The Ninth Talisman

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “That’s it,” Lore said.

  “But he is charged with protecting Barokan?” Boss asked.

  “Of course; it’s part of his oath.”

  “He’s not protecting us from this heat and rain,” Bow said.

  “That isn’t part of the oath,” Lore said. “He’s sworn to protect Barokan from rogues and madmen, and those who would use magic to harm others, and from other threats to the peace. It doesn’t say anything about weather.”

  “Is he charged with using magic to protect Barokan?” Sword asked.

  Lore stopped and stared at Sword for a moment as he considered that, then said, “I believe he is. The wording is not entirely unambiguous, but yes, his oath says that he is given the talismans of the Wizard Lord to use them in his task of defending the people of Barokan.”

  “Then he’s in violation of his oath,” Boss said, “and this needs to be pointed out to him.”

  “I assume you mean with an arrowhead,” Bow said. “I believe I ought to be able to hit him as he comes down the cliff—he’s fairly distinctive in those red robes of his.”

  “We don’t really want to just kill him,” Sword said. “People love him, you know. The roads have made everyone feel rich, they’ve made life exciting. I’m not saying we should just let him go on killing wizards, or do nothing about the ones already slain, but just putting an arrow through his heart doesn’t seem wise. We should probably give him a chance to make it right somehow. At the very least, he should be offered the option of resigning peacefully; he said that he would choose abdication over death.” He turned to Lore. “You were there when he said that.”

  “I was?” Lore replied. “I don’t remember anything of the sort.”

  “But you . . . ” Sword frowned. “You don’t remember it?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Then he was lying.” Sword glanced at Boss. “That’s not good.”

  “If you’re really sure I heard him say it, then yes, he must have been lying,” Lore agreed. “All the same, I personally would be satisfied if he simply agreed to stay in Barokan and promised not to harm anyone else, or to pry any further into this talisman business. Killing him would not be popular. And frankly, I like him.”

  “I’m not eager to kill anyone,” Boss replied. “I was thinking of a letter, not an arrowhead or sword point. We tell him that we want an explanation for the dead wizards, and that his oath requires him to be able to use his magic, and we go from there. If he says, ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t realize,’ and agrees to stay down here and leave the remaining wizards alone, then that’s fine, for the present—though of course we’ll keep an eye on his actions to make sure he’s behaving himself. If he won’t cooperate, we’ll remove him.”

  “So I’m to pass up the opportunity to shoot him on the way down the cliffs, tempting as it might be,” Bow said, “but if I see him going back up the cliffs, I’m free to take him down?”

  “More or less,” Boss acknowledged. “But I’m not sure I’m any more eager to see him killed than Lore is. As Sword and Lore have both told us, people love him.”

  “And for another thing,” Sword said, “his successor may be worse—the pool of eligible candidates must be pretty small.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” Boss said. “Why are there so few wizards left, anyway? In the old songs and stories there are hundreds of them.”

  “There are several reasons,” Lore said. “Probably the most important is that wizards have such a bad reputation that they no longer attract competent apprentices. Nobody likes wizards, so nobody wants to be one. And among the wizards themselves, the masters worry about training someone who goes rogue, or is appointed Wizard Lord only to become a Dark Lord, so they’re very, very selective, and most applicants are deemed unsuitable. Many wizards, most wizards, live out their lives without ever training a single apprentice, so for centuries, their numbers have been dwindling.”

  “Have they.” Despite the phrasing, Boss clearly did not intend this as a question.

  Lore continued, “The current Wizard Lord said that one reason he wanted to set up a system that doesn’t use magic is because he believes in another century or so there wouldn’t be any wizards to run things the old way, in any case.”

  “That’s . . . interesting. It explains a great deal,” Boss said thoughtfully. “So he thinks he’s just hurrying the inevitable.”

  “But we aren’t going to allow it, are we?” Bow asked.

