by Glen Cook
The iron mask turned my way. I couldn't meet his gaze. The power was still there.
"Better that you don't know, soldier. For both our sakes."
"I have taken the gold," I replied.
I expect he understood. Maybe he didn't. He said nothing more till he decided to go.
"It's time. Carry Fetch. Be wary."
I hoisted the little woman. She seemed awfully heavy. My strength had suffered. The mountains. The forest The fighting. The tension, always. They had ground me down.
We met no resistance. Only once did we hear what might have been men. They avoided us.
We rested often. Lord Hammer seemed to be weakening faster than I, though hjs resources were more vast. Maybe the Harish kill-dagger had bitten more deeply than he let on.
"Stop," he gasped. We were close to the end of the tunnel. I dropped Fetch.
Men's voices, muted, echoed along the shaft. "Chenyth." I started on.
"Stay." The command in Hammer's voice was weak, but compelling.
He moved slowly, had trouble keeping his feet. But he negated the spells that made us glow. "We must rest here."
"My brother..."
"We will rest, Willem Potter."
We rested.
XII
Outside ambushed us.
The sun had set. No moon had risen. The stars didn't cast much light. Bell weather had lighted no fires. We were suddenly there, beside Lord Hammer's stallion.
The last dozen yards we had to step over and around the dead and wounded. There were a lot of them. I kept whispering Chenyth's name. The only man I could find was Brandy. The griper had been dead for hours.
"They've killed or captured most of the animals," Bellweather reported. Lord Hammer grunted noncommittally. "We've killed hundreds of them, but they keep coming. They'll finish us in the morning. This's serious business to them."
"Chenyth!" I called.
"Will? Will! Over here."
I hurried over. He was doing sentry duty. His post was an open-topped bunker built of the corpses of savages.
"You all right?" I demanded.
"So far. Brandy and Russ and Aral are dead, Will. I'm sorry I came. I'm tired. So tired, Will."
"Yeah. I know."
"What happened down there?"
"It was bad." I told him the story.
"The other Harish. Will they?..."
"I'm sure their daggers are consecrated to the same name."
"Then they'll try again?"
"They made it? Then we'd better warn..."
A shriek ripped the air.
I hurled myself back toward Lord Hammer. I arrived at the same time as the Harish. Blades flashed. Men screamed. Lord Hammer slew one. I took the other. Bellweather and the others watched in dull-eyed disbelief.
Before Jamal died he cursed me. "You have given the Hammer his life," he croaked. "May that sin haunt you all the ages of earth. May his return be quickened, and fall upon you heavily. I speak it in the Name of the Disciple."
"What did he mean, Will?" Chenyth asked.
"I don't know." I was too tired to think. "They knew him. They knew his mission. They came to abort it. And to capture the dragon's blood for El Murid." I glanced at Lord Hammer. He had begun a sorcery. His voice sounded terribly weak. He seemed the least superhuman of us all. My awe of him had evaporated completely.
He was but a man.
"Maybe they were right," Chenyth suggested. "Maybe the world would be better without him. Without his kind."
"I don't know. His kind are like the dragon. And we have taken the gold, Chenyth. It doesn't matter who or what he is."
Sleep soon ambushed me. The last thing I saw was a ball of blue light drifting into the rocks where the savages lurked. I think there were screams, but they might have come in my dreams.
They took me back to the wars. To the screams of entire kingdoms crushed beneath the boots of legions led by men of Lord Hammer's profession. Those had been brutal, bitter days, and the saddest part of it was that we hadn't won, we had merely stopped it for a while.
My subconscious mind added the clues my conscious mind had overlooked.
I awakened understanding the Harish.
"His name is a joke," Fetch had said.
It wasn't a funny one. It was pure arrogance.
One of the arch-villians of the Great Eastern Wars had been a sorcerer named Ko Feng. He had commanded the legions of the Dread Empire briefly. But his fellow wizards on the Council of Tervola had ousted him because of his unsubtle, straightforward, expensive, pounding military tactics. For reasons no one understood he had been ordered into exile.
