Swords: 09 - The Sixth Book Of Lost Swords - Mindsword's Story (17 page)

      
Looking out of the window, Kristin could see a pair of watchfires in the farmyard below, smoldering and dying. There were dim motionless forms of troopers and bandits slumping and lying around them.

      
It was none of these who had called her.

      
Raising her eyes and gazing into the moonlit middle distance, the Princess beheld two mounted figures at the top of a long, grassy hill.

      
Her sense of wonder grew at the strangeness of the awakening call. Unsure at first whether she might not be still asleep and dreaming, the Princess arose from her bed and groped with her feet until she found her shoes. Otherwise she had lain down fully dressed. Opening her bedroom door, she went out into the hallway, partially lit by moonlight filtering through the oiled-paper window at one end. The white walls and coved ceiling, here in the hallway as in the rooms, were neatly plastered as in many prosperous homes in Tasavalta.

      
Kristin’s feeling that she might still be dreaming faded at the sight of Murat, who lay sleeping on the floor just outside her bedroom door. She had to step over him to leave her room. His face was shadowed. The Princess paused to look adoringly at her new lover, who moaned almost inaudibly in his slumber. The Crown Prince was sleeping of course with the Sword in his hand, and she drew in her breath with sudden fear that he might turn over in his sleep and gash himself on that Blade. The Princess knew from old and bitter experience that the Mindsword made terrible physical wounds, almost impossible to heal. Briefly she considered moving the Sword a little, for her lover’s safety, but then decided against making the attempt. Tonight Lord Murat might well need the protection offered by that black hilt in his hand, even at the risk of a sore wound.

      
And besides, she feared to wake her lord just now, lest he prevent her doing something that she had decided must be done—for his sake.

      
Scarcely had Kristin started down the hall than she stopped again, with a sharp intake of breath. Vilkata was sleeping only two or three meters away, on the floor near the head of the stairs. To her disgust, Kristin found herself compelled to step over his loathsome body as well; and as she did so she considered killing him—for Murat’s sake.

      
The Princess had left her hunting knife back in the bedroom, but there was a dagger in the demon-master’s belt that might be snatched away and plunged into his heart. Only two thoughts stayed her hand: this fiend was now sealed in loyalty to Murat, and the possibility was all too real that her beloved might soon be in need of every ally he had. Even this one.

      
Kristin let the wizard go on living. Stealing downstairs as quietly as possible, she encountered a few more sleeping bodies in parlor and kitchen, but to her surprise no one was awake and on guard. Surely some of these men should be faithfully on duty?

      
Perhaps, she thought, her lord in his wisdom had stationed the real sentries outside.

      
Still nagged by the feeling that someone had wakened her by calling her name, but more and more convinced that she had dreamt that much, the Princess went outside, through the kitchen and back door.

      
The pair of smoldering watchfires in the farmyard seemed to be burning even lower now than when she had glimpsed them from upstairs. Fires or not, there must certainly have been sentries posted out here; but Kristin saw to her surprise that they too, or at least the individuals who might have been sentries, were also fast asleep.

      
She took one of these men by the arm and tried, without success, to wake him.

      
Abandoning the attempt, the Princess turned. Peering uphill, into an alternation of darkness and moonlight created by the passage of some clouds, she could again make out the two dim human figures at a distance of something over a hundred meters. Up there on the summit two men were sitting their riding-beasts, at a distance Kristin judged to be somewhat beyond the limits of the Mindsword’s invisible power.

      
It struck her that she was able to see one of those men remarkably well, considering the conditions. Something about the figure’s clothing suggested a military uniform, though in the moonlight and at this distance it was really impossible to determine colors. The Princess was suddenly quite certain, without any conscious logic having entered into her discovery, that the man who seemed to be in uniform was a simple military messenger, come under a flag of truce to bring her word of her husband’s death in some remote place. In a moment he would ride down the hill toward her, his face grim, shoulders slumped under his tragic burden—

      
—but wherever the thing had happened, Mark was dead, slain in some stupid combat, or dead in some pointless accident, on one of his hopeless missions attempting to serve the Emperor. And this rider, the anonymous messenger she had feared with all her heart and soul for years, was on the verge of cantering downhill to bring her the word that she had dreaded for so long—

      
Kristin, knowing in her heart that her doom had come upon her, and moving in a sick, dreamlike calm, observed a path that led out of the farmyard and up the hill. A moment later she was following the path, climbing the hill.

      
Just as she was leaving the farmyard she took note of a man who ought to have been a sentry, sprawled sleeping at what must have been his post, just inside the fence beside the path. The man moved slightly as she passed him, but the eyes in the upturned face were closed—rather, almost closed—and he snored faintly.

      
Kristin went on her way. Looking uphill again, she thought that the second man on the hilltop, the one who sat his mount beside the messenger’s, looked very much like her uncle Karel.

* * *

      
Mark, straining his eyes, and gripping the hilt of Sightblinder tightly in an effort to enhance his own perception as much as possible, bit back an outcry. He recognized his wife by moonlight almost as soon as she stepped out of the shadows of the farmhouse doorway more than a hundred meters below.

* * *

      
Murat, after stretching himself out on the floor of the upstairs hall in the farmhouse, had taken no alarm when he began to grow heavily, deliciously sleepy. Such sensations were only natural, considering that his various concerns and responsibilities, together with the slowly diminishing pain of his wound, had allowed him but little rest on several successive nights before this one. He had welcomed the chance to lay his body down, with the black hilt of his drawn Sword still clutched in his right hand, upon a folded rug in front of Kristin’s door.

