Swords: 08 - The Fifth Book Of Lost Swords - Coinspinner’s Story (16 page)

      
And now it seemed to Adrian that yet another idea, this one the real step forward, had dawned at last on Talgai.

* * *

      
They spent one night on the journey, Adrian sleeping in the canoe, at Talgai’s insistence, because it was probably a little safer there, while man and dog and lucky Sword lay all close together on the grass nearby.

      
The travelers were all up early and on their way, and now it was obvious, from the rapidly increasing human presence on the banks and in the river, that they were getting very close to Smim.

      
When Coinspinner acted next, it was a subtle move, and Adrian did not at first recognize the small event for what it was.

      
Talgai was taking another turn at paddling. In the midst of another lament about his brother, he turned his head, broke off in midsentence, and pointed toward something on the shore.

      
“What is it?” Adrian asked.

      
“A friend of mine. Old Konbaung, he used to be my neighbor. There he goes. But now I remember, he had a relative who worked in the court! I must catch up with him, maybe he can do something for Buvrai.”

      
Driving hard with the paddle, Talgai turned the canoe abruptly toward the place where he was certain he had seen his old friend. There was a footpath there, following the riverbank, and one branch of it turned and angled inland, doubtless heading to town.

      
Running the canoe ashore, the woodcutter leaped out impetuously into the shallows. “Thank you for giving me a ride, lad. All the good gods be with you. I hope you find your parents.”

      
Adrian stuttered something, but he was too late. The man with his back turned was already up the bank and striding rapidly inland, the Sword of Chance a nondescript bundle on his shoulder.

      
The dog, after bounding around irresolutely on the muddy bank for a time, whining and yapping, suddenly decided to accompany Talgai, and went running inland in pursuit. The Princeling yelled after the nameless beast, but it ignored him this time.

      
Now the Sword was gone, and for a moment Adrian hesitated, on the brink of running after it. That would, of course, have meant abandoning the canoe, and he felt reluctant to do that after the many difficulties the craft had borne him through.

      
While yet he wavered, his mind was made up for him by the appearance of two men. These were both armed and unsavory-looking, and one was strolling upstream along the bank while the other moved downstream to join him. They were going to meet at the place where Adrian was hesitating.

      
“Hey, kid! Nice boat you’ve got there. Where’d you get it?”

      
He might have tried some magic on them, but it had become almost instinctive to conserve energy, to use enchantment only as a last resort. Instead, Adrian pushed off the canoe again and paddled out toward midstream. The river was wide enough here for him to—

      
Only when he was twenty-five meters or so from shore did he become aware of the two sizable boats, big enough to hold half a dozen men each and both crowded, that were closing in on him, one from upstream and one from down.

      
There were several other craft on the river also, but all of those were distant, and none were concerned with what was happening here.

      
The two ominous boats had got within fifty meters or so of Adrian, perhaps, before he could be sure that he was the object of their interest.

      
At the same time, the two men on shore, of similar appearance to those in the boats, were walking along the bank, staying opposite Adrian’s canoe, ready for him if he should try to land again. And the men on the bank exchanged brisk arm signals, obviously prearranged, with those in the boats.

      
“Let’s see what you’re hiding in the bottom of your boat there, lad,” a voice loaded with false heartiness called out to him. It belonged to a man standing in the prow of one of the two craft closing in. On this man’s shoulder there perched a winged, half reptilian-looking messenger.

      
Wood and his people used such creatures. Adrian felt his heart sink. “I’ve got nothing hidden!”

      
“Let’s just take a look.” The man grinned.

      
They think I’ve got Coinspinner with me. If only I did
.

      
Now a middle-aged woman, something of an enchantress from the look of her, was calling out from the other boat to the male leader, telling him something about the magical aura she was able to see around Adrian. She could quite definitely confirm his identification as the missing Prince.

      
“Good, we’ve got him, then. And where’s the Sword we were to look for? Has he got it there?”

      
“I doubt that very much,” the woman called back. “If he ever had it, I think it’s gone now, and no telling where.”

      
The two boats were moving steadily closer. With many oars apiece, they could easily overtake him on the water if he tried to flee.

      
“That’s the canoe we were told to look for, no doubt of that. And he’s the right age.”

      
The leader, smiling, spoke softly to the creature on his shoulder, whose beady eyes inspected Adrian. In a minute, the Prince thought, he’s going to send it back to Wood, with word that I’ve been taken.

      
There was no way to escape—diving, trying to swim away underwater would be simply foolish.

      
Adrian’s reaction to being trapped was the same near-instinctive reflex that had served him well before. Just as the two other boats were closing in on him, he reached with his mind into the depths of the earth, and fought for his life in the only effective way he could manage.

