The door behind him opened again, admitting Sarai. As was her custom, she had arrived later than Tandellin because she took charge of feeding their daughter, Sarai the Younger, before leaving home.
She looked down at Valder, sitting on the floor bare-chested with the bloodstained remnants of his tunic wrapped about his middle, then looked around the room, taking in the headless corpse, the spattered blood, and the general mess.
“I take it you had a rough night,” she said.
Valder stared up at her for a moment, then burst out laughing. The laughter was cut short by renewed pain in his side, but he smiled up at her and said, “You could say that, yes.”
After that, his problems somehow seemed less serious. He pulled himself up into a chair and supervised the cleaning up, the disposal of Hanner’s body, and the disposition of the head. No pikes could be found anywhere in the inn, but Tandellin improvised one from a boathook from the landing and set it up outside, near enough that its connection with the inn would be apparent, but far enough away that odor would not be a problem. Below the head he tacked up a sign that read, “THIEF,” in large black runes, in case anyone might miss the point.
When the inn was again fit for customers, Tandellin set out to find a wizard who could heal Valder’s wound, leaving Sarai to attend to the handful of travelers who drifted in, despite the cold and slush. Valder himself did not feel up to moving about much. Instead, he sat back and watched and thought.
He had not expected anyone to try to steal Wirikidor, or for that matter to try robbing him at all, though he did keep a goodly supply of coin securely hidden in his own bedchamber. The possibility had simply never occurred to him.
That, he realized, had been foolish.
The thief’s head would probably serve to discourage further attempts for a time, but it would also remind people that there might be something worth stealing. Something would have to be done about that.
He had heard that there were people in Ethshar of the Spices who would guard one’s money, for a small fee; they called themselves bankers. That suddenly seemed like a good idea. He had enough gold and silver tucked away to tempt an entire horde of thieves, he realized. He had nothing in particular that he wanted to spend money on, now that the inn was properly finished and supplied, so it just accumulated. He would do something about that.
The only other theftworthy item, really, was Wirikidor. It was far too late to quash the stories of his magic sword, and he would never convince anyone it was gone while a sword still hung over the mantel: That meant he would have to dispose of it somehow, if he didn’t want some young idiot to cut his throat while he slept in order to steal the fabled Valder’s weapon. He would not die of a cut throat, if Wirikidor’s enchantment held true, but he doubted he would enjoy the experience.
That was rather a shame; he had liked having it on display above the hearth.
The next question was what to do with the sword. Its magic was still strong and still as quirky and inconvenient as ever. He had not died, as the spell had promised he would not, despite losing an incredible amount of blood — but he had been seriously wounded. The sword would still fight for him, but only against men and only until he had killed one. The ownership spell still linked it to him; he was not sure whether it had actually jumped into his hand, but Manner had been unable to draw it, and he could not imagine any reason the thief would have been stupid enough to bring Wirikidor within reach had the spell not been working.
He shifted in his chair, and his side twinged. That reminded him of his wound all over again. What good was a magical spell that guaranteed his life, if he could still be cut to pieces? That might be worse than death. That infernal old hermit had promised the sword would protect him, but he thought he might well have been better off without any such protection as this. He smiled bitterly.
He should, he thought, have been able to avoid the blow. The little thief was a good swordsman, true, but Valder had once been at least competent, and he had possessed size, strength, and reach in his favor. He sighed. He was getting older and out of shape. He had not drawn a sword in more than a decade; no wonder he was out of practice! His reflexes had slowed, as well; he was thirty-seven, no longer a young man.
Not that the thief had been much younger, but even a few years could make a difference. Besides, the thief had obviously kept in practice.
Thirty-seven — he had not thought about his age much, but he was undeniably growing older. What did that mean as far as Wirikidor was concerned? Obviously the sword would not prevent him from aging, any more than it had saved him from being slashed. What would happen when old age came? Would he just deteriorate indefinitely, unable to die, growing weaker and weaker, losing sight and hearing, until he was little more than a vegetable? He had heard tales of men and women still hale and hearty past a hundred years of age — probably exaggerated — but, as he understood Wirikidor’s enchantment, the spell had no time limit on it at all. He might live not just one century, but two or three or a dozen, if he never again drew the sword. No, not might live that long, but would. He could theoretically live forever — but would he want to, if he kept aging? That was an unpleasant line of thought, one that did not bear further exploration just at present. He was only thirty-seven; he had decades yet before the question became really important.
He would, however, want to be very, very careful to avoid maiming or blinding or any other sort of permanent injury. He had once asked himself what sort of a life one should lead when one could live forever; he answered himself, “A cautious one.”
For now, he intended to put Wirikidor somewhere out of sight, where it would tempt no one. He might bury it, or throw it in the river; he knew that the Spell of True Ownership would prevent it from being carried downstream away from him. He was sure that he would be able to recover it should he ever want to.
Perhaps, he thought, I should hire a wizard to break the spell and live out my life normally. The war is long over; why do I need a magic sword?