  “I don’t know,” Boss said, “but we aren’t going to let the Wizard Lord make these changes unilaterally. If he wants to change the basic rules we operate by, then he needs to consult the Chosen and the Council of Immortals first.”

  That sounded sensible to Sword, but at the same time he did not think the Wizard Lord would agree to it; Artil’s opinion of his fellow wizards was not particularly high.

  “He accepts messages, doesn’t he?” Boss demanded.

  Lore hastened to assure her that the Wizard Lord did indeed receive and personally read a great many messages at the Summer Palace.

  “Then we’ll write a polite little note asking him to return to Barokan for a consultation,” she said. “We’ll set a reasonable deadline. We’ll be completely reasonable.”

  “And what if he doesn’t think it’s reasonable?” Sword asked.

  Boss shrugged. “We are the Chosen, and we know our duty.”

  “You killed the last one,” Bow said, looking at Sword. “Now it’s my turn.”

  “If it’s necessary,” Boss said.

  “You’re more than welcome to do any killing that has to be done,” Sword said. “Yes, I killed the last one, and it was . . . not something I’d care to repeat.”

  “Regrets? Nightmares?” Boss asked, looking him in the eye.

  “No,” Sword said.

  “Then what?”

  Sword looked at her for a long moment, then answered truthfully. “A sense of futility, actually—and of anticlimax. Here we are facing a new Wizard Lord who may be going dark; what, then, did we accomplish by killing the last one? And it took months of fighting our way across Barokan to reach the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills, but my final confrontation with him, the meeting that led to his death, lasted only seconds, not even as long as it takes to tell you this. The ler guided my hand so surely he stood no chance at all, so it felt not so much like honorable combat as like swift murder, and there is nothing I nor anyone else can do now that will undo any of it. A man is dead who deserved to die, and I am left feeling—almost nothing, only the certainty that I should feel more.”

  “Indeed,” Boss said, eyeing him carefully.

  “Is that why you didn’t kill any of those guardsmen?” the Seer asked over Sword’s shoulder.

  Startled, he turned to her. “No, Azir,” he said. “I didn’t kill any of them because there was no need to kill any of them; they had done nothing to justify killing them. They were doing their job, not harming innocents.”

  “I like to think of myself as an innocent,” Boss said wryly.

  “And they didn’t harm you,” Sword said. “Their commander signaled them to do something, probably to capture you, but none had yet touched you, or threatened you. I wished them no ill; I simply wanted to make clear to them that they were outmatched.”

  “There were twenty-five of them!” the Seer exclaimed. “You were knocking arrows out of the air!”

  “I am the world’s greatest swordsman,” Sword replied. “The Chosen Swordsman, defender of Barokan, gifted by the ler of muscle and steel with the skill to defeat any foe. And I had surprise on my side, as well. Disarming them was easy. I probably should have done it without drawing blood, but I wanted to discourage them quickly, and prevent them from regrouping before I got to them all. A cut on the arm or hand lets a man know he has been bested without making him feel he is fighting for his life. If they had had time to consider their situation and had come at me sensibly I might have found myself facing real volleys of arrows, too many to block.”r />
  “You seem to have given this some thought,” Boss remarked.

  “I have spent an hour every day for eight years practicing my swordsmanship and preparing for every eventuality—mentally as well as physically.” He shrugged. “I assume you have given some thought to the best ways to use your magic. Especially after your memories of how it could be abused returned.”

  “I have,” Boss admitted.

  “Mine . . . doesn’t work like that,” the Seer said. “It’s not under my conscious control—I just know certain things.”

  “As do I,” Lore said. “When I’m in Barokan I remember every true thing I have ever been told, and it takes no skill, no thought, no planning—the information is simply there.”

  “I practice and plan,” Bow said.

  “I hear what I hear, whether I will or not,” Babble said, “but what I say, to whom and to what, is mine to decide. I do no planning, give it no thought, but do as seems best when the time is upon me.”

  “I am always the Beauty,” the Beauty said, “but I can control the pitch of my voice and the tilt of my head to strengthen or weaken my effect on men. It takes no real practice.”

