Breaker had never seen oxen before reaching Valleymouth, and did not much like them—placid as the beasts were, their mere size and obvious strength was frightening.
And the towns in the Midlands were so close together that there were no guides; to reach the next he would have to venture through wild country unescorted. Even with the roads, that was a daunting prospect.
“I’ve done it,” Kopol told him. “It’s not hard.”
“But you’re a guide!” Breaker protested.
“Not here; I learned the routes up through Greenvale and part of Longvale from my mother, but in the Midlands I just set out at random, and I did fine.”
“But still . . .”
Kopol shrugged. “Please yourself,” he said. “But I’m heading north again tomorrow, and you’re on your own from here. The Galbek Hills are somewhere to the south, across the Midlands—you’ll have to find your own way.”
Breaker still hesitated.
Good as his word, the Greenwater Guide left the next day, leaving Breaker alone in the upstairs room of the trading post.
Eventually, after four days in Valleymouth, he gathered his courage and set out to the south. He arrived in Barrel unscathed, after a completely unremarkable walk.
It was in Barrel that he first learned to use money. The people of Longvale bartered goods and services, and sometimes used a measure of barley as a standard, but they had no coinage other than the copper tokens they traded with the bargemen, and a great many things were held in common by the entire village, to be used as needed. The people of the Midlands, as Kopol had warned, considered this foolish and old-fashioned, and used stamped silver disks as their medium of exchange. It took Breaker three or four days to get the hang of using the silly things, and to earn a modest supply by displaying his prowess with a blade and then passing a mug around.
He had developed his act little by little as he traveled; in every village since Hartridge, as soon as his identity was known, he had been asked to demonstrate his supernatural skills in exchange for his meals.
The stunts the Old Swordsman had taught him served him well; people were entertained by even the simplest tricks—slicing a tossed pear into three pieces before it hit the ground, deflecting a ball flung at his head without warning, disarming a stick-wielding attacker, snuffing a candle with the tip of his blade. He had gradually developed a standard performance, and could use it as his daily hour of practice. In the towns of Greenvale the end of the hour had usually meant a flurry of admiring questions and perhaps a little flirting from the local women; in Barrel it became his cue to hold out a mug and gather coins.
He was not the only one providing entertainment in the taverns and public houses—Barrel had no village pavilion, but instead several separate businesses arranged around a central square served the same purpose, and several people seemed to make their living by amusing the patrons of these establishments. Singers and storytellers would pass a mug or hat before and after each performance, and anyone who made a point of dropping in a larger coin than the usual could request a particular tale or tune.
Breaker bought himself a few stories and songs about the Wizard Lord, but alas, none of them were about the present Wizard Lord; instead he got to hear several familiar pieces about how this lord or that had turned aside a flood, or driven murderers to their doom, or fetched runaway children and cattle safely home again.
And of course, he heard the old ballads about how the Chosen slew the Dark Lords of Goln Vleys and Spider Marsh, though in versions not quite the ones he had learned back in Mad Oak.
In truth, Breaker thought he learned more talking to the townsfolk than he did listening to the professional storytellers. Here in Barrel, as in Valleymouth, Boss was a known and familiar figure, and several of the locals claimed to have met the Scholar, as well. Three men even mentioned encountering the Speaker once, when traveling.
“What are they like?” Breaker asked as he stood in a public house, a mug of ale in his hand.
The locals glanced at one another.
“What do you mean, what are they like?” a fellow not much older than Breaker himself asked.
“I mean, are they short, tall, thin, fat, jolly, sad, quiet, loud—what are they like?”
“Scholar’s pleasant enough,” one man said. “He’s about my height but thinner, with gray in his beard. He’s good company, will trade tale for tale, and takes his turn buying the beer.”
The man in question was of average height and stoutly built, which would make the Scholar a man of ordinary dimensions.
“He collects gossip like an old woman,” another man said. “Always wants to know the news since he last came through.”
“That’s true enough—he’ll remember everything you told him last time, about your sister’s boyfriend and your mother-in-law’s bad knee, and he’ll ask you what’s become of them, whether your sister’s married her man and how that knee’s been doing.” This third speaker shook his head. “Filling his head with gossip instead of studying the lore he should be!”
“Well, it’s not as if the Chosen will ever be called upon,” said the stout man. “He has the gift of learning, so why not use it to make himself pleasant?”
“Pleasant?” the young man said. “How is it pleasant?”
“Everyone likes a good listener.”
“And it’s not as if he spreads it about—he listens to all the news, but when it’s his turn he’ll tell a story about some wizard dead a hundred years.”
Breaker nodded. “And the Speaker?”
The men suddenly fell silent, the eyes of the others turning toward the three who had traveled; after an awkward pause, the man who had spoken of a mother-in-law’s knee said, “I think she’s mad, if the truth be told.”
“Aye. She’ll sit in the corner with her head tilted to one side, staring at nothing, and then she’ll startle at nothing, and when she speaks she interrupts herself with nonsense.”
“She’s a crazy old woman, and the magic should have been handed on long ago,” the stout man agreed.
