The First Book of Lost Swords - Woundhealer's Story (8 page)

      
And then he found one of her garments. The girl must have discarded it when she plunged into the water. But, when Zoltan came up to it and took hold of the fabric, it turned into brown moss in his fingers. Moss, grown long and tinged with gray, as if it had been growing here upon this log and rock for years. But though the cloth was no more than moss when he touched it, and seemed to be fastened in place, Zoltan could not be fooled.

      
The trouble, he decided, was that he simply wasn’t moving fast enough to catch her.

      
Having reached this conclusion, he began to leap and run. All went well for a little while. Then halfway through a steep descent he slipped, stepping on a slippery, angled rock, and fell, striking his chest on another flat rock with a thud that sent a shock of pain all through his rib cage. The breath was knocked clean out of him before he splashed into the next pool down. If the pool had been much larger he might have drowned. As it was, the rushing water deposited him like driftwood upon a narrow fringe of beach.

      
It seemed like a long time to Zoltan, lying in the grit and mud, before he could be sure that the pain in his ribs was going to let him breathe again.

      
Now something really strange was happening. Where was all the light?

      
Then he realized that the sun was going down. In fact it had gone down already. What light there was came from the full moon rising over the highlands, from which he had spent all day traveling.

      
Some animal off in the distance howled. It was an unfamiliar sound, as if Zoltan might already have reached some part of the world that was completely strange to him.

      
Groaning, he dragged himself up into a sitting position and decided that, after all, he was probably going to be able to go on breathing. Even though pain shot through his chest every time he drew in air.

      
It was, of course, impossible for him to get lost here—all he had to do was to follow the stream back up into the hills. Not that he was ready yet to turn back. He would rest here for a little while, and then he would go on. She couldn’t be far away.

* * *

      
Something made Zoltan turn his head. There, illuminated by the last sunlight of the western sky and the rising moon high in the east, he saw the top of the girl’s head, no more than ten meters away. Her gray eyes, fixed on Zoltan steadily, were looking over the top of a pile of brushwood. Another white spot, at a little distance, might be the top of one of her shoulders. He was much closer to her now than she had ever allowed him to get before.

      
The last light of day was dying quickly, and for the first time Zoltan began to be afraid.

      
He thought the gray eyes laughed and beckoned, but still the girl moved away from him, going somewhere farther beyond the brush pile, and disappeared.

      
He had to go after her. It was simply that he had no choice. Zoltan managed to stand up and follow her. Not only his ribs but his leg hurt, as he discovered when he tried to walk. He went on, with great effort and some pain.

      
After only a little distance, on an easy slope, he came to a larger pool than any he had encountered yet.

      
On a flat rock just at the side of the pool he saw her eyes again, and the black hair. But that object ought not to be her body. The shape of it was wrong, completely wrong. It altered further as he looked at it, the bones and skin alike becoming something different. And then Zoltan saw her scaly length, her flicking tail, go writhing across the rock, plunging down into the riverbank slime beyond.

      
But there were still eyes—other eyes—looking at Zoltan, from another direction.

      
He turned, raising his own gaze to meet them.

      
The dark, winged shape, almost man-sized, perched amid shadows on a high ledge of rock. It looked as much like an illusion as the girl had looked like reality. But the eyes that looked down at him from the winged shape did not change. Gradually, heartbeat by heartbeat, he came to believe that they were very real.

Chapter Seven

      
The full moon that Zoltan saw above the hills had waned to dark and waxed to full again when a column of about twenty riders approached within a few kilometers of the White Temple of Sibi.

At midday, a mounted scout, the first member of the advancing party to actually come within sight of the Temple and its compound, hurriedly surveyed the scene from a slight elevation nearby, then wheeled his riding-beast and sped away to make his report.

      
Less than an hour had passed before the scout was back, and the column with him. Halting atop a small hill that gave them a slightly better vantage point than that of the first reconnaissance, they looked over the situation more thoroughly.

      
At the head of the force as it arrived there rode a bulky, middle-aged man at whose belt hung a Sword, the symbol on the black hilt turned inward toward his body so that it could not be easily seen. Besides the Sword itself, appearances suggested nothing very remarkable about its owner. He was outfitted more like a bandit chieftain than an officer of cavalry, and indeed the clothing worn by his followers was very far from uniform. The men in the group—and the few women who were among them—made up an ill-assorted but well-armed gang, with no sign of any livery or colors, though pieces of the uniforms of several different armies could be distinguished among their garments.

      
At the leader’s right hand rode a woman dressed chiefly in animal skins, and whose face and body were painted in ways that suggested she must be some kind of a minor enchantress. That she was not a magician of overwhelming skill could be deduced from the obvious way that her youth-spells struggled with the years to preserve her own appearance.

      
From their hilltop these leaders looked out over a dozen buildings and an extensive compound, mostly garden, all centered on the white stone pyramid, at least ten stories tall, that was the Temple itself.

      
The enchantress was the first to speak. “The Sword, if it is there, is lightly guarded.”

      
The bulky man beside her turned his head. “Are you sure? Do your powers tell you that?” His voice was skeptical.

      
“My eyes tell me. I cannot be sure.”

      
“Then use your powers,” the man grumbled, “if you really have any. And make sure. As for eyes, I have two good ones of my own.”

      
“I have powers,” she flared, “and one day I’ll make sure that you respect them.”