      
Call upon heat, call up pressure, evoke great density and mass and elemental toughness. The layers of rock beneath the muddy riverbed shifted, vibrated, pounded with the sudden stress of their own energies, being manipulated in a new way. Relief came with concussive force. Suddenly the materials upon which Adrian’s mind was working split; a river-elemental was born almost accidentally, becoming separately objectified from the earth-elemental stirring at a deeper level.

      
Great pseudopods of water burst up into the air, overwhelming both large boats. Fortunately no innocent craft were near enough to be drastically affected. Gigantic geysers of rock and mud and water, flung higher than trees or houses, struck up into the air, projecting fragments high and hard enough to sting and wound the flying reptile, throwing it into a panic. It had sprung into the air from its master’s shoulder at the first eruption, even as the man himself was hurled out of his boat.

      
One shoulder of the nearest erupting wave caught Adrian’s canoe, lifted it above the river’s surface, and dandled it like an infant for a moment. But the creator of the creature was able to soothe his creation successfully, and just in time; his return to the river was no worse than a splashing fall.

      
Unfortunately for the men and the woman in the two large boats, they were unable to take wing. Their craft were capsized, spun and hurled in midair, and men who were weighted with weapons, some of them with armor, did not fare well upon being suddenly plunged into deep water. Clinging to his own canoe as it pitched and tossed, the Prince saw with horrified fascination, how the mud and water surged and raced and spun around their bodies, turning them over again and again, sucking them under when they might have fought back to the surface.

      
Rock and earth hurled toward the sky splashed back into the river. Unlike the eruption in the City, this one left few visible effects a few moments after it had occurred. The great waves raised locally were quickly dying as they spread. The mud spewed up fell into muddy water. Only the drifting shapes of the two capsized boats, and the bodies of the drowned or drowning, could be seen as its results. The two men who had been standing on shore were engulfed in a huge wave, and Adrian could see one of them, covered with mud, running in panic for some nearby trees.

      
Adrian’s canoe had not been damaged, though nearly swamped by water pouring in. Bailing frantically and not too effectively with his hands, he could not spare much attention for what was going on around him. He was aware of the flying reptile, still cawing in anguish, as it went laboring away on damaged wings.

      
The reaction of exhaustion came over the Prince, and he slumped in the canoe, on the point of losing consciousness. The body of a drowned man, bumping lightly against the side of the canoe, roused him to horrified new efforts.

      
At last, with most of the water bailed out of his craft, he was once more paddling downstream. Vaguely he had decided to go toward the docks of the town. As he paddled, he could still sense the aftershocks caused by the elemental’s violence rippling through the layers of rock deep beneath the river. He could hope that what he had done wasn’t going to set off a real earthquake—he continued to exert his best efforts to damp things down again.

      
Half dazed, the Prince found himself thinking of the great dog, and wondering what had happened to him. Well, he wasn’t going to hang around to look for him.

      
If I had taken Coinspinner when I had the chance, and held on to it, that couldn’t have happened
.

      
Right now Adrian was obsessed with one thought only. He was grimly determined to regain his contact with the Sword.

Chapter Thirteen

      
Talgai, as he trudged into the town of Smim with his lucky Sword still wrapped in canvas and still riding on his shoulder, reflected on the strange and frequently puzzling things that had happened to him in the course of his journey—and for most of which, he was sure, the Sword he carried was somehow responsible.

      
High on the list of oddities was the lucky meeting with the hungry lad who had happened to be paddling his canoe downstream, and who had offered him a ride. And there was the peculiar dog—peculiar to say the least—that even now was still following the woodcutter at a distance. Whenever he glanced back he could see it, coming along the path behind him, thirty or forty meters back. He didn’t want to call the dog to come to him, although he would have enjoyed its company, because it belonged to the boy, after all.

      
And then there was the incident, less than an hour ago, that had caused Talgai to leave his benefactor and proceed on foot, trying to catch up with a man he thought he knew.

      
While paddling the canoe, Talgai, glancing inland, had been convinced he’d spotted an old friend. But of course the fellow, when the woodcutter had finally overtaken him, had proved to be a total stranger, though the resemblance to his old friend was indeed remarkable. By the time Talgai had discovered his mistake, however, he could see the town quite close ahead of him and there was no point in turning back to the canoe. Gripping his bundled Sword now, he made a wish that young Cham should have a safe trip and meet his parents successfully-—somehow Talgai had got the notion that that was what the boy was trying to do.

      
A moment later, Talgai’s mind was once more filled with his brother and his brother’s predicament. He hastened on.

      
At some point since he’d last left home, the woodcutter wasn’t sure just when, the idea had begun to grow in his mind that Coinspinner’s magic might even be able to rescue his brother from execution. Provided, of course, that he, Talgai, could somehow contrive to get the Sword into Buvrai’s possession.

