He lay in the grass for what seemed like hours, halfway onto his left side, ready to thrust himself upward with the sword raised. He listened, but heard nothing but the grass rustling in the wind.
He looked, but from where he lay he could see nothing but the grass a few inches from his nose.
He debated crawling off into the grass, away from his trail, in hopes that the shatra would lose track of him, but gave up the idea after a trial poke at the surrounding plants. The grass in his immediate vicinity was not particularly tall and rustled quite audibly when he stirred it; the shatra would be able to locate him easily.
“Soldier!” a voice called, speaking Ethsharitic with a thick, unpleasant accent. “Soldier! Come out and we may talk!”
Valder lay still and said nothing.
“Soldier, you do not need to die. We treat prisoners well. Stand up and drop your weapons and you may live!”
Valder knew this was unusual, this attempt to coax a surrender. Ordinarily the northerners were no more eager to burden themselves with prisoners than the Ethsharites were; after all, prisoners had to be kept for life, since there were no provisions for exchange and the war had been going on since time immemorial and seemed likely to continue forever. The shatra had some reason for wanting Valder alive. Most probably, the Ethsharite guessed, the northerners wanted to find out how a lone enemy came to be wandering around behind their lines to begin with. They might also be wondering whether the dragon was a part of an Ethsharitic force.
As he thought back over what he had done, Valder realized that he had probably made quite an impression. He had appeared mysteriously out of nowhere, disposed of a coastal sentry, slain an expert swordsman in fair combat and then seriously wounded another man as well, and topped it all off by leading a hungry young dragon into a northern encampment that was presumably nowhere near the front.
He wondered how long he would live if he accepted the shatra’s offer of imprisonment and how long his dying would take. The northerners were said to be very ingenious in their use of torture. They were not likely to be gentle with someone who had caused them so much trouble. It seemed unreasonable to think that they might let him live out his natural span.
“Soldier, you are being very foolish. If you do not surrender by the time I count to five, I must kill you.”
Valder noticed that the notherner’s voice had come much closer. He had decided, without knowing it himself at first, that he was not going to buy himself a few days of life by surrendering, even though he had no important information that might be tortured out of him. He did not know where his unit was, or where the hermit had gone, or anything very useful about Wirikidor. He did not want to die — but he did not want to live in pain and disgrace, either. Besides, he could not drop Wirikidor if he tried; the sword would not allow it.
He listened carefully as the shatra began counting.
“One!”
He judged the northerner to be no more than thirty feet away now.
“Two!”
He was somewhere ahead and to the left. Presumably he knew Valder’s exact position and intended to take him from his bad side.
“Three!”
Valder adjusted his legs; he had changed his earlier decision and now intended to charge the shatra.
“Four!”
He launched himself upward, running through the knee-high grass toward the enemy, who stood roughly where Valder had expected him to be.
The shatra was not surprised. He smiled as Valder came toward him and raised his own drawn sword with leisurely grace.
Seeing the sword, Valder knew that the shatra either had no magical weaponry or preferred not to use it. He swung Wirikidor at the northerner’s throat.
As he had expected, the shatra’s sword snapped up and deflected Wirikidor.
As he had not really expected, however, Wirikidor responded on its own, twisting around the intercepting blade and striking down diagonally, stabbing into the shatra’s shoulder. Something hissed strangely, and sparkles of yellow light spat from the wound before ordinary red blood appeared.
Valder stared in delight. He had drawn first blood from a shatra! Wirikidor would save him after all! He tried to relax and let the sword do his fighting for him.
Wirikidor, however, did not cooperate. It swung back from the shoulder wound as if forced back by a blow, though the shatra, as surprised as Valder, had reacted by stepping back and assuming a defensive posture, without making any attempt to knock Wirikidor away.
Startled, Valder looked at his blade, and the two of them stood, scarcely four feet apart, both warily watching Wirikidor.
Naturally, the shatra was the first to recover. He brought his blade darting down toward Valder’s groin, apparently not troubled at all by his bleeding shoulder.
Wirikidor did nothing, but Valder managed to fall back out of the blade’s path. He lost his balance as he did so and landed in a sitting position. As he struggled to regain his feet, the northerner’s sword flashed toward his throat.
Wirikidor flashed up to meet it, then beat it back and slipped around the shatra’s hand and into the inside of his elbow.
There was no sound this time as the blade penetrated, but a single yellow flash preceded the first oozing blood. Wirikidor seemed to hesitate. It did not revert to lifeless metal but rather paused in mid-air, seeming to vibrate slightly.
The shatra was not so indecisive. The two wounds to his sword-arm, while scarcely more than pricks, nevertheless seemed to have affected his control; accordingly, he shifted his stance and tossed his sword from his right hand to his left before renewing the attack. This gave Valder time enough to rise to one knee.
For a moment Valder was unable to follow what happened, even though his own right hand was a part of it. At first the shatra was attacking, and then he was defending as Wirikidor met every attack and retaliated, pressing home its own assault, all in a blur of motion far too fast for a mere human like Valder to follow, never allowing so much as the fraction of a second the shatra would have needed to step back out of reach. Blood flowed redly down the northerner’s black tunic and spattered the grass.