      
He only grumbled again. Even that answer sounded as if it were merely as a matter of form. His attention had already moved back to the Temple, and the woman’s threat, if it had really been that, was disregarded totally.

      
The enchantress dismounted and got to work. From a bag she carried she extracted fine powders of various colors and blew them into the air in different directions, a pinch at a time, from her hardened and somewhat dirty palm. The men around watched curiously, but for a time no one had anything to say.

      
Presently the woman was able to promise the bulky man—who waited expressionlessly for her report—that the magical protection of the treasure he had come here to get would be trivial at best; she would be able to set it aside easily. “That last prisoner we sacrificed,” she assured him, “was a great help.”

      
The man beside her nodded calmly. He had really not expected much in the way of magical tricks and traps from the White Temple; nor much in the way of armed force, either. His only real worry on his way here to take the treasure had been that someone else might have beaten him to it.

      
Now he motioned to his other followers and raised his voice enough to be sure that they all heard him. “We’ll ride in, then. We will take what we want, but no more than that. And let there be no unnecessary killing or destruction.”

      
Hard-bitten lot that the troopers were, they received that last order without protest. Indeed, there came in response a murmur or two that sounded like approval. There were many people who considered any move against the White Temple to be unlucky. Those who still believed in gods—and what bandit did not, at least on occasion?—were vastly reluctant to risk making enemies of Draffut and of Ardneh.

      
The Temple people inside the compound, and those few who were outside near the front gate, noticed the approach of the bandits when the riders were still some distance off, but their entrance was unopposed. The two White Guards at the entrance retreated rapidly, not bothering to try to shut the gates.

      
Extending from just outside those gates into the foot of the pyramid itself, there stretched a line of people who had come here hoping to be healed—the sick and injured, some of them accompanied by their attendants.

      
With the last admonition of their leader still in mind, the intruders cut through this line almost courteously, giving the lame and the halt time to scramble out of their way. The bandit column halted just inside the compound walls, where, at the sharp orders of their leader, its members dismounted and were rapidly deployed, some to guard their rear, a few to hold the animals. Most of them moved on foot against the pyramid.

      
The pyramid had one chief doorway, at ground level. Half of the small handful of White Guards who were now assembled in front of that doorway decided at once to take to their heels. The other half were not so wise, and the attackers’ weapons, already drawn, had to be used. Blood spilled on the white pavement and on the chalky stones of the pyramid itself.

      
The bandit leader and others went into the Temple, and shortly afterward another Sword was brought out of the small interior room where it had been enshrined. When the bandit leader had satisfied himself that the object he had just acquired was indeed the genuine one he had been expecting, he left it in the hands of his chief lieutenant—in the case of this particular Sword he was willing to do that—and turned his attention elsewhere.

      
The Sword that had been at the leader’s side when he arrived at the Temple had come out of its sheath, briefly, while the fight was on, though there had been no need for him to use it. Now it was again sheathed firmly at his side; this was one blade that he was not about to hand over to anyone else.

      
The leader looked about him now. “You, there!” he shouted, and gestured imperiously.

      
An ashen-faced, white-robed priest came forward, trembling, to learn what the next demands of this robber and murderer might be.

      
“Bring out some food and drink for my people here. Enough to make them happy. And there’s someone I’d like to see. I’ve been told that she lives here now.”

* * *

      
Eight years had now passed since anyone had called her Queen, and when she heard that title spoken by one of the servants chattering and whispering in fear and excitement outside her bower, it required no very quick thinking on her part to suppose that she had at last been overtaken by someone or something from those old times.

      
Listening to the voices more carefully now, she soon recognized a familiar, careless booming that broke in among the others. No need to guess any further. She could tell that the tones of the familiar voice, even as loud as they were, were intended to be soothing; he already had what he wanted, obviously, and he was trying now to set these harmless white-robed folk at ease. Panic, she had heard him declare many times, was always undesirable, unless you wanted to make things unpredictable.

      
Now the familiar voice outside said: “Tell Queen Yambu that Baron Amintor would speak with her.”

      
The woman who had been listening from behind a leafy screen arose and went to the entrance of her bower, so that her caller might be able to see her for himself.

      
“Amintor,” she called out softly. “I had heard that you were still alive.”

      
He turned toward her in the open sunlight, showing her a face and body changed by the eight years, though not nearly so much, she knew, as she herself was changed. He bowed to her, not deeply but still seriously, she thought.

      
He said: “And I had thought, my lady, that you were dead. Only quite recently did I learn that you were really here.”

      
“And so you have come here to see me. Well, you will find me altered from the Queen you knew.”

      
“Aye, to see you. And I had one other reason for wanting to come here, which I thought it better to make sure of first. Now we can visit at our leisure. But you look well.”

      
“Always gallant, Amintor. Come in.”

      
Amintor followed the lady among her trellises into what was more a garden than a house, but even so, apparently her dwelling. Cultivated insects hummed musically among some flowers. In the silence of his own mind the Baron was thinking that she looked about sixty years old now, or fifty-five at the very least, although he knew that in fact she could hardly be much more than forty. Her hair had turned from raven black to silver since he had seen her last, and her face bore deep lines that he had never seen before. Her step was firm enough as she moved ahead of him, but without energy. Her body was still straight and tall, but he could tell little more than that about it because of the loose gray clothing that she wore. That, too, was a considerable change.