The Misenchanted Sword

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Valder sat, stunned.

  "I told you that you would not be pleased by my answers; when the first seemed so promising I could not resist asking my own questions." The wizard seemed almost to be gloating.

  "This hermit in the far north—what of him?"

  "Is that your third question?"

  "No! No, it isn't. Wait a moment."

  "The hermit knows you of old, apparently, and would probably refuse to aid you in anything whatsoever. Furthermore, because his surprisingly powerful magical aura interfered with my spells, I could not determine the extent of harm that might be done to you or to him if he were to try to remove the sword's spells. I give you this answer free of charge, and you have one question left."

  Valder sat for a moment, then finally asked what he realized should have been his first question. He had more gold, if necessary, and could ask further questions.

  "My question is this: What are all the possible ways in which I might be freed of the enchantment linking me to the sword Wirikidor?"

  Lurenna smiled. "That's a much better question; it may take some time, however. Would you prefer to return tomorrow?"

  "I'll wait," Valder replied.

  "As you wish," she said as she rose and again vanished behind the drapery.

  The wait this time seemed even longer than before— and in truth, it was longer than before. Unable to sit still, Valder at last rose and went to the door, only to discover that outside the street was dark and empty, the torches doused or burned out, the shops shuttered tightly, their lamps extinguished, and the people gone to their homes. The sky was clouded with the city's smoke, so that he could not judge the hour from the stars, but Valder guessed it to be midnight or later. He had, he remembered, arrived at this shop shortly after full dark; whatever spells Lurenna might be working, they obviously took time.

  There was nothing to see on the deserted street; he returned to his chair and waited.

  He had dozed off before Lurenna returned; he awoke with a start to find her staring at him, a sheet of parchment in her hand.

  He stared back for a moment, then said, "Well?"

  "No, I'm afraid it is not well at all." She held up the parchment. "I had to ask a second question, for which I will not charge you. The answer to your original question was very brief, very simple; you may only be free of Wirikidor with your death. No other possibility exists anywhere that wizardry holds sway—and wizardry, of course, holds everywhere. My second question, then, was by what means might you die—I promised you a complete answer, after all, and you paid me on that basis. There are only two ways in which you can die; I was surprised, I will admit, to find that out, since most men may die in any number of ways. You, however, may be slain only by another's hand drawing and wielding Wirikidor, or by a magical spell powerful enough to break the enchantment, thereby killing you, destroying the sword, and slaying the spell's wielder in an explosive release of the arcane forces pent in the sword. The wizard who cast the original spell, whether intentionally or not, booby-trapped it quite effectively."

  Valder continued to stare at the wizard for a long moment. "You're certain?"

  "Absolutely. I'll swear it by any terms you might choose."

  "You said that I might be slain only any another's hand; can I not kill myself?"

  "No; the sword must be drawn and wielded by another—and a man, at that."

  "But no one else can draw the sword!"

  "Not until you have slain another nineteen men."

  "Nineteen? Exactly?"

  "Could be eighteen, could be twenty, but it's probably nineteen."

  "Darrend wasn't that exact."

  "Darrend analyzed the sword a long time ago, without the spells I know, and when the spell was fresher and more chaotic."

  "I'm sixty-six years old; how am I going to kill nineteen men?"

  "One at a time," Lurenna replied with a shrug.

  "There is no other way out?"

  "None known to wizardry."

  "Damn wizardry!" Valder said as he turned and headed for the door.

  He had forgotten, in his anger, how late it was; he looked at the empty streets in annoyance, then headed back toward Westgate, looking for an inn. He knew that he might be closer to inns near the city's other gates, but preferred not to wander randomly in search of them.

  As he walked, his anger cooled; and as his anger cooled, he thought over possible courses of action.

  He could, of course, let things remain as they were and sink gradually into senility and decay that would last for as long as wizardry remained effective—forever, in short.

