An Armory of Swords

by Fred Saberhagen

  Lo-Yang, Keyes’s assistant on his dangerous quest for knowledge, had been ignored by the deity who had grabbed Keyes up. And moments later the stout apprentice, unpursued, had scrambled successfully away, running for his life in the direction of the distant camp where he and Keyes had left their riding-beasts.

  After sprinting only a short distance, Lo-Yang, out of shape and also unable to endure the suspense, had felt compelled to look back. Then he had paused, panting. The god who had caught Keyes was in the act of disappearing underground, his prisoner in hand. All the other gods were considerably more distant, and none of them were paying the least attention to Lo-Yang.

  Fatalistically, the apprentice dared to crouch behind a rock and wait, catching his breath. Paradoxically his fear had become more manageable, now that the worst, or almost the worst, had come to pass.

  Presently the great god who had taken Keyes—Lo-Yang was able to identify Mars, by the helmet the god was wearing, and by his general aspect—Mars came up out of the ground again, but without his prisoner, and went striding away to rejoin his colleagues.

  Time passed, and the sun rose higher. The frightened apprentice remained behind his rock. Eventually, gradually, the council of the gods broke up, though not entirely. The remnants, still wrangling, moved even farther off.

  When it seemed to Lo-Yang that all the gods were safely out of the way, he crept out from behind his rock, and dared to come back to the upper rim of the cave, looking for Keyes. With a surge of relief he saw that his master was at least still alive.

  But Keyes took no notice when his apprentice waved. Lo-Yang called down to him cautiously.

  At the sound the man below raised his head, turning it to and fro, in a feverish motion that spoke of near-despair and sudden hope. “Lo-Yang? I’m blind, I...”

  “Oh.”

  “Lo-Yang, is that you? Where are the gods?”

  “Yes sir, I am here.” The apprentice raised his head, squinting into the sunlight, then looked down again. “They’re all moving away, at the moment. Slowly. Still bickering among themselves. No one’s paying any attention to us. Master, if Mars has blinded you, what are we going to do?”

  “Your voice seems to come from a long way above me.”

  “I’d say twelve meters, master, or maybe a little more. I saw him carry you down there, and I thought...”

  “Lo-Yang, get me out of here, somehow.”

  The young man surveyed the entrance to the cave below, and shook his head. It pained him to see his proud master reduced to such a state of helplessness, to hear an unfamiliar quaver in the voice usually so proud. “We need a long rope, master. Looking at these rock walls, I wouldn’t dare to try to climb down without one. I’d only fall in there with you, and...”

  “Yes. Of course. And you have no magic that will get me out.”

  “Unhappily, master, you have as yet taught me nothing that would be useful in this situation.”

  “Yes. Quite true. And I also find that my own magic has been taken from me, along with my sight.” Keyes paused. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its urgency, had become slow and resigned. His shoulders slumped. “Hurry back to our camp, then, and get the rope. We have a coil in the large pack.”

  “Yes, master.” A pause. “It might take me a couple of hours, or even longer, to get there and back. Even if I bring our riding-beasts back with me. Should I bring them back here, master?”

  “Yes. No! I don’t know, I leave the details to you. Go!”

  “Yes, master.” And Keyes could hear the first few footsteps, hurrying away. Then silence.

  He was alone.

  Fiercely Keyes commanded himself to be active, more to keep himself from dwelling on his fate than out of any real hope. Slowly the approximate dimensions and contours of the flatter portions of the cave’s floor revealed themselves to the blind man’s probing. With his hands he explored as much of the walls as he could reach. Seemingly the god had not lied. The cave consisted of a deep shaft, down which Keyes had been carried, and an adjoining room or alcove whose bottom remained in shade. The whole space accessible to the prisoner’s cautious crawling was no larger than the floor of a small house, and it was basically one big room. Here and there around the perimeter were certain crevices which might, for all Keyes could tell, lead to other exits. But the crevices were too narrow for him to force his body into them. He was going to have to wait until Lo-Yang got back, with the rope.

  If Lo-Yang came back in time.

