Kahless - Michael Jan Friedman [81]
“Wait,” said Kurn. “There is a transmission.”
Kahless came over to see it with his own eyes. “I do not understand,” he said. “I destroyed the communications panel. You all saw it.”
“It is not coming from the station,” Worf’s brother explained. “It is being sent there from somewhere else.
The emperor snorted. “That’s more like it. What does it say?”
Kurn brought it up on his monitor. Of course, Picard couldn’t read Klingon very well. He had to wait for the others to provide a translation.
But after only a few moments, he could tell that the news was not good. Suddenly, Kahless blurted a curse and turned from the console.
The captain looked to Kurn. “What is it?” he asked.
“It is about the scroll,” Worfs brother told him. He glanced at the emperor. “It was tested for authenticityand it passed. Apparently, even the clerics of Boreth are now satisfied the thing is authentic.”
The Heroic Age In the center of Tolar’tu, Kahless held Shurin’s battered body in his arms and roared at the gathering storm. Rain fell in heavy, warm drops, mixing with Shurin’s blood and marking the dirt at the rebel’s feet.
“This was my friend,” Kahless cried. “Shurin, who never knew his father or mother, who lost an eye fighting Molor’s wars. Yet he saw more clearly than most men, for he was among the first to turn against the tyrant.”
With a sudden heave of his powerful arms, the outlaw raised Shurin’s loose-limbed corpse to the heavens.. ore importantly, he made it visible to the vast mob gathered before him-an assemblage of rebels that packed the square from wall to wall and squeezed into the narrow streets all around.
Nor was he the only one with a dead man in his hands.
There were hundreds of others clasped by friends and kin, grim evidence of the efficiency of Molor’s soldiers and the sharpness of their swords.
But for every rebel that fell, two of the tyrant’s men had gone down as well. For every one of Kahless’s outlaws, two of Molor’s soldiers. And in the end, that had been enough to save Tolar’tu from destruction.
Not all of it, unfortunately. Not the outer precincts, where the enemy had smashed and burned and gutted at their warlord’s command. But thanks to the courage of these rabble and riffraff, this square and the buildings around it had gone unscathed.
“What will I tell this man of courage,” Kahless raged when I see him on the far side of Death? What will I say took place after he left us? What tale will I bear him?”
There were responses from the crowd, guttural demands of vengeance and promises of devotion. He couldn’t make out the exact words for the echoes. But he could see the expressions on the rebels’ faces, and by those alone he knew he was reaching them.
Strange, the outlaw thought. He had always been able to reach them this way, hadn’t he? He had just never paused to reflect on it. Kahless raised Shurin’s body a little higher.
“Will I tell him his comrades came as far as Tolar’tu, then faltered? That at the last, they spit the bit and allowed his death to come to nothing? Or will I tell him we persevered, and went on to Qa’yarin, and trampled the serpent there under our heel?”
This time the answer was so deafening, so powerful, Kahless thought the buildings around him might crumble after all. It was like being in the center of a storm, the likes of which the world had not known since its beginnings-a tempest made of men’s voices and clashing swords and a yearning so fierce no enemy could stand against it.
Truth to tell, Shurin had broken his neck falling off his starahk in the midst of the battle. Kahless himself had seen the beast stumble and throw the man to the ground, and he had seen Shurin lie still as other beasts came and trampled him.
It might not have been that way if the man hadn’t had too much bloodwine the night before. Or if he had slept more instead of rolling gaming bones halfway to morning.
But that was not the picture the outlaw wished to paint-and since he had been the only witness to Shurin’s death, he could paint it as he liked. The one-eyed man would be an asset in death as he