The Ninth Talisman

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Bits of leaf fluttered about those side mounds in ways that had nothing to do with the faint breeze that found its way through the birches, and little glimmers of light and color moved through them where no sunlight could reach; the ler of the plants and other things that had been cleared away were obviously still active, and struggling to respond to the disruption of their home.

  The road itself, though, seemed clear and untroubled. Sword pointed at it. “That goes all the way to Willowbank?”

  “Indeed it does,” said the man who had first told him he faced a road crew, glancing proudly back over his shoulder. “Oh, it’s not all as straight as that, as we had to route it around the bogs, but it’s a good road. And before that we cut a road from Rock Bridge to Willowbank, and from Broadpool to Rock Bridge.”

  “You did?”

  “We did. And if the other crews have done their jobs, you can now walk from here all the way to Winterhome without a guide, so long as you stay on the road and wear a few feathers.”

  That was more than Sword could comprehend all at once. “Winterhome?”

  “Winterhome. That’s where the Wizard Lord lives, after all.”

  Sword nodded. “Of course,” he agreed.

  He had heard that the current Wizard Lord had chosen Winterhome as his home. He had vaguely wondered why, since he knew the Wizard Lord was not a native of Winterhome, but he had not pursued the matter. After all, a Wizard Lord could live anywhere in Barokan that he chose; if the current one wanted to live at the foot of the Eastern Cliffs, in the town where the Uplanders wintered, that was his business, and none of Sword’s concern.

  But Winterhome had to be a hundred miles away. Could there really be a highway all the way there, through all that wilderness? He stared at the road.

  After a moment’s awkward silence, the apparent crew chief turned and called, “All right, now, we have work to do! We want this cut through to Mad Oak while it’s still light—with luck we’ll dance with the girls in the town’s pavilion tonight!”

  A murmur of agreement sounded. The men lifted their tools and resumed hacking at the underbrush, extending their road through the birch grove.

  Sword shifted his gaze from the road vanishing into the forest to the hands swinging machetes and hoes. He stared for a moment, then turned without another word and headed back to town.

  This was all strange and new, and he had no idea how to react to it, but it did not seem to call for hostility. The road crew was not breaking any laws, so far as he knew. It was not customary to disturb all those wild ler, but there was no formal stricture forbidding it. As long as the men stopped at the boundary shrine, and did nothing to upset the town’s own ler, there was no obvious reason to interfere.

  Besides, Sword had no real authority in Mad Oak; he wasn’t a priest. He would go back and let the rest of the town decide what to do.

  As he neared the boundary he could see a score of his townsfolk waiting for him just beyond the shrine—not just those who had been there before, but more. Elder and Younger Priestess had joined the party, and looked unhappy; the sigils of office on their foreheads seemed to be pulsing and glowing red, rather than their usual pale and steady gold. Sword waved to them to indicate that all was well, but he was not actually sure that was true.

  “What’s happening?” Younger Priestess called. “The ler are upset!”

  “They’re building a road,” Sword called back. “All the way to . . . to Willowbank.”

  The priestesses exchanged glances; then Elder called, “They’re doing what?”

  “Building a road,” Sword repeated, though he was close enough to the border now that he no longer needed to shout. “They’re clearing a path through the wilderness, so we won’t need guides anymore.”

  “Can they do that? What about all the ler?” Younger Priestess asked. Her hand reached up to rub at her forehead.

  Sword shrugged. “The men don’t appear to be having any real problems. A few cuts and scratches. They’re wearing protective clothing and carrying ara feathers.”

  “They are disturbing the ler, though,” Elder said. “Many, many ler. We can hear them.”

  “And feel them,” Younger added.

  Sword glanced over his shoulder at the flashing machetes and thumping shovels. “They don’t seem to care.”

  “Well, they don’t need to live here!” Younger exclaimed. “Those are our ler . . .”

  “No,” Elder said thoughtfully. “They aren’t.” She looked at Sword. “They’ll stop at the border?”

