Swords: 10 - The Seventh Book Of Lost Swords - Wayfinder's Story (5 page)

      
“I am aware that you have had your people on the alert, everywhere around the world, or at least across this continent, for years now, for any evidence concerning that Sword. No matter what kind of defences you devise for your vast remaining treasure, Wayfinder can probably find a way to let another bold and clever robber in.”

      
Hyrcanus groaned audibly.

* * *

      
Less than half an hour later the meeting concluded, with Wood and Hyrcanus shaking hands, while their respective aides looked on watchfully. Both leaders pronounced their satisfaction with the agreement they had reached.

      
Outside Blue Temple Headquarters again, their removal having been effected without the use of any mundane door, Wood and Tigris strolled the streets in silence, until they were rejoined by the demon Dactylartha.

      
“Noble masters!” hissed the tiny voice, coming out of the barely visible disturbance in the air. “Was my performance satisfactory?”

      
“At least you will not be punished for it.” Wood spoke abstractedly, his main thought already elsewhere.

      
“Madam Tigris!” Dactylartha pleaded softly. “Did I not do well?”

      
“As our Master has said,” she responded curtly. “Did your old rulers recognize you, do you suppose, Dactylartha?”

      
This terrible creature, she remembered, had once been Blue Temple property, involved in the famous robbery, on which occasion the demon had failed as dismally as all the other layers of defense of the main hoard. That did not mean, of course, that Dactylartha was weak or ineffective. Against any one of the Swords, only failure could generally be expected—unless, of course, one was armed with another Sword.

      
A dangerous being to recruit; Tigris, though her own skills in enchantment were great, was not sure she could have controlled the thing without her Master’s help.

      
Wood, now giving the thing its new orders, curtly dismissed it, and in a moment it was gone.

      
“What are you thinking about, my dear?” the Ancient One inquired. “You look pensive.”

      
“About demons, Master.”

      
“Ah yes—demons. Well, as a rule, one kills them, or has some firm means of control—or is as nice to them as possible. That is about all there is to know on the subject.” And Wood laughed, a hissing sound that might have come from the throat of one of the very creatures he was contemplating.

      
Tigris changed the subject. “Which of the Twelve Swords would you most like to possess, Master?”

      
“Ah. Now that—that—is indeed a question.” The Ancient One mused in silence for a few paces. Then he said to Tigris: “There’s Soulcutter, of course. I certainly wouldn’t want to draw that little toy with my own hands—having heard what has happened to others—the trick of course would be to get someone else to draw it, under the proper circumstances.”

      
“I understand perfectly, my lord.”

      
“Do you? Good. As for the Sword of Wisdom, I confess to you, my dear, that I nourish a certain hope—that on coming into possession of that weapon I will be able to use it to lead me to the Emperor.”

      
Tigris wondered briefly whether she ought to pretend to be surprised. In the end she decided not to do so. She asked, instead: “What Swords does the Emperor have?”

      
“None, that I can determine with any certainty.”

      
Tigris, flattering: “Then of the two greatest magicians in the world, neither now has any Sword.”

      
It was true that her Master, Wood, at the moment had not a single Sword to call his own—while Prince Mark of Tasavalta, gallingly, had no less than four.

      
Tigris was taking great care not to remind her Master directly of this latter fact.

      
He grunted something, for the moment sounding completely human—a mode of existence he did not always appear to favor.

      
“Where to now, Master?”

      
“To a place where I trust we will not be interrupted, Tigris. We have work to do.”

Chapter Three

      
Morning had arrived, and Ben of Purkinje was enduring an enormous headache.

      
He sat up slowly, further tormented by a fierce itching. Particles of the hay in which he had been sleeping had worked their way into his clothing. According to the feeling in his head, the hour ought not to be much past midnight, but the exterior world ruthlessly assured him that a new day had indeed begun. The cavernous interior of the barn in which he had sought shelter was now becoming faintly visible, venerable roughhewn beams and gray wall planks bathed in an illumination that could only be that of dawn. Intermittent crowing noises now issuing from the adjacent barnyard offered confirming evidence.

      
The noises were there, but Ben was reasonably sure that they had not awakened him; they were completely routine, and he had been too deeply asleep to be roused by anything so ordinary.

      
Too deeply asleep indeed. Unconscious, he thought, would be a better word for it. Recalling some of last night’s adventures in the local tavern, he wondered if the second or third girl to sit on his lap might have put something unfriendly in his ale. The first, as Ben recalled, had been almost unconscious herself at the time, and he thought he could exclude her from the list of suspects.

      
He doubted that any of last night’s girls would have played a dirty trick like that on her own accord. Someone would have put her up to it.

      
Ben clenched his eyelids shut again. His memories of last night were somewhat hazed. He went prowling through that fog, in search of his newly-met drinking companions. They had been three or four youngish men, who had had the look of bandits—or, if not bandits, of people who had no higher moral standard than they found absolutely necessary for survival. A couple of them, perhaps not realizing what a formidable opponent they had encountered, had challenged Ben to a drinking contest. Before that had been carried to a conclusion, the tavern girls had taken a notion to sit on his lap, first in sequence, then together … or had that been his own suggestion?

