The First Book of Swords

by Фред Сейберхэген

  Of course it might be keeping speed in reserve, something to surprise the man with at a critical moment. But somehow Nestor doubted that. He had trouble imagining that there could be much in the way of cleverness behind that lack of face. The larva blew its whistling, forlorn whine at him, and advanced on him implacably.

  He hit it again, this time in the arm, stopping its advance. This was a harder blow, with much of the swordsman's weight and strength behind the driving edge, and now one of the larva's wrists and weapons dangled from a forearm that had been almost severed for all its hardness. The cut was leaking slow gray slime instead of blood.

  Nestor, gaining confidence now, made up his mind and charged the larva suddenly. He caught it with its weight on what seemed to be its weaker leg, and it went back and over the edge of the roof under the impact of a hard swordthrust that only started to pierce its tough breastplate. As it went back and over, the larva made grabbing motions, trying to seize the blade, but it lacked the hands with which to grab anything, and anyway one of its arms was almost severed, its weapon flapping like some deadly glove. Still, Nestor had one horrible moment, in which he feared that the sword was stuck so firmly into the chitinous armor that it might be pulled from his hands or else pull him after the larva as it fell. But the point tugged free when the weight of the gray body came on it fully.

  No skill or magic broke that fall, and the paved court was a full seven meters down. Looking over the edge of the roof at the inert, sprawled figure after it had bounced, Nestor could see that the whole gray torso was now networked with fine cracks. More of the varied grayness that must serve the thing as life was oozing from inside.

  Nestor had no more than started his first easy breath when the thing stirred. Slowly it flexed its limbs, then got back to its feet. It tilted its head back to let its eyes find its human enemy again. Then, moving deliberately, it limped back into the temple on the level below Nestor. He felt sure that it was coming after him again.

  He was sweating as he stood there on the broken roof, though heavy clouds were coming over the sun. He had the feeling that he had entered the realm of nightmare. But the urgency of combat was still pumping in his veins, and before it could dissipate back into fear he made himself start looking for the stairway where the thing would logically come up if it was coming. He was going to have to finish it off.

  They faced each other, Nestor at the top of a flight of halfruined, vine-grown stairs, the larva at the bottom. A monkbird screamed somewhere, still mocking the noise that they had made. With scarcely a pause, the larva started up, dragging one foot after it in its methodical limp, dripping spots of grayness from its cracked carapace. It raised the twisted little knife that was its one remaining weapon.

  Nestor, watching with great alertness, saw a tiny tip of something appear like a pointed tongue just inside the larva's small round mouth. He ducked, swiftly and deeply, and heard the small hiss of the spat dart going past his head. Then Nestor leaped forward to meet his enemy halfway on the stair. He piled one swordstroke upon another, driving the thing backwards down the stairs again, and then into a stone corner where it collapsed at last.

  Though it went down, Nestor kept on hacking at his foe. When both of the larva's arms had been disabled, and one leg taken off completely, he went for the torso, which at last burst like a gray boil. Nestor had to fight down the urge to retch; the smell that arose was of swamp mud and putridity.

  "And no heart, by all the demons," he muttered to himself. "No heart to stop in the damned thing anywhere." Indeed, nothing that he could recognize as an internal organ of any kind was visible, only thicker and thinner grayness that varied in its consistency and hue.

  Still, the broken arms of the thing kept trying to hit at Nestor's feet, or grab his legs. The attached gray leg still wanted to get the body up. Nestor, reciting all the demons' names he knew, swore that he was going to finish the horror off, and he went at it like a woodchopper, or rather a madman, abandoning skill. Some of his strokes now were so ill-aimed that the sword rang off the flagstones of the paved yard.

  Taking the head completely off settled the thing at last. With that, whatever spells had given the larva the semblance of life were undone. The gray chitin of its outer surfaces immediately started to turn friable. It crumbled at a poke, and the inner grayness that ran out of it thinned out now and spread like mud and water.

  Which, as Nestor could now see, what all it was.

  Some huge raindrops had already begun to fall. These now multiplied in a white rush. Parts of what had been the larva were already dissolving, washing away into the ground between the paving stones.

  Nestor deliberately remained for a time standing in the rain, letting it cool him. He raised his face to the leaking skies, wanting to be cleansed. The downpour grew fiercer, yet still he remained, letting it wash the sword as well. From his experience with Dragonslicer, he did not think that this blade was going to rust.

  When Nestor felt tolerably clean again he went back into the temple. Just inside the doorway he leaned against the wall, dripping rainwater from his hair and clothing, watching the continuing rain and listening to it. The thing he had just destroyed with his sword was already no more than a heap of wet muck, rapidly losing all shape as it was washed back into the earth.

  "Draffut — god or not, Beastlord, healer, whatever you may or may, not be — I am sorry to have destroyed your pet. No, that's doubly wrong. It wasn't your pet, of course. Your experiment in magic, or whatever. And naturally I'm not really sorry, it was a hideous thing. When something comes sneaking up and attacks a man with a hook and a peeling knife, he really has no choice. What's that?"

