The Misenchanted Sword

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  "Yes, sir." He admired Gor's estimate of his own thoughts and attempt to answer them. He did not agree with it; his objections were not rational but emotional and had nothing to do with glory or its lack. Still, the general was at least trying to help him accept his role, which was more personal attention than he had expected.

  "Good luck, then. I'll send someone when I need you."

  Valder nodded, bowed, and withdrew.

  He was somewhat overwhelmed by General Gor, who had managed to cover everything essential within three minutes, including his little speech of encouragement. On consideration, though, assassination was not so much like butchery as like burglary, save that, rather than jewelry, Valder stole lives.

  With Wirikidor's talents and habits, it did seem very much like stealing.

  It was ten days after that that Gor sent for him and gave him another assignment.

  This one was planned very neatly and went off smoothly. That, Valder discovered, was to be the standard in his work for Gor. The general did not plan the assassinations himself, but he did review the plans and modify or reject them, if they were in any" way flawed or incomplete.

  From then on, it was a rare and difficult mission when Wirikidor was drawn more than once. The missions came less often, but seemed more important. Valder disposed of the Empire's minister of transportation, assorted generals, and even a prince, as well as unidentified targets. Assignments came, on the average, one every three six-nights.

  In between, he was free to roam the Fortress, spending Tandellin's off-duty hours drinking and gaming with his old friend and spending most of the rest of the time either with women or alone in his bed, staring unhappily at the ceiling.

  Winter came and went, and Valder continued his duties ever more reluctantly. The count of his victims mounted. He was horrified, after one exceptionally complex errand involving three related targets he took to be the entire family of a northern nobleman, to realize that he was no longer absolutely sure what the correct count was.

  Occasionally, one of his brief liaisons developed into something more; the first was with a girl named Hinda, a few years younger than himself, who stayed in his room for almost a month before finding a more cheerful companion. She was followed by someone who called herself Alir; Valder suspected that that was not her real name, though the only reason for his suspicion was her excessively romantic nature. She seemed to be convinced that Valder was doing something very exciting and glorious whenever he was out of the Fortress; she finally departed when, even in bed, he refused to say just what it was that he did for General Gor.

  He acquired friends of both sexes as well as lovers, though none were especially close. He grew to like Sarai of the Green Eyes, a vivacious girl of eighteen or so, and was glad when Tandellin included her in their evenings together. He encountered Kelder occasionally and found that, once the little man was no longer telling him who to kill, he was pleasant company. He came actively to dislike Captain Dumery, who seemed to resent having Valder removed from his authority. In this latter opinion he was joined wholeheartedly by several of the men in Tandellin's barracks, but few agreed with his assessment of Kelder, who was generally considered to be a fool.

  The summer of the year 4997 arrived, and, by the fourteenth of Summerheat, Valder's count had hit eighty, give or take one. He lay alone in his room for a long time, staring at the vaulted ceiling and considering this.

  He had killed eighty men. With the connivance of the old hermit and his enchanted sword, he had ended fourscore lives. Most soldiers never actually managed to kill anybody. In his six years of regular service, he had never been certain he had killed anyone. He had drawn blood on occasion in skirmishes or with his bow, but he had never known whether anyone he had struck had died.

  Wirikidor, on the other hand, never left any room for doubt. He had killed eighty men and sent eighty souls to wherever northerners' souls went—Hell, presumably. Those men might have been anything—good, evil, or somewhere between. He had no way of knowing anything but that they had been the enemies of the Holy Kingdom of Ethshar.

  Why, he wondered, was it called a kingdom? So far as he knew, there had never been an actual king. He had never been very clear on just how the civilian government did operate, having spent his entire life under martial law in the lands outside the traditional boundaries where there was only the military, but he thought he would have heard of a king if one existed.

  What would the gods think of a man who had killed eighty men? Would they condemn him as a murderer or praise him for doing so much to rid the World of the demon-guided enemy? Everyone agreed that the gods favored Ethshar over the Empire, but not all agreed on why they did not directly intervene in the war, even when petitioned. One school of thought maintained that they were, in fact, waging war on an entirely different level, but were being countered so exactly by the demons aiding the Northern Empire that no sign of this conflict penetrated to the World. Another school argued that the gods were so pure that they could not take, were actually incapable of taking, any aggressive action; that they found violence so repugnant that they could not bear to help even their chosen people in the violence of war. There were dozens of variations. If the gods were repulsed by violence, though, then had Valder damned himself by wielding Wirikidor?

  If he had, it was far too late to do anything about it now. He wished that he had never drawn the sword or that he had never told anyone how he had come to kill the shatra on the plain that day.

  His thoughts were interrupted by someone shouting in the corridor outside his room; the words were unintelligible, and he tried to ignore the noise.

  He was, he told himself, a young man, scarcely twenty-three. He owned a magic sword that would, supposedly, prevent him from dying indefinitely. Yet, less than a year after acquiring this wonderful weapon, less than a fourth of the way through his term of service in the military, he had used up four-fifths of his ownership of the sword.