  “I assume so. One of them said something about dancing in our pavilion tonight. I don’t think they mean us any harm, nor anything in Mad Oak.”

  “They’re disrupting many spirits, though—earth and leaf and tree. And those won’t just quietly vanish.”

  The light and movement in those mounds alongside the road had told Sword as much. “What will they do?” he asked, genuinely curious. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

  The priestess frowned. “Well, they’ll dissipate eventually—a ler like that without a home, without a solid object to bind it to our world, fades away in time.”

  “Not all ler are tied to objects, though,” Sword protested, looking down at the sword in his hand.

  “The ler of the land are,” Elder said. “Any ler a priest can deal with is. The so-called higher ler, the abstract ler, they’re the domain of wizards, not priests, and I doubt they’re being disturbed by this. These men aren’t defying wind or fire or strength or warmth or any of those, they’re uprooting branch and stalk, and turning earth.”

  “So the disturbed ler will dissipate . . .”

  “Eventually. But until then they’ll strike out in any way they can. They’ll form into misshapen ghosts to strike at their attackers, they’ll look for things they can possess, new homes they can claim.”

  “But the men are protected,” Sword said. “They’re wearing ara feathers, and good sturdy clothes.”

  “Then they may be safe enough, but I won’t walk that road they’re building any time soon. And I think we may want to keep a close watch on the livestock and the children for the next few days, and be wary of bad dreams.” She looked Sword in the eye. “Did they say who began this? Whose idea it was, to battle the natural order in this way?”

  “The Wizard Lord,” Sword said. “The Lord of Winterhome.”

  “Ah,” Elder said. For a moment no one spoke; then she added, “Do you think you may need to kill him?”

  The question was not as bizarre as it might seem, and Sword took it very seriously. The Wizard Lord was selected by the other wizards of Barokan, the so-called Council of Immortals, to rule over all the land from the Eastern Cliffs to the Western Isles, and was given great magical power to do so. The Wizard Lord controlled the weather, and had power over wind and fire, over disease, and over many of the beasts of the wilderness. He was empowered to serve as judge and executioner of any wizard who misbehaved, and any criminal who fled from the towns into the wild.

  And as a check on the dangers of such great power, eight ordinary people were chosen to take up special roles and receive limited magical powers of their own, and it was the duty of these eight to remove any Wizard Lord who proved himself unfit for his high office.

  Sword, the Swordsman, was one of the Chosen. The silver talisman he always carried in his pocket bound him to the ler of muscle and steel and ensured that he was the world’s greatest swordsman, unbeatable in single combat. In the past, when Wizard Lords had gone bad, it was usually the Swordsmen of the time who eventually slew them.

  This particular Swordsman had thought the job was ceremonial when he first accepted it, as more than a century had passed without any known misbehavior by a Wizard Lord, but that long streak of good fortune had already been broken once. Several years ago Sword had struck down the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills with a single blow to the heart.

  But that Wizard Lord had slaughtered a village; this one was merely building roads. How could bui
lding roads be a crime punishable by death? Yes, it disturbed the natural order, but who did it really harm?

  And if the Wizard Lord had not gone mad, and was not harming anyone, nor trying to exceed the powers allotted him, then he was not a Dark Lord and did not need to be removed. The Chosen were not responsible for maintaining order, but only for ridding Barokan of Dark Lords.

  Elder was waiting for a reply.

  “I hope not,” Sword said. “I very much hope not.”

  [ 2 ]

  The road crew did indeed reach Mad Oak before dark—well before, in fact. The sun was still a hand’s breadth above the ridge when the overseer looked at the swath they had cut right up to the boundary stone, a ten-foot swath of bare brown earth, and called, “Tools down!”

  The crowd of villagers watching from safely inside the border burst into applause. They had been calling greetings, questions, and encouragement for some time as the road neared the town, and now that the job was complete they welcomed the road crew across the boundary with cheers, shouts, handshakes, and claps on the back. The idea of an open road all the way to Willowbank had captured their imaginations, though Sword was not entirely sure just what benefits they thought it would bring. After all, no one from Mad Oak had ever traveled much; the loss of the Willowbank Guide had been considered an inconvenience, but hardly a great tragedy.

