Swords: 08 - The Fifth Book Of Lost Swords - Coinspinner’s Story (9 page)

      
And once more, gripping the Sword of Chance in both hands, Wood hurled his trapping spells against the small and distant figure of Prince Adrian.

      
Tigris, who had followed her master on his rambling course across the garden, was perching now upon a comparatively new stone statue that bore the shape of some grotesque and probably imaginary beast. She shivered on the chill stone of her new seat, and felt a pang of anxiety as she listened to his voice call out the spells and sensed their potency. Skilled enchantress that she was, Wood’s powers awed her. This man, the Ancient One, this Dark Master she now served, simply knew too much, and was more powerful than any human being ought to be. If for any reason he should ever tire of her, or decide that she was dangerous—

      
His new ordering of spells complete at last, Wood hastened to carry Coinspinner down to the far end of the garden where the light of the flaming fountains was dimmest, and the ugly twin statues stood. He had reason to believe those images might have a helpful influence in what he was about to do. Balancing the bare blade carefully, he set it in place with his own hands, so that Coinspinner, catching one spark of light, formed a straight and slender bridge of steel between the pair of stone grotesqueries, running from the left shoulder of one across the right shoulder of the other.

      
Silently, Tigris had followed her master. She was frowning worriedly, like a small girl, scuffling her bare feet in the damp, cold grass. She noted that the wind was rising. In the distance, but swiftly blowing closer, rainstorms threatened.

      
Having set the Sword of Chance very carefully in place, the wizard spun around, urgently commanding any of his servants who might hear him: “Now, quickly, put Shieldbreaker into my hands!”

      
Tigris, hopping down instantly from her latest perch, the statue of some bull-like beast, was about to run to obey. But invisible forces had heard the command also, and were ahead of her. Enslaved powers had already taken up the Sword of Force, and were now pressing the ultimate power into the hands of the magician.

      
Accepting the blade, Wood heard and felt the thud of energy in Shieldbreaker’s black hilt. And then that energy cut off abruptly. Wood did not understand until he had turned back to the twin statues, with Sword uplifted to deliver a shattering blow.

      
The space between the stones, where he had placed the Sword of Chance, was empty.

      
The ugly, lifeless statues mocked him with their eyes, hollow sockets with stone depths illumined suddenly by distant lightning. Coinspinner had taken itself away. His luck was gone, and the gods alone, if any gods still lived, knew where.

      
Rain drenched him suddenly. As far as Wood could tell, the rain and lightning were completely natural.

Chapter Seven

      
Shortly after dawn, Talgai the Woodcutter, as was his daily custom, said good-bye to his small family, turned his back on their little riverside hut in its forest clearing, and with his load beast and his tools headed off into the deep woods to see what he could find there of value.

      
It was a fine morning. The woodcutter, a wiry, somewhat undersized man approaching middle age, hummed as he hiked along. Now and then he amused himself by whistling bird imitations, and sometimes he was pleased to hear an answer from the forest canopy.

      
For the first few hundred meters the trail he had chosen ran beside a stream, but at the first branching he turned away from the water, tugging at the little load beast’s reins to lead it uphill.

      
Two hours and numerous trail branchings later, Talgai had ceased to whistle. For some time now he had been struggling along a small side trail, so little-traveled and overgrown that the intruder was forced to hack with his long brush-knife at encroaching small limbs and undergrowth to force a passage. Trees in uncountable numbers, live and dead, surrounded him now, and had done so since he left home, but he only glanced at their trunks in passing and then ignored them. To earn a reasonable livelihood with the small loads that his single beast could carry, he had to, sometimes at least, find wood that was good for more than burning; and today he was determined to do just that.

      
Having made half a kilometer’s progress along the overgrown trail, he happened to glance upward through the canopy, trying to fix the sun’s height in the sky. Just as he did so his eye was caught by the gleam of something mysteriously, piercingly bright amid the greenery.

      
Sidestepping carefully, squinting upward for a better look, Talgai soon discovered that the bright gleam emanated from the blade of a sword, which was stuck through a tree trunk. It was a miraculously beautiful sword, looking as out of place here as something in a dream.

      
To the woodcutter it seemed for a moment or two as if the spectacular weapon must have been planted here just for him to find. Who else was going to be coming through here, after all?

      
But that, of course, was nonsense.

      
Now Talgai had halted, standing almost directly below this metallic apparition and staring up at it. It was certainly a glorious weapon to say the least, quite out of the class of any kind of tool that Talgai had ever seen before. And as marvelous as the presence of the thing itself were the circumstances of its presence. The bright blade was embedded in the tall tree as if perhaps some giant’s arm had forced it there, so deeply that half its length came out the other side.

