The First Book of Lost Swords - Woundhealer's Story (9 page)

      
They had now reached a roofed portion of her dwelling where there was simple furniture. Here the lady gestured her caller to a plain wooden seat.

      
“I know what I look like,” said the former Queen, seating herself across from him, and in her voice he could hear for the first time a hint of the old fire and iron. “Hold Soulcutter in
your
hands throughout a battle, man, and see what you look like at the end of it. If it were not for Woundhealer, of course, I’d not be here now to talk about the experience … I suppose you’ve got that one in your possession now; Woundhealer I mean. I thought I heard some clash of arms out there. Well, I could have told them that they’d need more guards. A child could have told them they’d not be able to keep such a treasure here without defending it. But they’re impractical, as always. Never mind, tell me of yourself. That’s not Woundhealer at your side, is it—? No, it couldn’t be. What is this one that you have, then?”

      
Her visitor had been waiting for an opportunity to reply.

      
When he was sure that his chance had at last arrived, he said: “My lady, you amaze me as always. How d’you know it’s not the Sword of Mercy that I wear here? You’ve not touched it, and I wear the symbol on the hilt turned in.”

      
“Amintor, Amintor.” She shook her head a little, as if to rebuke him for his slowness. “The Sword you wear at your side is the one you’re going to grab when danger threatens. No fear of your relying upon the Sword of Love for that-—you’ll want to make some wounds, not heal ’em. What then? It can’t be Shieldbreaker, not unless your fortunes have risen higher than the rest of your outfit indicates.”

      
Amintor smiled. His hand brought the bright metal a few more centimeters out of its scabbard and turned it to give the lady a better look at the black hilt. Now she could see the concentric circles making up a small white target.

      
“It’s only Farslayer, my lady. Nothing for you to wince at when I start to draw it in your presence.”

      
“
Only
Farslayer? And I may be your lady, but I’m Queen no longer; now I can wince whenever the need arises. I’m afraid that any of the Twelve would be likely to make me do so now.”

      
“Even…?” Her visitor inclined his head slightly, in the direction of his own waiting troops. There was some laughter out there; apparently they were being fed and somehow entertained.

      
“Oh, the one you’ve just appropriated has kept me alive when otherwise I would have died. But I’ve had all the help from it now that it can give me. And I won’t be sorry to see it go, for it reminds me of all the rest. But never mind all that. While we have a little time here, tell me all that you’ve been doing. Gods and demons, Amintor, listen to the way I’m babbling on. Seeing you again awakens in me a craving that I had thought was dead. A craving for information, I mean, of course.” There was the hint of a twinkle in the lady’s eye. “Now that you’re here, and no one seems to be pursuing you, sit with me for a while and talk. If one of the servants ever dares to stick her head in here, I might even be able to offer you a drink.”

      
Amintor smiled, gestured to show that he was at her disposal, and settled himself a little more solidly in his seat.

      
The lady demanded: “First tell me what happened to you on the day of that last battle.”

      
His smile broadened. “Well, to begin with, I was locked up in a closet.”

* * *

      
That closet had made him a dark and well-built prison, on the ground floor of the House of Courtenay, within the city of Tashigang. By the time Amintor was thrust into it and the door barred shut on him, the fighting had already broken out inside the city and was getting close to the house. Something even worse impended also—the wrath of Vulcan, more terrible than any simple human warfare. Or so it was considered at the time.

      
After Amintor had spent some time in a useless trial of his fingers’ strength upon the hinges of the closet door, he found himself unable to do anything better than curl up in a corner and try to protect his head from falling bricks. The level of the noise outside his prison was now such that he fully expected the walls to start coming down around him at any moment. The battle had definitely arrived in the vicinity of the house, and the building appeared to stand in some danger of actually being knocked down.

      
Still, there were some voices out there that occasionally were able to make themselves heard above the tumult. There was one in particular whose roaring the Baron thought could only be that of an angry god. Then, just when it seemed that the din could be no worse, it somehow managed to redouble. Only when part of one of the closet walls actually came down in a thundering brick curtain was Amintor able to do anything to help himself.

      
When that opportunity arrived at last, he did not waste it. In an instant the Baron had scrambled his bulky body out over the pile of fallen masonry now filling the space where the lower part of the wall had been. Gasping and choking in a fog of dust, he caught dim glimpses of a scene of havoc.

      
What he had last seen as two rooms on the ground floor of the House of Courtenay had been violently remodeled into one. In this large space there were now a mob of people scuffling, men and women together surrounding the figure of a giant and trying to bear it down. The plain physical dimensions of that central figure, which struggled to maintain its feet, and laid about it with a Sword in its right hand, were little if at all beyond the human scale. But there was something about it all the same that made Amintor at once accept it as gigantic, more than human.

      
That fact was accepted by the Baron, but it was not of much immediate concern to him. What concerned him first was his own survival. In that first moment of his freedom from the closet the immediate danger that he faced was the mass of staggering, tumbling, rolling bodies, coming his way and threatening to bury him again.

      
Despite that immediate threat, Amintor’s eyes in the next instant became focused upon the Sword in the giant’s hand. That Sword, generating from within itself a sound of thudding like a hammer, went blurring about with superhuman speed and power, smashing furniture and knocking down sections of the remaining walls whenever it touched them. But it did no harm to the bodies of the unarmed folk who found themselves in its path.

      
Unless Amintor’s eyes were lying to him, that blade passed through their bodies as through shadows, leaving them unharmed.

      
But when one man came running with a mace to join the wrestling fight against the god, Shieldbreaker turned in its arc with a thud, shattered his weapon into fragments, and in the same stroke clove him gorily in half.

