The Misenchanted Sword

CHAPTER 22

Valder gazed at the room with calm satisfaction. It was almost exactly as he had pictured it four months earlier, when he had first staked his claim to the land at the fork. The windows were shuttered, since he had not yet been able to buy glass for them, and the furniture was mostly mismatched and jury-rigged, the tables built of scrap and the chairs upholstered in war surplus tent canvas, but the wide stone hearth, the stone chimney, oaken mantel, and the white plastered walls were all just as he had wanted them. A fire blazed on the hearth, keeping out the autumn chill, and a dozen lamps lighted the room.

In the rest of the inn, every room, upstairs or down, was taken for the night, and no one had complained of the accommodations or the fare at supper — even though the only wine he had been able to get was truly horrible, and as yet he had no ale at all. The most popular beverage was river-water filtered through five layers of canvas, surely an unheard of situation in any roadside inn!

He wondered whether he should sink a well. The river water seemed safe enough so far and did not taste bad at all, either before or after filtering, but he did not entirely trust it. There were just too many people upstream who might be pouring garbage, sewage, or poisons into it.

Getting ale and decent wine was more important, of course. He had appointed half a dozen of his erstwhile construction crew as agents and sent them out looking, in various directions, for suppliers. One was permanently posted in Azrad’s Ethshar at no pay, but with a promise of three pieces of gold if he found a reliable supplier — a sizable sum now that prices had come back down to more reasonable levels, though they were still higher than in wartime. The other five had been given expense money and scattered across the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, as the name now seemed to be, and the Small Kingdoms.

Valder’s original supply of money had given out long ago, since he had paid generously at first in the interest of speed; but even before his inn had a roof, customers had been at his door, eager to pay for a night’s shelter. He foresaw no difficulty in earning a living and paying for any improvements he might care to make. Of course, the original flood of traffic had not lasted. Within a month of the war’s end, the southbound flow into Azrad’s Ethshar had thinned to a trickle. By then, however, the northbound exodus was in full flood, as the new arrivals finally convinced themselves that the city was not the golden land of limitless opportunity.

That, too, had passed, and Valder had had a bad six-night or two when business slowed drastically. He had used it as an excuse to cut his bloated, overpaid crew in half, and then in half again. Initially, he had wanted as many men as he could find work for, since speed in construction was more important than economy, and hauling stone from the riverbed took plenty of manpower. Once the walls and roof were in place, however, speed was no longer essential, as most customers asked no more than to get in out of the rain and the cool night air. His sixty-man crew, lured by the prospect of a copper piece a day, free water, and whatever food he could find for them, was an unwanted expense.

He had been glad to be rid of most of them. A man did not require much in the way of character or intelligence to drag rocks from the riverbed to the building site and drop them in place, so he had just taken anyone who volunteered when he shouted out his offer. The interior work, furniture, and finishing, however, called for more skill, skill that most of the men did not have and could not learn quickly.

He had kept a crew of fifteen, even when that meant paying out more than he took in — he had refused to give in to temptation and had set his charges to his customers roughly at wartime levels, rather than the absurd rates that had been asked in Azrad’s Ethshar during the great confusion. He had been convinced that traffic would increase again and that the completion of the inn would prove worthwhile. He had been right. Refugees and wandering veterans were no longer arriving in any significant numbers, though a few still drifted in every so often, but merchants and tradesmen had begun to appear, bringing supplies into the city or skills and goods out. He had bought the foul stuff that passed for wine from one such commercial traveler, and the surplus-canvas had come from an enterprising young ex-sergeant who had bought up hundreds of old tents cheap when the border camps were disbanded.

After the merchants had come the farmers bound for market and the would-be farmers searching for land. As yet, the farmers were few and their produce unimpressive, and the would-be farmers were invariably poverty-stricken, but Valder was sure that within a year that would change dramatically. The war had not ended until well after planting season, after all, so that crops had not been planted on schedule.

