If that was true, then should the Wizard Lord be removed? Maybe it really was time to bring the whole system to an end. Maybe Artil was right.
But the Wizard Lord’s soldiers had butchered Azir and Babble without giving them any chance to surrender. They had taken Boss and Lore prisoner for doing nothing more than their duty. And the Wizard Lord had, by his own admission, planned for that. He had prepared troops with stopped ears to capture the Leader, female troops to face the Beauty. He had intended to destroy the Chosen, he hadn’t just stumbled into it.
Sword wondered how much of this had been Farash’s suggestion, and how much had been Artil’s own idea. He was fairly sure Farash had contributed something, but Artil had said all along that he wanted to destroy the old system and run Barokan without magic. He was the one responsible, even if Farash had been there advising him.
Sword wondered just how Farash was involved. If he ever did get the chance to kill the Wizard Lord, he did not think he would spare Farash again.
The Wizard Lord had said he wanted to eliminate magic, and Sword had never really thought that through, never understood just how completely he meant it. Artil had spoken with Sword and Lore, treated them as honored guests and trusted advisors, and all along he had been planning how to kill or capture them.
Sword could imagine what Artil would have said to this—that there were inevitably going to be some awkward moments in the transition, that not everyone would be pleased with the improvements he was making, but that over all, it was for the greater good. Azir and Babble were just in the way, like the ler of the wilderness that had been driven out or destroyed by the road crews. Boss and Lore were resources to be guarded.
And the rest of the Chosen? More obstacles.
He looked down at the sword in his lap, remembering how he had cut his way through the Wizard Lord’s soldiers with it—and how easy it had been. The ler of muscle and steel had given him superhuman speed and control, and neither the ler nor his years of practice had failed him; he had always known just where the blade needed to be, and how to get it there. He had not been thinking of those men and women as people, with friends and families, with their own lives and souls; he had been thinking of them as targets.
That was wrong, to ever think of his fellow human beings that way.
The Wizard Lord probably saw him as a menace, and Sword was not sure he was wrong.
He was still staring at the freshly wiped blade, seeing blood that was no longer there, when he heard voices, and footsteps—many footsteps. He froze.
The tramping drew closer, and he knew what he was hearing; this was a company of the Wizard Lord’s soldiers, marching steadily closer.
Then they stopped, still some distance away, and he heard voices again as one man barked orders he could not quite make out. There were footsteps again, just a few this time, and then the sound of latches rattling and fists pounding on wood.
“Locked up tight, Captain,” someone called.
“All right, then—back in line!”
The footsteps retreated, and then the captain’s voice called, “Forward, march!”
Sword understood now; they were checking the guesthouses, to see whether anyone had broken in and taken shelter in one. Sword thought that was slightly stupid. It would take an ax or a sledgehammer to break through those massive doors and shutters, not just a sword, and the damage would be obvious. It had never even occurred to him to try to get into one of the guesthouses, and it had apparently not occurred to these men that someone might just hide behind them, out of sight of the road.
At least, he hadn’t heard anyone looking behind the one they had just checked, but perhaps . . .
His hand closed on the hilt of his sword.
The company had marched up to the very structure he was sitting behind, and once again the main body stopped while a few men tried the doors. He waited, muscles tensed, ready to spring up and fight his way free.
But no one came around the corner of the guesthouse, no one spotted him, no one called an alarm, and after a moment the soldiers marched on, to the next guesthouse in the row.
He could not be certain who they were looking for, of course, but it seemed very likely that they were hunting for the remaining Chosen, including himself. And their intentions were not benign. He remembered Azir shi Azir screaming, her blood spraying; he remembered Babble folding and falling almost silently, and the blades chopping at her until her head rolled free of her body.
He knew that if he met any soldiers, death would result—perhaps his own, perhaps others, he wasn’t sure, but there would definitely be death. He didn’t want that. There had been enough killing—or almost enough; the Wizard Lord still had to die, and probably Farash with him.
Sword realized he could not stay anywhere in Winterhome; the Wizard Lord’s people were everywhere, constantly moving around the town on one errand or another. He would have to go elsewhere.
And he could not safely use the roads. The Wizard Lord’s soldiers might be patrolling those, looking for him.
He could not hire a guide, if there even were any left around here; guides could speak to some ler, and might recognize him as the Swordsman. While he doubted most guides would be very fond of the Wizard Lord who had built the roads that put most of them out of business, he could not rely on anyone’s silence. He had to remain anonymous, wherever he went.
He looked down at his sword again, and turned it so the blade caught the afternoon sun. He would need to hide it.
He could not leave his talisman behind, though; he became ill any time he was more than a few feet from it. Fortunately, it was small and easily concealed. The sword could be hidden or buried. . . .
But he would need to practice for an hour every day; the ler required that of him. He did not need to use an actual sword in his practice, but he did need to practice, and that might be inconvenient. Surely, though, he could contrive an hour of privacy each day.
