For several days now, the four had been slogging steadily northeast, in the general direction of Tasavalta. The land through which they traveled had gradually grown more rugged, and their progress had become correspondingly slower.
Now and then the Sword they followed decreed some slight variation in their course toward Sarykam. When this happened, the four travelers sometimes speculated about the possible cause of this deflection. But none of the three who had considerable experience with the awesome power of Swords suggested doing anything but going along with Wayfinder. And the detours, whatever their cause, had proven short. At the moment the four were once more, as nearly as they could estimate in this almost roadless waste, on or near a straight-line path toward the Tasavaltan capital.
Over the last few days and hours, Yambu had started several tunes to ask Ben more about what the Emperor had said to him regarding Ariane. But Ben, who had suggested such a conversation, no longer seemed to know what else he wanted to say, or hear, on that subject.
The lady was about to raise the matter with Ben again. But before she could do so, the travelers were excited by the arrival of a winged messenger.
Eagerly Ben unfastened the pouch from the great bird, and fumbled it open. Intently he scanned the note inside.
Zoltan read it over his shoulder. “Nothing of importance,” the young man complained.
“Better than it looks,” Ben assured him. “There are a couple of code words. First, congratulations—that’ll be for our getting Woundhealer. And second, help is on the way.”
Their spirits considerably lightened, the four pushed on.
Within an hour, they became aware that someone was following them, maintaining a careful distance.
“Your old friend Brod,” Zoltan decided, squinting at the distant, barely visible man who doubtless thought himself adequately concealed. “We should have finished him when we had the chance. I suppose he went off in the little boat just to be deceptive.”
“Why should he be following us?” Valdemar wondered.
Ben shrugged. “His gang’s been wiped out, and he’s going to have to find some other way to make a living.”
The Silver Queen had no comment; her thoughts were evidently elsewhere.
That evening, she spoke confidingly to her old friends Ben and Zoltan, and her new follower Valdemar.
“I am almost a girl again … no, I don’t mean that. What foolishness! I am fifty-one years old, and healing will not turn back the years; age in itself is not an illness or an injury. But in a way I feel like a girl. The horrible burden that Soulcutter put on me so many years ago has at last been lifted. Can you understand what that means? No, there is no way you could understand.”
And in her emotion the lady laughed and cried, in a mixture of joy and confusion; the emotional reaction which had come upon her when she was healed was now repeated, even more strongly than before.
“Can you understand? I can no longer be certain what my purpose in life is, or ought to be.”
“I think I can understand, my lady.” Ben’s large hand pulled the Sword she had given them out of its sheath; he held the black hilt out toward her.
Zoltan nodded; it was a slow, uncertain gesture, as if he had trouble comprehending the Lady’s difficulty, but considered that Wayfinder’s powerful medicine ought to be worth a try in any case.
Once more gripping Wayfinder, Lady Yambu posed a new question.
“Blade, once more I seek your guidance. Was I speaking only foolishness when I asked you to find eternal truth for me? You answered me, I know, but … I am no longer sure what I was thinking two days ago. It is almost as if I have been reborn.”
The Sword of Wisdom hung inert in her grasp. Of course. The question she had just asked, as Yambu understood full well, was not the kind Wayfinder could be expected to answer.
“Take your time, my lady.” Ben was respectfully concerned.
The trouble, Yambu was discovering, was that she now found herself unable to formulate any inquiry to her own satisfaction. Indecisively she raised the Sword, and lowered it, and raised it up again.
At last, words burst forth: “Was my healing the only truth I needed? I have been granted the touch of the Sword of Mercy … but again, that is not the kind of question any Sword can answer for me, is it?”
Even as she spoke, Yambu was wishing that she had gone off by herself to so apostrophize Wayfinder. Certainly the others were watching and listening with intense interest. But now, as if he were embarrassed, Ben motioned to the two younger men, and all of them moved away, leaving the Lady alone with Wayfinder.