Then, abruptly, it was over, and Valder found himself still on one knee, not yet having managed to arise, but with his sword thrust through the northerner’s heart. The northerner’s own sword had fallen from his hand, the blade still gleaming and unstained.
Shatra, however, were not mere mortals, and the northerner was not dead. He looked down at the sword that had impaled him and reached for it with both hands. The right was unsteady.
Valder stared in horror. He had no doubt that Wirikidor had found the shatra’s heart; the blade was buried in the northerner’s chest just left of center, yet he still lived.
Perhaps, Valder thought, he had no heart. He was shatra, not human, after all.
Valder tried to pull his sword free, but human reactions could not match shatra; the hands grabbed Wirikidor’s blade.
Wirikidor writhed, ripping open the shatra’s chest, and that was the end of it; the hands fell away and the northerner toppled backward, sliding off the enchanted blade. He lay in a heap on the trampled grass.
Valder sank back to a sitting position and stared at the corpse, half-afraid that it would return to life. He could see the proof of its inhumanity in the gaping chest wound, where something smooth and slick and black gleamed, something that was definitely not human flesh or bone. He shuddered. On the outside the thing had seemed human enough — tall and pale and fair-haired, like most northerners.
Finally, he looked at Wirikidor, drooping in his hand. His wrist ached; his hand had been dragged along, willy-nilly, in the sword’s movements, and, as a result of moving so much faster than it was meant to do, his wrist was now very sore indeed.
The sword had saved him. It had seemed hesitant at first, but it had saved him. He wiped the blade clean on a corner of the dead northerner’s tunic, then sheathed it with a sigh of relief. It was good, very good indeed, to have it on his belt inste
ad of naked in his hand.
He wondered why the sword had not immediately been enthusiastic. Surely, there could be no doubt that a shatra was a true warrior! The very name was said to be an old word for a great warrior — though apparently not in the same tongue as his sword’s name.
The sword had seemed to hesitate after each of the first two wounds it had inflicted, he thought, as he stared at the body of his enemy. Those two wounds had almost seemed to strike sparks; perhaps the blade had encountered a demonic part of the shatra and had been daunted by it. Shatra were half man and half demon; perhaps Wirikidor was not up to handling demons.
Valder decided that that made a certain amount of sense.
As he sat gathering his wits and regaining his breath, he heard a faint rustling and something that sounded like distant voices. His hand went to his sword hilt, but he resisted the temptation to draw; he did not want to be stuck carrying Wirikidor unsheathed again should he manage to avoid fighting. Carefully, he got to his feet and looked back along his tracks, expecting to see more northerners.
There were none.
The rustling continued, and the voices grew louder. Valder realized they were coming from the opposite direction. He turned around and saw half a dozen men advancing toward him through the grass; others were visible behind them, and still more on the horizon. His hopes shriveled within him. Wirikidor would handle the first one without any difficulty; but if his one-warrior-per-drawing theory was correct, he would be on his own after that, and he knew he would stand no chance at all against so many. He must have come upon the entire northern army!
“You there!” one of the advancing men called, in good Ethsharitic. “Stay right where you are!”
Valder glanced at the corpse at his feet. At least, he told himself, he had killed a shatra. That was something that not very many could say. He sighed, trying to decide whether to surrender or go down fighting; he was sure that he would die in either case. He did not want to die, but he could accept it if he had to.
The sun was sinking in the west, and its light was reddening; the shadows were long, and he had been alone, surrounded by enemies, for months. Perhaps that was why it took him so long to realize the true situation. It was not until the six men of the advance party came within a hundred yards that he recognized their uniforms.
The new arrivals were not northerners; they were an advance guard of the Ethsharitic army.
He had made it. Wirikidor had brought him home.
PART TWO
The Reluctant Assassin
CHAPTER 9
They took away his weapons, of course. Despite the trouble it had caused him with its mysterious behavior, he found himself reluctant to let Wirikidor go; it was not so much an attachment because it had saved his life as it was a wordless feeling of unease at the thought of someone else handling it.
The soldier who confiscated his weapons seemed reluctant to handle the sword, but obeyed his orders and accepted it along with Valder’s dagger, sling, and broken-stringed crossbow.
After a little discussion, someone located a pair of boots for Valder, which he pulled on gratefully. They even fitted him fairly well.
The brown-clad officer in charge of the party asked him a few questions — who he was, how he came to be where he had been found, and whether he knew anything about enemy positions. Not feeling up to long explanations, he briefly gave his name, rank, and unit, explained that he had been cut off months earlier, and said that the only enemy position he had seen was the small encampment he had passed through a day’s walk to the northwest.
With that, the officer seemed to lose interest in him. Valder hesitated and then asked, “Sir, who are you people? What are you doing here? I thought I was still behind the northern lines.”
The officer looked back at him. “I can’t tell you anything,” he said. “You might be a spy.”