      
Talgai had never been a fighter, and was basically uninterested in weapons. Nor was he, in the ordinary sense, a treasure hunter. But the finish of that steel, even seen at a distance of several meters, and the bright straightness of that blade were far too impressive for him to simply pass it by.

      
There was a problem, in that the sword was well above his reach as he stood on the trail, and the tree that it transfixed was somewhat too thorny for an easy climb. The woodcutter had to remove his bundle of tools from the back of his little load beast, and then stand precariously balanced on the animal’s back himself, to bring his right hand within reach of the black hilt.

      
He thought he felt a faint vibration in the Sword when he first touched it, but in a moment the sensation vanished.

      
Getting the Sword out of the green, tough trunk took even more wrenching and tugging than the man had expected. But eventually, with Talgai’s strong grip on the black hilt, the keen blade cut itself loose.

      
After hopping down from the load beast’s back, the woodcutter inspected his find with wonder. The black hilt, he now discovered, was marked with a small white symbol, depicting two dice. Talgai, who seriously disapproved of gambling, frowned. And the symbol explained nothing to him. He thought of himself as a practical man, one who stayed close to home in mind as well as in body. He had barely heard of the gods, whose disappearance a few years ago had caused much excitement in the world’s more sophisticated circles. And Talgai had never heard at all of the gods’ twelve magic Swords.

      
Well, what ought he to do now? The woodcutter looked around him rather nervously. To him the presence of any sword, especially when unsheathed, suggested combat. And surely a weapon like this must belong to some wealthy owner, who, if he was not lying slaughtered in the bushes nearby, was bound to come looking for it eventually.

      
Talgai was too honest to even think of keeping the weapon if he could find its owner. But he could look forward hopefully to a substantial reward.

      
The fact that this precious length of steel had been stuck so forcefully in a tree created in Talgai’s mind the vague suggestion that other violent events might have occurred nearby. But his widening search, peering and hacking his way among the trunks and undergrowth, discovered no evidence to support this idea. His calls, first soft, then loud, all went unanswered. And no sign anywhere of recent travelers. There was in fact no indication that anyone except himself had passed this way in a long time.

      
Presently the woodcutter gave up the fruitless search and returned, Sword in hand, to his patient load beast. Standing in one of the rare beams of sunlight that reached the ground through the thick cover overhead, he fell to examining his find more closely.

      
The Sword’s supernaturally keen edge did not appear to have been damaged in the least by the rough treatment it had received, and Talgai could not resist trying it out on some nearby brush. The tough twigs fell off cleanly, mown as neatly as if they had been tender grass. He whistled to himself. This was a better tool than any brush-knife or machete he had ever owned!

      
He reloaded his other implements upon his beast and began to move along the trail again in his original direction; he could usually think better when engaged in some kind of physical action. As he walked, he slashed with his new tool at obstructing twigs and branches. Long and heavy as it was, the bright blade balanced very neatly in his hand—

      
And then the handle seemed to twist. His foot slipped at the same instant, and he dropped the blade.

      
Bending to pick it up, he thought himself lucky that he had not gashed his leg or foot with it. While he was still bent over, he happened to glance under some nearby branches, through a gap in the greenery opened by his last random slash.

      
Thirty meters or so away, leaves of a unique coppery color shimmered, dancing lightly in a random breeze, glowing in one of the slender, random beams of sunlight that managed to find their way down through the high green canopy above.

      
The woodcutter made a sound like a long sigh. He did not straighten up, lest he lose sight of what he had discovered. Instead, stooping and crawling under other branches, he maneuvered his way closer to his find. It was, as he had known from his first look, a rare tree, one of the species Talgai was always looking for. Its heartwood, highly prized as incense, made this tree worth more than any other Talgai could have found.

      
After making his way back to his load beast and his tools, Talgai needed only a brief time to hack a good path through to the tree, and a little longer to fell it with his axe and then despoil it of its central treasure.

      
With such a small though worthwhile cargo packed in his load beast’s panniers, he needed work no more today—or indeed for several months. Not that he was really able to imagine such a period of inactivity, unless it should be enforced by illness or injury. But certainly he would range the forest no more today. Instead, he decided to set out at once for the nearest sizable village, where he would be able to convert his precious wood quickly to coins and food, and where he also might discover some indication of who might have lost such a valuable weapon.

      
Moving at an unhurried pace, Talgai did not reach the settlement until after midday. The small cluster of wooden buildings dozed as usual in the sun; a few of the inhabitants were at work in their gardens, while others rested in the shade of their verandas, or under the few ornamental trees that had survived the woodcutters’ onslaughts within the town itself.