  Still, most of the town seemed to think the road was a wonder that would somehow make the world a better place, and had greeted the road-builders as heroes.

  The two priestesses, however, had had to withdraw to the pavilion; the disturbed ler beyond the boundary shrine were making them both ill. Younger had been frighteningly pale when she withdrew, her sigil of office resembling a smear of blood. Elder’s color had been better, but she was not steady on her feet, and Sword had helped her up the path.

  Sword had gone back out for another conversation with the road-builders at one point, asked a few questions about the project and the Wizard Lord’s actions elsewhere, and how other priests and priestesses had handled the resulting discomforts, but then he had come back up to the pavilion to check on the priestesses.

  They were obviously suffering, but insisted there was nothing he could do. When Sword had spoken to the road crew they had expressed sympathy, but said that the pain would pass off in time, with no permanent harm done. The Wizard Lord had been building roads for four years now, and all those myriad displaced wild ler had not yet killed a priest; the tame ler had always protected their patrons.

  Sword had left the priestesses in the rocking chairs by the unlit hearth, and had gone out to the pavilion terrace to watch the celebration begin. He leaned over the rail and peered down as the road crew finished their work, and the cheering started.

  He remembered once before when he had stood leaning on this rail, seven and a half years before, looking out across the trees below. That had been the night of that year’s barley harvest celebration, when the Old Swordsman and two wizards had arrived in Mad Oak, seeking a volunteer to replace the aging member of the Chosen.

  But that had been different. It had been a quiet evening at dusk, not a bright afternoon, and he had been looking straight out at the valley, not across the fields to the borders; enjoying the weather and thinking about his future, not watching what might be a change in the very nature of the town’s existence. The crowd had been up here gathered around Brewer that night, drinking up the summer beer to make room for fresh wort, not down by the boundary shrine marveling at a new road.

  Surely, he thought, he must have stood out here since then, but he could not think of a time when he had. His training in swordsmanship, his daily practice, the unhappy year he had spent traveling, his sour disposition upon his return—he had not spent much time in the pavilion at all, really. He recalled a few gatherings and meetings inside, including the conversation with Younger Priestess three years before that had led to his odd experience with the memories trapped in the village shrine, but he could not remember a single occasion when he took a moment to come out on the terrace and simply look down at the valley.

  Seven and a half years ago he had agreed to become the Chosen Swordsman, and that had led in not much more than a year to his meeting with the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills, atop that crude tower outside Split Reed. He had slain the Wizard Lord, avenging the murdered innocents of Stoneslope, and then he had come home to Mad Oak, hoping to never again have reason to leave.

  And until now, he hadn’t. The new Wizard Lord had done nothing to attract his attention or cause him concern, nor had any of the other Chosen visited to discuss anything. There was absolutely no evidence that the present Wizard Lord had murdered anyone or otherwise broken the strictures that he was expected to obey. The few reports that had reached Mad Oak had all seemed quite favorable.

  But building roads, disturbing countless ler—while hardly a crime, that was not what was expected of the Wizard Lord. It was completely unanticipated, a thing that had never happened before. It might even be a sign of madness.

  If the present Wizard Lord had gone mad, like the last, then he, like the last, must be removed. There had never been two Dark Lords so close together, Sword was fairly sure, but that did not mean it could never happen.

  But building roads—if that was mad, could there be such a thing as beneficial madness? Those cheering townspeople down there clearly didn’t see anything wrong with new roads, no matter what the wild ler might think. It wasn’t as if anyone liked wild ler, they were a dangerous nuisance, something to be respected, but never loved. The loss of any link with Willowbank when the old guide retired had been an annoyance to many of the town’s inhabitants, and they seemed delighted to have a new connection.

