"I will do no harm unless harmed."
Everywhere the swamp lived, thrived, sang. . . .
"But what I do for you, I can do against you."
The breeze died away as Frost brought his arms back down. The mist slowly cleared, taking with it the sweet, herbal scents.
Frost turned and glared into the reeds again. "That one!" he snapped. Rosivok spun half around and leaped into the brush. Something howled, a thin and jolting sound not possible from any man, then the Subartan emerged with one arm carefully wrapped around the chest of a kicking, growling beast. It wore a garment of sorts, a shirt made of a dark, limp cloth, half-sleeves and open at the front to expose the thin fur on its round belly—thicker on its narrow chest. The face, pointed and nearly as furry as its arms, seemed wracked with agony. Long, sharp nails clawed at the air.
"Your king," Frost demanded, bending to the creature, while keeping well out of range of both claw and spit. The leshy's small black eyes burned with rage. Frost pointed his staff at the creature's dangling genitals. "I will not ask more than twice!"
The creature screamed as though emasculation had already commenced, when in fact, Frost had done nothing—yet. Still the leshy held its tongue. Then motion began again all around them, movement in the water, the reeds, behind the trees.
"Why don't they attack?" Jaran asked in a loud whisper close to Frost's ear.
"They are wary of me," Frost said. "Of what I might do to their swamp, or to them, and so they wait. But they may overlook their fears in a moment. You will also remember that the leshys are not the only ones we must contend with here, something the leshys know only too well. The worst is yet to be, unless this one can be made to talk."
Frost raised his staff up and touched the captive leshy's forehead with it, and the creature went completely stiff. "The name of your king," Frost asked again, leaning much closer now. Narrow leshy lips trembled and began to move. Then the green waters of the bog exploded.
Rosivok let the leshy fall boardlike to the ground as the dead rose up and came toward shore. The barrow-wights seemed to wade at first, but it was quickly apparent that they moved by forces much stranger than legs—their limbs and torsos were naught but bone draped in the ragged remains of hair and flesh, cloth and leather. Some wore bits of bronze armor, others seemed to go without, but all of them wielded swords or daggers of one kind or another. Empty eye sockets gaped at those onshore as the water rolled out of them, and from their dead open mouths came a hissing chorus like wet rocks thrown into a fire.
The first of the spirits to reach Rosivok seemed to fling itself straight upon him as though its momentum gave it no other choice. Rosivok twitched the subarta blade, standing his ground. Rotted wet bone flew about in bits and chunks. Rosivok brushed pieces of the thing off himself, then dodged the blade of the next barrow-wight—only to be spattered again as Sharryl joined the fight and dismantled the second creature, just above Rosivok's head.
Jaran and his men joined the Subartans then, followed by Madia. They formed a line along the shore just in front of Frost, all of them hacking furiously at the flying, hissing dead soldiers. Frost began to concentrate, finishing a carefully planned warding spell meant solely to muddle the dead's perception—a quick variation on the spell of "sight" he had been using, which was really all a barrow-wight had to go by. As the greater part of their numbers reached the shore he released the spell, and the creatures seemed to grow disoriented. They wheeled and spun about, swinging their weapons wildly at thin air and trees as much as their intended targets.
Seizing the advantage, the living spread out and worked quickly, using their swords two-handed to chop and cleave in all directions until the air was finally silent, and the ground was littered with sodden chunks of darkened bone and cloth and twisted metal.
Frost turned back to the captured leshy and spoke to it through the trance that still immobilized it. "Your king," he said again. "What is his name?"
Once more the leshy's mouth began to work, and a whisper came forth: "Ergris."
Frost released the spell and the leshy came quickly around. It shook briefly, head jerking side to side, eyes wild as it tried to look in all directions at once. It turned, glanced once over its narrow shoulder, then ran into the cover of brush and trees. Frost watched it go, then turned his back to the others to face the surrounding bog.
"I come on behalf of Ramins," Frost said, enhancing his voice, making his words unnaturally loud in the silence of the swamp. "I come to speak to Ergris!"