Valder had to admit that that would seem like a reasonable possibility. He said, “Oh.”
Seeing his disappointment, the officer took pity on him. “I suppose it won’t do any harm,” he said, “to tell you that, as far as we know, there no longer are any northern lines around here to be behind.”
Valder was not sure whether he was glad to have this tidbit of information or not, since it opened up vast areas of speculation. He lapsed into silence and stood waiting for instructions while the officer considered something.
A young soldier, one of the group that had found Valder, came up and saluted, the back of his hand tight to his shoulder in parade-ground style. “Sir,” he said, “That dead northerner — he’s shatra.”
The officer looked up. “What?” “The corpse we found this man standing over — it’s shatra. No doubt of it. And the body’s still warm.”
The officer looked at Valder with renewed interest. “Care to explain that, scout?”
Valder shrugged and tried to look nonchalant. “He followed me, I think from that camp I mentioned. I killed him, just before you found me.”
“You killed a shatra?”
“Yes.”
“Single-handedly?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“With my sword; it’s enchanted.” He gestured in Wirikidor’s direction.
The officer followed Valder’s gesture, then turned back and eyed him carefully. “What’s a scout doing with an enchanted sword?” he demanded.
“Oh, it wasn’t enchanted when it was issued. I ran into a wizard in a marsh two sixnights or so north of here; he put a few spells on it to help me get back to my unit.”
The officer did not bother to hide his disbelief, and Valder realized just how stupid his story must sound. Before he could say anything further, however, the officer said, “All right, your sword’s enchanted. In that case you’re not my problem; the general’s magicians can decide what to do with you. Sergeant Karn! You and your detail will take this man and his belongings back to camp with you!”
That dealt with, he turned away and attended to other matters. Valder no longer concerned him.
Sergeant Karn was a black-haired giant of a man, well over six feet tall and heavily muscled; his detail consisted of five young soldiers, whom Valder guessed to be new recruits. Their green kilts were unworn, their breastplates still bright, and the oldest looked no more than eighteen. Valder greeted them, hoping to strike up a conversation, but the sergeant quickly stifled that. “He might be a spy,” he reminded his men.
Within ten minutes of being given the order, Karn had Valder’s weapons and belongings gathered together and added to the bundles his men already carried and was leading his little party southward along a newly made path through the tall grass. This path was merely the simplest and narrowest of trails at first, nothing more than the place a dozen or so men had trampled their way along; most of the advancing Ethsharitic line had been spaced out across the plain, but the commanding officer and his attendants had traveled in a tight little group, leaving the path behind them.
As Karn’s party moved on to the south, however, they passed an assortment of people heading north — supply wagons, fresh troops, messengers, and even curious civilians. They passed captured northerners and wounded men traveling south more slowly than themselves and were passed in turn by hurrying messengers. By the time they had gone a league, the path had become a road, the grass trodden into the dirt. This was a welcome relief for Valder’s tired feet after so long trampling his own paths — though any sort of walking was not something he welcomed. It did not help any that the soldier carrying Wirikidor kept stumbling and bumping into him.
Shortly after that they passed the smoking ruins of a small northern outpost; Valder stared in fascination, but the others, obviously not interested, hurried him on.
The sun was down and the light fading when Karn called a halt. “All right, boys,” he said. “We’ll take a break and see if we can hitch a ride on a supply wagon going back empty. Once the men at the front have had their dinner, there should be a few.”
“We ar
en’t stopping here for the night?” Valder asked.
Kam looked at him scornfully, the expression plain even in the gathering dusk. “No, we’re not stopping for the night. We’re on campaign, soldier!”
“I’m not,” Valder protested. “I’ve been barefoot for two sixnights or more and walking for three months, and I need my rest!” “Rest in the wagon, then.” Karn turned away.
As he had predicted, an empty wagon came trundling southward perhaps half an hour later, as Karn was showing his men how to make torches of the tall grass. Valder had refused to help with the instruction, so that he was the first to see the wagon’s own torches.
Once they were aboard the wagon, the rest of the journey was almost pleasant; the road was smooth enough that even a springless ox-drawn cart did not jolt excessively, and Valder was able to sleep off and on until dawn.
They reached the camp early in the afternoon. The first sight of it, as they topped a final hill, was impressive indeed; lines of dull green tents reached to the horizon in three directions amid hundreds of streamers of smoke from cooking fires, broken here and there by an open space. Of course, the camp lay in a narrow depression, so that the horizon was not as far away as it might have been, but Valder was impressed nonetheless. Certainly the encampment was far larger than any he had seen before; he judged that it must hold more than fifty thousand men, and at least one of the open spaces held a tethered dragon. Some of the others held horses or oxen.
He had several minutes to look it over as the wagon made its way up over the hill and paused, while the sentries at the perimeter met them with a perfunctory challenge. They were quickly allowed through and moved on down the slope past the outermost line of tents. At the third row, Sergeant Karn signaled the driver, who slowed the oxen to a halt and allowed his passengers to disembark.
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