      
Only later did the Baron have the time to puzzle out some meaning from all this. At the moment he could only do his best to get himself out of the fighters’ way. Doing so was far from easy. He was in a corner with only the ruined closet behind him, and it appeared that he was trapped.

      
He dodged as best he could.

      
Just when the crush of struggling bodies was at its nearest to Amintor, threatening to pin him against the wall, he saw at the giant’s waist a sword belt that carried two sheaths. One of them was occupied, and momentarily the black hilt that sprouted from it was almost at the Baron’s hand.

      
Again he did not hesitate. The tempting second Sword came out of its scabbard into his grip. It was still in his hand as he made his dodging, running, cowering, crawling escape from the building. He came out of the place through what had been the back door but was only a jaggedly enlarged doorway now, from which fragments depended on wrecked hinges. Evidently the fighting had indeed been fierce in and around the building even before that little mob of mad folk, whoever they were, had decided that they were going to wrestle a god. The fallen were everywhere, in the street and on the floor, most of them uniformed in the blue and gold livery that meant Blue Temple guardsmen.

      
Outside, a large quantity of smoke hung in the air, and Amintor could see that the house he had just got out of, though built mostly of bricks and stone, was trying to burn down.

      
The other buildings nearby were largely intact, but still there were signs of war down every street. Nearby, the Corgo flowed stained with blood, and rich with debris, including bodies. The whole city of Tashigang was reeling under the combined assaults of human armies and of gods.

      
While Amintor was still inside the house, the thought had briefly crossed his mind that he might try out his newly acquired weapon in the melee there, against one side or the other. But the Baron had rejected that notion as soon as it occurred to him. None of the humans in that house were likely to be his friends, whether he helped them now or not; and a god’s gratitude for any kind of help was certain to be chancy at best. He did pause, now that he was outside, and look at his Sword’s hilt, anxious to learn which weapon he had siezed.

      
Farslayer itself! He almost dropped the weapon when he saw the small white target on the hilt. Instead he looked around him quickly to see if he was being pursued, and ran on when he saw that he was not. Right now, he thought, Sightblinder would have been a luckier acquisition, almost certain to mean a safe passage out of all this. He was uncertain of the exact limits on the powers of the Sword of Vengeance, and not at all anxious to have to try them out in open combat. As matters stood, the only playable move for him right now was a quick retreat, a maneuver which Amintor proceeded to carry out with as much dispatch as possible.

      
Fortunately for himself, the only folk he encountered directly in the streets of Tashigang were refugees, even more frightened and certainly more disorganized than he. They all gave a wide berth to the great bare blade that he was carrying, whether any of them recognized its magical potential or not.

      
At each intersection that he came to, the Baron paused, and he looked carefully down each street before he crossed it. He avoided anything that looked like the colors of any army, and anything that even suggested the live presence of organized troops.

      
Now and then the Baron would pause in his course to squint up at the sun. Frequently it was obscured by one column of smoke or another, but he could estimate the time. Many hours would have to pass before darkness came to help him make his way out of the city. It was now no later than mid-afternoon, and the dust and smoke of the city’s suffering still hung over everything in an evil fog.

      
The walls that completely surrounded the city were everywhere too high, and the gates too few, to encourage casual passage at the best of times. These times were not the best. The Baron’s first objective was the Hermes Gate, but when he came in sight of its inner doors he could see that they were still closed and defended.

      
Breaking his way into a tall building through a poorly barricaded rear window, he went up many stairs. Looking down from the high rooftop, he thought he could see soldiers of an assaulting army massing on the road just outside the gate, with reinforcements coming up. He was going to have to find another exit.

      
Back in the street again, Amintor chose a route that roughly followed the curving course of the great, ancient walls, that went uphill and down like the Great Worm Yilgarn. He was looking for a way out, but discovered none until he had come back to the river, the same broad stream that flowed beside the House of Courtenay.

      
Even after all he had already seen today, the Baron was astonished by what he now beheld. One of the huge watergates guarding the approaches to the city by river had been torn down. Very little was left of its gigantic frame of magically rust-proofed iron and steel. Later the Baron was to learn that the gate had been wrenched from its granite sockets by the hands of Vulcan himself, before the Sword of Force had had the chance to work its strange weakening doom upon him.

      
Amintor was on the point of committing himself to the river as a swimmer when he was presented with what he perceived as yet another opportunity to better his condition; he seized this one as quickly as he had the other two. This one appeared in the form of a tall, fat pilgrim wearing the white robes of Ardneh, who came wandering through the streets toward the docks and declaiming against the horrors of war around him.

      
With Farslayer’s long blade in hand, Amintor had little trouble in getting the man’s attention and urging him into an alley. There, away from any likely interference, the man was persuaded to divest himself of his fine white robes before they should become stained with blood; such stains would have detracted from the pilgrim image that Amintor wanted to present. As matters turned out, no bloodstains anywhere were necessary—once stripped of his dignity, the pilgrim sat down in a corner of the alley and wept quietly.

      
Trying on the white robes over his regular garments, the Baron confirmed to his satisfaction that they were long enough to let a man carry a long Sword under them almost inconspicuously.

      
Now, to the river again. After the earlier evacuation, and this much fighting, there were no boats available at any cost, in money or in blood. Wrapping up his newly acquired Sword in his newly acquired robes, Amintor floated the resulting bundle in front of him upon a sizable chunk of wood. In this mode he plunged in and went splashing strongly upstream through the open gateway and was not killed, though for some reason someone’s soldiers who were now manning the flanking defensive towers decided to use his bobbing head for target practice with their slings. Fortunately for him, they were still out of practice when he was out of range.