He stood quietly for a moment—until the brush began to stir, and the leshy king emerged.
He came surrounded by a dozen of his kind, distinguished from them only by the ornamental dyes that had been applied to the smoothed-back fur on his head and the dark, nearly hairless skin of his face. Ergris paused a few paces from Frost, ears twitching, eyes quick as he examined each of the human intruders.
"What know you of Ramins?" the leshy king asked, speaking in the human tongue.
"I am as he was," Frost replied. "Know me as you knew him, and we may share what was shared."
Ergris stood staring at Frost, his round belly expanding and contracting as he breathed. "You make the forest grow," he said.
Frost nodded, almost a bow.
"Only Ramins did this."
"True."
"Ramins and Ergris shared many things," the king affirmed. "Time and thoughts, food and drink. Many things."
Frost stood eye to eye with Ergris, saying nothing.
"You seek the Demon Blade?" Ergris asked.
"Yes."
The king's expression soured—a severe condition on a leshy face. He looked about at the small army of leshys in the reeds and gathered knee-deep in the nearby waters and poking out between the trees and undergrowth elsewhere. Barrow-wight bones and garments had already begun to move—slowly, indirectly, but certainly toward each other—had already begun to reassemble themselves. Like the wolves at Highthorn, these dead refuse to die, Frost thought.
"Then you will go," Ergris muttered. "Alive, if you go quick. Dead if you do not."
"I, too, am good at making threats," Frost replied. "We can threaten each other at length and destroy what we each value, but in the end this would not be sensible. I can hold your forest hostage while you hold the Demon Blade, but the Blade does not belong to you, any more than Golemesk belongs to me."
Ergris seemed moved by Frost's logic. He wore a strange, perhaps embarrassed look for an instant, though it was hard to tell, then he seemed to come to some conclusion. He shook his snout as if it annoyed him, then he turned and began a rapid, grumbly, snarling conversation with the leshys directly behind him.
"There is more to consider," Frost said, beginning again the instant their voices left a silence. "There is a new ruler in Kamrit."
"The leshys know of this. Lord Ferris sends men into Golemesk. They too seek the Demon Blade, like the other unwanteds who have plagued us since the death of Ramins. We kill most of them."
"He masquerades as the Lord Ferris," Frost said, "but in fact he is no man at all. Within exists a Demon Prince of great powers, a threat to all peoples in all lands, including the leshys and Golemesk. Soon the Ferris demon will rule these lands as he rules Ariman. All this will be his. You will be his, and the Demon Blade, you may trust, will be his as well."
"So you say," Ergris answered.
"It is true," Madia said, speaking up, almost pleading. "The Blade may be our only hope against Ferris and the growing armies he commands. Armies that will come upon you like a plague if you do not yield!"
"And so you say as well," Ergris repeated.
"Come here, to the water," Frost said. "See what is reflected there." And with that he turned and went to the mossy edge of the wet bog. He took his staff in both hands and spoke silently over it, concentrating for a time, then he wavered, touched by a wash of mounting fatigue as he called the spell to life. He drew a long, slow breath. "Clear a spot," he told Madia, pointing to the thick green
blanket of algae that floated on the waters. She used her boot to splash the green slime aside, producing a rough circle of black tea-water perhaps two paces across. Before the algae could flow back, Frost plunged the tip of his staff into the middle of the circle.
Ergris, other leshys crowding close behind, came cautiously forward, pressing in along with Jaran and his men, their hostility momentarily forgotten. As the ripples quieted, the reflections of trees and brush and Frost and leshy formed clearly on the surface, then these began to fade. In their place, new images took shape. In the silence even Frost was aware of a sudden, rising clatter and scrape behind him.
All eyes turned momentarily to find the disassembled army of dead Holan warriors now almost fully reassembled everywhere around the living. As each creature formed it raised its sword once more, prepared to take up the battle again, though as yet, none had.
"Come," Frost said, looking into their empty dead eyes, letting them see what was in his mind. "You too must share in this." He signaled Rosivok and the others to ease back a bit. This they did, though with great hesitation. The barrow-wights came slowly near, then hung in the air above the ground and the water, clutching their weapons clumsily now, as if they had come to weigh far too much.