  Sword nodded—and noticed that the eighth member of the party had not spoken. He looked at Snatcher.

  “Oh, I practice,” the Thief said, acknowledging Sword’s gaze. “And I plan. And I keep my mouth shut about it—people have an entirely understandable distaste for thieves.”

  No one had a good response to that, and for a moment the eight were silent; then Boss clapped her hands together and said, “I suppose writing the note is my job this time. Beauty, where do you keep pen, ink, and paper?”

  [ 22 ]

  “I could hit him,” Bow said calmly, as he stared at the line of tiny figures making their way down the cliff face. One of them wore red robes. “I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m sure you could, too,” Sword said, “but we don’t want to kill him.”

  “Speak for yourself; I want to kill him.”

  “Well, don’t. Not yet.”

  It had been almost a month since Boss had sent a message up to the Wizard Lord, and half as long since she had received a reply saying that he would be happy to meet and discuss matters when he returned to Barokan. The Leader had made plain her displeasure with the delay, but had not deemed it sufficient to allow the Archer his head.

  “Talk first,” she had said. “We can kill him later if we need to. If we kill him first, talking isn’t likely to do much good.”

  So they had waited, crowded into the Beauty’s little house, running short on funds and food and getting on each other’s nerves, until at last rumors reached them that the Wizard Lord’s household was preparing to leave the Summer Palace for Winterhome.

  And one morning not long after, the Seer had suddenly announced, “He’s back! He’s on his way down the cliff.” Bow and Sword had hurried out into the street to watch the Wizard Lord’s descent, while Boss and Lore and Azir made their way to the Winter Palace to arrange an audience.

  “I really think we should just kill him now,” Bow said. “If we wait, we’re giving him a chance to make it difficult. Remember last time, slogging halfway across Barokan in the rain?”

  “I remember,” Sword said. “But Winterhome is not the Galbek Hills. This Wizard Lord isn’t some murderous lunatic living out in the wilderness; he’s a sensible man trying to make the world a better place. And people love him.”

  “Maybe,” Bow said. “But he kills wizards, and he may have other surprises for us, as well. Remember the traps in the cellars beneath the last one’s tower?”

  “Of course I do,” Sword said, slightly startled; usually Bow did not care to remind anyone of those traps, since he had walked right into one of them and been caught. He had only been freed after Sword slew the Wizard Lord.

  “Can you honestly tell me that you are absolutely sure there aren’t traps like that under this Winter Palace of his?”

  Sword blinked, and turned his attention from the tiny figures wending their way down the cliff to the graceful facade of the Winter Palace. He had been inside there, of course, had even spent a day or two living in it when he first arrived in Winterhome, but he knew he had only seen a small portion of it, and that portion had not included any of the cellars.

  He remembered how very cautious Artil had been about the Chosen, demanding that Sword be stripped naked before being allowed into his presence. And there had been his determined and lethal inquiries about the possibly nonexistent ninth member of the Chosen. Clearly, the Wizard Lord, no matter how good his intentions might be, feared that the Chosen might want to remove him, and if Lore had told the truth, then Artil did not intend to resign if asked. He presumably intended to fight to the death.

  And equipping his soldiers with earplugs demonstrated that he had given some thought to just how he might counter the Chosen, and had implemented some of those ideas.

  With all that in mind, Artil might have built traps and dungeons in there; it wasn’t by any means out of the question.

  “No, I’m not absolutely sure,” he admitted.

  “Then maybe he’s not so very different from the last Dark Lord after all, eh? Maybe he’s just better at disguising his evil schemes. Maybe he’s trying to lure us in, make us trust him.”

  “Then he wouldn’t have taken this long to come back down and talk to us,” Sword retorted. “Or let us find out so easily about some of the things he’s done.”

  “Ah, he doesn’t want to be too obvious about it, that’s all.”

