Mindsword's Story

by Fred Saberhagen

  When the boy entered, a few moments later, Kristin stared at her son, then held out her arms to embrace him.

  Leaving mother and son alone for the time being, Mark and Karel walked out of the tent. When they had gone a few paces, and were out of earshot of the sentries, they began conversing in low tones.

  Mark asked, “How long will it be, magician, before she’s my own wife again?”

  “That I cannot say, Prince,” Karel answered heavily. “We may hope for some favorable change in a few days.”

  Before Mark could speak again, Stephen, on the verge of weeping, came bursting out of the tent. The boy walked quickly away, avoiding his father when Mark would have spoken with him.

  Mark let him go. After a final word with Karel, he retired to his own tent to try to get some sleep, leaving word that he wanted to be called as soon as there was any sign that Murat had awakened.

  * * *

  Sleep came quickly to the exhausted Prince, but his rest was soon troubled by strange dreams. It seemed to Mark that he was wandering, fully armed, but with only ordinary weapons, in a strange countryside. His path led him beside an unknown stream. Eventually it came to him that this must be the Aldan, the small river on whose wooded banks he had grown up. Having made this discovery he tried to walk faster, in hopes of catching sight of the mill operated by his foster-father, Jord, or hearing the familiar groaning of the wheel.

  The stream might have been the Aldan, but every detail about its banks remained stubbornly unfamiliar. At last, on rounding a bend, Mark came upon his father the Emperor, leaning against a flowering tree with his arms folded, and regarding Mark as if he had been waiting for him to arrive. The Emperor looked no older than the last time Mark had seen him, and now for the first time it struck Mark that this man, his father, looked somewhat younger than himself.

  Standing a little behind the Emperor was Ben. Ben’s massive arms were folded like the Emperor’s, and he was regarding Mark with a strange solemn silence.

  The Prince did not hesitate, but strode toward the Emperor in an angry mood, ready to challenge his assumed authority—as indeed he tended to do in waking life, on those rare occasions when he actually saw the man.

  Mark halted two paces away from the waiting, imperturbable figure dressed in gray.

  “You are my father,” Mark said. The words came out like an accusation.

  “Yes.”

  “Very well, then, I need your help.”

  The middle-sized man in gray looked sympathetic. “What kind of help?”

  Mark had not realized until this moment what kind of assistance he meant to ask for. But now he did not hesitate. “I want you to lend me Soulcutter. I know you have it.”

  The father who appeared to be no older than his son now seemed to be regarding the younger man with disappointment if not distaste. “How do you know that?”

  “Because that Sword was in your possession when it was last seen, years ago. You picked it up on a battlefield and carried it away. Who else should have it now if you do not? Did someone take it from you, or have you given it away?”

  “The answer is no.”

  “No?”

  “No. I did not remove the Sword of Despair from that field only to give it back again. Besides, that weapon does not belong to me. But even if it were in my possession, I would categorically refuse to loan it to anyone, especially my son.”

  “Why?”

  “I need give you no explanations, Mark, but I will. The best way to put it is that you don’t know what you’re asking for.”

  Ben, looking gloomy, having nothing to say, remained standing in the background. Mark understood that this dispute was to be only between father and son.

  The Prince moved a step closer, looming over the smaller man in gray. “Will you for once give me a straight, complete answer when I ask you a question? Will you for once admit that I might be right?”

  The Emperor smiled faintly at him, and said nothing.

  Groaning, muttering in exasperation, Mark moved to seize the Emperor by his garments and shake him. But somehow it was hard to obtain a solid hold.

  “You are a bothersome son, sometimes,” his father said. And Mark himself, to his surprise, was grabbed in a grip of incredible strength, and jerked about until his teeth rattled.

  At that point he came struggling out of the dream to reenter the real world, to find that someone was really shaking him, albeit much more gently than the Emperor had done.