      
Certainly Talgai could not ignore the possibility, if it offered any hope at all.

      
The path he had followed from the riverbank had soon joined with another, larger, one, and that in turn with a road that was considerably larger still. Traffic of all kinds came in to being and steadily increased. Presently Talgai found himself entering the busy city on the high road from the east, along with an assortment of carts, wagons, occasional mounted folk of the upper class, and other humble pedestrians like himself.

      
The town of Smim was busy though not particularly large, being otherwise unremarkable of its kind. But its size was great enough to be confusing to the woodsman, who tended to feel ill at ease in any settlement larger than a dozen houses.

      
Still he experienced no difficulty in locating the prison. Very near the center of town, this facility occupied the two upper levels of one of the largest and tallest buildings in sight. The windows of the building’s two lower levels displayed rooms full of clerks puttering about, doing incomprehensible things at desks and tables.

      
Fearful that he might, after all, have arrived too late to help his brother, Talgai began stopping people in the street and asking whether any execution had taken place in the past several days. The answers he obtained were mainly reassuring in that regard, though one man chose to try to plunge him into despair with a tale of horrible dismemberment on the scaffold, for no reason at all that Talgai could see. But the woodcutter did manage to learn, from several sources, that a public hanging was indeed scheduled for tomorrow at dawn.

      
Evidently he had not arrived too late—thank the Sword for that. But certainly there was no time to waste.

      
After quenching his thirst at a public watering trough—for some reason several well-dressed passersby favored him with amused glances as he did this—the woodcutter walked completely around the prison and the attached administrative complex, looking things over from every angle. It was of stone construction, and it was certainly a large building, he remarked to himself unnecessarily when he had observed all sides of it. Perhaps the largest he had ever seen. The trouble was that having inspected this large building thoroughly Talgai really had no better idea of how to proceed than he had had before.

      
Returning to the square in front of the prison, he rather timidly observed the grim-faced guards, armed and uniformed, who were stationed at the building’s doors and in its one visible courtyard. An even more disconcerting sight was the ominous-looking scaffold that had been erected twenty meters or so from the front of the prison, right in the public square. The scaffold was of logs, and it had a well-used look.

      
Despite their bright uniforms, the guards all looked as grim and sullen as the walls they guarded. As Talgai stared at them, and thought of the authority that they must represent, it seemed to him that any appeal for mercy was doomed to failure at the start. He might, of course, attempt to bribe someone, using the marvelous Sword he carried—he had no doubt that at least some of these people could be bribed. If only he knew better how to go about such things, or if he had more time in which to learn the proper ways—but in fact he had hardly any time at all.

      
Likely, the woodcutter thought, if he tried bribery he’d only approach the wrong person, or make some other mistake that he couldn’t foresee, and get himself arrested. He’d hand over the Sword, and that would be that. The Sword would protect him only as long as he actually had it with him, close enough to touch. He understood that now. And once he’d handed over his lucky tool to someone else—well, there’d be no protection for himself or his brother either against these scoundrels. Whatever his brother’s faults, he felt sure just from looking at the men who were about to hang him that they were scoundrels too.

      
Getting himself arrested wouldn’t be a good idea. It wouldn’t do his brother any good. And he, Talgai, had a wife and small children dependent on him.

      
But he was going to have to do something. He was sure of that when he stood gazing at the gallows. Just thinking of watching any execution, let alone his own brother’s, made Talgai shiver. No, he wasn’t going to be able to stand here and watch anything like that happen to Buvrai.

      
So be it. Therefore he must try to get the Sword into his brother’s hands. The only question was, how to go about it?

      
One method of course would be to make his attempt at the last moment, when Buvrai was actually being led out to his death. But Buvrai’s hands might well be bound then, Talgai supposed. And if the condemned man was unable to reach for the Sword and grasp it, make it his own, how could it do him any good?

      
Deep in gloomy thought, Talgai strolled aimlessly about the square before the prison. He was bothered by growing worries about the impending fate of his wife and children. Suppose he got himself into trouble that would keep him from ever seeing them again.

      
Standing under the gallows, he resolutely put such fears behind him. His brother’s predicament was immediate and real, and therefore it had to come first.

      
Now, once Talgai had firmly made up his mind as to what he wanted to do, his good fortune took effect again and things began to fall his way at once.

      
Only moments after his decision at the scaffold, as Talgai stood looking up at the front of the prison again, he was able to identify the window of his brother’s cell without any trouble. This was possible only because, fortunately, his brother came to the window and looked out while Talgai happened to be watching.

