when the Vulk’s strange mind left its body. The creature’s muscles twitched and a thin trickle of