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.“Just because these people are primitive doesn’t mean that they are stupid.We’ve seen them spying on each other just to try to get better deals.Use the implants for any communications outside our roles, or to stay in touch with the Hamilton.Alert us at once if you run into trouble of any sort.”She smiled.“It will be hard for some of you to stay in character,” she concluded.“Remember that there is no other choice – and that you volunteered for it.”Dacron hadn’t volunteered – or perhaps the AI that had spawned him had volunteered in his place.But it wasn’t what Elyria meant and he knew it.Everyone would have to play their roles, including the women – and they were playing second-class citizens at best.The Confederation had no real concept of gender discrimination – being able to change sex at will had eliminated it completely – but Darius didn’t seem to have anything of the sort, unless it was done by magic.Elyria had stepped into primitive worlds before, as had Adana.Gigot.hadn’t.Two hours later, the drones helped move the wagons to the surface.The horses weren’t happy at all – they’d been bred on a Ring and they found Darius a little unnatural – but Fred and Plax handled them perfectly.Indeed, it was possible that the locals would want them both for breeding stock.They’d had their genetic code improved, although they hadn’t been uplifted to intelligence.Uplift procedures were banned, another legacy of the Thule War.No one would easily forget uplifted gorillas rampaging across human worlds.“Here we go,” Elyria said, as she climbed into a carriage.“Next stop, Warlock’s Bane.”Despite himself, Dacron couldn’t resist a thrill.This was going to be something new.CHAPTERFOURTEENThey smelt the city a long time before they drew near to it.Elyria took a breath, silently grateful for the enhancements in her sense of smell.Most primitive societies lived in filth, literally, unaware that it was dangerously unhealthy.Only a handful of human colony worlds that had lost technology had remembered germs and how diseases spread from person to person.Darius didn’t seem to be any different.The unholy combination of smells reached out towards them as they finally headed down towards the city.Warlock’s Bane was laughably small by the standards of the Confederation, or even by the standards of a Second Age society.The snoops had revealed no more than a few thousand people living in the city, mainly workers, merchants and a handful of governors and City Guardsmen.That too wasn’t untypical; the majority of Darius’s population would still live on the land, producing food for their masters.They’d seen enough farms from orbit to conclude that the yields were very low, barely average for a First Age society.The locals had no way of countering crop pests, diseases and other problems that plagued comparable societies.The city was surrounded by a high stone wall, topped with battlements that suggested the main threat to the city was an invading army trying to climb over the defences and into the city.Elyria knew that such walls would become obsolete very quickly once the locals developed gunpowder; indeed, given the power of some of their magicians, the walls might be already useless.Maybe they just marked the limits of the city, although they’d seen several cities where the walls were surrounded by shacks on both sides.An enemy with nothing more than swords and spears could use the ramshackle hovels for cover and advance against the city.It wasn’t very secure.Warlock’s Bane seemed to avoid having any habitations on the wrong side of the wall.Someone had cleared away everything that could provide cover to an invading army, leaving them exposed to arrows fired from the walls – assuming that the City Guards had enough manpower to hold back an army.Their snoops couldn’t go everywhere, so it was impossible to be sure, but it looked very much as if they didn’t have enough trained men to hold the walls.The real protection of the city rested in the power and reputation of Master Faye.That was strange, almost an inverse of every other First Age society Elyria had studied; there was no way to know what it meant for the development of society at large.Unless it’s another Kahn, she told herself, silently.Some animals are just more equal than others.The road, never very good outside the borderlines, grew better as they headed down towards the main gates [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]