      
Only in the last few moments before the Crown Prince dozed off did certain unwelcome thoughts enter his mind. Since making his decision to keep the Mindsword continually unsheathed, he had found himself growing more rather than less afraid of Mark. The nets of defensive magic that Murat had woven about his own person with the Sword, and with Vilkata’s and the demon’s help, was bringing him no increased feeling of security.

      
Rather the reverse.

      
And then there was Kristin, and her all-too-justifiable unhappiness caused by Murat’s toleration of the foul wizard-king Vilkata. Perhaps worse, in her view, was his new reliance upon an actual demon. Kristin, tender-minded and basically innocent, was unable to face the fact that he, Murat, must now depend upon such creatures.

      
Well, Vilkata was—or had been—a foul villain indeed, and under other conditions Murat would not have delayed in putting the eyeless man to a horrible death, in payment for what he had once done to Murat’s beloved bride-to-be. But the purifying power of the Sword had transformed the foul, treacherous torturer and beggar into a trustworthy servant, at least for the time being. And the fact was that Kristin’s own welfare, perhaps her very survival, now required Murat to seek help wherever he could.

      
That was the last thought of which the Crown Prince was conscious before he fell asleep.

* * *

      
As Kristin climbed the hill, mounting closer and closer to the two men who seemed to be waiting for her at the top, logic suddenly awoke to remind her that Sightblinder, in someone else’s hands, might be the cause of her perception of a dreadful messenger. But logic could offer only cold and fragile comfort against the inner certainty of that waiting figure’s identity, and the nature of his message. These were horrors that had formed the core of her worst dreams over the past few years. Fatalistically, she climbed on.

* * *

      
Mark had been sitting motionless in his saddle, gazing downhill with fierce intensity, hardly taking his eyes from that small figure as it approached. He had seen his wife, as if in response to the sheer power of his will, leave the unattainable camp below and come deliberately walking up the hill toward him. Now the Prince feared to move or speak or even breathe, lest he break whatever beneficent spell was granting him his most fervent wish.

      
Karel, waiting beside the Prince, was silent too, and almost motionless.

      
Breathing softly now, Mark dared to move, to dismount. Once on his feet he did nothing but stand and wait, while Kristin in the course of her next few steps emerged from the eerily visible haze of the Mindsword’s influence. Then, approaching in deliberate silence, she came to stop some four meters from her husband.

      
At that point she spoke. “Mark? I feel it is really you before me, and not the form I see.”

      
The Prince unbuckled Sightblinder from his belt, then handed the weapon, sheath and all, up to Karel, who still sat mounted. In the next moment the Prince turned and took a swift step forward, meaning to enfold his wife in his arms.

      
But Kristin stepped back quickly, avoiding Mark’s embrace; and as she moved she uttered a strange gasp, partly of relief and partly of something else.

      
Mark halted himself in mid-stride, reminding himself that the Mindsword’s spell could not be so easily dissolved. Considerable time and loving care would be needed to heal Kristin of its effects, even after she had emerged from the field of its direct influence.

      
There would be no point in beginning with an impassioned declaration of love. “What form did you just see?” he asked his wife, in as calm a voice as he could manage.

      
She tossed her hair. Her voice was almost bright. “Some anonymous courier, come to tell me that you were dead.”

      
“Kristin!” Again Mark spread his arms, and started to move forward.

      
Again with a swift, lithe movement she maintained the distance between them. “Mark, I have come up here to tell you, face to face, that from now on you must allow me to go my own way.”

      
Mark managed to edge a half-step closer without provoking a reaction. Silently he cursed all Swords; he cursed Murat. He could see now that he was probably going to have to seize Kris bodily, if he could, to keep her from darting back into the Mindsword’s sphere of magic. He could see the blue haze flickering almost at her heels.

      
Of course he should be subtle; but at the moment he could not.

      
“Kris, that Sword,
his
Sword, is making you go away from me.”

      
“No!” Her denial, though forceful, was calm and matter-of-fact. “The Mindsword shocked me at first, but—no. Do not think, my former husband, that I am its slave. Or Prince Murat’s.”

      
“I am your husband, now and forever—but later we can talk about that. Right now—”

      
“We must talk about it now. Or rather, I must convince you now that our marriage is at an end. You no longer have any right to command my people, my armies—or my magicians.”

      
Here she swung her gaze abruptly toward Karel. And Mark could see her pause, as if in renewed horror, at whatever image she saw in her familiar uncle’s place.

      
Since Kristin’s arrival the old wizard had waited in his saddle, silently and patiently. He was holding Sightblinder now, and when Mark glanced his way he saw instead a second image of Kristin, this one mounted, gazing reproachfully back at him.

      
When Karel spoke, he did not respond to what Kristin had just said to him. Instead he said: “Holding the Sword of Stealth, I can see more than I did. I see the two of you—”

      
His words broke off.

      
“Well?” Mark cried impatiently, at his wife’s mounted image. “What is it, old man?”

      
Kristin too was staring at her uncle, but Mark could not guess who or what she might be seeing in his place.

      
“Never mind,” said Karel at last. For Mark, his voice was Kristin’s too. “Never mind. Let us finish our business here.”

      
For Mark, it was, as usual, easier not to look at whoever was holding the Sword of Stealth.

      
And it was foolish, thought Mark, as he faced back to Kristin, for him to stand here arguing—because he was arguing not with his wife, but with the powers of Murat’s Sword. Kris in her present state was no more than a puppet, compelled to say these awful things.

      
As if determined to prove that the bond between the two of them might after all, when put to the test, be stronger than all magic, the Prince extended a hand toward his wife.