Frost looked them over carefully, then motioned with just a finger. One of the dead floated nearer and came to rest on the ground between Frost and Rosivok, this one bearing a long pleated tunic unlike the others and the blackened remnants of what had been a massive silk hat, worn instead of a helmet.
"Watch, Tiesh," Frost said, calling the dead mage by his name. "And know the truth."
Frost turned back to the water. He finished the incantation, animating the scene that had formed clearly now on the water's surface. Great armies came in a time when the trees and ground of Golemesk were bare; they swept over the land led by a creature that was human in shape but clearly a demon in appearance, a crimson, blackened yet glowing thing with eyes that burned dull white and a mouth that gaped, revealing jagged bone where teeth might have been.
Leshys fought the invaders, striking from what little cover there was, but the army was too vast, and quick to set fire to tangles and holes wherever the leshys fled. The human and demon forces reached the bog, and the demon breathed upon the frozen waters until they melted, then began to boil, filling the air with steam. When this cleared, nothing remained but the rotting barrows and the mud and decayed debris of the bog's bottom.
One by one the barrows were smashed and the spirits cast out into the sunlight. Those who survived the sun and the swords of the soldiers, Tiesh clear among them, were left to face the demon prince. In a brief, final moment, the spirits of the dead were seized and consumed. Then the demon strode among the wreckage of barrows, and in one, digging briefly, it seemed to find something.
Frost withdrew his staff. Reflections of man and leshy and the floating dead stared up from the dark waters, then these too disappeared as the surface covered over again with green.
"You might make anything appear there," Ergris said, though the edge was now gone from his voice.
"You have enough sense of these things," Frost replied. "As do you," he added, turning to Tiesh. "The images are not mine. Both of you know this."
Ergris said nothing for a time, though there was communication of a kind between Tiesh and the leshy king, a silent exchange.
"Give the Blade to Frost," Madia said, sounding almost frightened. "You must. If we are successful, perhaps I will rule Ariman. I give you my word that I will seek the allegiance of the northern kings and defend the sovereignty of Golemesk."
Jaran cleared his throat. Madia turned to him with a fierce look. He raised his eyebrows incredulously, but said not a word.
Ergris nodded to Tiesh and received a nod in return. The dead sorcerer rose up and drifted out over the waters, then over the cluster of mounds poking up everywhere. Near the center of the pond he descended into the waters and was gone. Soon enough the surface churned gently, and Tiesh emerged again, carrying a weapon that was neither large enough to call a sword, nor small enough to call a dagger. The hilt was thick and black and bore a gold knuckle bow; the blade was straight and tapered, with no false edge and only a single groove cut along its center from hilt to point. Tiesh drifted to a stop as he reached the shore and gave the weapon over to Ergris.
The leshy king held the Blade tenderly, looking it over as he ran one dark finger along an edge. He glanced about as if drawing a consensus from the other leshys; none seemed willing to comment. Finally Ergris turned to Frost and offered the weapon over, using his left hand, as its makers had intended. Frost nodded graciously and reached with his own left hand to accept the Blade.
His eyes went suddenly wide. He opened his mouth, and he began to scream.
* * *
The Blade lay nestled in the moss at Frost's feet, exactly where he had dropped it. He held his left forearm with his right hand, trying to comfort the flesh, rubbing to bring warmth back into it. He had no doubt whatever as to what had happened, no trouble understanding the intense, exotic pain that still radiated up into his shoulder. His left hand had a thinned, almost bony look, as did the arm.
In a way the mistake was obvious, now that he thought about it. He had anticipated the moment for so long and with such intensity that his passion had overruled his wits. Like a man long of thirst he had tried to drink too deeply, had unconsciously fused with the Blade with nearly every available resource, desperate for some slight reaction. But something quite unexpected had happened—though Frost had no idea exactly what.