He remembered then that Darrend had thought the spell was unbreakable. Well, Darrend could have been wrong. It would undoubtedly take a very powerful wizard to break the spell, of course, and wizardry was expensive — not just because of the greed of its practitioners, but because so many of the ingredients needed for charms were so difficult to obtain. He recalled when a call had gone out, years earlier, for the hair of an unborn child, needed for some special spell Azrad had wanted performed; he wondered if any had ever been found. Other ingredients were said to be even more difficult to acquire. By ordinary standards he was well off, as the inn was successful, but, if he tried hiring high-order wizardry, his savings could easily vanish overnight.
He resolved to ask whatever wizard Tandellin might bring back about the possibilities of hiring powerful countercharms, but for the present he had no intention of actually having the spell broken. Wirikidor could be useful. Dangerous, but useful. He could safely draw it at least fifteen more times, perhaps as many as twenty-three, by his best count. That was still a safe margin.
When it dropped to single digits he might reconsider — or when his health started to go.
He would mention it to the wizard — assuming Tandellin did not bring a witch or theurgist instead — but for now he would simply bury the sword out back.
Two days later, his wounds magically healed, he did just that, working alone late at night by the light of a lantern, using a patch of ground that he had thawed with a bonfire that day.
The earthquake that followed a sixnight later was small and localized. It broke a few windows, emptied a shelf or two, sent a wine barrel rolling across the cellar floor, and, of course, split open the ground and flung Wirikidor up, to lie against the inn’s kitchen door.
Valder considered throwing it in the river only until he had estimated how much damage would be caused by a flood big enough to carry the sword half a mile up the slope to the inn. The flood might not come, but he was not willing to risk it.
He wondere
d idly what a concealment spell would cost, but finally just tossed the sword under his bed and forgot about it.
CHAPTER 25
The news of the death of Gor of the Rocks in 5034 sent Valder into a brief depression. He had admired Gor once, but that admiration had largely worn away, starting with the overlord’s request that Valder serve as his personal assassin in peacetime. The loss of the territory where Valder had served, when it became the Kingdom of Tintallion, had been another blow. The Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, which had once seemed so pure and all-embracing, had been corrupted and whittled down.
Gor’s part in putting Edaran of Ethshar on his father’s throne had not raised Valder’s opinion any; it had left the entire central region that Anaran had once controlled at the mercy of Gor and Azrad, who had taxed it heavily. Gor had gotten an edge over Azrad by marrying off his son and heir, Goran of the Rocks, to Edaran’s sister Ishta of the Sands in 5029, despite Ishta being eleven years older than the boy.
Over the years Gor had gone from being virtually an object of worship in Valder’s eyes to just another conniving tyrant, but still, his death was not welcome news.
It removed any possibility of further difficulty over Valder’s long-ago refusal to serve as an assassin, but it also removed the last vestige of his boyhood hero.
Gor had been only a dozen years older than Valder, at that, and yet he was dead of old age. Valder still felt strong and healthy, but Gor’s death was another reminder that he, too, was growing old and that Wirikidor was doing nothing to prevent it.
Goran was now overlord of Ethshar of the Rocks, a young man in the prime of life — and he had not even been born until thirteen years after Valder built his inn. The thought of that oppressed him as he sat in a corner staring at the half-dozen patrons in the dining room, every one of them too young to remember the Great War.
Perhaps, Valder mused, part of the depression was because he had never taken a wife and, to the best of his knowledge, had sired no children. He had had women, certainly, but none had stayed. When he had been a soldier, none of his pairings had been expected to last by either party, because most did not in a soldier’s life, and since becoming an innkeeper the only women he saw were those with the urge to travel. Some had stayed for a time, but all had eventually tired of the calm routine of the inn and had moved on.
It seemed a bit odd that Tandellin, who had always seemed rowdy and irrepressible as a youth, had been happily married for thirty-seven years, while Valder, who had always thought of himself as dull, ordinary, and predictable, had never married at all. It went against the traditional stereotypes.
He knew that he could have found a wife in Ethshar of the Spices, had he ever wanted to; but since the completion of the inn, he had never once returned to the city. He disliked the crowds and dust and knew that swords were no longer worn openly there, save by guardsmen and troublemakers, so that the necessity of carrying Wirikidor would mark him as a stranger.
He had always done well enough for himself without visiting the city. His lack of a family had never really bothered him; Tandellin and Sarai and their children had been his family in many ways.
He mulled all this over, sitting in the main room with a mug of ale that Sarai the Younger kept filled for him. As he glanced up to signal her for another pint, his eye fell on Wirikidor, hanging over the hearth.
The sword had lain neglected beneath his bed for scarcely a month before he restored it to its place. He had gotten tired of questions about its absence from familiar customers; too many had gone away convinced that the thieves had indeed gotten away with it, even if they had lost one of their number in doing so. Although that might have deterred thieves on the grounds that there was nothing left worth taking, it grated on Valder’s pride. Besides, Valder had gotten tired of seeing the empty pegs and could not think of any way to remove them short of sawing them off as close to the stone as possible.
