Swords: 09 - The Sixth Book Of Lost Swords - Mindsword's Story (24 page)

      
Carlo suddenly found himself holding the body of an unconscious woman; the attendant had fainted. He lowered her body to the floor, and leaped to bar the door that he assumed led from this bedroom out to the corridor. A moment later he had followed his father into the next room. This was another bedroom of some kind, too dark for him to be able to make out much of its contents. Here a door stood partially open to another balcony, and to the summer night.

      
The young man hastened to bar the hall door of this room too; almost immediately afterward the handle was tried from the outside, and immediately after that someone out there began a heavy pounding on the door. Now the alarm was being raised in earnest.

      
Murat was looking warily out onto the balcony of the darkened bedroom. Now he stepped out onto it.

      
“My love,” his son heard him breathe.

      
In the next moment the Crown Prince began to draw his Sword. Carlo, approaching his father from behind, saw with astonishment a half-grown boy, wearing only a long nightshirt, step from behind some draperies beside the doorway and hurl his body on Murat’s right arm.

      
The Crown Prince was taken by surprise, and the Sword of Glory, glittering faintly in the light of candles in the room, escaped from his grip.

      
Immediately magic informed the air. The voices of a multitude, inspired and invisible, sounded in the mind of every human near. Murat could only watch as the naked Mindsword described a smooth arc, clattered briefly on the dark slates of the nearby roof, and then went sliding swiftly down out of sight.

      
Before the Sword had struck the roof, Murat went lunging after it. The unreal voices, chanting glory, mocked him. His convulsive effort to catch or retrieve Skulltwister knocked the night-shirted child aside into a corner.

      
The Princess Kristin, dressed in a delicate robe, stepped into Carlo’s field of vision, clutching at the arm of the Crown Prince. But Murat, groaning and muttering, thrust her roughly aside too, and in the next moment had vaulted lithely over the balustrade. There he crouched, in an exposed position on the roof’s edge, staring intently down into the near-darkness of a courtyard, trying to see where his Sword had fallen.

      
The Princess, murmuring and crying, would have climbed after him, but Carlo stepped forward to hold her back. Then for a moment neither of them was able to act effectively. Both were stricken, stunned, half-entranced by the wordless, soundless flow of the freed Sword’s magic.

      
Others, all around them, were affected too. And the mundane silence of the night had been irretrievably shattered. Whether from one source or several, the alarm against intruders was spreading.

      
Carlo, holding the Princess with one arm, looked around and drew his own sword, momentarily expecting a rush of guards from somewhere. But as yet nothing of the kind materialized.

      
In the next instant Kristin, with a surprisingly strong effort, had broken free from Carlo’s grasp and was bending over her son. The bare-legged boy in the nightshirt lay moaning, half-stunned, his upper body leaning against the wall in a corner of the balcony.

      
Murat, maintaining his precarious position a few meters away, at the very edge of a section of roof, had just turned his head to call to his own son, when a crackling noise and a brief glare of light roiled the air eight or ten meters above their heads.

      
Carlo looked up to see an image of the wizard Vilkata, borne in midair amid a small swarm of half-visible demonic shapes. These descended with their burden, as the Princeling watched, to deposit the Dark King upon an angle of roof. The Eyeless One’s landing place was one level down from where Carlo and his father were watching, that much closer to where the fallen Sword had lodged.

      
Having conveyed their wizard-master to the place of his choosing, the demonic forms melted away into the damp air.

      
Vilkata—there was no doubting the solidity of his body now—straightened up, his fists on his hips in a royal pose. He called out mockingly to Murat: “Have you lost something, Great Master?”

      
There was no answer.

      
A moment later the eyeless man went on: “My ethereal servants, who dwell in air and darkness, inform me that within the last minute a certain treasure has ceased to belong to you, Crown Prince.” The magician laughed, and made a pretense of peering around him. “Where can it have gone, I wonder?”

      
Before Vilkata had finished speaking, the rain that had been threatening broke from low-flying clouds, a steady downpour certain to make the footing on slate tiles even worse.

      
“Don’t fall, Murat! Careful, glorious Master! Ha ha!”
      
Murat, hanging awkwardly at the brink of the perilously steep and slippery roof, finally answered his quondam magician—with a curse.

      
Then, for the moment ignoring the wizard’s threatening presence as if Vilkata did not exist, he turned back to his son. In an almost conversational voice he said: “I can see the Sword, Carlo! It’s only a little way down. Guard me while I climb down and claim it.”

      
“Father, don’t—”

      
“I can reach it, and I will. None of these swine can keep me from it.”

      
But Vilkata, starting from his lower level, was already moving toward the prize, and was plainly in position to reach it first. The man descended carefully, with a certain unnatural slowness in his downward movements, as if he had provided himself with magical protection against a fall.

      
The Crown Prince looked up at his son again, in desperation. “Carlo, your sword! Throw it! Stop him, kill him!”

      
Abandoning the Princess, whose attention was still focused on her son, Carlo obediently climbed over the balustrade. He had no particular fear of heights.

      
“Stop him!” It was a scream of agony.

      
Carlo, only having got down a meter or two, stopped where he was, clinging by one hand to a drainpipe, his feet braced precariously on small stone knobs he could not really see. With his free hand he drew his sword, and hurled the weapon at the Dark King five or six meters distant; a drawn blade was one of the strongest moves any nonmagician could make against any magical operation in progress. But either Vilkata’s magical protection was equal to the challenge, or else the missile simply missed him. In any event it fell harmlessly. And for a long time. They all heard it strike, at last, on pavement far below.

