The Summer Palace (25 page)

That was impossible. It would take days, days of working out here in the cold and wind. His fingers were already going numb even now; what would happen to them after he spent hours out here?

And what was the rest of the trail like? That narrow path down the cliff face—was it, too, covered in snow? Shivering, Sword turned
westward and began trudging along the northern rim of the canyon to take a look.

An hour later he found himself approaching the edge on his hands and knees, so that the howling wind could not blow him over the precipice. He watched great swirling plumes of snow blow out from the clifftop, like white-speckled spiraling banners a hundred feet long, gleaming in the moonlight, and he knew that if he were to stand too close, he would be swept off the edge as well.

He, however, would not glitter and swoop gracefully in the night air; instead he would tumble down the cliffs to a horrible painful death.

He fell to his belly and crept forward through the snow, so low to the ground that each time he brought up a knee the opposite end of the spear on his back would slap against the snow to the side. Despite this, in time he found himself peering over the top of that final snowbank.

He could not look straight down; there was no way to safely get
that
close to the edge. Instead he was looking along the curve of the cliff face, toward where the trail doubled back on itself two miles south and half a mile down from where he lay.

He blinked snow from his eyes and squinted, trying to interpret what he saw in the colorless moonlight. At first the white and gray and black seemed mere meaningless lines and shapes, but at last he managed to resolve the image into stone, snow, and ice. He found the trail, and followed it with his gaze.

The path was not lost beneath drifting snow, as he had feared; snow had not clung to the sheer cliffs and piled up on the trail. No, it was worse.

It was covered in
ice.

He could see how it would happen; the afternoon sun shining on the snowpack atop the cliffs produced a thin trickle of meltwater, which ran down the cliffs and pooled on the first horizontal surface it struck—which would usually be the trail. And there most of it froze again, building up over time into the thick sloping layer of slick gray ice he now saw shimmering glassily in the moonlight.

The entire route down the cliff was utterly impassable. He could not possibly hope to climb down mile upon mile of ice without sooner or later slipping over the edge and plummeting to a bloody death.

Whether going down to Winterhome to confront the Wizard Lord was a good idea or not no longer mattered. It wasn't possible. He was trapped in the Uplands until that ice melted in the spring thaw.

He was trapped—and he didn't have enough food.

He would just need to eat less, he told himself. He would need to make what he had left last. He would reduce the size of his meals.

Although perhaps that would just be prolonging the inevitable. Might it be better to just get it over with, and die now? Perhaps if he started down the trail, and fell to his death, his ghost would haunt Artil.

But then, he might just as well haunt the Summer Palace.

A thought struck him. If he started down the trail, he would be back in Barokan, and would have his magic again. He would have the superhuman reflexes of the world's greatest swordsman, the gifts of
ler
of muscle and bone and steel. Perhaps he
could
somehow climb down that path.

He looked down the cliff again, and shook his head. No, his magic was not
that
strong. The trail was simply gone, buried beneath the ice, and even the Chosen Swordsman could not run down the face of a sheer cliff for thousands of feet and live.

Shivering, he pushed himself back from the edge, turned around, and began shuffling through the snow; when he was fifty feet from the cliffs he arose, bent against the wind, and started the long, weary walk back to the palace.

He would eat less, he told himself as he slogged through the colorless world of snow and wind and night. He would make his food last, somehow. He would ignore the grumbling of his belly.

He would probably die all the same, he knew that. He would die, and his ghost would haunt the palace. . . .

Or would it? In Barokan the soul of someone who had suffered an untimely and unjust death lingered, and could be felt, but in the Uplands? This land was so different that he could not be sure. He had
never heard any of the Clan of the Golden Spear mention ghosts, and as it happened no one in the clan had died during his stay with them. Perhaps ghosts dissipated in the thin air.

He did not like that thought at all.

And if he died, Artil im Salthir would reign untroubled over Barokan. The spirits of Babble and Azir would linger unavenged and unappeased in the streets of Winterhome, while Lore and Boss rotted in the Wizard Lord's dungeons.

Barokan as a whole might be happy, he knew—all the lesser wizards were gone, dead or in hiding, while the Wizard Lord presided over expanded trade, safer travel, lesser hazards everywhere. Magic was fading away, and that made life more comfortable for most people.

Much as he hated to admit it, Sword thought that might be a good thing. When Artil finally died, the system of Wizard Lords would presumably be at an end forever.

Or would it? What did Artil plan? Perhaps he intended to train a successor and pass on his amulets and talismans.

And while he lived—yes, he was suppressing other magic, and improving everything he could think of, but he was a tyrant, allowing no threat to his rule. He had destroyed the Council, and broken the Chosen; would he really stop there?

Sword shivered as he pressed on through the snow toward the gate he had left standing open. Artil had found and destroyed potential enemies before they actually threatened him; why would he stop? Anyone and everything was a potential enemy, after all; anything might turn against him in time. The Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills had exterminated his own hometown, innocent and guilty alike, rather than take the trouble to sort them out, or risk leaving witnesses alive—once he began killing, it was easier. Why would Artil be any different?

If he turned his attention to Bone Garden, for example, might he simply wipe out the entire community, guilty and innocent alike?

Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps his own better judgment would prevent it—though it hadn't when he went after the Council and the Chosen. If it didn't, well, nothing
else
could stop him.

The Council of Immortals had created the Chosen for good and convincing reasons, Sword thought, and now Artil im Salthir had defeated the Chosen.

He had to be killed.

