Free The Warlock of Rhada by Robert Cham Gilman

said quietly. “Is there another way?”
    “Shana,” Shevil Lar said, “I don’t think he is a warlock or a demon. I think he is a mad old man. Nothing he says makes sense.” The girl held her father’s arm and said with a wisdom far beyond her years, “Whatever he is, Shevil, he offers us more than Ulm’s soldiers.”
    With deep misgivings, taking his daughter’s hand, Shevil Lar picked his way between the still guttering, discarded torches down the mountain toward the dark houses where his people trembled in fear--caught between the madness of the Warlock and the lances of the warriors waiting for dawn on the ridge.
     
     

Chapter Seven
     
    Historians of the Inner Planets have had, for many years, a tendency to regard the Rhad as simply a troublesome and warlike people, given to periodically disturbing the peace of the galaxy. This is an oversimplification of the Rhadan role in stellar politics. While it is true that during the Interregnal and Early Second Empire periods Rhadan warbands ravaged the Rimworlds with unparalleled ferocity, it is also true that the men of Rhada were among the first to support the standards of Glamiss during the Reconquest. And chroniclers of the First Empire record that Rhada, though far from the seat of Imperium at Nyor (on Sol III), was traditionally the personal holding of the King-Elector--the Heir to the Star Throne of the First Empire Galactons.
    --Vikus Bel Cyb-1009, Rhadan Influences in Galactic History ,
Early Confederate period
     
    Though I am not Rhadan by birth, I take pride in my Imperial Principate of that place. It is fitting that this world of warriors should always be the hereditary holding of the man chosen Heir to the Imperium.
    --From a letter written by Fremir ibn Sol alt Messier (Rigell XXV)
discovered in the Imperial Archive of Nyor during the Late Second Stellar Empire period
     
    Through the deepest part of the night, those hours when both moons were in the sky, Glamiss watched the valley through his monocular. He noted the torches and the gathering at the valley’s far end, but even through the instrument, it was impossible to make out clearly what the people of Trama were doing in the distant moraine. First there was a gathering, and then, much later, he could make out a few figures moving up the moraine in the cold moonlight--but how many, and to what purpose, he could not be certain.
    In the fifth standard hour of the night, Warman Quant relieved him at the watch, and Glamiss returned to the bivouac to roll himself in his furred cloak and sleep for the time remaining until dawn.
    The sky was filled with the bluish promise of sunrise when Vulk Asa woke him. The eyeless face looked smooth as stone in the shadowless skyglow.
    “Glamiss Warleader, I have dreamed of Rahel,” the Vulk said.
    Glamiss waited, wise in the ways of the Vulk. Asa’s dream might be simply one of the mildly prescient dreams the Vulk frequently had (and which often provided intelligence of coming events that a clever warman would be advised to heed)--or the dream might not be a dream at all, as humans understood the term, but a sleep-waking contact with another Vulk, usually stronger and clearer than the mind-touch contacts forced by the daylight necessities of the Vulks’ masters.
    “She is well?” Glamiss inquired, as manners dictated.
    “Well enough, Warleader,” the Vulk said with equal courtesy. Glamiss, though accustomed to these elliptical Vulkish conversations, suppressed a certain impatience. Rahel, as the more sensitive of the two Vulk owned by the House of Vara-Vyka, was always kept confined in whatever keep Lord Ulm was using to house his people. Glamiss considered this summary deprivation of liberty an unnecessary cruelty, but it was common practice among the lords of the various planets in this part of the Great Sky.
    “She delivered your message to the Lord Ulm, of course.”
    “May she be thanked. But? There’s a ‘but’ of some sort in your manner,