  The two miserable priestesses, on the other hand, whatever they might think of the road itself, were suffering from its effects on the natural spirits of the land. Both seemed very ill, though they were somewhat vague about the exact nature of the illness. Younger Priestess had said the pain was in her soul, not her body.

  If Elder Priestess was right about the road’s creation releasing malignant ghosts into the community, then Sword thought others might also come to regret the road’s arrival, as well.

  But those effects would be temporary, wouldn’t they? And when the ghosts were laid and the disturbed ler scattered and harmony restored, the road would still be there. Anyone who wanted to would be able to walk to Willowbank in half a day.

  And the road crew had told him that similar roads already stretched the length of Longvale, and all the way to Winterhome, under the cliffs east of the Midlands. Other roads were being built out to the coastal towns to the west, and into the southern hills. These projects had been under way for years. Surely, building any of those would have cast out ler just as much as this one had, yet road construction had continued. The aftereffects could not be so very dreadful, then.

  The crowd of villagers and laborers was moving now, heading up to the pavilion to celebrate properly; Sword could see Flute and Fiddle hurrying to fetch their instruments, and probably to rouse Drum and Sword’s sister Harp. There would be music and dancing, and someone would undoubtedly convince Brewer to roll out a barrel or two of his best.

  Sword had not done much dancing of late. His experiences as one of the Chosen had not given him anything to dance about.

  Perhaps, though, that was a mistake. Perhaps it was time he cheered up. This road—it was a change, certainly, a big one, but wasn’t it a change for the better? Couldn’t a Wizard Lord use his power not just to protect Barokan from storms and outlaws, but to improve life for ordinary people?

  Sword did not remember hearing of any Wizard Lord who had ever done that, but why not?

  Those disturbed ler and the discomfort they caused the priestesses would fade soon enough, while the road would remain. Anyone who wanted to travel to Willowbank or beyond could do so, even though the last Willowbank guide had retired without training a successor. Oh, a few ara feathers might be a good idea, to ward off hostile l
er to either side, but there would be a road, a clear and open route to follow. And presumably it would, in time, have ler of its own, and as with nearly all man-made things, those ler would be cooperative and helpful. Ler always reflected the nature of the objects they ensouled, so that a hammer’s ler helped it strike hard and true, a knife’s ler helped it cut, and a road’s ler would, it must be assumed, guide travelers’ feet to their destination.

  Of course, a knife’s ler sometimes thirsted for blood, since that, too, was in the nature of a blade; Sword’s mother had thrown away at least one outwardly good knife because it insisted on nicking fingers at every opportunity. A road’s ler might have some unwanted aspects, but really, they could hardly be as dangerous as the wild ler of the forest.

  Perhaps the ler of the road would coax people to travel, to wander, to hunger to see what lay beyond the next bend.

  In fact, Sword found himself thinking now, when surely the road’s ler could be only half-formed at best, that it was time he did some more traveling himself. And it was obvious where he would go—down the new road to Winterhome, to talk with the Wizard Lord, and perhaps meet with some of the other Chosen.

  He had briefly seen Winterhome before, years ago, during the reign of the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills. Likewise, he had met the Wizard Lord before, when the man was simply the Red Wizard, an ordinary member of the Council of Immortals. The Red Wizard had even visited Mad Oak, when Sword was preparing to claim his place among the Chosen.

  It would be interesting to see how both Winterhome and the wizard had changed.

  And then the cheering crowd was spilling into the pavilion, shouting and laughing, and the time for serious thought was past; this was a time to join in the celebration. Within minutes a barrel was rolled out, cakes were fetched, and the music began.

  Sword made a halfhearted effort to join in, but did not dance much. He took a few quick turns with Younger Priestess in an attempt to take her mind off the disturbed and scattered ler, but she quickly regretted the motion and insisted on returning to her chair. He danced one gavotte with young Potter, who had only recently finally escaped her childhood nickname of Mudpie. Mostly, though, he stood and watched, and the sword on his hip was enough to deter anyone who might have tried to intrude on his thoughts or drag him into the festivities.