The mute Sword only quivered uncertainly, in response to the questioner’s uncertainty.
“Changeable, are you? At least you are a silent counselor, and there’s wisdom to be found in that.”
Rejoining the others, she sought out Valdemar, and held out the black hilt of the sheathed Sword. Yambu said: “I am having but poor success. Will you try it for yourself once more?”
The young man in farmer’s clothing hesitated, then shook his head doggedly. “No, I have already used Wayfinder more than once, and each time it has led me to you. My purpose has not changed. So, for now, let me continue as I am.”
“Even if I have changed? If I no longer know where I am going?” The young man smiled faintly. “Very well then, let me try the Sword once more.”
As steadily as ever, the Sword of Wisdom with its black hilt once more in the huge hands of Valdemar, pointed straight toward the Silver Queen.
He returned the weapon to her hilt-first, making an almost courtly flourish. He said: “I am content to follow, Lady, whatever you decide to do.”
She sighed. “Then let your fate be on your own head.”
Chapter Eight
This night it was Valdemar’s turn to stand the last watch, the hours just before dawn.
At the proper time Ben woke him, and silently held out to him the black hilt of the Sword of Wisdom, with which his comrades were to be protected as they slept.
The young man sat up, the folds of his blanket falling from around his massive shoulders, and held both hands to his head for a long moment before he accepted Wayfinder.
“Bad dreams?” Ben inquired in a low voice.
“No. Yes, I think so, but I don’t remember.” Valdemar shook his head. “I keep worrying about my vineyard.”
“Once upon a time,” said Ben, “when I was very young, all I wanted out of life was to be a minstrel. I really thought that I could be one, too. Carried a lute around with me everywhere. Can you believe that?”
“Yes, I can,” said the other after a moment’s thought. “Were you any good?” he asked with interest.
Ben appeared to consider the question seriously. “No,” he said at last, and turned away. “Me for my own blanket.”
Valdemar began his watch in routine fashion, by asking the Sword of Wisdom a question concerning the safety of the camp. Testing the limits on the kind of question the Sword would answer, he tended to keep trying new variations. Tonight’s first variant was: “Will we be safer if we move?”
To this query the Sword in Valdemar’s hands returned him no detectable answer; he presumed that Wayfinder would have pointed in the proper direction had its powers decided that the camp would indeed be more secure somewhere else.
The general safety assured, for the moment at least, to the sentry’s satisfaction, he asked his second question of this watch. This one was whispered so softly that he could not hear his own words. “Where is the nearest person present whose advice I should be following?”
The Sword of Wisdom indicated Yambu, who appeared to be fast asleep.
Valdemar nodded. Carrying Wayfinder drawn and ready, he paced the vicinity of the small camp, applying the good sentry’s technique he had learned from his new friends. He varied his route and pace, turning sharply at irregular intervals, eyes and ears alert to the surrounding darkness. He kept his eyes averted from the small fire’s brightness to preserve their
sensitivity in the dark.
Meanwhile his routine worries returned. Counting the days he had already been away from home, confirming his estimate of the advancing season by the current phase of the Moon, Valdemar knew with certainty that his vines would soon be leafing out, and would need care. He had done all he could for the plants before he left, but they would soon be growing wild, and insects would attack them.
He lacked the skills of magic necessary to do anything effective about these problems at a distance, though of course he could try. Valdemar doubted whether he could project any potent spells against insects, at least not over more than a few meters. He’d make the effort, of course, but not now. Right now he had to concentrate upon his duties as a guard.
Once more he put a safety question to the Sword, on the chance that circumstances had changed adversely in the past few minutes. Once more Wayfinder seemed to assure him that all was well.
Time continued to pass uneventfully. Ben had hardly hit the ground before falling fast asleep, as a faint rumble of snoring testified. The night wind ghosted past Valdemar’s ears, and the moon and the familiar stars, though only intermittently visible through a patchwork of clouds, moved in their familiar paths above his head.