  Or he could find one of the eighty or ninety high-level wizards capable of undoing the spell and perhaps convince him to make the attempt, thereby condemning himself, the innocent wizard, and probably others to a messy death. That assumed, of course, that one of those eighty or ninety wizards would be foolish enough to make the attempt, which seemed unlikely; surely they would be able to do their own divinations and would see the danger. The possibility that one of that group might be suicidal was too slim to bother pursuing.

  That left dying on Wirikidor's blade as the only way out, unappealing as it was; and, according to the wizards, he could not kill himself, but must use up his ownership of the weapon and then wait to be murdered. He resolved to test that theory—but not immediately. He did not feel quite ready to die yet. Besides, if he drew the sword and the wizards were right, someone else would have to die, and he had no good candidates.

  If the wizards were right—and he believed that they were—he would have to kill nineteen more men, give or take a few. In peacetime that was not going to be easy.

  He could, of course, do what he had been asked to do so often and go join one of the warring armies in the Small Kingdoms—but wars could cripple and maim as well as kill. Besides, old as he was and with poor eyesight, what army would want him, magic sword or not? And he did not care to kill people just because they were fighting a war; he would want to be on the side that deserved his help and he had no idea how to go about choosing the morally superior side in a petty border war where the truth about the causes of the conflict would be almost impossible to get at.

  There must, he told himself, be some way of finding people who deserved to die and killing them.

  That was an executioner's job, of course, killing convicted criminals. Once before, he had slain a prisoner with Wirikidor and, although he had found it repulsive, he could think of nothing better. He resolved that, come morning, he would go to the Palace and apply for a job as an executioner.

  He reached this decision somewhere in the Old Merchants' Quarter but was distracted temporarily by the necessity of finding an inn still open for business at this late hour. By the time he found a rather dirty and unappealing one a few blocks from Westgate, its sign weathered blank but shaped in a rough approximation of a gull, he had so thoroughly accepted the idea of becoming a headsman that he was wondering about such trivia as how much the job paid and what the perquisites accompanying the post might be.

  Chapter 28

  He awoke late the next morning with innumerable itches and the unclean feeling that conies from sleeping in a bed already inhabited by a great many assorted vermin; as he alternately scratched and pulled on his clothes, he thought over the events of the night before.

  He had been exhausted, he realized—perhaps so much so that he had been too tired to realize just how tired he was. Still, in reviewing what he had said and done, he could find nothing he would have done very differently, had he been more alert. His questions to Lurenna might perhaps have been better used, and he wondered whether he might have talked down the price, but what had been done was done, and he had the answers he needed. Although his outlook on the world was somewhat different, now that he had slept and been eaten by bedbugs, and would presumably change somewhat more when he had himself eaten, he had no doubt of the wizard's veracity. She had been recommended by Tagger, after all, whom Valder had trusted because he had not claimed
to be able to do more than he could. For that matter, were Lurenna less than she claimed, she would most likely have given him more encouraging answers and would not have stretched his three questions to the five she had actually answered.

  That meant that there was no easy way out of his situation; he would have to kill nineteen men before he himself could be murdered, and the only way he could see to do that without the slaughtering of innocents or undue hardship for himself was to become an executioner.

  In the cold light of morning, however, as he struggled to pull his boots onto swollen feet, becoming an executioner did not seem quite so simple. Just how did one become an executioner? To whom did he apply? Could he just walk up to the Palace and ask? Or was that a military job, in which case he should ask at the gatehouse?

  The gatehouse was certainly closer than the Palace; once he was dressed and had gathered his belongings, he headed downstairs with every intention of proceeding directly to the gate—until the smell of cooking bacon reached him and reminded him that he had not eaten, save for some stale bread and cheese at bedtime, since reaching the city. He had doubts about any food that this inn might provide, but decided to take the risk.