  What it had sounded like was human voices, a small burst of excited conversation. Nestor waited in silence, listening, and presently the voices came again. They were in the middle distance somewhere. He couldn't make out words, but they sounded like the voices of panicked people who were trying to be quiet.

  What now?

  The sounds came again. Nestor still could not make out any of the words. Some language that he did not know. Most likely that meant some of the savages of the swamp.

  Muttering a brief prayer that he might have to do no more fighting, to gods whose existence he still partly doubted, Nestor took a good grip on his sword and went to see what he could see, through a ruined room and out into the slackening rain again. He would move, then wait until he heard the voices and move again.

  Climbing a tumbled corner of the temple, past a tilted deity with rain dripping from his nose, Nestor had a good view out to the northeast. In that direction an arm of the swamp came in closer to the center of the island than in any other. This inlet was visible from the high place where Nestor crouched, and he could see that a handful of dugout canoes had just arrived there. The last of them was still being pulled up on the muddy shore. There were about a dozen people, with straight black hair and nearly naked coppery skins, already landed or still disembarking. It wasn't a war party. Among them they were armed with no more than a couple of small bows and a few clubs — not that they were carrying much of anything else. There were women and children among them, in fact making up a majority of the group. Everything they had looked poor — the Emperor's children, these were, born losers if Nestor had ever seen any.

  One of the women pointed back into the swamp, away from Nestor and the temple, and made some statement to the others in the language that Nestor did not know. Then the whole small mob, now gathered on shore, turned inland and began hurrying through low bush toward the temple. They were certainly not aware of Nestor yet, and he crouched a little lower, concealing himself until he could decide what he ought to do next.

  Before he could make a plan, something that looked like a large, low-slung lizard came scrambling up out of the swamp behind the people. Though it was mostly obscured by bushes, Nestor could tell it was moving with an awkward run in the same general direction as the humans — but it was riot pursuing them. It passed them up and they ignored it. A g
eneral migration of some kind? A general flight..?

  Farther back to the northeast, in the depths of the swamp, another shape was approaching, with Nestor's view of it still dimmed by rain. Presently he made it out to be another canoe, paddled by two more copperskinned men. Two women crouched amidships, slashing at the water with their cupped hands as if determined to do everything possible to add speed. The people on shore ceased their progress inland to turn and watch.

  When the craft was just a little nearer, Nestor could see a horizontal gray shape coming after it. For a moment he thought this new form was some kind of peculiar wave troubling the water of the swamp, bearing dead logs on its crest. But then he realized that what he had first taken for a wave was really an almost solid rank of larvae like the one he had just destroyed, marching, swimming, clambering forward through the swamp. Beyond this first jumbled rank there appeared a second; Nestor, looking to right and left, could not see the end of either. Scores of the things at least were coming toward the island, and more probably hundreds. He could hear them now, what sounded like a thousand whistling utterances that could not be called voices; he could hear the multitudinous splash of their advance, and the forest of their dead limbs, knocking together softly like tumbled logs in a flood.

  Now more animals and birds, large and small together, came fleeing the swamp, as if before a line of beaters in a hunt. The approaching terror came closer, and Nestor's view of it grew less blurred by rain. Now he could see, all along the advancing lines of larvae, how arms ended in spears, in flails, in maces, clubs, and blades. No two pair of raised arms appeared quite alike, but all of them were weapons.

  A hundred meters to Nestor's right, he saw a mansized dragon climb from the muck onto a hummock and turn at bay before the advancing horde, snarling defiance. In an instant the dragon was surrounded by half a dozen of the dead-wood figures. It hurled one back, another and another, but more kept crowding in, their deadly arms rising and falling. Somewhere farther in the distance, a great landwalker bellowed, and Nestor wondered briefly whether it too would choose to stand and fight, and what success it might have if it did.

  The people who had already reached the island were waving their arms and calling now, trying to cheer on the last canoe. Its paddlers appeared to Nestor to be gaining on the pursuing horror. But then the bottom of their craft scraped on some large object, log or mud-hump, under water. The next moment, despite all their frantic paddling, they were stuck fast.

  Nestor could see now that both of the women in the canoe were carrying, or wearing, infants strapped to their bodies. All four of the adults in the canoe were working frantically to free it, and they seemed on the point of success when the gray wave overtook them, and the first handless arms reached out. To the accompaniment of human screams the canoe tipped over, and its passengers vanished.

  Those who had already gained the shore turned from the scene in renewed panic. Crying to one another in a fear that needed no translation, they ran for the temple.

  Nestor hesitated no longer over whether to show himself, but jumped up into their full view. He was not going to be able to outrun the oncoming threat, particularly not on a small island; nor were the refugees from the boats. In union lay their only possible chance of making a successful stand against it; and that possible of course only if Townsaver's latent powers could somehow be called into action, and if they were as great as Nestor had been led to expect. The mental map that he had formed during his exploration of the temple showed him another key factor in his hope: a certain high room, open only on one side, that would perhaps be defensible by three or four determined fighters.