So he had returned Wirikidor to its place of honor, but devised another approach to the problem of removing temptation. He held contests whenever the inn was crowded, offering ten gold pieces to any man or woman who could draw the blade. This served as good entertainment on many a night and demonstrated to all present just how useless the sword was to anybody else. Rather than suppressing details of the sword’s enchantment, as he had before, Valder made a point of explaining that it was permanently linked to him and that every time he drew it a man died. That had discouraged any further attempts at theft. After all, who cares to risk one’s life for a sword that nobody can use, knowing that, if it does leave its scabbard, someone will die — and that that someone will not be the sword’s owner?
He had not mentioned that the spell was limited to another score or so of uses, however, nor that it would then turn on him. He did not mention his theoretical immortality, lest someone be tempted to test it.
He stared up at the dull gray of the scabbard and the tarnished black hilt. Wirikidor was such a very ordinary-looking sword; how could it have such power over him?
That is, if in fact it actually did. At times Valder was uncertain whether he should so trustingly accept the assessment made so long ago by General Karannin’s magicians. Karannin was long dead; Valder had heard that he had been knifed ignominiously in a brawl in 4999 or 5000. He had no idea what had become of the wizards. Sometimes it seemed as if most of the world’s wizards had vanished after the war; once the army’s control was gone, the Wizards’ Guild’s compulsion for secrecy, which had done so much to restrict wizardry’s effectiveness in the war, had taken over unrestrained. Now even simple spells could be difficult to obtain or prohibitively expensive. Certainly there were still wizards around, but most seemed to be severely limited in what they would undertake.
That virtually eliminated the possibility of having Wirikidor’s enchantment removed, even if he decided he so wanted. When last he had sent an enquiry to the city, he had been told that no wizard in Ethshar would attempt to remove an eighth-order spell for less than a thousand pieces of gold. Valder was not sure whether Wirikidor’s enchantment was in fact eighth-order, but he remembered a mention of that number. A thousand pieces of gold was considerably more money than he had ever had in his life and far more than he had at present, as business had trailed off slightly. Furthermore, as he grew older, he turned more and more of the work over to his helpers, which meant he needed more helpers — all three of Tandellin and Sarai’s children now worked for him — and that meant more money. He had more than enough to live comfortably on, but he was not rich.
Karannin was dead. Gor was dead. Anaran was dead. Terrek was dead. It seemed as if all the men who had fought the war were dead or dying. Valder had not seen a man in a wartime uniform in decades; the soldiers of the Hegemony, such as were posted in the guardhouse at the bridge, had long ago switched to a new one, with a yellow tunic and a red kilt replacing the old familiar brown and green and with no breastplate at all.
Azrad was still alive, of course, and still ruled over the seas and the southwestern portion of the Hegemony, from the Small Kingdoms halfway to Sardiron — but he was a doddering old man now, three-quarters of a century old and showing it. He had not aged well.
And Valder of Kardoret still lived, no longer the young scout, or the desperate assassin, but the aging proprietor of the Thief’s Skull Inn — the skull had fallen and been buried years ago, but the name still lingered. Valder wondered if his younger customers even knew the name’s origin; he rather expected that the name would soon change again, perhaps back to the Inn at the Bridge.
He finished his ale and put down the mug, signaling that this time young Sarai was not to refill it. A pleasant young woman, that, more like her father than the mother she was named for.
Life was still good, Valder told himself, and as long as it remained so, he need do nothing about Wirikidor. Gor’s death did not change anything.
Still, he could feel himself growing older. He knew that he would have little chance in a fair fight, either with swords or un
armed, against almost anyone. He would not stay healthy forever.
When the time came that his health was irretrievably going, he promised himself, he would take decisive action to free himself from Wirikidor’s curse. There was always a way out; he had only to find it. He reminded himself of that resolve periodically from then on and even wrote it down, lest he forget. When the time came, six years later, that he could no longer deny that he was losing his sight, he made his decision.
He could put it off no longer. His vision was slowly deteriorating, and he was certain that in a year or two he would be blind. The thought of spending an eternity helpless in the dark was more than he could take, particularly when he realized that he would become a perpetual invalid, with no prospect of dying, and that Tandellin and his family would be forced to care for him indefinitely. He had heard — his hearing was still good — his patrons speak with scorn of old Azrad, who still clung to his life and his throne despite his eighty years of age and poor health. He did not care to engender similar scorn. Azrad could abdicate, if he so desired, and be taken care of in luxury for as long as he lived; Valder did not have that option. Tandellin and Sarai were not his family and had no obligation to stay on if he fell ill, but he was sure, nonetheless, that they would. They were far from young themselves, as evidenced by the recent birth of their second grandchild; where else would they go? They had lived their lives as his helpers at the inn; it was all they knew. If he became an invalid, they would have little choice but to tend him for as long as they could. He would not saddle them with a blind old fool who would live forever; that would be unforgivably unfair.
And if he were to reach a point where death became preferable to living on, how could he die, if he had grown too old and feeble to draw Wirikidor?
He saw only one course of action. He would take Wirikidor and go to the city. He would seek out a wizard there, or several wizards, and learn whether Wirikidor’s enchantment could be removed, allowing him to live out a normal life. Once that was done, finances permitting, he would also have his fading eyesight restored, so that he might live out his remaining years more pleasantly. He was ready and willing to pledge everything he owned toward the cost of such spells.
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