His nickname, on both sides of the battle line, had been The Hammer.
Aboud had told me he was my enemy...
The savages bothered us no more. Lord Hammer's sorcery had sufficed.
Only a dozen men were fit to travel. Chenyth and I were the only surviving Kaveliners...
Kavelin had borne the brunt of the Great Eastern Wars. The legions of the Dread Empire knew no mercy. The nation might never recover...
I was sitting on a rock, fighting my conscience. Chenyth came to me. "Want something to eat?"
"I don't think so."
"What's that?"
"Kill-dagger. Aboud's." I had been staring at it, and had hidden it at his approach. I showed him.
What's the matter, Will?"
"I think I know who he is. What he's doing. Why."
"Who?"
"Lord Hammer."
"I meant, who is he?"
"Lord Ko Feng. The Tervola. The one we called The Hammer during the wars. They banished him from Shinsan after it was over. They took his immortality and drove him into exile. He came for the dragon's blood to win the immortality back. To get the time he needed to make his return."
"Oh, Gods. Will, we've got to do something."
"What? What's the right thing? I don't know that he's really Ko Feng. I do know that we've taken his gold. He's treated us honorably. He even saved my life when there was no demand that he do so. I know that Fetch thinks the world of him, and I think well enough of Fetch for that to matter. So. You see what's eating me."
My life wasn't usually that complicated. A soldier takes his orders, does what he must, and doesn't much worry about tomorrow or vast issues. He takes from life what he can when he can, for there may be no future opportunity. He seldom moralizes, or becomes caught in a crisis of conscience.
"Will, we can't turn an evil like Ko Feng loose on the world again. Not if it's in our power to stop it."
"Chenyth. Chenyth. Who said he was evil? His real sin is that he was the enemy. Some of our own were as violent and bloody."
I glanced toward the split in the mountain. The giant black stallion stood within a yard of where Lord Hammer had posted him yesterday. Hammer slept on the ground beneath the animal.
Easy pickings, I thought. Walk over, slip the dagger in him, and have done.
If the horse would let me. He was a factor I couldn't fathom. But somehow I knew he would block me.
My own well-being wasn't a matter of concern. Like the Harish, it hadn't occurred to me to worry about whether or not I got out alive.
I saw no way any of us could get home without Lord Hammer's protection.
Fetch dragged herself to a sitting position.
"Come with me," I told Chenyth.
We went to her. She greeted us with a weak smile. "I wasn't good for much down there, was I?"
"How you feeling?" I asked.
"Better."
"Good. I'd hate to think I lugged you all the way up here for nothing."
"It was you?"
"Lord Hammer carried the Scuttarian."
"The others?"
"Still down there. Love."
"It was bad?"
"Worse than anybody expected. Except the dragon."
"You got the blood?"
"We did. Was it worth it?"
She glanced at me sharply. "You knew there would be risks. You were paid to take
them."
"I know. I wonder if that's enough."
"What?"
"I know who Lord Hammer is, Fetch. The Harish knew all along. It's why they came. I killed two of them. Lord Hammer slew two. Foud killed Sigurd. That's five of the company gone fighting one another. I want to know what reason there might be for me not to make it six and have the world rid of an old evil."
Fetch wasn't herself. Healthy she would have screeched and argued like a whole flock of hens at feeding time. Instead she just glanced at Lord Hammer and shrugged. "I'm too tired and sick to care much, Will. But don't. It won't change the past. It won't change the future, either. He's chasing a dead dream. And it won't do you any good now." She leaned back and closed her eyes. "I hated him for a while, too. I lost people in the wars."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. He lost people, too, you know. Friends and relatives. All the pain and dying weren't on our side. And he lost everything he had, except his knowledge."