  The people Nestor was calling to now, who paused in their frightened flight at the sight of his figure in their path with a sword, probably did not understand his language any more than he knew theirs. But they were ready to follow shouts and gestures, to grasp at any straw of hope. In obedience to Nestor's energetic waves, they came running to him now, and past him. Then they let him get ahead and lead them, at a run over piled rubble and up tilted slabs and collapsing stairs, to reach the place he had in mind.

  This was one of the highest, surviving rooms of what had once been a towering structure. The only way to approach it now was up a long, rough slope of rubble. When Nestor had led the whole group toiling up this ascent, and had them gathered in the high room, they came to a reluctant stop, looking about them in bewilderment.

  He gestured with sword and empty hand. "I'm afraid this is it, my friends. This is the best that we can do."

  He could see the understanding growing in the adults' faces, and the renewed terror and despair that came with it.

  Nestor turned away from those looks, facing downslope and to the north as he looked out of the room's open side. Not a very large width to defend, hardly more than a wide doorway; but it was a little more space than any one man with any one sword could cover. From this high place he could see now that which made his heart sink: the ranks of the larvae, that had come sweeping across the swamp from the north, extended to both east and west across and, beyond the entire width of the island, and farther, for some indeterminate but great distance out into the swamp. There must certainly be thousands of them.

  There was movement among the people behind Nestor, and he turned around. Slowly the four or five males of fighting age among the group of refugees were taking their places on his right and left, their bows and clubs as ready as they were ever going to be. Nestor looked at them, and they at him. Fortunately there seemed to be no need to discuss strategy or tactics.

  The wave of the enemy had some time ago reached the island, and was now sweeping across it. The gray ones had swarmed into the temple, perhaps in extra numbers because of fleeing prey in sight; the ranks looked thicker than ever when they came into Nestor's view at the foot of the long slope of rubble. They paused there, continuing to thicken with reinforcements behind the steady upward stare of a hundred faceless heads that gazed upslope as if already aware of determined resistance waiting at the top. What sounded like a thousand larval voices were whistling, whining, mocking, making a drone as of discordant bagpipes that seemed to fill the world.

  The ranks of the Gray Horde paused briefly to strengthen themselves at the foot of the long hill of rubble. Then they began to mount.

  The women behind Nestor, brought to bay now with their young, were arming themselves too. He glanced back — and saw them picking up sharp fragments from the rubble, ready to throw and strike. Something flashed across Nestor's mind about all the concern that warriors, himself included, had for their own coming deaths, all the wondering and worrying and fretting that they gave the subject whether they talked about it or not. And these women, now, had never had a thought in their lives about image and honor and courage, and they were doing as well as any…

  As for Nestor himself, the thousand voices of the larvae assured him that his time was now, that he was never going to have to worry about it again. Just behind Nestor, a baby cried.

  And at the same moment something thrummed faintly in Nestor's right hand. The swordhilt. His own imagination? Wishful thinking? No…

  The gray wave was coming up on limping, ill-made legs, brandishing its dead forest of handless arms, aiming its mad variety of weapons, shrieking its song of terror.

  Nestor opened his mouth and shouted something back at them, some warcry bursting from he knew not what almost-buried memory. And now around him the bowmen loosed their first pitiful volley of arrows, that stuck in their targets without effect. Other men murmured and swung their clubs. Nestor realized that he was holding the sword two-handed now, and he could feel the power of it flowing into his arms, as natural as his own blood. Now the blade moved up into guard position, in a movement so smooth that Nestor could not really tell if it had been accomplished by his own volition or by the forces that drove the sword itself. And now with the blade high he could see the threaded vapor coming out of the air around it, seeming to flow into the metal.

  He had not a mo
ment in which to marvel at any of these things, or to try to estimate his chances, for now a dart sang past his shoulder, and now the awkwardly clambering gray mass of the enemy was almost in reach.

  He yelled at them again, something from the wars of years ago, he knew not what. Townsaver, pronounced a secret voice within his mind, and he knew that it had named the sword for him.

  Townsaver screamed exultantly, and drew the line of its blade through a gray rank as neatly as it had sliced the fruit. It mowed the weapon-sprouting limbs like grass.

  Chapter 14

  "This is it, Your Grace," said the lieutenant in blue and white. "This is the place where the dragon-pack attacked us."

  Duke Fraktin halted his riding-beast under a tree still dripping from the morning's rain, and with an easy motion dismounted from the saddle. He made a great gesture with both arms to stretch the muscles in his back, stiffening somewhat after hours of riding. He looked about him.

  He did not ask his lieutenant if he were sure about the place; there was no need. From where the Duke now stood, surrounded by a strong force of his mounted men, he could see and smell the carcass of a giant landwalker. The dead beast lay forty meters or so away among some more trees, and now that the Duke looked carefully in that direction he could see a dead man lying close to the dead dragon, and a little farther on one of his own cavalry mounts stiffened with its four feet in the air.

  The pestilential aftermath of war, thought the Duke, and stretched again, and started walking unhurriedly closer to the scene of carnage. With a war coming, indeed at hand already, he decided it would be wise to reaccustom his senses as soon as possible to what they were going to be required to experience.