Lords of the Seventh Swarm Read Free Page B

are no better than dronon, though they have human shapes. And do you know what it’s got you, Gallen: you’re a slave. You’re a miserable slave!”
    “A slave?” Gallen said, amused by Orick’s tirade. “Maybe so, but … I was born to be a Lord Protector.”
    “Yeah, so you’re a clone of some famous Lord Protector,” Orick grumbled. “That doesn’t mean you have to follow in his footsteps. As I remember the story, didn’t he eventually get martyred? Are you going to follow in his footsteps? Are you going to let somebody else decide how you’ll live your life?”
    “What else can I do?” Gallen said. He began pacing, hardly daring to look at Orick.
    And at that moment, the answer came to Orick, an answer he had felt in the depths of his soul but never had been quite able to voice to Gallen. “Ignore evil,” Orick said. “Jesus said to forgive others. If a man comes to you, though he has sinned seventy times seven, and asks forgiveness, then you forgive. Ignore evil.”
    Gallen shook his head angrily. “I disagree! ‘Resist Satan, and he will flee from you’! God strengthened David so he could slay Goliath. God ordered Joshua to destroy the Hittites and the Jebusites.”
    Orick grinned, a glint in his eye. “The devil quotes Scripture, too. You’re not a religious man, Gallen. When did you start quoting Scripture?”
    Gallen laughed. “I warmed my share of pews as a kid. You forget, I’ve got more than one priest in my family.”
    Orick felt chagrined. He said softly, “Sometimes, sometimes God has commanded men to fight. But I’d like to know Gallen, are you so eager to fight because that’s what God wants of you, or is it just in your nature? Sometimes God tells people to run, too. Moses took the children of Israel and fled from Pharaoh. Joseph and Mary were told to flee Israel when Herod sent his soldiers to slaughter the babes. Sometimes you should run from evil. Maggie’s right in this, in asking you to run. Her life is at risk as much as your own. And there’s the babe to worry about. She has to make the choice for her own life.”
    Gallen opened his mouth to argue, yet nothing came out.
    Orick looked up at Gallen, then shook his head in despair. “Gallen, my oldest and dearest friend, I think it’s time for me to leave you.”
    There, he’d said it. He’d been thinking it for months, and now he’d finally said it.
    “Leave?” Gallen asked, astonished. “Where would you go?”
    “Anywhere. We’ve been on a dozen fine planets. Home, maybe. Back to Tihrglas.”
    Gallen’s mouth just worked of its own accord, as if he would speak but couldn’t find the words. He’d been totally unprepared.
    Orick felt weary, sick at heart. “Oh, don’t you see it, Gallen? I’ve been thinking about this for months. The night the dronon came to Tihrglas, I almost left you for good. You know I’ve always wanted to be a priest. I wanted to serve God, but you’ve become a slave to evil, and I can’t watch it anymore. You sicken me, my friend. You’re destroying yourself!”
    Orick’s eyes watered with tears. It hurt to say these things.
    “What do you mean, I sicken you?” Gallen asked. “I haven’t changed.”
    “Oh yes you have!” Orick said. “Remember the day we first met?”
    Gallen looked at Orick, confused, and shook his head.
    Orick reminded him. “We were on that hot August road that runs through the hills by the mill outside Gort Ard, and you was hunting for that killer, Dan’l O’Leary?”
    “You mean the very first time we met?” Gallen asked. “You were with that friar, what’s-his-name.”
    “Friar Bannon,” Orick said, remembering the thin old fellow with the rotting teeth, his head shaved bald. “A godly man—one of the best there has ever been.”
    It had been a scorcher of a day, and Gallen was tracking a murderer and had lost the boy’s trail somewhere along the road. Dan’l O’Leary had managed to leap off the margin of the highway into some brush.