Now his income once again exceeded his expenses, though not by as much as he might have liked. He had cut his payroll once again by dispatching his six agents. Of the nine men who remained, seven were making other plans. One had taken a fancy to the river and was waiting for a berth on a barge. Another was saving his pay and working odd jobs for guests with plans to become a brewer, which pleased Valder quite well, as that might assure him of a supplier. The other five were still vague, but three had been foresighted enough to stake out claims on land in the vicinity while the opportunities were still there, and all were among the cleverer and more skilled of his original group; Valder had no doubt they would find suitable work when the inn was finished.

One of the two men planning to remain was Tandellin. Valder had been utterly astonished to find his old friend among the mob in the Hundred-Foot Field, and delighted as well, and had wasted no time in signing him on with the other volunteers. Sarai had been with him, and, although she was too small to be of any real help in hauling stone, she had helped out considerably on lighter jobs. She had been the only woman on the site, and some of the other men had grumbled mildly about her presence and exclusive attachment to Tandellin, but there had been no serious problems involved.

Only after three days of work had the couple been willing to admit that they had followed Valder, taking the next ship after his, rather than turning up in Azrad’s Ethshar by sheer coincidence. Tandellin would give no reason, but Sarai explained, “You always seemed to know what you were doing, and nobody else did. The moment you had your pay, you were gone, as if you actually knew where you were going to go and what you were going to do. We had been sitting around for three days arguing, without coming up with a single idea we could agree on, until you left — then we agreed to come see what you were doing, and here we are.” She shivered. “Things looked pretty bad there in the city, when we lost track of you.”

It came as a surprise to Valder that he had seemed to know what he was doing, as he certainly had not thought he did, but when he said as much, Sarai simply pointed out that everything had worked out well enough.

Valder had to agree with that.

Tandellin and Sarai were not the only ones to follow Valder’s lead. His inn acted as a spark or a seed; once he had claimed his piece of land, others took to the idea, and farmhouses were abuilding all along the highway between the bridge and the city. Customers told him that other inns were springing up, as well, further up the road.

He was pleased by that, particularly by the proliferation of farmers determined to plow under the grassland. He had gotten by at first by hunting small game and fishing, or by buying what others caught, but his supplies were always low. Some food came down the highway or the river, mostly fruit from the orchards around Sardiron of the Waters, in what had been the southwestern part of the Northern Empire, and Valder bought what he could afford of that to augment his catches. He suspected that people were starving in Azrad’s Ethshar, though he knew supplies were reaching the city by ship. If farms were in production all along the highway and throughout the countryside, that would change.

For the present, he was getting by, and the future looked bright, with the inn built and paying customers in every chamber. He was well pleased as he looked about the dining room. Wirikidor hung above the fireplace on pegs driven into the stone; he smiled at it. He had no intention of ever drawing it again, and looking at it now only reminded him of the unpleasantness he had left behind and how lucky he was to be free of it and doing well. He had never thought he would be fortunate enough to outlive the war, but here he was, alive and thriving, and the Northern Empire was no more than a memory. The sword’s enchantment might complicate his life eventually, with its supposed grant of immortality but not freedom from harm, but that was far from urgent. He enjoyed being an innkeeper, able to hear the news of the world from his guests without leaving home.

A knock sounded, though everyone else in the inn had retired. Valder turned and hurried to the door, hoping that, late as the hour was, the new arrival would be someone selling something he could use. He would settle for a customer willing to sleep on the dining room floor, though.

Two men stood on the threshold, wearing the tattered remnants of Ethsharitic uniforms, huddled together against the cold wind. As yet, no snow had fallen this year, and the locals assured him that often years would pass without a single flake in this region, but winter was assuredly coming and the winds were cold, even this far south.

“Come in!” Valder said, trying to conceal his disappointment. Ragged as they were, these two were not likely to be selling anything, nor to have enough money to be worthwhile as customers. Still, an innkeeper had obligations; everyone must be made welcome.

The two entered. One made directly for the fire on the hearth, but the other hesitated, staring at his host.

Disconcerted, Valder stared back. Something was very familiar about the man. Undoubtedly they had met somewhere before, but Valder could not place where.