  That, he told himself, was stupid. It was idiotic to go on squandering his life in this manner. His life was tied to his ownership of the sword; with each killing a part of his life slipped away. His superiors were forcing him to throw it away.

  He would refuse, he promised himself, to continue doing so. As politely as he could, he would tell General Gor at the first opportunity that he, Valder of Kardoret, had done his duty, contributed his fair share to the war effort, and would no longer be available for assassinations. After all, they could not kill him; only Wirikidor could do that.

  The shouting in the corridor was still going on, and now someone was pounding on his door. Annoyed, he rose and lifted the latch.

  Tandellin tumbled in, panting. "Valder, have you heard?"

  "Heard what?"

  "The enemy has broken through on the eastern front, clear into the homeland! Old Ethshar itself is under attack by demons, they say, real demons, not just shatra! General Terrek is dead, and the Kingdom is in retreat. Everyone is to be ready to leave on a moment's notice; the wizards are getting spells ready, and we expect to be sent to the new front at any time."

  "Demons?"

  "Oh, there are hundreds of stories about them! There's definitely something new happening!"

  "Demons." Wirikidor would be of no use against demons. He knew of nothing that would be—but then, he did not know what wouldn't be, other than his own sword with its insistence on killing men. Nobody, so far as he knew, had ever actually fought a demon before. Even the very few Ethsharitic demonologists, or the theurgists who worked both sides, never directly fought the demons they conjured up, but instead controlled them through complex magical restraints and elaborate prayers that only the original summoner could use. If the northerners had really unleashed demons on Ethshar, the war might well end very soon—perhaps with no victor at all.

  This, he thought, would be a good time for the gods to intervene if, by some chance, they had been waiting for the right moment, like the magicians in the songs who always appeared in the last stanza to rescue
the doomed heroes.

  He strapped on his sword and headed for General Gor's office to see if he had any orders. This was not, he knew, a good time to try resigning from his job as an assassin.

  Chapter 17

  Valder sat in the bare stone antechamber feeling stupid. Naturally, Gor had been besieged with questions, advice, requests, demands, and information; he had no time to spare just now for an assassin. Valder knew that, had he given it any thought, he would have realized as much. What could an assassin do in a battle against demons?

  Having come to offer his services, however, he was not about to slink back to his room. Instead he sat and waited while officers and messengers ran in and out, so that he might be ready if summoned and so he might catch a few bits of information in passing. All the magicians in the Fortress and some brought from elsewhere were busily gathering information—the wizards by various spells, the theurgists by prayer, the witches and the lone sorcerer by arcane methods Valder did not understand. Gor's two demonologists had utterly failed to make contact with anything, or so rumor had it, which seemed to confirm that quite literally all the demons of Hell were loose in the east.

  As people hurried in and out, Valder could catch snatches of conversation, and every so often someone would pause to rest, or be asked to wait, and might be willing to answer a hurried question. Nobody seemed very sure of what was happening. A steady babble poured out through the door of the inner chamber, but Valder could make sense of none of it.

  Then, abruptly, the babble died. In the sudden silence as the echoes from the stone walls faded, Valder heard a single voice exclaim, "Gods!"

  He heard questioning voices raised, and the silence was washed away as quickly as it had come by officers and men demanding to know what had silenced the magicians.

  Valder could not make out the reply and was astonished by an outburst of wild cheering. He could stand it no longer. He rose and marched up to the door.

  "What's happening?" he demanded of the guard posted there.

  "I'm not sure, sir," the soldier said, deferring to Valder's special uniform.

  "You couldn't hear what was said, what started the cheering?"

  "I'm not sure, sir—I think he said something about a counterattack, that the gods themselves had counterattacked. I don't really know. The gods couldn't do that, though, could they?" The soldier's voice was pleading and uncertain, though he struggled to maintain the properly stolid expression a sentry was expected to have.

  "I don't know," Valder said. "I'm no theologian." The whole affair seemed unreal. He knew very well that gods and demons existed, had always existed, but, aside from the halfbreed shatra, they had always been aloof from human affairs, intervening in the World only when summoned by elaborate invocations, and even then usually offering little more than advice and the occasional petty miracle. Had this somehow changed? The whole universe seemed to be turning topsy-turvy around him.

  Valder found himself wondering whether perhaps he wasn't lying delirious in a coastal marsh in the summer of 49%, imagining it all. He had led an ordinary life for twenty-two years, boring and predictable—born to a soldier and his woman of the moment, raised in an assortment of camps and villages, signed up at sixteen and trained as a scout, and assigned to the western coast where nothing of importance ever happened. Then, suddenly, everything had shifted. The enemy had attacked, seemingly out of nowhere, destroying his home unit and driving him into the wilderness, where he found an old hermit who had enchanted his sword and thereby granted him the possibility of eternal life—or of a rather nasty doom. That enchantment had made him an assassin, prowling the streets of northern cities and camps that most of his former comrades never knew existed. Former comrades, because his work as an assassin set him apart.