And he needed to get away from Winterhome until he could devise some method for getting at the Wizard Lord and slaying him. He could use neither road nor guide, but he was one of the Chosen, and more than a dozen ara feathers lined his garments; he could cross the wilderness on his own in reasonable safety. He would need to be careful, as some of the wild magic might be dangerous even to him—he remembered his encounter with the Mad Oak the first time he left his home village, and shuddered. The Wizard Lord had removed some such hazards, but others still lingered.
An additional complication was that he had no supplies; all his belongings save his sword and the clothes on his back were either back in his mother’s house in Mad Oak, or had burned up when Beauty’s home was destroyed.
Still, he could manage, he was sure.
But where would he go?
Returning to Winterhome would be suicide. He would want to go back someday, to kill the Wizard Lord, but he could not risk it immediately. Those soldiers would be everywhere, hunting down the Chosen.
He wondered what had happened to the others. Snatcher ought to be safe enough; stealth and concealment were his specialty. He might even find a way to slip into the dungeons and free Boss and Lore eventually, or at least talk to them—freeing them might be a mistake, actually, as the Wizard Lord would never kill them while they were prisoners, but he might have no such compunctions if they attempted escape. Those three were probably alive and well, and safer without the Swordsman around.
The Beauty might be alive, or might be dead. Sword was sure that the Wizard Lord wanted her dead, but his little squad of soldier-women had been wiped out, and Beauty could probably handle any males sent after her.
He realized he had no idea what she would do, with her home destroyed. He could not begin to guess.
And Bow—Bow was probably dead. Yes, he had the knack of not being noticed, but he wasn’t invisible, and with a hundred men after him it seemed unlikely he even got down from that rooftop alive. He would put up a fight, certainly, but his magic was intended for use at long range, and h
is supply of arrows was not infinite.
If he had somehow escaped, as Sword had, then he would be just as lost and helpless as Sword was. Neither of them could hope for shelter in Winterhome, or anywhere they were known; the Wizard Lord’s men were hunting for them, and the ordinary people would almost certainly choose the man who had built their roads over the ones who had slaughtered two dozen soldiers. Even in Mad Oak, Sword was not sure he would be welcome—and of course, that would be almost the first place the Wizard Lord would look for him.
Sword needed to find some village where he would not be recognized, some place he could be a harmless traveler rather than the Chosen Swordsman, but how was he to do that? If he simply set out across the countryside at random he might never find another outpost of civilization.
Or at least, that would be a risk in the northern vales—but he wasn’t in the vales, he was in the eastern corner of Barokan, beneath the cliffs, and to the west lay fifty miles of flat, densely populated land. If he stayed in the thickly settled Midlands he should be able to find his way without road or guide; the towns were often in sight of one another.
And he might see smoke he could follow, or firelight by night.
He would manage somehow.
He pushed himself upright, still tired, and slid his sword into its sheath; then he took a bearing from the sun, and began walking, bound west by southwest, to whatever he might find.
[ 26 ]
There was one detail Sword had not initially considered; he still wore the distinctive loose black garb of a Hostman, and everyone knew Host People didn’t travel, even now that there were so many new roads. This realization struck him as he peered across the twilight fields at the brightly clad people of whatever village he had found. The men he saw here wore red shirts, and the women wore brightly patterned yellow gowns; his black clothes would make him immediately recognizable as a foreigner.
Well, he told himself, he didn’t really have much choice. He couldn’t have passed for a native in any case; everyone in a village this size surely knew each other by sight. And perhaps he could pass himself off as coming from some far northern town that affected black clothes; he had a northern accent, after all, and surely the Host People weren’t the only ones who dressed entirely in black.
But he was still only a few miles from Winterhome, and these people would know how their neighbors dressed. The gathering darkness and his accent would help, but not that much. He looked down at himself. He could remove the ties at ankle and wrist, perhaps roll the waistband up…
And then what? Walk in across the field? They would know something was wrong then; nobody just walked in from the wilderness.
He would need to circle around and come into town on a road—any town this close to Winterhome would surely have a road by now. And he really ought to do it before full dark. The sun was already just a narrowing orange sliver on the western horizon.
He began adjusting his clothes as he walked, trying to make them look as strange as possible without being silly. He unstrapped the sword from his back and tucked it under one arm, then detoured to a distinctive tree, shinnied up the trunk, and set the sword securely in the branches, some eight or nine feet off the ground, well hidden from the casual eye by the surrounding leaves.
He was fairly certain he could find it there when the time came. He had already done his hour’s practice, on his way through the wild, so barring disaster he would not need the weapon again until morning. He dropped back to the ground, brushed himself off, and trotted toward the road.
A few minutes later he strode into town, looking for some sign of a guesthouse or inn, and found himself the target of a hundred astonished eyes. He stopped, realizing that something was wrong.
Could word of his outlawry have reached here already? Had he been recognized so quickly? He had thought that his route across country had gotten him here faster than any of the Wizard Lord’s soldiers could have come by road, even if they knew where to go. Had he misjudged that badly?
But he didn’t see any soldiers. . . .
For a moment no one spoke; then someone called, “Didn’t you see the shrine?”