Every form of energy his body and spirit possessed had been diminished to some degree, instantly. He had no clear sense even now of the Blade's powers or his encounter with them. What strange manner of magic did this weapon possess? What were its limits? its controls?
He needed to know all the secrets that had been lost with the ages and the death of Ramins. Perhaps this is how he died, Frost thought; for such an old, frail man, skinny as Aphan, the slightest use of such a weapon would be fatal. He looked down at the Blade, unable even to consider reaching for it again, at least just now, and he wondered if the weapon's promise had been forever lost with Ramins. He wanted nothing more than to unravel its mysteries, its magic, its powers. But not every question has an answer, even for me. . . .
Madia touched his good hand and he met her gaze.
"I am all right," he said, answering the unspoken question. "Or I will be."
"The weapon is cursed," Rosivok said. He stepped around in front of the others, heels in the water, and reexamined the Blade from that angle, then Frost's depleted arm.
"No curse," Ergris exclaimed, fidgeting. "We would know of such. Leshys would hurt, too, but we do not." He proved his words by picking up the Blade himself and waving it about in the air, then feinting a forward strike.
"You are right, Ergris," Frost said. "I have long supposed that the Blade was somehow able to amplify the powers of the ancient wizards, that it and its user could become one. I tried to make it so. But something else happened."
"There is a pull, it is true," Ergris said, laying the Blade back down. "I have felt it and resisted. Leshys have little to give."
"Look at his arm," Prince Jaran said, standing now between Frost and Madia. "Look how withered it has already become. What good is a weapon that eats a man alive? It must think you a demon, Frost."
"Perhaps that is its secret," Madia said. "One simply tricks a demon into taking the Blade and using it in battle, and the Blade consumes him?"
"Not impossible," Frost said, though he felt fairly certain that was not true. There was nothing to indicate that the weapon was capable of distinguishing demons from leshys, or wizards from peasants. The "flavor" of its powers seemed endlessly complex and exotic, but not completely unfamiliar. "There are, I think, many answers," he suggested.
"Let me," Rosivok said. Abruptly he bent down and took up the Blade. He stood there holding it, examining its shimmering steel, the beads of mo
isture rolling off of it. After a moment he shrugged. "Nothing," he said.
"No," Frost agreed. "There should not be." He took a very deep breath—deciding he would have to use his right hand, the left simply did not have the strength—and reached toward the Subartan. "Let me try once more."
Rosivok held the Blade out. Briefly, Frost closed his eyes. He pushed all thoughts of the Blade's powers, as well as his own ideas about them, out of his mind, then spoke a minor spell to himself, one to keep his magical energies turned inward, turned off, for now. He looked at the Blade again and reached, and touched it. This time, after a moment, he gently smiled.
* * *
The tree stretched up to the high leafy canopy that hid the sky above the bogs; its trunk was massive, as big around as a dozen men. At its base Rosivok had built a tiny fire of twigs. Frost raised the Blade in his left hand, a hand still weak, but partly recovered during three nights and four days of rest among the leshys. He mouthed a brief spell and pointed the weapon, and the tree burst into a pillar of flames. Man and leshy alike quickly fell back several steps and shielded their eyes as the heat reached them. Then Frost spoke once more and the fires were gone, the tree apparently untouched.
Slowly, a handful of leshys made their way to the tree and looked it over, followed by Jaran and Madia. No sign of the bright, intense fires could be found.
"I have learned something," Frost announced. He had spent the past few days cautiously experimenting with the weapon, bringing a lifetime of amassed knowledge of magic and its working to bear, a lifetime of curiosity. The results were not ideal. "I have gained a basic control of the Blade, though it is not what I expected."
"And your arm?" Sharryl asked, looking at it.
"Well," Frost said. "I will try to explain. There are limits to how much power can be utilized by anyone at any one time. No matter now much rest and size and talent I might come by, I can only channel energy just so fast. With the Blade, however, this limit is . . . removed. I can call upon any amount of energy I possess and direct it through the Blade, all in a single instant, for any single purpose I choose. It is as if one of you knew a way to run with unlimited speed, but only until all your strength and energy was consumed."
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