"Oh." I saw what she was trying to say. Lord Hammer was no different than the rest of us leftovers, going on being what he had learned to be.
"Is there anything to eat?"
"Chenyth. See if you can get her something. Fetch, I know all the arguments. I've been wrestling them all morning. And I can't make up my mind. I was hoping you'd help me figure where I've got to stand."
"Don't put it on me, Willem Potter. It's a thing between you and Lord Hammer."
Chenyth brought soup that was mostly mule. He spooned it into Fetch's mouth. She ate it like it was good.
I decided, but on the basis of none of the arguments that had gone before.
I had promised myself that I would take my little brother home to his mother. To do that I needed Lord Hammer's protection.
I often wonder, now, if many of the most fateful decisions aren't made in response to similarly oblique considerations.
XIII
I need not have put myself through the misery. The Fates had their own plans.
When Lord Hammer woke, I went to him. He was weak. He barely had the strength to sit up. I squatted on my hams, facing him, intimidated by the stallion's baleful stare. Carefully, I drew the Harish kill-dagger from within my shirt. I offered it to him atop my open palms.
The earth shook. There was a suggestion of gargantuan mirth in it.
"The Dragon mocks us." Lord Hammer took the dagger. "Thank you, Willem Potter. I'd say there are no debts between us now."
"There are, Lord. Old ones. I lost a father and several brothers in the wars."
"And I lost sons and friends. Will we fight old battles here in the cupped hands of doom? Will we cross swords even as the filed teeth of Fate rip at us? I lost my homeland, and more than any non-Tervola could comprehend. I have nothing left but hope, and that too wan to credit. The Dragon laughs with cause, Willem Potter. Summon Bellweather. A journey looms before us."
"As you say, Lord."
I think we left too soon, with too many wounded. Some survived the forest. Some survived the plains. Some survived the snows and precipices of the Dragon's Teeth. But we left men's bones beside the way. Only eight of us lived to see the plains of Shara, west of the mountains, and even then we were a long way from home.
It was in Shara that Lord Hammer's saga ended.
We were riding ponies he had bought from a Sharan tribe. Our faces were south, bent into a spring rain.
Lord Hammer's big stallion stumbled.
The sorcerer fell.
He had been weakening steadily. Fetch claimed only his will was driving him toward the laboratories where he would make use of the dragon's blood...
He lay in the mud and grass of a foreign land, dying, and there was nothing any of us could do. The Harish dagger still gnawed at his soul.
Immortality rested in his saddlebags, in that black jar, and we couldn't do a thing. We didn't know how. Even Fetch was ignorant of the secret.
He was a strong man, Lord Hammer, but in the end no different than any other. He died, and we buried him in alien soil. The once mightiest man on earth had come to no more than the least of the soldiers who had followed him in his prime.
I was sad. It's painful to watch something magnificent and mighty brought low, even when you loath what it stands for.
He went holding Fetch's hand.
She removed the iron mask before we put him into the earth. "He should wear his own." She obtained a Tervola mask from his gear. It was golden and hideous, and at one time had terrorized half a world. I'm not sure what it represented. An animal head of some sort. Its eyes were rubies that glowed like the eyes of Lord Hammer's stallion. But their inner light was fading.
A very old man lay behind the iron mask. The last of his mystique perished when I finally saw his wizened face.
And yet I did him honor as we replaced the soil above him.
I had taken his gold. He had been my captain.
"You can come with us, Fetch," Chenyth said. And I agreed. There would be a place for her with the Potters.
Chenyth kept the iron mask. It hangs in my mother's house even now. Nobody believes him when he tells the story of Lord Hammer and the Kammengarn Dragon. They prefer Rainheart's heroics.
No matter. The world goes on whether geared by truth or fiction.
The last shovelful of earth fell on Lord Hammer's resting place. And Chenyth, as always, had a question. "Will, what happened to his horse?"
The great fire-eyed stallion had vanished.
Even Fetch didn't know the answer to that one.
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