“I know you,” the man said.

“Valder the Innkeeper, at your service,” Valder replied. “Welcome to the Inn at the Bridge.” He saw no reason to deny his identity if the man did know him; but on the other hand, he was not in the mood for reminiscing about good old days that had, for him at any rate, been relatively miserable. Calling himself an innkeeper made clear that he lived in the present, not a nostalgic, glorious past such as many veterans seemed to prefer.

Of course, peace appeared to have treated this pair far worse than the war had; they were thin and hungry, and their clothes had obviously been lived in for months, probably months without shelter.

“Valder?” The man stared at him. “You mean Valder of Kardoret?”

“That was I,” Valder admitted.

“The man who killed a shatra in single combat?”

Startled, Valder asked, “How do you know about that?”

“I was with the party that found you standing over the corpse. Gods, that was a weird thing! That body had all this strange black stuff in it — I’ll never forget it. When we burned it, it stank like nothing I have ever smelled. And it was you! It was! You look different now, without the uniform, and you’ve put on a little weight, I think, but it’s you.”

“Yes, it is,” Valder agreed.

“And you’re an innkeeper now? Valder of the Magic Sword, an innkeeper?”

“Better than starving, isn’t it? The war is over — not much call for magic swords anymore.” He smiled.

The other grimaced. “Anything is better than starving, I’d say. I’ve had a little more experience of it than I like. Still, a man like you — you weren’t any common soldier, you could have made your way in the world.”

“I am making my way in the world. I own this inn and the landing on the river, don’t I?”

“Oh, but you could have been rich! A man who could kill a demon, you could have done almost anything!”

“It was the magic sword that killed the shatra, not me; I’m happy here.”

The man shrugged. “If you say so,” he said.

“I say so. Now, what can I get you? Supper was over hours ago, and there isn’t any ale, but I can find some cold food, if you like, and we have wine and good clean water.”

The man looked embarrassed. He called out to his companion, “Hey, Tesra! Have you got any money?”

Valder sighed inwardly. These two were obviously not going to make him rich.

Tesra produced five copper bits, and after a little dickering Valder conceded that that was a fair price for staying the night on the floor by the hearth with a meal of scraps and water. When that was settled and the two tattered veterans were gnawing on pigeon bones — rabbits had become quite scarce, due to extensive hunting, but pigeons made a decent pie — Valder asked, “Where are you headed? You must have been on the road quite some time.”

Tesra looked up at him. “We thought we’d try our luck in Azrad’s Ethshar; it’s been no good anywhere else. We’ve been on the road since the war ended, been up to Sardiron of the Waters and on through the Passes, and then came down the Great River from there.”

Valder felt a twinge of guilt. “Was that five bits your last money? Ethshar’s expensive these days, and, from what I hear, there isn’t much work.”

“Oh, we’ll get by,” said Selmer, the man who had recognized Valder. “We’re not picky.”

Valder shrugged. He had made his gesture, given his warning; if the two of them chose not to heed it, that was not his problem. Rather than continuing with the subject, he asked about Sardiron. He had heard of the town, captured almost intact from the Northern Empire when it fell, but he knew little about it.

He talked with the pair until almost dawn. Tesra fell asleep, utterly exhausted, while the conversation continued, but Selmer lasted several hours before his eyelids, too, drooped. Finally Valder rose and left the two of them asleep on the floor. He left a brief note for Parl, the man who was to handle morning business, saying the two had paid in advance for the night but not for breakfast, and then retired. When he awoke, the sun was high in the eastern sky, and the two veterans were gone. Parl reported that they had left an hour or so earlier, hoping to reach the city by nightfall.

Valder knew they would not manage it; one had to leave the inn within an hour after dawn to reach Ethshar before dark, traveling on foot. He wished them well and forgot about them.

At least, he forgot about them for a sixnight or so.