  The eastern wall of his campaign tent was glowing in the rays of the newly risen sun. An officer had come in with an urgent report: Ben of Purkinje was unaccountably missing from the camp. Missing with Ben were two riding-beasts, an undetermined amount of supplies, and the Sword Sightblinder.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Something—he had an impression of distant shouts or screams—awakened the Crown Prince well before dawn, and he could see by moonlight that the door of Kristin’s bedroom was standing ajar. Only a quick look at the empty bed inside was needed to confirm that she was gone. Had intruders, treading in supernal silence, stepped over him as he slept? There were no signs of struggle in Kristin’s room. And it ought to be impossible for anyone, here in the central glare of the Sword’s full power, to intrigue against Murat, to kidnap his beloved. But still the bedroom window was wide open.…

  Trying to think clearly, but still fighting a hideous drowsy lethargy, Murat struggled to his feet, stepped over the still-inert form of Vilkata farther down the hall, and began to stumble downstairs, leaning on the farmhouse wall to keep his balance. In the process of making his way down the narrow stair, the Crown Prince shifted the Sword very carefully from one hand to the other, being very careful lest it fall from his cramped fingers. With the transfer he felt only the slightest alteration in the effortless flow of magic. But not for an instant did Murat cease to hold Skulltwister. There was no moment in which even the swiftest enemy might have been able to penetrate his defensive field and strike.

  Except, of course, by some other magic, operating from a distance. Now he understood that the slumber from which he struggled to extricate himself was certainly unnatural.

  Having reached the dark hall at the foot of the stairs, Murat turned toward the kitchen, passed through it and went out into the night. But when he found himself outdoors he was unable for the first few minutes to do much more than stagger about the farmyard like a sleepwalker. Groggily the Crown Prince strove to free himself fully from the toils of Karel’s slumber-inducing enchantments.

  And it was in the farmyard, before he was fully awake, that he heard for the first time eyewitness testimony of Kristin’s departure. One of the sentries, seemingly the only man in camp who had not been entirely overcome by sleep, swore that he had watched her go, alone.

  Swiftly mounting anger helped Murat break free of the clinging tendrils of soporific magic. And as soon as he felt confident of being able to think coherently, he strode back into the farmhouse, climbed to the upper hall, and in a cold fury started trying to rouse his supposed magician.

  He went at the job with ruthless energy, but still it took him a few minutes to get Vilkata fully awake. When the Crown Prince was satisfied that the man could hear him, he informed his vanquished wizard that the Princess was gone.

  “One of the sentries,” Murat grated, “reports that she walked out of the camp alone, apparently of her own free will. Up the path toward two mounted men who appeared on that hill.”

  The wretch who had once been the Dark King, now sitting on the floor in a moonlit corner of the little upstairs hall, pressed his pale albino’s hands, incongruously backed with dark hair, over the bandage that crossed the upper portion of his face.

  His voice sounded muffled. “You say the man reports her leaving, my lord? Why didn’t he stop her?”

  Murat could answer that, having already briefly interrogated the sentry who had witnessed Kristin’s departure. The soldier swore that he had been in a helpless state that kept him from doing anything abo
ut Kristin’s departure—or would have prevented his interference, had he considered it his duty to interfere. Actually, as the shaken trooper had pointed out, the sentries had been given no orders to keep the Princess in the camp. Rather, everyone had been commanded to grant her every wish. Murat, raging in the farmyard, had been forced to realize that in justice there should be no punishment for the sentry.

  Indoors he continued his dialogue with Vilkata, but, as it seemed, to little purpose. When presently the two men descended into the farmyard again, Murat vented his anger on other people. He beat one man with the flat of his Sword when the fellow could not be awakened by less violent means.

  And he continued to be angry at his magician for allowing Karel to prevail and put them all to sleep.

  “Scoundrel, charlatan! Where is your demon? I suppose the vile beast is sleeping too?”

  “I do not think so, Great Lord.” Vilkata’s tones were full of misery. “But where he is at the moment I do not know.”