  If the assistant ever came back at all. If he had any intention of doing so. Mentally the newly helpless magician reviewed the times in the past when he had treated his apprentice unjustly. He had hardly ever beaten him. Surely, on the whole, he had been a fair master, and even kind....

  Mindful of the divine warning about pits, Keyes continued his exploration for the most part on all fours, and, when he did stand up, walked very carefully. By this means he located several perilous gaps in the floor, holes into which tossed pebbles dropped for a long count before clicking on bottom. Presently in his groping about the cave he came upon some bones. After he had found a skull or two, he became convinced that the bulk of the bones were human, evidence that other human victims had died in this cave before him. Sacrifices, perhaps? Or simply unlucky hunters, blinded by night or by driving snow, who had fallen in by accident.

  Lo-Yang had said that the god was Mars—and Mars had said that he was coming back, and soon. Mars had spoken of using Keyes in some kind of an experiment.... Once more quivering with horror and fear, the trapped man persevered in his compulsive search for something, anything, that might offer him some chance of escape.

  And so it was that at last, behind some loose rocks in the comer farthest from the entrance, the blind man’s trembling, groping fingers fell upon something that was round, and smooth, and narrow, and was not rock. When he pulled on the object, it came toward him.

  When he stood up again, he was holding in both hands the padded, meter-long weight of a sheathed Sword.

  Even with his sense of magic almost numbed by Mars, Keyes could tell this was no ordinary weapon. He had no real doubt of what he had discovered, though he had never seen or touched one of Vulcan’s Swords before, and had not expected to ever have the chance to touch one—at least not for a long, long time.

  Thanks to his magical investigations at a distance, the difficult, painstaking studies he’d carried out even before the forging of the Blades had been completed, he knew the Twelve Swords well in theory—understood them better, no doubt, than all but a few of the gods yet did. But how one of the Twelve Blades had come to be tucked away in the remotest corner of an obscure cave was more than the human magician could understand. Certainly it had not been placed there for him to find; only his fanatical thoroughness in searching, his determination to keep busy, had led him to the discovery.

  Slowly one possible explanation took shape in the man’s mind: One of the divine gang might have stolen another’s Sword, as a prank or as a ploy in their great mysterious Game, and had found a handy, nearby hiding place at the very bottom of this cave.

  Impulse urged Keyes to draw the unknown Sword at once, to end, if possible, the suspense of waiting in ignorance, and to endow himself immediately with whatever powers his find might confer upon him—but there was one ominous contingency which made him hesitate. Fate, or some cruel trickster of a god, might have given him Soulcutter.

  He was aware that in recent months his ambition had, perhaps more than once, irritated certain of the gods. Until now, by good fortune, none of them had become more than half-aware of him, as humans might be vaguely cognizant of some troublesome insect in the air nearby—but his magic, practiced as subtly as possible on Vulcan’s human assistant, had been clever and strong enough to bring him extensive theoretical knowledge of the Twelve Swords and their unique powers.

  It was utterly frustrating that he had no way to determine which Sword lay in his hands. He knew that all but one of the Twelve Blades were marke
d with distinguishing white symbols on their black hilts—a target shape for Farslayer, a human eye for Sightblinder, and so on. But sightless Keyes had no way to perceive the sign, if any, on the Sword he held. Holding his breath, he tried with all his will and care to find and read the symbol with his fingertips—but for all he was able to discern by touch, there was no sign there to read.

  Ah, if only Lo-Yang with his two good eyes had stayed with him a little longer!

  Suppose it was only the black hilt, unrelieved—that would mean that he was holding Soulcutter. Keyes shuddered. But he could not be sure. The odds seemed to be against it. For all he knew, there might very well be a symbol right under his hand, dead flush with the rest of the hilt, undistinguishable by touch.

  Everything depended upon his finding out. An enemy more powerful than any demon had stuffed him into this hole, and was coming back, perhaps at any moment now, to use him in an experiment. It was vitally important to identify the Sword, before he made any plan to use it.

  Which one did he have?