Sword blinked, startled. In fact, he hadn’t seen a boundary shrine, since he had come cross-country. When he had found the road he was already well inside the borders.
“What do you . . . ” he started, but he didn’t complete the sentence; every person in sight had cringed, and most of them had clapped their hands over their ears.
“Don’t speak!” someone called.
Baffled, Sword stood where he was, trying to decide what to do.
The village was arranged in a circle around a central green; brick buildings formed a broken ring around the grass, with seven streets—he counted—leading away in various directions. He had come in on one of these seven streets, and now faced across the circle toward the largest structure in sight, a brick-and-marble building that filled the entire space between two streets.
And as he watched, the black doors of this building suddenly burst open, and three black-haired girls in yellow dresses came tripping hastily down the front steps, each clutching a handful of brightly colored ribbons. The last to emerge also carried a small drum, which she beat with the hand holding the ribbons. They ran across the green toward him, their steps keeping time to the drum.
Obviously, the local ler required some sort of formal greeting ritual.
Sword silently cursed himself, he had been so caught up in his own situation, the conflict of the Chosen and the Wizard Lord, that he had not given local customs any thought at all. The Wizard Lord, the Chosen, and the Council of Immortals might determine the fate of all Barokan, but on a day-to-day basis, it was the local ler that mattered.
“Oh, ler of this place, forgive me,” he murmured under his breath as the girls approached. “I meant no disrespect. I most sincerely beg your pardon.”
And then the girls were surrounding him, ringing him in hastily strung ribbons, and dancing in a circle to the simple rhythm the drummer beat. He stood and waited, assuming they would give him a sign if he needed to do anything more.
They were pretty things, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old—a little out of breath from their hurried arrival, but all dancing eagerly and gracefully.
When they had caught their breath a little, the drummer signed to the others, and all three began singing, first in a language he didn’t recognize, and then in an archaic-sounding Midlands dialect of Barokanese.
“Oh, stranger, who disturbs our order, who are you that comes to our border?” they sang, in clear, sweet voices, though one stumbled a bit on the word “border,” glancing uneasily up the road. The tallest girl, who was in front of him at the moment, beckoned for him to reply.
Sword knew better than to lie to ler, but he also did not want to announce his role. Fortunately, there was a simple alternative.
“I am Erren Zal Tuyo,” he said, trying to give his voice a sing-song quality.
This was apparently satisfactory; the three girls exchanged glances, never stopping their dance, and then one signaled the others. “You who speak a foreign name, what have you come here to claim?” the girls sang. “ What brings you to our humble home, why have you seen fit to roam?”
“I am passing through,” Sword replied. “I just want lodging for the night, and perhaps supper and a bath, and I’ll be moving on in the morning.”
“One more request we three must dare,” the girls sang. “We have an oath that you must swear.”
Sword waited, but they did not continue; instead they were watching him as they danced, clearly anticipating a response.
“Tell me what I must swear,” he said.
“By sky above and earth below, you must vow in peace to go; by light and water and by air, now swear you will no weapon bare; by blood and sinew and your heart, swear you take no foeman’s part; by sun’s bright light and moon’s soft glow, vow you’ll strike no hostile blow.”
Sword hesitated, remembering for a moment what
he had done and seen on the streets of Winterhome, but then he said, “I do so swear and vow.” His eyes felt suddenly damp; he blinked to clear them.
He hoped very much that he could keep that oath.
“Then welcome stranger, to our town; now may you lay your burdens down!” And with that the girls broke their ring, twirling apart, whipping their ribbons into bright spirals above their heads before bursting into giggles and running wildly away.
With the ceremony complete, several of the villagers now approached, smiling. Sword stood where he was, careful to make no threatening moves.
“Good to meet you,” one burly man said, holding out a hand. “Erren, was it? I’m Dal—my daughter’s Second Dancer.” He nodded toward one of the girls.
“Thank you,” Sword said. “I’m glad to be here.”
“You have us all wondering, though—why didn’t you wait at the boundary shrine? Can’t you read? You gave us all a fright, walking in without ringing the bell, and starting to speak to us!”
“I can read,” Sword admitted, “but the truth is, the day was so pleasant and the ler seemed so agreeable that I cut across the fields a little, and missed the shrine entirely. I’m very sorry.”
This was not exactly correct, but Sword doubted the local ler would care; people lied all the time in most towns. Names were special, the ler concerned themselves with names, especially during rituals like that dance, so he had not dared give a false identity, but now that he was simply talking man-to-man he thought he could stretch the truth.
Dal shook his head. “Dangerous, leaving the road like that. You young men think nothing’s going to hurt you, but one of these days you’ll step on the wrong ground and find yourself cursed.”
“Well, I hope that hasn’t happened yet, and I’ll be more careful in the future,” Sword said. “I’ve very sorry if I upset anyone, and thank you again for your welcome. Is there an inn here, perhaps? Or a guesthouse at the temple?” He glanced around and discovered that he was now surrounded by villagers, but none of the others were speaking; they seemed content to let Dal act as their spokesman.
The Ninth Talisman Page 30