      
…but of course nothing could be done about any of that now. If in fact someone had tried to drug his drink, he had survived the effort. This was morning, and at least it wasn’t raining—he would have heard that on the barn roof. Trouble was, the first subtle indications of this fine spring morning were that things were not going to go well today for Ben of Purkinje, known in recent years as Ben of Sarykam. Right now he feared that his headache might be the least of today’s problems, because certain sounds outside this borrowed barn were like those of no ordinary farmyard in the early morning. These were the noises, he now felt sure, which had awakened him.

      
These ominous mutterings and footfalls evoked for Ben the presence of a number of men, maybe half a dozen or even more, clumsily exchanging low-voiced words with undertones of urgency. Muttering, and then separating, spreading out, moving quickly but quietly as if they meant to get the barn surrounded.

      
That was not at all a reassuring image.

      
Getting off to a bad start as he seemed to be this morning, Ben hoped that no one today was going to call him by any name that mentioned either Purkinje or Sarykam. As soon as anyone did that, he would know that the false identity under which he was currently traveling had been penetrated. Not that he had much hope for the false identity anyway. It had been a resort of desperation, conceived on the spur of the moment several days ago, when other plans had at last gone desperately and completely wrong. A man who weighed close to a hundred and forty kilos, and looked capable—and was—of twisting a riding-beast’s iron shoe into scrap with his bare hands, tended to attract attention. For such a man, ordinary disguises were seldom of much avail.

      
Ben’s worst suspicions were presently nourished by new evidence. If he had been in the least danger of drifting back to sleep—and with a start he realized that he just might have been—that peril was destroyed by a loud call in a hoarse male voice, coming from somewhere not far outside the barn. The words were meant for him. The man outside was threatening to fire the wooden structure if he didn’t immediately come out and surrender.

      
The bass roar was almost instantly repeated: “Ben of Purkinje! We know yer in there!”

      
Despite the besieged man’s huge size, he came up to his feet softly and promptly amid the hay, the wooden floor of the hayloft creaking under the shift of weight. At the same time he took a quick inventory of assets. Through recent misfortunes his personal weaponry, apart from his own mind and body, had been reduced to one middle-sized dagger. Leaving the dagger at his belt, he caught sight of a pitchfork not far away, and swiftly and softly took possession of it.

      
A certain urgency within his bladder next demanded his attention, all the more so with impending combat probable. Relieving himself quietly into the hay, regretting the lack of heroic capacity that might have served to put out a fire, Ben listened for more shouts but for the moment could hear only the throbbing of his aching head.

      
Doing his best to give the situation careful thought, he decided that allowing or encouraging the barn to burn down around him would be a waste of time for all concerned, and a waste of some perhaps innocent farmer’s property as well. Ben had no real idea how many of last night’s companions and their friends might be outside. What sounded like the clumsy muttering of six or eight might instead be a much cleverer attempt by two or three men to suggest greater numbers.

      
Well, he would soon find out how many men were outside, and whether they were bluffing. He would go out and see. But he would do so without announcing his real intention first.

      
Ready for action now, he bellowed a defiant challenge, to the effect that if they wanted him, they were going to have to come in and get him.

      
Then, as quietly as possible, he slid down the ladder from the hayloft to the dirt floor of the barn. And then, pitchfork in hand, he came out fighting.

      
Ben’s youth was behind him, but he could still run faster than anyone would be likely to expect from a man of his size. He went out, moving fast and hard, through a small door in what he would have called the rear of the barn. The suggestion of numbers, he saw with a sinking feeling, had been no bluff. At least five armed men were waiting for him among the manure piles in the back, but at first they recoiled from him and his pitchfork, yelling.

      
The bass voice that had commanded Ben to give up now shouted orders meant for other ears, screaming hoarsely that if they wanted to survive this day themselves, they had better take this fellow alive. These commands and threats were issuing from a squat oaken hogshead of a man, somewhat shorter than Ben himself, but apparently little if any lighter. Not one of last night’s tavern companions. Ben would have remembered this one.

      
Ben now had his back against the barn wall, hemmed in by a semicircle of lesser men, most of them fierce-looking enough to inspire some measure of respect. They kept him at bay, turning this way and that. While feints came at Ben from right and left at the same time, one of them got almost behind him with a clever rope. A moment later Ben’s pitchfork had been lassoed, and a few moments after that several strong hands had fastened on him, and his dagger was plucked from his belt.

      
“We got him, Sarge!”

      
But in the next instant Ben proved to those who grasped his arms and legs that they really hadn’t. Not quite, not yet. He used his arms to crack a pair of heads together with great energy.

      
The blade of a very keen-looking knife, coming up under his throat, stopped this effort.