Supper was being dished out, a thick chowder and stale bread being all that Valder had on hand, when a late arrival knocked. Valder happened to be free, so he answered the door himself, admitting a party of four. First in the door was a young woman in flamboyant red velvet trimmed with white fur; behind her came two huge men wearing what looked like military uniforms, but in a pattern and color Valder had never seen before. Last came another woman, this one short and plump and wearing blue satin.

“Welcome, all!” Valder said. “Supper is just being served, if you would care to join us. The meal is a copper each with water, or a silver bit with wine. I’m afraid we have no ale or strong spirits.”

“We did not come here to eat,” the woman in red announced.

“A room, then? We have a few still available, two coppers the night.”

“We are looking for someone.”

Valder noticed that the woman spoke with a peculiar accent. He had taken it to be nervousness at first, but now thought she might be from somewhere where the language was spoken differently. He had noticed a slight difference between the people of Azrad’s south and Gor’s northwest previously, but this was far more marked. It made judging her tone difficult. Valder guessed she was from some obscure corner of the Small Kingdoms.

“This is my inn,” he said. “And I want no trouble. You will have to tell me whom you’re looking for and why.”

“We seek Valder of the Magic Sword.”

The woman insisted on speaking quite loudly, and the entire population of the room — three of Valder’s employees and fourteen guests — were now listening closely, the chowder forgotten for the moment.

“I’m Valder, now the Innkeeper,” he said. “Come inside and close the door.” He had no idea why anybody might be looking for him and was not at all sure he wanted to find out. This group hardly looked like anything Gor might send after him. He remembered Tesra and Selmer, who had insisted on calling him Valder of the Magic Sword, and wondered if they had anything to do with it.

He was about to suggest a more private conference when the thought struck him that Gor of the Rocks might not care to send anyone obvious on a mission to deal with his former assassin. Gor was tricky enough to have contrived a group like this. Valder decided abruptly that privacy was not called for. When the woman in blue had closed the door, he led the way to an unoccupied table and gestured for the newcomers to sit.

The woman in red hesitated, and the others were all obviously following her lead. “Is there no place more private?” she asked.

That convinced Valder that he did not want to be alone with his group. “No,” he said. “We speak here if you wish to speak with me at all.”

Reluctantly, the woman in red nodded and took a seat; her companions followed, and Valder, too, sat down.

“I am Sadra of Pethmor, Pethmor being the rightful capital of all Ethshar. We have come seeking your help.”

Valder interpreted this to mean that Pethmor was indeed one of the Small Kingdoms. Most of them claimed to be the ancient capital. “What sort of help?” he asked.

“We came to Azrad’s city to find someone who might be able to help us, and two men there told us where you might be found. They said that you were the greatest fighter that had ever lived, that you had slain a northern demon in single combat. Is this true?”

“No.” Valder was reluctant to elaborate. “No?” Sadra was taken aback. “But you are Valder of the Magic Sword? They swore...”

“They swore? What did they swear?”

“One of them swore that you had slain a demon...”

“Oh. Well, yes, I did kill a shatra, which is half demon, but I’m hardly a great fighter. I had a magic sword.” It seemed unwise to mention that he still had the sword and that it was in fact hanging in plain sight not ten yards away.

“Ah. The sword is gone, then?”

Valder shrugged.

“Of course it is, or you would not be an innkeeper — but perhaps you could get it back? Or perhaps you might help anyway?”

“You still haven’t said what sort of help you want.”

“Oh, it is quite simple. There is a dragon, a rather large one, that has been scorching the fields...” Again, as seemed to be a habit with her, she let the sentence trail off.

“You want me to kill a dragon for you?”

“Yes, exactly.”

Valder put his palms on the table as if to rise. “I’m sorry, Sadra, but I can’t help you. I wouldn’t stand a chance; the only time I ever fought a dragon single-handed, I wound up running for my life.”

“Then you have fought dragons before?”

“Just a little one and, I told you, it almost killed me. I will not fight your dragon for you. Talk it out of burning your fields, or hire a dragon-tamer from the city, if no one will fight it. Now, will you have supper here, or a room for the night, or will you be going?”