  In the actual event, the food was not bad at all, and the few patrons of the Gull who were awake and present were pleasant enough. The ambitious had risen early and were already gone, while the unsavory still slept. Valder considered asking one of his more talkative tablemates about the city's executioners, but never found an opportunity in the conversation; beheading criminals was not a subject that sprang readily to mind in cheerful breakfast chatter. Before he had managed to bring up the topic, the sitting was over and the guests departing on their various errands, making way for the remaining late risers. He found the innkeeper, a huge, surly fellow, standing over him, a cleaver in one fist, and took this as a hint that his seat, too, was wanted—though he hadn't realized the inn held that many people that it would be needed.

  The innkeeper, however, seemed as likely an informant as any, and the cleaver brought the subject up as nothing else had.

  "No need to use that thing, I'll be going," Valder said, trying to sound lightly amusing. "You've no call to chop off my head."

  The innkeeper stood and glared silently; Valder stood.

  "Ah... speaking of chopping off heads, I'm looking for work as a headsman—I've been trained in the art. Whom would I speak to about such employment?"

  His only training had been the standard army training in combat and his rushed indoctrination as a scout, but he saw no need to limit himself to the absolute truth.

  The innnkeeper's glare turned from simple resentment to puzzlement and wariness. "A headsman?" he said, uncomprehendingly.

  "An executioner, then."

  For a long moment the Gull's master stared in open disbelief at the master of the Thief's Skull. "An executioner?"

  "Yes; whom must I talk to?"

  "The Lord Executioner, I guess," the innkeeper said, still baffled.

  "Where do I find him?"

  The city-dweller shrugged. "Don't know; the Palace, I guess." He turned away, losing interest.

  Valder watched him go, wondering how the man had ever become an innkeeper when nature had plainly intended him to be a thug of some sort, then shrugged and departed. He glanced in the direction of the gate wistfully as his boots struck the packed dirt of the street, but headed for the Palace.

  Half an hour later he stood in the Palace Market, on the only stone pavement he had yet encountered in Eth-shar of the Spices, staring at the home of Azrad the Great.

  The Palace was immense; Valder could not see all of its facade from where he stood, but it was several hundred feet long and three stories high for its full length. It was gleaming white and appeared to be marble, ornamented with pink-and-gray carved stone. It stood on the far side of a small canal from the marketplace, connected by a broad, level bridge; at each end of the bridge stood huge ironwork gates, and at each gate stood a dozen guards.

  The gates were closed.

  That puzzled Valder; surely, he thought, there must be some way for people to get in and out in the ordinary course of day-to-day business, without having to open the immense portals. He could see none, however; the canal turned corners at either end of the Palace grounds, wrapping itself all the way around. The bridge was the only visible entrance.

  With a mental shrug, he decided that the direct, honest approach was likely to be the most effective. He walked up to the gates and waited for the guards to notice him.

  When they gave no acknowledgment of his existence before he came within arm's reach of the iron bars, he revised his plan and cleared his throat.

  "Hello there," he said, "I have business with the Lord Executioner."

  The nearest guard condescended to look at him. "Business of what nature?"

  Valder knew better than admit the truth. "Personal, I'm afraid—family matters, to be discussed only with him."

  The guard looked annoyed. "Thurin," he called to one of his comrades, "have we got anyone on the list for the Executioner?"

  The man he addressed as Thurin, standing in front of one of the great stone pillars that supported the gates, answered, "I don't remember any; I'll check." He turned and lifted a tablet from a hook on the pillar. After a moment's perusal, he said, "No one here that I can see."

  Before anyone could shoo him away, Valder said, "He must not have known I was coming; Sarai sent a message, but it may not have reached him in time. Really, it's important that I see him."

  The guard he had first spoken to sighed. "Friend," he said, "I don't know whether you're telling the truth or not, and it's not my place to guess. We'll let you in—but I warn you, entering the Palace under false pretenses has been declared a crime, the punishment to be decided jointly by all those you meet inside, with flogging or death the most common. If you meet no one, it's assumed you're a thief, and the penalty for robbing the overlord is death by slow torture. And that sword isn't going to make a good impression; we can keep it here for you, if you like. Now, do you still want to get in to see the Lord Executioner?"