      
There was a river, small and generally somnolent, passing along the edge of this town, the same stream on which Talgai had his hut. The river made it easy to ship logs downstream from here to the city markets, where they were used for construction as well as fuel.

      
The proprietor of the local wood yard was an old acquaintance of Talgai, and greeted him in a friendly way. He was also glad to buy Talgai’s cuttings of valuable heartwood for a small handful of coins, paying a price rather higher than the woodsman had expected. The townsman also marveled at the marvelous weapon Talgai was carrying with him, and at the story of how it had been found. But neither the proprietor of the wood yard nor any of the hangers-on who gathered to hear Talgai’s story could offer any constructive suggestion as to who the true owner might be, or how the treasure had come to be embedded in a tree in the deep woods.

      
At last the businessman suggested: “If you can’t find the owner, Talgai, maybe you’ll be thinking of selling it?”

      
The woodcutter shook his head. “I’m a long way from that. I must try to find the owner first—and if I can’t, this makes a marvelous brush-knife. And such steel, such an edge, I believe I could even cut a tree down with it if I had to!”

      
“There’s magic in it, then. Well, that’s easy to believe.”

      
“Yes, I suppose there is.” Talgai frowned. Nothing in his small experience of magic had led him to think that it was ever quite safe or trustworthy.

      
Talgai was just passing out of the wood yard into the street when he turned for one more word. “You know, I think this tool has brought me good luck. I mean, it led me to find that cinnamon-wood.” Then he walked on.

      
Not wanting to appear armed and threatening while he was in town, he had wrapped the sword in a piece of canvas, part of his usual equipment, and put it under his arm. Thus burdened, he now proceeded across the street to the single inn of the village.

      
The husband and wife who owned the inn were also old acquaintances of Talgai. They were glad to see him, simply as friends, and pleased to furnish him with a midday meal in return for one of the smaller of his newly acquired coins. As to the sword, they marveled at it even more than had the proprietor of the wood yard, but they could offer no more helpful comment.

      
A handful of other customers were at the inn, and a couple of these were travelers from afar. The first of these outlanders gazed at Talgai’s prize blankly when it was unwrapped and displayed. Nor could he tell the woodcutter anything of any passing strangers, at least not of anyone who had lost a treasure and was offering a reward for it.

      
But the second traveler from distant places froze, a spoonful of soup halfway to his mouth, at his first glimpse of the sword. As soon as this man was ready to resume normal motion and speech, and had examined the blade more closely, he swore that he knew what it was—quickly he outlined the story of the Twelve Swords, and claimed that he had been privileged to see one of the others, twenty years ago.

      
“What you have there, woodcutter, is the great Sword Coinspinner—the Sword of Chance, it’s also called, sometimes. By all the gods! And it was just stuck in a tree limb, in the forest? By all the gods, hard to believe, but there it is. I can believe it, though, of this one. They say Coinspinner is liable to just take itself away from anyone who has it, at any time, without rhyme or reason, and then show up where someone else can find it.” The traveler shook his head. “No point in looking for the owner, I’d say. It’s yours now.” His tone seemed to imply that he was glad, just out of a general sense of wariness, that the Sword was not his own.

      
“It does seem to have brought me good luck.” Talgai offered the idea cautiously.

      
His informant chuckled, shook his head, and chuckled again. “I should think it might do that,” he said.

      
“May it bring you good luck forever, Talgai,” the innkeeper’s wife cried spontaneously.

      
“Talgai? Is that your name?” This came from the first far-traveler, the outsider who had been of no help in identifying the Sword. “And you say you are a woodcutter?”

      
“Talgai, yes sir, that’s me.”

      
“What a very remarkable coincidence! Would you believe that when I passed through Smim, two days ago, I overheard someone shouting that he wanted to get word to Talgai the Woodcutter?”

      
“But how can that be? Who in that town would have any message for me? I’ve never even been there.”

      
“Well. It happened when I was in the town square. I heard a voice shouting, and looked up, and there was a man standing at one of the barred windows in the house of government—they have the jail cells up there, you know.” Here the speaker paused, almost apologetically.

      
“Go on!”

      
“Well, there was a man up there, shouting, just calling out to anyone who’d listen to him—there were quite a few people in the square. He kept pleading for someone to take a message to his brother, who he said was Talgai the Woodcutter. It seemed—well—a somewhat mad way to attempt to send a message. But it certainly caught my attention, and I remembered. And then I suppose the poor fellow probably had no better means at his disposal.”