The party from Pethmor stayed for supper and for the night, and for breakfast as well. Sadra made several more attempts to enlist Valder as a dragon slayer, but without success.

In the morning, as she was about to depart, Sadra stopped and turned back. “Selmer told me you were a hero,” she said. “That you would be glad of an excuse to give up this dreary inn. I think he misjudged you badly.”

Valder nodded agreement. “I think you’re right. I like it here.”

Sadra nodded in turn, plainly disgusted, and left.

Valder thought that was the end of the matter — until the next party turned up, trying to recruit him. This group was not after a dragon, but intended to loot the ruined cities of the north and wanted to hire Valder as a guard. A few surviving shatra were said to linger still amid the ruins, and what better protector could they have than the only man who had ever slain one in fair fight?

Valder got rid of them politely and marveled at how nobody acknowledged the part the sword’s magic had played. They all credited him with far more prowess than he actually possessed. They wanted to believe in heroes, not ordinary, everyday magic.

Valder was no adventurer, no great warrior; he was just an innkeeper and glad to be one. He said as much to anyone who asked. Yes, he had a magic sword once, and yes, he had killed a shatra with it, and yes, he even admitted to having served as an assassin when that story finally surfaced — but all he was now was an innkeeper.

That was what he told the doddering wizard who wanted to hire him to fetch the ingredients for a certain unspecified spell and what he told the self-proclaimed mercenary captain who was trying to raise a company of war heroes to fight in the continuing border squabbles in the Small Kingdoms. From what Valder had heard from his guests, these little conflicts were too small to be considered real wars. The “captain,” who had never risen above sergeant in the Great War, believed a small group of experienced men could make a big difference. Valder suspected he was quite correct in that, but was not interested in being one of those men and said as much.

He liked being an innkeeper. He enjoyed hearing his guests talk of their travels, their hopes, their goals. He enjoyed seeing the weary to bed, feeding the hungry, and serving drink to the thirsty, and watching their faces relax as their problems faded. As an innkeeper, he took no great risks. True, he made no great gains, but that did not bother him. He had not killed anyone since the end of the war, nor had anyone seriously attempted to kill him — he discounted a few drunken threats from men who could barely stand, let alone fight. The worst problem he ever confronted as an innkeeper, once he had found reliable suppliers of food and drink, was an occasional boisterous drunk, and the one advantage he saw in his growing fame as Valder of the Magic Sword was that troublemakers who had heard of his reputation avoided him. As the inn’s proprietor, he was his own man; admittedly, he took orders from his customers, but only when he chose to. It was nothing like the military.

Yes, he liked being an innkeeper. It was infinitely more enjoyable than being an assassin or an adventurer. He preferred Wirikidor over the mantel, not on his belt. He had to repeat this often. The talkative Selmer and the various guests who had overheard his conversation with Sadra or with others who had tried to coax him away spread his fame far and wide. In general, Valder did not mind; he rather enjoyed being famous and suspected that his reputation drew business that might otherwise have passed up the Inn at the Bridge in favor of other, newer inns that had sprung up along the highways.

He turned down offers that ranged from dull and dangerous to downright bizarre, requests for aid from silk-robed aristocrats and starving children — the latter leaving disappointed, but always well fed. He refused to rescue princesses, slay dragons, depose tyrants, locate lost siblings, kill pirates, loot tombs, battle wizards, terrorize witches, dispose of demons, settle boundary disputes, and search for everything from ancient magical treasures to a missing cat. Whenever possible, he tried to suggest someone who might serve in his stead. He was dismayed that, even safely sheathed, Wirikidor was still affecting his life.

He suspected that nobody ever believed him when he said that he enjoyed innkeeping, that many thought him a coward or a fraud. When a messenger from Gor of the Rocks came to ask if he had reconsidered his retirement, Valder turned him down politely, as he had all the rest, and was relieved when the man departed peacefully, apparently convinced that Valder was a harmless coward.

Nobody, not even Tandellin, believed that all he wanted was to be an innkeeper, but it was the entire truth.