      
Vilkata was within two meters of being able to grasp the Sword of Glory when the demon Akbar appeared, standing on another balcony, on the far side of the fallen Sword from the magician, but as close to it as he was.

* * *

      
Murat, slowest of the three active contenders, remained hopelessly distant from his prize. Now the Crown Prince paused in his slow progress, just as he was about to lower himself from a roof drain, to see the outcome of this new confrontation. In a moment Murat had hurled his own knife in the direction of the wizard, with no effect. His shouted orders to the demon were ignored.

      
Now Murat, gesturing fiercely, shrieked again for his son to go and seize the Sword, to sheathe it and bring it back to him, to fight the demon, to do something.

      
Carlo smiled vaguely, nodded his perfect obedience to his father, and moved as quickly as he could toward the Sword. He could see Skulltwister, caught from its fall by a small projecting cornice, leaning hilt uppermost against a wall in a precarious position.

      
In the next instant his feet slipped from an impossible foothold, and then his grasping fingers slid from the edge of the slick roof.

      
Falling, he had several seconds in which to think, to fully realize his failure.

* * *

      
Murat, as if he were not yet aware that his son had plunged to the ground, still barked orders at Akbar, commanding him to put the sheath back on the Sword. “Then bring it to me, to me, your master!”

      
Akbar, posing on the balcony in the form of a maiden, sent an amused glance toward Murat.

      
“I have decided,” said the maiden, “that someone besides you, my Lord Murat, should bear the Mindsword from now on. I’ll carry it myself, for the time being, though I don’t look forward to all the attention it will bring me.”

      
The Crown Prince, unbelieving, made a strange sound in his throat.

      
Akbar continued: “Because you—you, my gr-r-reat Master!—live increasingly in a world of your own megalomaniac fantasies. Therefore, in my judgment, you are becoming undependable.”

      
“You are to serve me! I command you—I charge you—”

      
“Yes, yes. I know you are convinced you are my master. Most humans who, deal with me willingly are under some such illusion. But very few indeed can keep the relationship in those terms. Very few. And you are not one of them.”

      
“—by the Sword’s power, I command—”

      
“Fool. What are mere Swords to me?”

* * *

      
Mark, who had been in a distant part of the city when he was alerted to what was happening in the palace, was hurrying desperately in that direction now. As he passed, he could see swarms of troops and magical assistants gathering, torchlit ranks forming, at somewhat more than a hundred meters from his invaded quarters. These defenders, under good discipline, were deploying somewhat outside the range of the Mindsword’s effective action.

      
At least no one who now held the Mindsword within the palace would find there an army ready-made to fight for him.

* * *

      
“Such delusions are very common when one of my kind—forms a relationship—with one of yours,” said Akbar—the maiden was sitting now on the balustrade, modestly swinging her shapely legs.

      
The demon was obviously toying with his enemies before he reached out to pick up Skulltwister.

      
Meanwhile Vilkata, only five or six meters from the demon, was almost gibbering at it, plainly trying one spell after another. Plainly none of them were working.

      
Akbar went on, speaking in leisurely tones: “
After
I pick up this weapon—
after
that, I say—you will, each and all of you, be delighted to serve me, for the rest of your miserable lives. And I intend to see to it that—at least in your case, great wizard, and your case, glorious Master—those lives are very long. But, sadly, it is only now, beforehand, that I can enjoy your anticipation of that prospect.”

* * *

      
Fuming and raging, now standing recklessly on a minute ledge in a position where moments ago he had been clinging with both hands, the Crown Prince would not listen, would not understand.

      
Angrily, with demented determination, he once more ordered the demon to crush Vilkata, and to properly sheathe and deliver the Sword of Glory.

      
“I think not, Master—but no, it no longer amuses me to call you by that title. I am wearying of this game. ‘Fool’ is a much better name for you, I think. I am not, and never was, compelled to take your orders. What is the power of a mere Sword, to
me
?”

      
Murat’s speech was becoming unintelligible.

      
Akbar went on: “The fact is, I do not want to crush the man you call Vilkata just yet. I may well find some better use for him.” And the maiden cast a speculative look in the Dark King’s direction.

      
Vilkata was about to say something, but before he could speak the maiden’s slender hand gestured in his direction.

      
“There. I withdraw my gift of vision. You, my dear Vilkata, shall be blind—for the time being at least. You must be made to understand what the true nature of our partnership is to be.”

      
The Eyeless One clapped hands to his face. Now truly blind, he groped and whimpered helplessly on his slippery roof.

      
“Be of good cheer. If you were to grovel properly in supplication, I might be willing to shorten your period of darkness.”

      
But instead of groveling, Vilkata ceased to whimper. Drawing himself up, he regained and maintained some dignity in the face of this threat.

      
He muttered a few words in a low voice.

      
“Calling for help, great wizard? Feel free to do so. I can repel your—” Akbar’s voice broke off.

      
The Dark King had risked all, diving bodily forward, over empty space, in a blind lunge aimed at the Sword he could no longer see; his right hand and arm, groping, grasping for treasure or for a life-saving grip, made violent contact with the razor-keeness of the Blade. The impact gashed Vilkata, and knocked Skulltwister from its perch.

      
The Sword fell again, once more passing out of everyone’s immediate reach.

      
Vilkata, his gamble lost, clung blindly to the cornice for an instant, with his uninjured hand. Then he fell—but not to his doom. The shape of his newly summoned demon blurred through the air, catching him in mid-tumble.

      
The maidenly human shape of Akbar was leaning over the balustrade, watching the Sword fall, when a bulky man burst into view behind it on the balcony and grappled the demon from behind.