  “Then summon him, and let us see!”

  With this end in mind, Vilkata and Murat went alone behind some outbuildings, so that the simple soldiers should not be unduly terrified, and there the Dark King went through the brief necessary ritual.

  Akbar when summoned appeared promptly, a blurred and shifting figure in the center of a muffled glow that soon outshone the moonlight and then quickly died away. An almost-convincing human shape was left: the simple maiden’s form which Murat had seen during the previous manifestation.

  On being informed of Kristin’s departure, the demon professed surprise, and started trying to console Murat for her loss.

  “Ugly monster!” the Crown Prince roared back hoarsely. “I do not want your sympathy! What I want is to know where you were at the crucial time!”

  Akbar, cringing again, replied in a small maiden’s voice, explaining his absence by saying that he had wanted to keep out of the way of Mark, whose approach to the encampment he had detected, and who was known to have a knack for dealing ruthlessly with demons.

  “I thought this was in accordance with your orders, sir.”

  “Could you not at least have warned us that we were all being put to sleep?”

  The demon cursed and groaned, hoarse tones and coarse words dimming the illusion of maidenhood, admitting that Karel must have been too subtle for it.

  “I failed to understand what was happening, sir. I thought the two men were only scouting.”

  * * *

  Soon Murat ordered Vilkata to dismiss the useless creature. There was no sleep for anyone in camp during the remainder of the night. By dawn Murat’s rage at his enemies, his sleeping sentries, his incompetent wizard and cowardly demon, and at Fate, for failing to prevent Kristin’s departure, was threatening to become irrationally, murderously violent.

  At last the sight of his son, who was watching him with frightened eyes, sobered the Crown Prince somewhat. Carlo was the only one in his company at whom he had not grown angry.

  The royal anger persisted, though over the next few hours it tried to fix itself upon serious targets and grew more calculating. The Crown Prince was now in the process of consciously deciding that whoever was not firmly with him was most definitely against him. By degrees he was coming around to the conviction that whoever did not support him without reservation really did not deserve to live.

  He told a small worried gathering of confidants, including his son Carlo and Captain Marsaci, that almost anything bad that happened to such people could be regarded as a just punishment for their wrong attitudes and willfully bad behavior.

  Again and again during the course of the morning, while Marsaci, Vilkata, and others waited for meaningful orders, the Crown Prince called the unfortunate guard, now completely wide awake, back into his presence and demanded to be told all the details of Kristin’s departure.

  The formerly somnolent sentry, his nerves dissolving under the barrage of repeated questions, informed his master over and over that he had been unable to see any details of what had happened up on the hill. But he had heard several screams from up that way, a few minutes after the Princess had walked out. Yes sir, those yells could have been made by the Princess; it had sounded like a woman’s voice.

  By now it was thoroughly confirmed that all of the other sentries—indeed everyone else in camp—had been sound asleep at the time. Murat suspected that some of them might have been inclined to deny it, except that any who admitted to being awake when the Princess was spirited away feared being held culpable for having failed to prevent such a calamity.

  * * *

  Around noon Vilkata, on being asked by the Crown Prince for his advice, urged strict enforcement of the military code concerning simple soldiers who slept on sentry duty.

  “It will be easy for my lord to replenish his ranks, should they be depleted in the course of justice.”

  Murat, looking at the other sourly, declined to follow his advice. “Perhaps recruiting more soldiers, even if that were my object, would not be that easy. Think about it. The enemy, fearing to come near my Sword, will certainly retreat in haste from any offensive move we make. They’ll run away swiftly, and leave me to waste my energy and scatter my forces into uselessness if I am so inclined. No. No, thank you. When I order a march at last, I’ll move to better purpose than that.”