      
One of the Sarge’s wrists, prodigiously thick and hairy, came into Ben’s field of vision. The enemy leader, striking out at his own knife-wielding man, seemed to have suddenly become Ben’s ally. “
Alive
, I says! He’s the one Blue Temple wants!”

      
That name made Ben redouble his efforts to break loose. It was useless, though. He might have been able to fight off two or three of the ill-clad, ill-equipped bandits at a time, and the remainder of them might have been poorly coordinated or plain cowardly enough to stay at a safe distance. But when the Sarge himself jumped in and grabbed him, using the biggest hands that Ben had ever seen or felt, while two of his more stubborn minions still clung on, Ben no longer had any chance of wrestling free.

      
This time he was down flat on his back. Raising his head as well as he was able, he peered through a drifting haze of dust and barnyard chaff to take a count. There were six or eight of them altogether, and two of them at least, the ones whose heads he’d banged, were just as flat as he was. He hadn’t done so badly at that.

      
Now, though, four or five held Ben more or less in position, and another was commencing operations with a coil of thin rope brought from the barn, tying his wrists skillfully behind his back.

      
Ben, looking at the world through a reddish haze of exhaustion, his chest heaving, his pulse thudding in his ears, had the sudden notion that at forty-two, give or take a year or so, he was definitely getting too old for this kind of thing.

      
Now, Ben’s arms immobilized, a couple of his stronger captors took him by the arms and heaved him to his feet.

      
It seemed there were going to be formal introductions.

      
“Sergeant Brod,” growled the walking hogshead, standing directly in front of Ben, and extending one enormous hand as if Ben ought to be able to snap free of his bonds and shake it. “Better known to some of me own followers as the Sarge. I am the leader of this small but efficient band.”

      
“Pleased to meet you,” said Ben. Squinting at Brod and the men who surrounded him, Ben decided that Brod’s men all appeared to be more or less afraid of him, and with some cause.

      
Brod’s coloring was fair, right now still red-faced from his recent efforts. His features were fairly regular except for a nose that approached the size to qualify as a disfiguring defect.

      
Fancy tattoos adorned the Sarge’s massive shoulders, which bulged out of a sleeveless leather vest. His dirty hair, some indeterminate shade between blond and red, was tied in long pigtails.

      
From inside his vault of a chest, his bass voice rasped out what sounded like an accusation: “You’re Ben of Purkinje.”

      
Ben blew a tickle of straw free of his upper lip. Trying to get his breathing back to normal, he replied as nonchalantly as he could: “You have the wrong man. My name is Charles, and I’m a blacksmith.”

      
The Sarge had a good laugh. He really enjoyed that one.

      
“Aye, and my name’s really Buttercup, and I sell cobwebs for a living!” Fists on hips, he sized up his prisoner’s size and shape, and appeared delighted with what he saw. He clouted Ben a friendly buffet on the shoulder, rocking him on his planted feet.

      
In another minute the little gang was on the march, away from barn and farmyard. Ben, arms bound, marched in the middle of the group. No one bothered to grip his arms now; he wasn’t going to run away. From snatches of conversation between Sergeant Brod and his followers, he gathered that he was being held for delivery to certain representatives of the Blue Temple, who had a standing offer of a great reward for the live body of Ben of Purkinje, or some lesser amount for that body dead. To Ben the proposed transaction sounded all too convincing.

      
That the Blue Temple wanted him was easy to believe. But that those notorious skinflints would consider paying any reward at all was frightening. It showed how badly they craved getting their hands on him.

* * *

      
The little band of freebooters, Ben still with his arms tied in their midst, were angling downhill, approaching the good-sized river which ran only a couple of hundred meters from the barn. On the near bank Ben saw a flatboat tied up. It was a crudely constructed craft, a score of paces long, half that distance wide, fashioned mostly of unpeeled logs.

      
As soon as it became obvious that he was being escorted right to the boat, Ben stumbled. Then he dug in his feet. Or gave the impression of trying to do so.

      
“Where are we going?” he demanded.

      
“Just a little cruise.” Roughly he was pushed along. On being taken aboard the flatboat, the prisoner gave every indication of trying to disguise a deep distrust of water, edging reflexively toward the center of the crude plank deck.

      
One of the gang, watching him with shrewd malice, probing for a weakness, smiling slyly, asked him: “Don’t care for the water?”

      
Ben, a nervous expression on his ugly face, turned to his questioner. “Not much of a swimmer,” he admitted.

      
They were willing to let him sit down approximately amidships. There was a little freight on board as well, a couple of barrow-loads of unidentifiable cargo tied down under a tarpaulin. From where Ben was sitting, he could see one small rowboat, stowed bottom-up on the broad deck. It looked serviceable. He couldn’t see any oars.

      
Ben considered making a serious effort to break his bonds. Having got a look at the old rope before they used it, he thought that doing so would not be completely beyond the bounds of possibility. But any such effort would have to wait until he was unwatched.