      
The cell window—it was heavily barred, like all the windows near it, so Talgai assumed that it opened into a cell—directly overlooked the square, providing a good view of the gallows, which at the moment was claiming Buvrai’s thoughtful attention. Most of the windows in the wall were heavily barred with ironwork. Those on the ground floor opened into offices of some kind, shadowy tiled and paneled rooms where clerks and administrators sometimes appeared.

      
“Buvrai! It’s me! Down here!”

      
The prisoner saw and recognized his brother gazing up at him from the street below. He shouted something back, and the two exchanged waves.

      
Glancing at the guards, Talgai saw that they were watching with bored expressions and a minimum of interest.

      
The two brothers conversed some more. Buvrai, starting to rave now, shouted that he had been imprisoned unfairly, because he had incurred the enmity of the Red Temple, who had falsely accused him of cheating in a game of chance.

      
“Is that all?”

      
“They say I killed a man. But it’s all lies.”

      
“How can I help you?”

      
“If you want to help me, get me out!”

      
The building containing the prison was no more than four stories high, and the condemned man’s cell was not at the top. Still, Buvrai’s window was much too far above the ground for Talgai to be able to simply walk up to it and push the Sword in between the bars. Nor did there appear to be any feasible way to climb the wall and get within reach.

      
“You’ve got to do something to get me out of here. See the governor or something. They mean to hang me tomorrow!” Buvrai went on, shouting renewed complaints against the Red Temple.

      
Whatever the truth of Buvrai’s claims, his situation sounded bad. It sounded so bad that Talgai was beginning to have doubts again. How could good luck help against impossibility? What kind of a miracle could even Coinspinner possibly work in such a desperate case?

      
“Tomorrow, Talgai! Will you do something?”

      
“Yes, yes, I’ll try!” he shouted back.

      
The guards were still watching and listening impassively. Probably they heard similar shouted conversations all the time.

      
The woodcutter couldn’t imagine what good a lucky Sword was going to be in this case. But he tried as best he could to suppress his doubts. He clung as hard as possible to a simple faith that the weapon he had been carrying was going to do something effective.

      
Now Buvrai was shouting down more instructions for him, something about Talgai’s trying to see someone who was being held in the women’s cells on the ground floor. Maybe she could think of something, some way to get them both out. The woman’s name sounded like Amelia.

      
Presently, because his brother’s yelling, his concocting of desperate, half-witted schemes, was only confusing him now, and nothing was getting done, Talgai waved once more and hurried off to think, out of sight of the prisoner’s window.

      
At last, after some agonizing minutes of indecision, trusting in Coinspinner’s power but seeing no other way to harness it properly, Talgai decided that the only thing to do was to simply stand back and throw the Sword up at his brother’s window.

      
He wondered urgently whether he ought to yell up a warning to his brother just before he threw the Sword, so that his brother would come to the window and reach out between the bars and catch it.

      
If anyone could catch a blade like this one, spinning in midair, without cutting off his fingers.

      
Well, Talgai supposed, it might be just at that point, the Sword’s first contact with a new owner, where the miraculous good luck might be expected to come in. And if luck failed there—well, Buvrai, at least, had nothing to lose.

      
The woodcutter considered whether he ought to leave the Sword wrapped, but bind his canvas bundle tightly before he heaved it up, so it would be able to fit in between the bars when Buvrai caught it. Yes, Talgai supposed, that would be the way.

      
At last, with his bundle ready, and himself as ready as he could get for whatever might be going to happen, Talgai came out into the open square again, and walked steadily closer to the prison.

      
Buvrai was watching for him. “Well?” the prisoner shouted impatiently.

      
“Well,” Talgai called back. “Here’s all that I can do for you, brother. The best that I can do.”

      
“Here? Where?”

      
“Right here. Coming up.”

      
Talgai considered that he had a good eye for distances, and a good arm for throwing. When he threw the Sword up, with even a little luck it ought to go just about where he wanted to send it. It would almost certainly come within his brother’s reach, provided that his brother was standing at the window. Maybe it would even fly right in between the bars. So, if he acted now, while his brother was at the window and presumably ready to react…

      
But Buvrai, instead of paying heed when his brother, who had evidently taken leave of his senses, appeared to be ready to throw some kind of awkward bundle up to him, just turned away from the window at the crucial moment, expressing his disgust.

      
Muttering the closest thing to a prayer that he had mouthed in a long time, directed indiscriminately at any god who might be willing to listen, Talgai ran forward two long steps, and with both hands, using an awkward, almost unplanned sidearm motion, heaved the Sword.

      
Gazing upward, holding his breath, Talgai saw the canvas-bundled Sword of Chance, spinning in midair, align itself so precisely with the configuration of the barred window that when it reached those bars it went flying neatly in between them, the bundle lacking even a centimeter to spare on either side. In a year of trying he could never, without magic, have made the cast so neatly.