  “How did you ever stand living under the Lord of Spilled Basket?” Sword asked, referring to the Wizard Lord who had preceded the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills. “He never did anything that even the most suspicious mind could point to as indicating evil intent.”

  “But he was an old man,” Bow said. “I knew he wasn’t the one I was destined to kill.”

  “What makes you so sure you’re destined to kill anyone? None of the other Archers ever killed a Wizard Lord.”

  “Well, then it’s our turn, isn’t it? Four Swordsmen, a Beauty, and a Leader have killed Dark Lords—isn’t it about time someone got some use out of the world’s greatest archer?”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” Sword said, turning away.

  Bow took one last look up at the cliff and said, “We’re wasting a great opportunity here—I may never have a shot like that again.” Then he shrugged and followed Sword. “But I trust Boss.”

  Sword nodded. He, too, trusted the new Leader, far more than he had ever trusted Farash inith Kerra. Farash had looked the part—a tall, handsome, powerful man in the prime of life—where little Boss did not, but all the same, Boss fit her role better than Farash ever had. She was short and not particularly attractive, to the point where Sword sometimes wondered how she could bear to live in the same house as Beauty without going mad with envy, but no one ever doubted who was in charge among the Chosen. Her wits were faster, her tongue sharper, than any of the others. She spoke with authority, made decisions swiftly and for sound reasons.

  When Farash had been the Leader, Sword had sometimes wondered why the Chosen did not seem to work particularly well together; he had been uncomfortably aware that they did not often act as a team. Under Boss, though, they were a team, always.

  Farash, of course, had been deliberately subverting his role in order to forward his own schemes for dominion. He had probably been actively preventing real teamwork. Boss had thrown herself into her role, determined to prove herself. . . .

  Well, either that or she was much, much better at hiding her true intentions than Farash had been. Sword tried not to think about that possibility as he ambled toward the plaza.

  And even when he did consider it, he couldn’t begin to believe it. Like Bow, he trusted Boss.

  When the Wizard Lord and his entourage made their grand entrance through the gate and marched on around to enter the Winter Palace, they found Boss and Lore and Azir waiting for them at the big front do
or. Sword and Bow and the others were absent, by design, so that the Chosen’s delegation would appear unthreatening.

  In fact, Sword was waiting quietly in the plaza outside, milling about in the normal crowds, dressed as one of the Host People. His sword was strapped to his back, out of sight, but if there were a disturbance he could have it out in seconds.

  Likewise, Bow was somewhere nearby—Sword was not sure exactly where, though. They had split up, to make themselves less likely to be spotted. Part of the Archer’s magic was the ability to go unnoticed, to simply not draw attention, and while the other Chosen were largely immune to this it meant that Sword could not hope to locate his compatriot by seeing where other people were looking. Searching the rooftops or scanning the crowd might have let him find Bow, but it would mean taking his attention off the Wizard Lord, his entourage, Boss, Lore, and Azir.

  Snatcher was supposed to be somewhere nearby, as well, but Sword knew better than to think he could see Snatcher if Snatcher did not want to be seen. The Thief was a master of disguise, stealth, and misdirection.

  Beauty and Babble had stayed behind, at the house. Boss had thought she had quite enough in reserve with the Thief, the Archer, and the Swordsman standing by.

  Not that Sword could actually see or hear much from his post; the crowds and guards at the entrances kept him from getting close. He had no idea what Boss might be saying to the Wizard Lord; he could only hope that he would hear any shouting or screams that would indicate the meeting had gone badly.

  He did see Boss and Lore and Azir accompany the Wizard Lord into the palace; he stood and waited.

  After several minutes a secondary door opened, and Boss, Lore, and Azir reappeared, apparently uninjured and unhindered. Sword did not rush to their side, but instead followed at a moderate distance as they turned north and headed back toward Beauty’s house.

  He noticed that perhaps half a dozen others emerged from the palace a moment behind Boss and Lore, all in the attire of Host People. One of these men stopped to talk to one of the guards, and the others scattered in various directions.