The First Book of Lost Swords - Woundhealer's Story (28 page)

      
“It’s all right,” Karel assured him. “All right. But now, now is the time for all of you children to tell us everything else you can remember. I can make it come out all right—I think I can—if you tell me all about it now.”

      
Beth’s ten-year-old brow was creased in a thoughtful frown. “I thought I knew the wizard,” she said, “because I had seen him before.”

      
“Where?”

      
“There’s a book, I think,” she said at last.

* * *

      
The scrolled-up storybook lay on the little bedside table in Adrian’s quiet room. Karel held the book up in his two hands and felt of it and looked at it, not only with his two eyes. It had been much used and read and even chewed on, but the linen was strong and durable, and some of his own arts had been invested in the paints. The colors in the painted pictures were still quite strong and clear.

      
“This is the book?”

      
“Yes sir.”

      
“Show me the picture.”

      
They found it immediately. The friendly, funny wizard, with some storybook name, helped the children in the story through the jolly adventures that befell them. Beth had read this book when she was smaller, and Stephen read it sometimes now, and Adrian had liked very much to be read to out of it.

      
The Princess was staring at the worn scroll. “I thought Adrian took that with him. I thought that the maid packed it. But it was probably here, in the bed or somewhere, and didn’t show up until they’d left.”

      
She took the book from her uncle’s hand and frowned at the pictured wizard. “I’ve seen that costume before, somewhere. I know, the Winter Festival.” And now she stared at Karel.

      
“That’s what I said!” chimed in Beth.

      
Karel gazed at the picture too. Yes, he remembered now. Years had passed since he’d done anything for the children at the Festival, and this imitation wizard hadn’t been a big part of it, even then.

      
He said: “I’m surprised that you remember that, child. I confess that I’d forgotten all about it myself.”

      
And now Karel was on the verge of beginning to understand.

Chapter Twenty

      
Amintor was standing in a tent, trying on his new uniform in front of a mirror. The tent was real enough—or at least he thought it was—but the mirror was certainly not glass, and perhaps it wasn’t there at all. Still, he could see himself as if it were. And the splendid new uniform had magic in it too, for it kept changing colors on him, slowly and subtly. Burslem, it seemed, had not yet made up his mind on the proper livery for his army. Right now the Baron was decked out in a plum-colored turban, trousers and boots of ebon black, and a jacket that kept shimmering between crimson and silver.

      
The uniform looked all right, Amintor supposed, allowing for the chromatic inconsistency, but right now he hardly saw it. His mind was too much absorbed in other matters. The Baron had been forced to put aside, for the time being, the planning and problems involved in attempting to create an army practically from scratch. Burslem was insisting on an immediate advance, and attack in some form, against Tasavalta. They were to march at once, with whatever forces were immediately available.

      
The wizard had promised to explain his change in plans en route. For the time being, Burslem’s three hundred or so armed guards—backed up, of course, by the power of the great worm—were going to have to suffice as an army. It was necessary to move against Tasavalta at once, and Amintor would be told why in good time.

      
The man who had commanded the three hundred guards until Amintor’s arrival, a baby-faced scoundrel named Imamura, was naturally resentful of the Baron, who had appeared as if from nowhere to take over his command. Amintor understood this reaction perfectly, though Imamura did his best to mask it. Accordingly the Baron had done his best to placate his displaced colleague by promising him that he would soon have more people to order about than he had ever dreamt of—and, of course, all the wealth, rank, and privilege that went with such a powerful position as chief of staff of a large army.

      
But now even that problem was going to have to wait. Somehow, for some reason, they were going to have to move against Tasavalta, leaving at once and doing all their planning en route.

      
The urgency of Burslem’s decision had apparently been increased by an unpleasant discovery he had just made and had related tersely to Amintor: A hostage that the wizard had thought he was holding securely, one of the minor Princes of the Tasavaltan house, had somehow escaped or been set free. That in itself did not seem to the Baron a reasonable cause for panic. Obviously more was going on here than he had been told about, a state of affairs that he intended to rectify as soon as possible.

      
Amintor had already put forward the suggestion that if for some reason it was really essential to move at once against the Tasavaltans, the wisest idea would be to try to kidnap Prince Mark and his heir, rather than recapturing the hostage who had somehow got away. (And the mere fact of that reported escape preyed upon the Baron’s mind as well—had he somehow overestimated the quality of the magical power with which he was making such an effort to ally himself?) It was almost certain that Prince Mark, traveling as he was with an escort including a caravan of baggage, had not yet reached home; though probably the invalid child, having benefited from treatment with the Sword of Mercy, was now riding as robustly as anyone else.

      
If both Mark and his offspring could be taken and held for ransom, there would probably be little need to do anything else to bring the proud Tasavaltans into the position of a subject state. It was even possible, thought Amintor, that then, with a little face-saving diplomacy, even the Tasavaltan army might become available for certain tasks.

      
The Baron had already suggested that possibility to Burslem, and it had been moderately well received by the wizard; but in truth Amintor himself had grave doubts about it. He had just received Princess Kristin’s answer to his demand for pearls, and that answer had not been at all encouraging. Possibly the lady was even tougher than the Baron had suspected—or maybe she really wanted to get rid of her husband.

      
He still thought the blackmail scheme had been a worthwhile gamble, but there had been several drawbacks to it from the start, not the least being, as in all extortion, that you had to reveal yourself as an active enemy before you really struck at your victim. And as for the weapon employed, the last line of its verse in the old Song of Swords certainly signaled caution:

Farslayer howls across the world

For thy heart, for thy heart

Who hast wronged me!

