‘The peasant told you that everybody around here knows the story about the fellow who found the gold,’ fat Estarg said, his eyes squinting shrewdly. ‘Before you go running off into the wilderness why don’t you ask some of the others if they’ve ever heard it. If they haven’t, then the first peasant was lying through his teeth, and we can all join hands and rip him up the middle.’

The penned-up farmers all confirmed Ara’s myth, of course, and after a day or so, Regulator Konag gathered up a dozen of his black-uniformed men and led them up through the farmland toward the mountains lying across the northern boundary of Veltan’s Domain. Their route lay somewhat to the west of the more populated coastline, so they encountered very few real farmers along the way, but Ara provided several imaginary farmers to fill in the gaps - and to repeat her myth.

The more she thought about that, the more Ara came to realize that it was not absolutely essential for Konag and his men to actually climb up into the mountains and look out at some vast stretch of imitation gold. All that was really necessary would be to make them believe that they’d seen it.

It would most definitely solve a problem that had been nagging at her since she’d first come up with her scheme. There were a large number of Sorgan’s sailors and Narasan’s soldiers in the basin above the Falls of Vash, and Ara definitely didn’t want Konag and his men to know that they were there.

Konag and his men dreamed that they were breathing very hard when they reached the top of the imaginary pass that opened out into the basin above the Falls of Vash, but - in their dream, at least - they hurried on toward the wide gap in the ridge-line at the north of the basin.

And there they stopped, astonished and awed by the wonder stretching off to the northern horizon. The sea of gold sparkled in the morning sun, and several of Konag’s hard-bitten Regulators actually wept at the sight.

Ara held the dream image before them for perhaps an hour, and then she turned them around and pointed them toward the south.

They were all positive that they were totally exhausted by the time they reached the foot of the vast waterfall, so they decided to stop for the day when they reached their previous camp site -which in fact, they had never left. This merged dream with reality to the point that Konag and his men were absolutely convinced that what they had dreamed was hard truth. Ara was quite pleased by how well it had turned out.

Then she implanted a sense of urgency in the minds of Konag and his fellow Regulators, so they arose early the following morning and set out toward the south before the sun was even over the horizon.

Jalkan and Adnari Estarg would have much preferred to keep a tight level of secrecy on the matter, but Ara had already bypassed them. Konag’s Regulators were all possessed by an overpowering urge to tell everyone they met about the wonder they had seen, so at least half of the church soldiers in the encampment on the southern coast of Veltan’s Domain knew about the field of gold before Konag reported it to his superiors.

Konag went directly to the crude hut that Jalkan and Estarg had appropriated upon their arrival.

‘Well?’ Jalkan demanded when Konag entered. ‘Was that idiot actually telling you the truth?’

‘No,’ Konag replied with an absolutely straight face.

The fat church man groaned. ‘I knew it was too good to be true,’ he grieved.

‘No, Your Grace,’ Konag disagreed. ‘When you get right down to it, the native’s story didn’t begin to tell us just how much gold was out there. The golden sand that blankets that desert beyond the mountain goes all the way out to the horizon. My men and I were fairly high up in the mountains, so I’d say that it was at least fifty miles to the horizon, and I have no idea at all of just how wide it was.’

‘Did you bring any back with you?’ Jalkan asked eagerly.

‘Adnari Estarg ordered us not to,’ Konag replied. ‘We were supposed to verify that foolish story and then come right back.’

‘I’d really like to see some of it, Konag,’ Jalkan whined in a voice filled with disappointment.

‘It’s not really all that far north, Jalkan,’ Konag told him. ‘You can go up there and look at it all you want if it means that much to you.’

3

Ara’s thought surveyed the south coast of Veltan’s Domain to get a better idea of just how many Trogites were now in the region. There were villages all along the coast, of course, and by now each village had been appropriated by church soldiers, and there was now a slave-pen attached to each village.

As the days passed and word of Konag’s discovery reached those other villages, an increasing number of church soldiers decided that army life no longer suited them.

At first, the desertions were almost always made under the cover of darkness, but then Ara implanted a growing anxiety in the minds of the soldiers who had remained behind. Her message got right to the point. ‘If you wait too long, those who have already deserted will get all the gold, and there won’t be any left for you,’ seemed to work quite well.

The soldiers began deserting their posts in broad daylight at that point, and after a few days, the priests who were theoretically in charge of the scattered villages began to send urgent messages to Adnari Estarg, begging him to send them more soldiers.

But by then, of course, there were no more soldiers, since they were now deserting in battalions.

The messengers stopped coming to Adnari Estarg’s door a few days later, and then the priests began to arrive, pleading for help.

Adnari Estarg ordered the priests to return to the villages to which they had been originally assigned, and a few of them even obeyed his orders - but not really very many. Ara extended her warning to include the priests, and very soon, most of the priests had joined the ranks of the deserters.

Ara’s thought lingered in the vicinity of the village where Jalkan and Adnari Estarg were growing increasingly distraught. She found that there was a certain charm in their growing sense of panic.

Ara was rather fond of the farmer known as Bolan, since it had been his recitation of her ‘myth of gold’ that had neatly snared Konag, so she briefly touched him to point out the fact that since there weren’t any soldiers guarding the slave-pen any more, there wasn’t really any reason to remain there. Bolan got her point almost immediately, so after the few priests remaining in the village had gone to bed that evening, Bolan and his friends tore down the western wall of the slave-pen and vanished into the night.