Sword remembered a conversation he had had with Farash inith Kerra, then Leader of the Chosen, in Winterhome, years ago. They had been arguing about whether the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills had to be removed. Sword and old Seer had pointed out that the man had killed the entire town of Stoneslope, and Farash had argued that there was no reason to think he would ever do anything like that again.

Sword had been horrified at that. He had done it
once;
that was all the evidence they needed that he might do it again and could not be trusted. Sword had been astonished that Farash could even question the necessity.

Later, of course, it had all made sense, when he learned that Farash had secretly been conspiring with the Wizard Lord to betray the Chosen and rule Barokan.

Artil was a different Wizard Lord, a better one; he had done many good things, and had greatly improved the lot of the ordinary people of Barokan. All the same, he had already murdered innocents not once, but twice—first the Council, then the Chosen. The principle was the same as it had been with Galbek Hills.

He had to be killed.

And if Sword did not give his best efforts toward that end, he was no better than Farash had been—than Farash
was,
since Old Boss was now serving as Artil's chief advisor.

If Sword allowed himself to die of cold or hunger, he was betraying the ghosts of Azir and Babble, betraying the imprisoned Lore and Boss. He could not let himself die.

He staggered up to the open gate and caught himself against the frame, gazing in at the ghostly fountains and trellises, gleaming white in the moonlight, their outlines blurred into soft shapelessness by the snow.

He would survive the winter, Sword promised himself. Somehow,
he would live through it—by eating less, by whatever it took. And when first the spring and then the summer came back to the Summer Palace, and the Wizard Lord came back with it, Sword would kill him. He didn't know how he would survive, and he didn't know how he would kill Artil, but he would do it.

He had to.

He did eat less, and within just a handful of days gnawing hunger became a constant distraction. As Sword practiced with his blade he imagined himself carving up
ara,
or hogs, or cattle; as he hacked and scraped in the tunnel he thought about chopping vegetables, or scooping barley. He tried to fill his belly with water, but the melted snow was cold and sat heavily in his gut. As the days slipped away and his supplies dwindled, he began to feel weaker, and his hands were less steady. His vision seemed blurry, and his thoughts, too, lost focus. His teeth hurt, and chewing the jerky became steadily more difficult.

He tried not to think about it. Instead he thought about anything and everything that might distract him from his present situation.

He thought about his mother, back in Mad Oak, and wondered how much of the Wizard Lord's lies about him had reached her, and how much of them she believed. She had tried to talk him out of accepting the role of Swordsman; she had asked him whether he wanted to be a killer.

He had said no, that he wanted to be a hero.

Some hero he was. He had killed a Dark Lord, yes, but not in some epic battle suitable for a ballad; he had simply caught the man off guard and run him through. The whole thing had been over in a second.

And when another Wizard Lord had gone bad, Sword had been unable to stop it. He had been unable to prevent the murder of two of his friends, and the capture of two others. He hadn't killed
that
Dark Lord. Oh, he had killed more than a dozen soldiers
working
for the Dark Lord, but what good did that do anyone? Artil im
Salthir had his magic and his position, and could recruit all the men he needed.

And Sword had sworn to kill Artil despite that.

He had become the killer his mother had feared he would be. Did she know that?

Was she safe, back there in Mad Oak? Were her daughters, Sword's sisters, taking care of her?

How were the townspeople treating her? They all probably believed the Wizard Lord's tales of how the Chosen had rebelled, how they had tried to stop him from improving Barokan. Sword hoped they weren't taking any of that out on a poor old widow.

And Harp, and Fidget, and Spider—what did they think of their brother now? Spider had been so proud that her own brother was one of the Chosen; would it hurt her that the Chosen were now seen as traitors trying to prevent Artil im Salthir from building roads and slaying monsters?

Of course it would hurt her, Sword told himself—but how much? Would she be heartbroken, or just annoyed? Would she believe the lies?

Would Harp still sing the old ballads about the Chosen Heroes? Would her brother's supposed treason have soured her marriage to Smudge the blacksmith? Were their children being teased about their murderous uncle?

At least their father wasn't around to hear anything bad about his only son.

At that thought, Sword's eyes welled with tears.

He had never really wept over his father's death; he had come home from his adventures, from slaying the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills, to find the old man dead and gone. It had been over and done, and Sword's entire world had changed so much that his father's death had been just one more aspect of his new life, to be accepted and lived with, like his new name or the fact that he had killed a man. Grumbler's son had been a youth named Breaker, a common barley farmer given to bouts of daydreaming and brief fits of ill temper; Sword, the world's greatest swordsman, Chosen Defender of
Barokan, slayer of Dark Lords, was someone else, someone who had no father.

But right now, as Sword sat in the cold palace kitchen chewing on a leathery bit of blackened bird-flesh, he wished more than anything else that he could go back to being that ordinary youth, that Grumbler was still alive, that father and son were living peacefully with White Rose in their little house in Mad Oak, a quarter-mile north of the town's pavilion.

Breaker had never been very close to his father; the old man had been ill so much of the time, and even when he was healthy he had never been a very attentive parent. Still, Grumbler had always been there when Breaker was young, always a comforting part of the background.

And now he wasn't.

The Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills was dead and gone, as well, and Sword doubted whether anyone missed
him
very much—he had been an orphan who had wiped out his native village, deliberately killing everyone who had known him before he went off to become a wizard. But everyone knew he had lived and died, and who, now, remembered that Grumbler had ever existed? No one outside of Mad Oak, most likely.