  Well, there was one sure way by which Soulcutter, at least, could be ruled out. Hesitantly Keyes began to draw the weapon, starting it first one centimeter out of its sheath, then two. Meanwhile he held his breath, hoping that if the hilt in his hand was indeed Soulcutter’s, he could retain enough sense of purpose to muzzle that deadliest of all Blades again before its growing power overwhelmed him with hopelessness, before all possible actions, and even life itself, were robbed of meaning.

  If this experiment should demonstrate that he was holding the Sword of Despair, Keyes decided that he was desperate enough to use it, by threatening to draw it against the returning god.

  His cautious tugging was exposing more and more of the Blade, but still no black cloud of despair rose up to engulf Keyes. He felt no more miserable with the Sword half-drawn. With a sigh of relief he concluded that his prize had to be one of the other eleven.

  He pulled hard on the unseen hilt, and with a faint, singing sigh, the long steel came completely free.

  Keyes soon disposed of any lingering doubt in his own mind that the weapon he held was genuinely one of the Twelve Swords. Proof lay in the facts of its unbreakableness, and that the extreme keenness of the edges—he tested them on the tough leather of his dagger’s sheath—could not be dulled by repeated bashing on rock.

  Several of the Swords, his earlier investigations had informed him, ought to produce distinguishing noises when they went into action. But the only sound so far generated by this one was the bright clang, purely mechanical, of thin steel on tough rock.

  The blind man uttered a prayer to Ardneh that the hilt he was gripping belonged to Woundhealer, and that that Sword’s power would let him see again. Feverish with hope, maneuvering the long Blade awkwardly, he nicked first his eyebrow, finally the bridge of his nose and very eyelids, with the keen edge. All he achieved were stinging pains and a blood-smeared face. His fevered hope that he might be holding the Sword of Healing, that its steel would pass painlessly, bloodlessly, into his flesh on its mission of restoration—that hope was lost in a few drops of blood.

  Hope was lost briefly but not killed. Actually his situation would be better if this was one of the other Swords, carrying some power that could free him completely from his enemy.

  Under the stress of his predicament, the attributes and powers, even the names of all the Swords seemed to have fled his memory. Might this be Wayfinder, then, or Coinspinner?

  Keyes whispered a short string of urgent requests to the magic Blade he held. He asked it to show him how he might get out of the cave, and where he might find help. When nothing happened, he repeated his demands more loudly, but as far as he could tell, he was granted no response of any kind. In this situation, either Coinspinner or Wayfinder ought to be pulling his gripping hands around, bending his wrists in a particular direction, showing him the way he ought to move. And Coinspinner, whether it indicated any particular direction or not, would bring him great good luck, in fact whatever extreme of luck he needed. If necessary the Sword of Chance could call up an earthquake on behalf of its client, to shatter the rocky cage around him and let him walk or climb away unharmed.

  But nothing of the sort was happening. Two more possibilities, it seemed, eliminated.

  When it occurred to Keyes to make the effort, testing for Stonecutter was simple enough. One thing he had in ample supply down here was rock. And Stonecutter in fact could be just what a man in his situation needed, the very tool with which to carve his way out, creating a tunnel or a stair, slicing hard stone as easily as packed snow.

  But the cave’s walls did not yield effortlessly to this Sword when he swung it against them, then tried it as a saw. Now he realized that his first attempts to test the durability of the blade ought to have been enough to convince him of this fact. Hard, noisy hacking produced only dust in the air, small chips and fragments which stung the man’s blind face. A steady pressure, indestructible edge against limestone, did no better.

  Well, then, quite possibly he was holding Farslayer. But Keyes could think of no way to distinguish that Sword from its fellows, short of naming a victim and throwing it with intent to kill. The stony walls that closed him in would pose no obstacle to the Sword of Vengeance, which would pass through granite as through so much air, if that were necessary to reach its prey. Farslayer would kill at any distance—but would not come back peacefully to its user. To employ that weapon at a distance was to lose it, and even should Keyes succeed in slaying the god who had trapped him here, he would still be trapped.