CHAPTER 23

The Inn at the Bridge flourished. Valder flourished with it, and in fact all the world seemed to be doing well once the initial confusion had passed.

In 5000 the three overlords of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars announced that the last northern stragglers had been eliminated and the last vestiges of the Empire destroyed. In celebration, the annual Festival that began 5001 ran for seven days instead of the traditional five. A few realists pointed out that this corrected astrological errors resulting from wartime neglect of the calendar, but they were generally ignored in the widespread merry-making.

That was the year that Valder finally got glass panes in all his windows.

In 5002 the northern territories surrounding Sardiron of the Waters refused to acknowledge the rule of the Hegemony when tax collectors came around. Instead they set themselves up as an array of baronies under the erstwhile officers of the occupying armies, with a high council meeting at Sardiron itself. The triumvirate, well aware that the people of the Hegemony wanted no more war, did nothing about it. The rumor circulated that Azrad and Gor had decided to wait, outvoting Anaran, in hopes that the baronies would tear themselves apart in petty rivalries as the Small Kingdoms had done, allowing the Hegemony to move in and pick up the pieces. If the rumor was true, this appeared to be a miscalculation; no reports came of internecine strife in the north. Instead, caravans came down the highways and barges down the Great River, filling Valder’s guest rooms and his purse.

Valder heard all the news and all the rumors from his guests, but paid little attention. That was the year he finally considered his cellar to be adequate, with thirty wines, a dozen ales and beers, and both brandy and oushka in stock. One of his former workmen now had a brewery and provided much of his supply. His staff was down to just himself, Sarai, Tandellin, and Parl.

By 5005 virtually all the veterans were settled, and the offer of free land was discontinued. Almost all the old battlefields were now farms, and the vast grasslands that had stretched from the Great River to the western ocean had been plowed under and sown with corn and wheat and barley. Ethshar of the Rocks and Ethshar of the Sands were real cities now, rivals — but never quite equals — of Azrad’s Ethshar, now called Ethshar of the Spices in recognition of its most profitable trade. The Small Kingdoms were still splintering and fighting amongst themselves, and most of the people of the Hegemony had come to think of them as barbaric. It was hard to remember that they had once been the heart of civilization, Old Ethshar. But then, nobody mentioned Old Ethshar any more. The past was forgotten, and the Hegemony and its three capitals were the only Ethshar.

That was the year that Valder tried unsuccessfully to start a ferry service in competition with Azrad’s toll bridge. A torch “accidentally” dropped from the bridge onto the ferry one night and burned it down to the waterline, putting an end to that enterprise. Valder decided against rebuilding; the next stray torch might have hit his inn. The walls were stone, but the roof was thatch.

In 5009 the northern coast followed Sardiron’s lead and declared itself the independent Kingdom of Tintallion, with joint capitals on the mainland and on the island from which it took its name. Valder calculated, after much discussion with travelers who had been there, that the mainland capital was just about on the site of the camp where he had served prior to the desperate enemy drive to the sea that had left him stranded alone in the woods.

That was the year an incompletely tamed dragon accidentally burned down Valder’s stable. Terrified by the results of its actions, the dragon had smashed its way out through the wall and vanished, never to be seen again. Fortunately, the dragon’s owner did not get away in time to avoid a generous cash settlement for the damages, and the only injuries were to two boys knocked down and bruised when they attempted to catch the other animals fleeing through the hole left by the dragon’s departure.

In 5011 Anaran of the Sands died at the age of sixty-three, and, after a month or so of widespread concern, Azrad and Gor declared Anaran’s ten-year-old son Edaran of Ethshar to be the new overlord of Ethshar of the Sands. Since would-be commanders could no longer prove themselves in battle, the surviving overlords had decided to make their positions hereditary. Nobody seemed to object, Valder noted, and it did ensure peaceful transitions. Azrad and Gor both had sons to succeed them, and no one seemed very concerned about having a mere child as cornier of the Hegemony.

That was the year that someone tried to rob the Inn at the Bridge.