Vengeance is his who casts the blade

Yet he will in the end no triumph see
.

      
Other verses of the old song had turned out to have truth in them, all too often for Amintor to feel that the warning in this one could be disregarded. He meant to be very cautious when it came to actually using Farslayer; but he had hoped to profit from the threat.

      
And then, in these matters there was always the nice question of exactly how much to demand from the victim. Amintor, an experienced hand, was convinced that it was at this stage that many blackmailers went wrong. They asked too much, so that the victim elected a desperate defiance rather than cooperation. And he ought not to have underestimated the Princess Kristin. He had carefully calculated—or miscalculated, as it now appeared—his demand for two pearls. Maybe, he could not help thinking now, if he had asked for only one…

      
Behind the Baron, the flap of his tent was rudely, without warning, jerked open from outside. An image of Burslem’s head, swathed in a purple turban, appeared in the magic mirror. “Come!” summoned the wizard’s voice imperiously. “We can delay no longer!”

      
Amintor had thought that he was waiting for Burslem, but he made no argument.

      
“Very well,” he replied, and gave his collar a last tug as if it were indeed his uniform that had been engaging his attention. As he turned away from the mirror he saw from the corner of his eye how it went out, like a blown candle-flame.

      
Squaring his shoulders, he marched out of the tent after Burslem, to where servants ought to be holding their riding-beasts for them. He—

      
He stopped and stared.

      
Forty meters or so ahead of Amintor, the great worm lay quiescent, its mouth closed, eyes half-lidded, enormous chin resting on the ground. A dozen humans, clambering on and around the vast hulk of its body, were attaching what looked like a howdah—a roofed basket big enough to hold five or six people—on the back of what would have been the creature’s neck if it had had a real neck. The howdah was ornamented with rich side hangings, now furled out of the way, and it appeared to be stuffed with pillows. Standing on the ground in front of the legless dragon’s enormous nose, several minor magicians chanted and spun things before its glassy eyes.

      
Two more assistants held a ladder and beckoned to the leaders. Burslem was the first to climb into the basket, an honor that the Baron had no intention of disputing.

* * *

      
The worm, carrying the two partners in the howdah on its back, led the procession toward Tasavalta, with the army of three hundred following, and after that a baggage train. As soon as the march got under way, some of Amintor’s apprehensions about the worm—though not the worst of them—were confirmed. This despite the fact that, in its regular mode of forward travel, the head and what corresponded to the neck were preserved from the most violent of the side-to-side undulations that propelled the legless body forward.

      
The howdah, just behind the head, balanced aloof from almost all the lateral vibration. The mass of the body just beneath it poised nearly motionless, armored belly a meter or two off the ground, for a period of several seconds, long enough for a human to draw a breath; then, accelerating fast enough to jerk a rider’s head back, it shot straight ahead, more or less, for twenty or thirty meters. After the shudderingly sudden stop, there again ensued a nearly motionless balancing as the twisting body behind caught up. The cycle repeated endlessly.

      
The motion, and the sense of the earthshaking power latent in the enormous body underneath him, began to make Amintor giddy almost at once. He could easily picture the walls of castles going down before this battering ram beneath him. As always, Shieldbreaker and Farslayer were both riding at his sides. The chance to use both of them, he was sure, would come in time.

      
Dizziness became transformed into a kind of giddy exaltation. In the silence of his own mind, the Baron cried out:
With wizard, worm, and weapons of the gods, all to do my bidding, who shall stop me?

* * *

      
Exalting, in a way, the motion of the worm might be, but in practical terms such lurching back and forward made it all but impossible for the passengers to conduct any rational discourse. Accordingly, after a quarter of an hour, the partners called a halt and by mutual consent switched to more conventional transport. Climbing down from the basket, attempting to appear nonchalant, Amintor had the distinct sensation that his guts and possibly his brains as well had been churned into a homogeneous jelly.

      
Soon the whole column was under way again, the two leaders now mounted on riding-beasts. The monstrous, legless dragon, still of course under Burslem’s magical control, propelled itself along in the same direction, on a parallel course some hundred meters distant from the mounted humans. The sound made by the dragon’s passage was a continuous, hoarse crashing, a pronounced, slithering roar of displaced rocks and dirt and vegetation.

      
All human attendants were also keeping themselves at a distance from the leaders. Now at last Burslem could broach the subject he had been unable to discuss coherently in the howdah.

      
“It comes down to this, Amintor: we are both of us being tested.”

      
“Ah? How so?”

      
“The failure of your extortionary scheme and the escape of my hostage render it all the more imperative that we succeed in this, our greater effort. It will not be well for us if we do not succeed.”

      
“I eagerly await the details.”

      
“Even as you applied to me for a partnership, so I too applied to one whose power stands above my own.” Burslem was on the verge of adding something to that, but refrained. His manner was uncharacteristically defensive, even worried; then—double failure had affected him even more than Amintor had realized until now. The wizard wiped his forehead nervously. Now it seemed that he had said all that he intended to say.

      
“What do you mean?” the Baron asked with what he considered heroic patience. “You have applied to someone as a partner?”

      
“I mean just what I say.” And the magician looked around again, as if he thought they might be followed by someone or something other than his own small army.

      
This news of another and even more senior partner was startling to the Baron at first. But when he began to think about it, certain matters that previously had puzzled him started to make sense.