  Adding to Murat’s difficulties of the day was the fact that now his pair of flying scouts, who were too unintelligent for the Mindsword to have any effect on them, had somehow been lost. It was not surprising, when he thought about it, that the beasts should have been lured away or killed by other flyers, or by Tasavaltan handlers, beastmasters more skilled than the lone expert in the small force of his defectors.

  But the loss of the beasts was a substantial blow. Murat saw that without good scouts he should have no chance of catching up with Kristin, or Mark, or any other well-informed and well-mounted individual. He hesitated to send out any more human scouts; it would be a waste of time, now that his camp must be surrounded—at a prudent distance—by numerically overwhelming Tasavaltan forces.

  Shortly after midday, Vilkata timidly informed his master that he suspected Karel had found some way to make visible the field of influence of the drawn Mindsword, at least to some of the enemy, including of course Mark himself.

  The Crown Prince cursed fluently. It was truly maddening to have the power of the Mindsword in hand, and be unable to strike with it effectively. But the most tormenting aspect of the situation was Kristin’s behavior. In truth, he had been hesitating in camp for more than half a day because he was endeavoring to make up his mind about Kristin.

  Try as Murat might to disregard it, an unquenchable suspicion had begun to gnaw at him. His doubts had begun the moment he heard that she was gone, that she had evidently walked up the hill to meet her abductor willingly.

  Her chief abductor, of course, must have been her former husband. The Prince of Tasavalta, armed with Sightblinder, had dared to approach the camp of the Crown Prince closely. Perhaps the Sword of Stealth had shown him to the Princess in the guise of Murat, presenting an image that she might not have been able to distinguish from Murat himself … that was a comfort to the Crown Prince, to think that his beloved had remained loyal, but had been treacherously deceived.

  Carlo, when consulted, argued in favor of this interpretation. But as much as the Crown Prince wanted to believe it, he suffered persistent doubts.

  * * *

  Vilkata, in his sincere desire to serve his master, was permanently suspicious of all other servants and advisers, including Carlo. Perhaps these others meant well, but what did this youth and these ignorant soldiers know about intrigue, what understanding did they have of the great game played with Swords? Only he, Vilkata, the wizard and former king, had the experience and foresight to offer proper guidance.

  Therefore, the Dark King, in a mode of thought as natural to him as breathing, mentally prepared ways in which he might discredit other advisers. In his heart he was firmly co
nvinced that the dear and glorious master really would be better off if he came to rely on the Dark King above all others…

  * * *

  And Murat, as the hours of the afternoon dragged on with no orders given, no decisions made, could not get the suspicion out of his mind. Could she, could she, after all, have been lying to him all along? Only faking her conversion by the Sword?

  Kristin’s uncle, after all, was a mighty wizard; those versed in such matters counted Karel one of the world’s best, though he did not seek fame and seemed to care little for his reputation. Might Karel have been able to provide his Princess with some special help, some protection that would grant her immunity even to the Mindsword’s powers?

  But no, no such magic existed anywhere. The Crown Prince was ready to stake his life on that.

  Except, of course, in the Sword Shieldbreaker.

  Kristin, while she was with him, had not been carrying any Sword. But for all he, Murat, knew, Mark or Karel might possess the Sword of Force. And if they could somehow have transferred the power of that mighty weap-on to her—

  No. Kristin would have told him if Shieldbreaker was somewhere in Tasavaltan possession. No, Murat would not, never could, never would, believe that his beloved had been lying to him about her love.

  Vilkata, when Murat again questioned him closely, assured his beloved master that yes, years ago, Prince Mark had seemingly defied the Mindsword’s power for a time. Oh, for a matter of minutes only, an hour at the most. Vilkata’s only explanation was that, somehow, on that distant day, Sightblinder’s power of allowing its holder to see things and people as they really were had worked as an effective antidote to the force of Skulltwister.

  Murat growled. “And what the Sword of Stealth has accomplished before, it might be able to do again.”

  “No one can deny it absolutely, my lord. But I think it could not have enabled Mark to enter your camp last night, and go away again.”