  His musings were interrupted by the onslaught of a swarm of large, furry, carnivorous bats. No doubt disturbed by the racket he’d been making, the creatures came fluttering out of some of the high, dim recesses of the deep cave. Indifferent to sunlight, they erupted from their holes by tens or dozens to threaten Keyes, who at the sound of their approach got his back against a wall and raised his Sword.

  He could hear the bats piping, crying out blurred words in their thin little voices, uttering incoherent threats and slaverings of blood-hunger. They were flapping their wings violently—they got close enough to let him feel the breeze of their wings, and he cringed from the expected pain of their needle-like teeth and claws—but that did not follow. In blind desperation he waved the naked Sword at his attackers, and he remained untouched. Once the blade clanged accidentally on rock, but he had no sensation of it striking anything fleshy in midair. Still, one after another, the little bat-cries became shrieks of anguish, and then died away.

  Panting, gripping the hilt of his still-unknown weapon with both hands, Keyes stood waiting, straining his ears in silence. Not a bat had touched him yet, nor had he touched them, but when he cautiously changed his position by a step or two, his foot came down on a dead one. Gingerly he felt the furry little thing with his free hand, making sure of what it was, then kicked it away from him.

  Not Farslayer, then. Whichever Sword he held had somehow killed at least one animal without making physical contact.

  The bats had not been routed for more than a minute or so when the demon arrived—drawn up out of the rocks, perhaps, by a sense of the proximity of helpless human prey, or simply by the disturbance man and bats were making.

  Even sightless as he was, Keyes could tell that a demon was near him, and coming nearer. He knew it by the feeling of sickness, a gut-deep wretchedness, that preceded the monster’s physical presence. Again the man experienced overwhelming fear, panic that made him cry out and tremble. Better to be torn to bits by flesh-devouring bats than to wind up in a demon’s gut, where flesh was the last component of humanity to be destroyed.

  And then he heard the creature’s hideous voice, a tone of dry bones breaking, dead leaves rattling, reverberating more in the man’s mind than in his ears. It sounded as if it were standing almost within arm’s length of Keyes.

  With stately formality the demon announced its name. “I am Korku. Will you introduce yourself?”

  “My na
me is Keyes.”

  “Unhappy man named Keyes! Here you are down in this deep hole with no way to get out. And newly blind! Is it possible that you have angered a god? If so, that was unwise.”

  “He’s coming back, the god who put me here. He’ll be angry if anything happens to me.”

  “Oh, will he? But he is not here now.”

  Keyes was silent. His lungs kept wanting to pant for air, for extra breath with which to scream, and he struggled to control the urge.

  The demon said: “It is too bad that you are unable to appreciate my beauty visually. If only you could see me, I am confident that you would be—overwhelmed. Most humans are.

  “Go away.”

  “Not likely.” The dry bones crackled, the sound formed itself into words. “Not until you have handed over to me that ridiculous splinter of metal you now clutch so tightly. Then I will leave you in peace to wait for your dear god.”

  “Go away!” Keyes tightened his grip upon the unknown hilt.

  In response came a voiceless snarl that made his hair stand up, and then the voice again: “Hand it over, I say! Or I will cut you into a thousand pieces with your own weapon, and swallow you a piece at a time—and put you back together in my gut, where you will dwell for a million years in torment.”

  “Not likely!” Keyes replied in turn. He thought it quite possible that this demon had as yet learned nothing about the Twelve Swords and their god-given powers. Or maybe the damned thing had learned just enough, or guessed enough, to make it determined to have this Sword for itself. But demons were notoriously cowardly; and so far it was being cautious.

  This was not the man’s first contact with a demon—no magician adept enough to acquire deep skill was able to avoid all encounters with that evil race. But only magicians who had turned their faces against humanity entered willingly into commerce with such monsters, and Keyes still found pride in being human. In his present desperate situation, he might well have tried to bargain with a demon to lend him its perception, as other more powerful and unscrupulous wizards had been known to do—but he had nothing with which to bargain.