“Is she old?” Breaker asked. The Old Swordsman had implied otherwise.
The men exchanged glances.
“She still has her teeth.”
“And her hair hadn’t gone gray as yet, when we saw her.”
“Not so very old, then.”
“I’d be hard put to guess her years,” the stout man acknowledged.
“I think the madness makes her seem older,” said the man who had called her mad.
“I know that the Chosen guard us all against the Wizard Lord going bad and we owe them respect for that, but it’s hard to think well of such as her.”
“Scholar and Boss, though—they’re both fine men, and I’d not like to be a Wizard Lord who’d done evil.”
“And show us that sword of yours again! I saw some of the tricks you did, and I wouldn’t care to have you after me, either!”
“Buy me something to eat, and I’ll show you how fast steel can move,” Breaker agreed. “I can’t do my best on an empty stomach!”
“Fair enough.” The stout man beckoned to the landlord.
“Do you know who I would like to meet?” one of the others began.
“The Beauty. We know. We all would.”
Breaker smiled. “The most beautiful woman in the world—who wouldn’t want to meet her, if just to see the standard by which all others might be judged?”
“And is that why you agreed to be the Swordsman, then—so you’d have a chance to get to know her?”
Breaker shook his head. “No—fool that I am, I didn’t even think about that aspect of it until after I’d started my training. It certainly wouldn’t have discouraged me, though!” His smile faded. “Would you have any idea where she might be found?”
“None at all.”
“Nor I.”
That was hardly a surprise. The Old Swordsman had said she lived in Winterhome, at the base of the Eastern Cliffs where the trail came down from the Uplands
into Barokan, but Breaker was not sure how reliable the old man had been. He had been vaguely hoping these people might know more—if the Beauty were nearby, then visiting her, getting to know another of the Chosen, might have been a good idea.
But she apparently wasn’t, and before he could say anything more the landlord was there, and the men fished out a few coins to cover the cost of a platter of ham and vegetables.
As they did, Breaker was thinking over what he had learned. The Leader, or Boss, or whatever he called himself, sounded like a good strong man and a useful ally, worthy of being one of the Chosen, but there was nothing to indicate that he would know much of anything about the Wizard Lord. And the Speaker, if she was truly mad, would be useless.
The Scholar, though—if he had been collecting gossip for years, he might well know more about the Wizard Lord than anyone else. So far, Breaker had not heard a single negative word about the current Wizard Lord from anyone but the Old Swordsman—but he was beginning to notice he hadn’t heard anything positive, either. There were hundreds of stories about Wizard Lords righting wrongs and saving lives and so on, but they were all about former Wizard Lords, not the current holder of the title.
Someone must know something about the man, and the Scholar was more likely than anyone else to be that one.
“When was the Scholar last in Barrel?” Breaker asked.
The men looked at one another.
“Last summer, was it?”
“Spring. I’d just been planting the north field.”
“That’s right—remember, he left just before the priests started looking for the solstice sacrifice.”
“Right. Last spring, then.”
A year’s head start was more than enough to be discouraging, but Breaker had little else to guide his travels; he knew he wanted to head generally southward, toward the Galbek Hills, but other than that his plans were vague. He refused to be distracted by the mention of a solstice sacrifice, and asked, “When he left, which way did he go?”
“Toward Blackwell.”
The others nodded.
And the following morning Breaker passed by an exceptionally ugly boundary shrine and headed southeast toward Blackwell.
[13]
Crossing the Midlands took almost half the summer; midsummer found Breaker in the foothills on the southern edge of the plain, in a town called Dog Pole—a name no one could explain. The local dialect was sufficiently different from the language spoken in Longvale that Breaker was not entirely sure he would have understood the explanation, in any case.
He had noticed as he moved south that the names, for both towns and people, seemed to make less and less sense. Some of them seemed little more than random syllables, rather than descriptions. Most people used the beginnings of true names for each other, as the people of Greenwater had, but nicknames, often bizarre ones, were common; a complete avoidance of true names, as in Mad Oak, was rare.
He had always wondered what “Galbek” meant; he now suspected that it didn’t mean anything, but was just a meaningless name given to a particular set of hills. That seemed to be how these Southerners operated.
Of course, he reminded himself, he wasn’t really in the South yet, but only just approaching its boundaries.
Along his way he had heard descriptions of several of the other Chosen—the handsome Leader, the gossip-loving Scholar, the mad Speaker, the short-tempered Archer, the motherly Seer. The Beauty and the Thief remained completely unknown; no one would admit meeting either of them.
He had learned very little about the Wizard Lord. Several people had told stories about the previous Wizard Lord—Breaker had not visited Spilled Basket, where he had made his home, but he had passed within about twenty miles of it—or about others even farther back, but hardly anyone knew anything about the present incumbent. The most common response to questions was a shrug and a remark, “The weather’s been fine.”