  With only an instant's hesitation, Valder nodded. "I'll risk it; I really do have to see him. And I'll keep my sword."

  "It's your life, friend; Thurin, let this fellow in, would you?"

  Thurin waved for Valder to approach; as the innkeeper obeyed, the guard knelt and pulled at a ring set in the stone pillar.

  With a dull grinding noise, one of the paving stones slid aside, revealing a stairway leading down under the great stone gatepost; trying to conceal his astonishment, Valder descended the steps and found himself in a passage that obviously led, not over the bridge, but through it. He had never encountered anything like this before; in fact, he would not have guessed the bridge to be thick enough to have held a passageway and he wondered if magic were involved.

  The pavement door closed behind him, and he realized that light was coming from somewhere ahead; he walked on and discovered that in fact the bridge was not thick enough to conceal the corridor, but that the corridor ran below, rather than through, the center of the bridge; this central section of the passageway consisted of an iron floor suspended from iron bars. It seemed rather precarious but gave a pleasant view of the canal beneath.

  At the far side of the bridge, another set of stairs brought him up beside another stone gatepost, facing another guard.

  "Destination?" the soldier demanded.

  "I'm here to see the Lord Executioner."

  "You know the way?"

  "No."

  "In the left-hand door, up one flight, turn left, four doors down on the right. Got that?"

  "I think so."

  "Go on, then." The guard waved him on, and Valder marched on across the forecourt.

  Three large doors adorned the central portion of the Palace facade; Valder followed the guard's directions, through the left-hand door, where he found himself in a broad marble corridor, facing ornate stone stairs. He could see no one, but heard
distant hurried footsteps. As instructed, he went up a flight, turned left at the first possible opportunity into another corridor—not quite so wide or elegant as the first, but lined with doors spaced well apart, with figures visible in the distance. He found the fourth door on the right and knocked.

  For a long moment nothing happened, save that the people at the far end of the corridor disappeared. He knocked again.

  The door opened, and an unhealthy young man peered out at him.

  "Hello," Valder said, "I'm here to apply for a job as an executioner."

  The young man's expression changed from polite puzzlement to annoyance. "What?"

  "I'm an experienced headsman; I'm looking for work."

  "Wait a minute." He ducked back inside, closing the door but not latching it; a moment later he reappeared, something clutched concealed in one fist. "Now, are you serious?"

  "Yes, quite serious," Valder answered.

  "A headsman, you said?"

  "Yes."

  "From out of town, obviously."

  "Yes."

  "Headsman, let me explain a few things to you that you don't seem to know, though any twelve-year-old child in the streets could tell you. First off, the Lord Executioner is the only official executioner in the city and has no interest in hiring others; if he did, he'd hire his friends and family first, not strangers who wander in. Understand?"

  "But..."

  "But what?"

  "This is the largest city in the world; how can there be just one executioner?"

  "That brings us to my second point. The post of Lord Executioner is not a very demanding one; after all, no nobleman likes to work. It's true that the Lord Executioner could hire assistants, as his father did before him, but there's no call for them, because hardly anybody manages to require an official execution. Generally, captured thieves and murderers are disposed of quite efficiently by the neighborhood vigilance committees; they don't come to us. All we get are the traitors and troublemakers who have contrived to offend the overlord himself, and the occasional soldier guilty of something so heinous that his comrades aren't willing to take his punishment into their own hands and that can't just be dealt with by throwing him out of the guard and out of the city. This comes to maybe one execution every two or three sixnights, and it will be a long time before the current Lord Executioner is too feeble to deal with that himself. Which brings me to my third point—you don't look like much of an executioner in any case. You must be sixty, aren't you?"