Where, he wondered suddenly, was Woundhealer resting at this moment? He tried to remember who had been carrying the Sword of Mercy. Then, in the course of his next sharp turn as he patrolled, the young man, peering intently by the vague light of stars and moon, caught a glimpse of the black hilt. The Sword was currently in Zoltan’s custody, its shape unmistakable within its wrappings, lying in contact with his sleeping body.
All was well, then. Valdemar relaxed though he reminded himself sternly to remain alert. But as his watch dragged on, he strayed into asking Wayfinder one private question after another, only to realize guiltily once more that long moments had passed in which the Sword of Wisdom was no longer really charged with protecting the camp.
Tonight he was not only worried about his vineyard, but also bothered by particular concerns about his bride-to-be. As pictured in his imagination, she was a creature of unsurpassed loveliness. But her existence, as anything but a creation of his own imagination, he had begun to doubt.
Lost intermittently in these problems, Valdemar continued his pacing, circling the small campfire on an irregular path, the Sword of Wisdom naked in his right hand, a battle-hatchet belonging to some fallen warrior stuck in his farmer’s belt.
At the moment his half-distracted mind presented Wayfinder with a new inquiry for the benefit of himself and the sleeping three: “Which way to go to foil our enemies? Which way to go—”
This time the Sword returned him a firm answer; generally northeast, the direction of their daytime travel.
Then Valdemar stopped, listening to himself. Actually, of course, neither he nor any of his three companions wanted to go anywhere at the moment—right now they all wanted to get some rest.
But how hard it was, thought Valdemar as he paced on again, for a man to know consistently what, beyond the physical necessities of the moment, he really wanted to do, to achieve. The world held so many kinds of things to want.
Anticipating the first rays of dawn, the young man found it impossible to keep his mind with absolute consistency upon the camp’s defense. Then he would silently upbraid himself, and once more stalk about in his random pattern holding the Sword, and murmur: “I seek the safety of this camp. I seek the safety of this—”
Receiving no answer to what was not really a question, he would shake his head and mutter: “No need to keep repeating things like that. No need to keep repeating things…”
An hour passed. All continued quiet, and nothing untoward occurred.
And, as nothing in particular seemed to be happening, other questions, other urges, drifted as subtly as growing vines into control of Valdemar’s mind.
* * *
Thus it was that the pacing, dreaming sentry was granted no warning whatsoever. One moment he and his sleeping companions were, as far as he knew, all safe, all at peace, save for the faint animal noises of the nocturnal wasteland, sounds more reassuring than disturbing.
And in the next moment they were being overwhelmed.
The onslaught, as Valdemar came later to understand, was well-coordinated, and consisted of an airborne magical component as well as a force of more mundane attackers on the ground. Somewhere over the young man’s head there came a beating of great unseen wings, sounding far larger than those of any flying creature Valdemar had ever seen or heard before; simultaneously he heard a prosaic thunder of approaching hoofbeats on the ground.
Letting out a hoarse cry Valdemar whirled about, brandishing his Sword, unable for the first moment of the attack to see anything out of the ordinary at all. Then suddenly the sentry found himself confronted by a live man standing where a moment earlier there had been no one at all. The figure was that of a warrior, sword upraised, garbed in the same Blue Temple colors worn by half of yesterday’s fallen.
For just a moment Valdemar was frozen by his own imagination, by the terrible image of all those bodies he had helped to rob of food and shoes and weapons, of those dead risen now to claim some kind of vengeance…
For a moment only. Then a second swordsman and a third materialized behind the first out of darkness and the desert, and the young man understood that his attackers were only too full of mundane life. He let out a hoarse shout of alarm, realizing even as he did so that his warning must now be too late.
But his companions were reacting very quickly. Around him, friends and foes were scrambling in the darkness.