He wondered whether the Old Swordsman’s fears might have been completely baseless; certainly, he saw no sign that anyone else suspected the Wizard Lord of any sort of misbehavior. No one actually professed to like him, but neither did they fear him. As far as Breaker could tell his journey to visit the Wizard Lord at his home in the Galbek Hills was largely pointless, but he was not inclined to turn back yet; overall, he was enjoying the trip.
He had asked sometimes about other wizards, as well, and had been surprised at how few reports he heard about them. None seemed to make their homes in the Midlands, or at least not in the portion of the Midlands he crossed; a few vague tales and legends trickled in from the west and south, but Breaker was unsure how much credence to give them. He supposed wizards preferred the less-crowded parts of Barokan, but it still seemed somewhat odd.
He had encountered hundreds of strange customs and unfamiliar rites in his traveling, and had become largely inured to them. People did what they had to to live with the ler, and he was no longer surprised by any demands the spirits might make. Appalled, sometimes, but not surprised. He still had trouble believing that people would willingly live in a community whose guardian ler demanded a human sacrifice every spring, but he had encountered at least three such towns.
He had continued to follow reports of the Scholar’s presence, which had led him almost directly south—he was unsure what to make of that, whether it was merely coincidence or something else at work. He had gained some ground; the Scholar had reportedly passed through Dog Pole in early spring, no more than three or four months ago.
The Seer had also come this way not so very long ago; he wondered about that.
All in all, he was enjoying his journey, but found it worrisome that he was not learning more about his own role in the world.
One morning he was sitting at a battered table in Dog Pole’s one and only public house, wondering whether he should continue following reports of the Scholar’s route or try to find his way directly to the Galbek Hills, when the door opened.
He didn’t look up at first; he was trying to estimate how long it would take to get back to Mad Oak if he took as direct a route as possible and only stayed a night in each town along the way. If the snows didn’t come early he might take another two months to find the Wizard Lord’s tower and still be home . . .
“Swordsman?”
Startled, he looked up, his right hand falling to the hilt of his sword. That had become a completely involuntary habit, but one he could not break; he suspected it was part of the magic his role entailed.
The speaker was a somewhat elderly man, rather weathered-looking but still straight-backed and apparently vigorous, clad in well-worn deerhide. “Yes?” Breaker said, returning his hand to the tabletop.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” the white-haired man said, holding out a hand; he spoke the Midlands dialect, but with a thick southern accent. “I’m here to take you to Tumbled Sheep.”
Breaker blinked at him. “What?”
“I’m a guide—I know every road in the hills from here to Crooked Valley. I’m here to take you to Tumbled Sheep—it’s a village about fifteen miles southeast of here.”
Breaker frowned. “Who told you I want to go to Tumbled Sheep?” He was tempted to remark on the bizarre stupidity of naming a village “Tumbled Sheep,” but restrained himself; that would just prolong a conversation he wanted to end quickly. He wanted this person to go away and let him think; he was in no great hurry to go anywhere but home, and did not think Tumbled Sheep sounded like a promising destination. He guessed the old man had heard the Swordsman was traveling the area, and wanted to earn himself a guide’s fee and the enhanced reputation that aiding any of the Chosen might bring.
“The Seer,” the guide said.
Breaker abruptly sat up straight, suddenly attentive. “What?”
“The Seer sent me to fetch you; she and the Scholar are waiting for you in Tumbled Sheep.”
“The . . . They are? But how would they know I was here?”
The guide snorted. “There’s a reason they ca
ll her the Seer, you know.”
Breaker had known, of course, that the Seer had magical abilities, and always knew where the other Chosen were, but somehow it had never occurred to him that she would be using that knowledge to find him.
But he supposed it made sense.
“Why do they want me there?”
The guide smiled crookedly. “Swordsman, she didn’t tell me that, but she did say you might not remember right away that you were looking for the Scholar, and if so, I should remind you. Well, consider this your reminder—here’s your chance to talk to him.”
That was true—but if they wanted to talk to him, why hadn’t they come to Dog Pole?
“But why Tumbled Sheep?”
“Because that’s where they are. They didn’t tell me anything; they just sent me to get you and bring you there.”
“Oh.” He supposed it was perfectly reasonable for the Seer and the Scholar to want to meet the new Swordsman—after all, as the guide had pointed out, he had wanted to meet them. Simple curiosity was more than adequate to explain their interest.
And thinking about other possible explanations, he very much hoped mere curiosity was the only motivation. He stared at the guide for a moment longer, then rose. “Let me get my bag.”
Ten minutes later the two of them marched past a boundary shrine, out of Dog Pole, and into the southern hills.
The rolling country was not as strange as the flat plain of the Midlands, but in a way it was even more disorienting to someone from the northern valleys; none of the hills seemed to line up into ridges, but instead they thrust up here and there, apparently at random—and every hill had its own ler, of course, some of them visible as lights or mist or shadows, like the ler of Mad Oak. The guide led Breaker along a winding, circuitous route that dodged most of these, but he stopped in a few spots to placate the local spirits; in one case this required a libation from a wineskin he carried, at another he recited an elaborately worded prayer, and so on.
The Wizard Lord Page 14