  All that, however, seemed logical and coherent compared with the news that demons were attacking eastern Ethshar and the gods themselves counterattacking. The World had always been fraught with magic, controlled by unseen forces, but those forces had been predictable unless manipulated by men and women. The gods had never been prone to whims.

  What would this superhuman conflict mean to the World, to the war—to Ethshar and to Valder?

  The cheering in the inner room had spread, become universal, and then died down again. Now Valder heard the unmistakable tones of orders being given, and a stream of men and women began pouring out past him. Among them was Kelder, who spotted Valder and paused, stepping out of the onrushing human current for a moment.

  "Go get some rest," he said. "None of us can do anything right now; it's all in the hands of the gods. That's not just a pious saying anymore, but the literal truth. Go back to your room and get some sleep, so you'll be well rested if we need to move quickly. Everyone is getting this same order—wait and be ready. Go on."

  Reluctantly, Valder got to his feet and went. He was not in need of sleep, but he sank back on his cot again nonetheless, one hand slipping down the side of the mattress to grip the rope webbing beneath. He lay there, staring at the ceiling, until he knew every joint in the vaulting and the shape of every stone.

  The universe was coming apart in the east, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Eventually he must have dozed off, because he was awakened by a knock on the door.

  "What?" he managed to say in reply.

  "Everybody in the upper court—General Gor has an announcement. Everybody up!"

  Whoever the messenger was, he had a voice like ah avalanche. He roared off down the corridor, rousing all and sundry.

  Valder was still fully dressed and, at this point, cared not at all about his appearance, so that he rose immediately and without ceremony headed for the upper court, hoping to find a spot where he could hear the general directly, rather than needing to rely on relays.

  That hope did not last long once he reached the top of the stairs; his corridor, not surprisingly, given its out-of-the-way location, must have been among the last to be called. Men, women, and even children jammed the courtyard, and some were standing on the surrounding ramparts as well. He squeezed to one side to allow the people behind him to emerge and looked about for General Gor, hoping that he would be able to follow the proceedings from where he was. The din was unbelievable, even under the open sky, as everyone present seemed to be trying to guess what Gor was going to say.

  Valder saw no point in that particular game, since a brief wait would tell all. He was more interested in trying to figure out who all the hundreds of people were. There seemed to be far more present than he had thought the Fortress housed; had some been summoned in from elsewhere?

  Before he could pursue this line of thought, he was pushed back by guards emerging from the stairway door; to his surprise, immediately behind them came the general himself. Once out in the sun—for the first time Valder noticed that it was late morning; he was unsure of what day—Gor turned and ascended one of the emergency ladders to the battlements. To his surprise, Valder found himself standing almost directly below, in the front row of the entire mob. He had expected General Gor to appear elsewhere, as had, apparently, almost everyone else; it took several minutes for the noise to fade as people gradually noticed Gor's arrival.

  When at last the roar of conversation had died to a dull muttering of breath, shifting feet, and rustling garments, Gor took a deep breath and announced in a powerful, carrying bellow, "I am Gor of the Rocks, heretofore High Commander, Field Marshal, and General Commanding the Western Forces of the Holy Kingdom of Ancient Ethshar."

  Valder wondered at this formality. Surely all present knew who Gor was!

  "I have come here today to tell you several things. The World in which we now live is not the one we have all known for so long—and the time has come to reveal that most of you did not know the old World as well as you thought you did." He paused to catch his breath and a low murmur swirled through the crowd.

  He looked about and hesitated, then shouted, "The war is over!"

  If he had intended to say anything mor
e right away, he never had a chance; the wave of cheering battered at him like a storm wind. He grinned and looked out at the sea of faces and flailing arms, mopped perspiration from his brow with his sleeve, then folded his arms and waited for the noise to abate.

  The noise did not abate for several seconds, during which time Gor said, apparently to himself but loudly enough that Valder, almost beneath his feet, managed to catch it, "Oh, gods, 1 have always wanted to live to say that!"

  Finally, after a solid minute, the cheering subsided; Gor raised his arms for quiet and, when satisfied with the lessened sound level, he said, "I'm sure that most of you have heard that our ancient enemy, the Northern Empire, unleashed the demons of Hell itself upon the eastern marches of our nation. This is true, and I'm sorry to say that at first the attack was a great success—if any of you had family or friends to the east of the southern mountains, I'm afraid that they are almost certainly gone, as what fragmentary reports our magicians can provide indicate that all the eastern lands, from the Empire's borders right to the southern edge of the World, are now a burning waste. General Terrek is dead, and his armies destroyed."

  He paused to allow that to sink in; shocked murmurs arose and died. The earlier elation was gone, and Valder was sure that many of the people were now wondering whether the war had ended in victory or defeat. For his own part he was sure, from Gor's face and the fact that the Fortress itself still survived undamaged, that at worst a truce had been arranged.

  Gor continued, "The fact that our vile foes resorted to demonic aid, despite the horrible price such aid always demands, shows us that, as we had thought, their situation had become desperate and their cause hopeless by any other means."