The first attacker recoiled from the camp’s sentry, out of respect for the Sword that Valdemar was holding, if not for his gigantic figure. But now others were coming at him from the sides—and now a gossamer net, more magic than material, came dropping softly toward him from a great blurred form in the softly moonlit sky.
Barely in time he twisted out from under the net, sensing its enchantment. Drawn steel, Valdemar had heard, was the most effective countermeasure an ordinary man could take against a wizard’s onslaught, and perhaps the Sword in his right hand, the battle-hatchet now drawn in his left, exerted some measure of protection.
The Lady Yambu, who had been the closest of the other three to Valdemar when the enemy appeared, now rose up at his side, hands spread in a magician’s gesture, joining him in his hopeless though spirited defense of the camp.
Part of his mind noted that the Lady did not have Woundhealer—of course, that Sword had been with Zoltan.
“Fight!” she snapped at Valdemar. “We must not let ourselves be taken alive! Not by these—”
Valdemar, with no time to think, only grunted something in return. Brandishing the battle-hatchet in one hand and Wayfinder in the other, and confident in his own strength though mindful of his lack of skill, he faced the enemy soldiers as what looked like a crowd of them came at him.
The young giant wielded both hatchet and Sword with ferocious energy, and by sheer strength he succeeded in chopping down at least one of his attackers.
To his surprise, the others fell back momentarily. The Silver Queen had become a shadow gliding at Valdemar’s side, and afforded him some unexpected but very welcome magical assistance.
Still, the odds in favor of the enemy were overwhelming, and they were returning to the attack.
* * * * * *
Zoltan had come wide awake, alerted by some subliminal perception, two or three heartbeats before the attack actually fell on the camp. He was fully conscious and active in an instant, and aware of Ben beside him also springing to his feet. Both were veterans, who needed only a momentary glimpse of the assailants surrounding Yambu and Valdemar, the latter fighting with the Sword of Wisdom, to convince them that the odds were hopeless. But so far Zoltan and Ben were not surrounded; rather, they were at one side of the struggle, and escape appeared to be still possible.
Getting the Sword of Mercy back to Tasavalta came ahead of everything e
lse. Zoltan, with Woundhealer already in his hands, unsheathed the Blade and without hesitation plunged it deep into his own body, holding himself transfixed with a hand on the black hilt. With his other hand he pulled his own short sword from its scabbard, and used it to run through the first enemy trooper to come at him in the dimness of the fading night. The trooper’s dying counterstroke cut down on Zoltan’s left shoulder, and might have nearly taken off his arm, had not Woundhealer’s overwhelmingly benign force prevailed. The enemy’s sword fell free, Zoltan’s wound closing behind it so quickly that he lost no blood.
Ben, who had been unarmed except for a short knife and Wayfinder, grabbed up the fallen weapon, and killed two men with it in the next few moments of confusion.
Zoltan was running now, with Ben beside him, away from the beleaguered Yambu and her young ally. Zoltan struck down another attacker, receiving another harmless sword-slash in the process and Ben smashed another foe aside. Both of them kept on running, their backs to the noise and turmoil surrounding Valdemar and the Silver Queen.
A flying reptile came lowering out of the sky at Zoltan, talons biting harmlessly, almost painlessly, into his head and face, which were still protected by the magic of the gods. One claw bit through his eye and did no harm, his vision clearing once more with a blink. He could hear, below the harsh gasping of his own lungs, the softly breathing sound made by the Sword of Mercy, mending this new damage to his body as quickly as it happened.
Even as his eyesight cleared, Zoltan’s killing sword bit into the airborne reptile’s guts. He heard the beast scream, and then fall heavily to earth behind him as he ran on.
Ben kept pounding along beside him, so far managing to keep up. But now a net of magic fell about them both, a gossamer interference with thought and movement that would have stretched them both out on the ground, had not Zoltan been protected from all injury. His senses and his thought remained clear, and he felt the evil magic only as he might have felt a cobweb tear across his face.
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