It was a slow night in deep winter, the fourth day of the month of Icebound. Enough snow was falling to discourage the neighbors from dropping in for a meal or a drink, and no trade came down the highway from the north at this time of year. The river never froze this far south, but, as it happened, no boats had stopped that day, and no travelers from the Small Kingdoms to the east or the Hegemony’s other cities to the west had happened by. Tandellin and Sarai had gone home to the house they had built for themselves on the other side of the highway, and Parl had gone off, as he often did, with a young woman. He might not be back for days, but in winter he was rarely needed. Valder sat alone in the dining hall, keeping the fire alive and contemplating the coals, not thinking about anything in particular.

A knock sounded; startled, Valder looked up. He did not particularly want to leave the hearth and get a faceful of cold air, so he bellowed, “It isn’t locked! Come in!”

For a moment he thought that the latch must have frozen or the new arrivals had not heard him, but then the door swung open.

He did not much like the look of the two men who came in. The first one was short, with dark hair that looked curiously lopsided; it took Valder a moment to figure out that the man had been wounded on the scalp and that no hair grew from the resulting scar tissue, leaving him partially bald on one side and not the other.

The second man was huge, perhaps six and a half feet tall and disproportionately broad. Both wore battered breastplates — not standard army-issue — and carried old swords on their belts, unusual in these peaceful times. The larger man had one of the strange, black, Northern helmets jammed onto his head, the first such helmet Valder had seen in years. Both had the look of men who were perpetually broke and always blaming others for it, though what money they acquired would invariably go for oushka or inept gambling. Valder had seen enough of the sort and did not like them. Such men usually felt that because they had served a few years in the army the world owed them a living.

Valder judged this pair to be his own age or a year or two younger — mid-thirties, certainly. That would mean they had only served a few years each, probably not a decade between them. No one owed them anything.

Still, he was an innkeeper. “Welcome!” he said. “Come in and get warm! What can I get you?”

The two looked around for a moment. The big man remembered belatedly to close the door.

“Cold out there,” the small man remarked. “Have you got something that will warm a man’s gut?”

“Brandy or oushka,” Valder answered. “Two coppers, or a silver piece for a bottle.”

“Oushka,” the little man replied, as Valder had expected. These two did not look like brandy drinkers.

He nodded and headed for the kitchen. He had not expected any customers tonight and had stored the keg away earlier than usual. “Make yourselves comfortable,” he called back over his shoulder. He decided silently to be as quick as he could, so that he would be back before this pair could cause any trouble. There was little to steal in the big room, but they might decide it would be fun to smash a few tables.

“Hey, innkeeper,” the big man called after him before he had reached the door. “Is your name Valder?”

Valder stopped and turned. “What if it is?”

The big man shrugged. “Nothing; we just heard that this place belonged to someone named Valder of the Magic Sword, supposed to be a war hero.”

Valder sighed inwardly. These two were obviously not just going to express polite interest in his wartime experiences. They undoubtedly wanted something from him, probably aid in some unsavory scheme, and might get ugly about it.

Well, he could take care of himself. “I’m Valder,” he admitted. “I was in the war; I fought and I killed a few northerners, but I don’t know that I was a hero.”

“What was this magic sword, then?”

“I had a magic sword; got it from a crazy hermit out on the west coast.”

The big man waggled a shoulder in the direction of the hearth. “Is that the sword, up there?”

Valder did not like the sound of that. “What if it is?”

“Hey, just asking. I never saw a magic sword up close before.”

“Well, that’s it. Take a look, if you want, but I wouldn’t try touching it.” He hoped the vague threat would discourage the pair. He was not particularly worried. Unless he had been sleepwalking and killing people without knowing it, nobody else would be able to draw Wirikidor, and no other weapon could kill him. “What about that oushka!” the smaller man demanded.

“I’ll get it,” Valder answered. He marched out through the door to the kitchen, leaving it open so that he could hear anything that happened.

He heard nothing but low voices and quiet little bumps that could be chairs being moved about. That was fine, then, if the two were settling down at a table. He filled two crystal tankards with oushka. Most inns avoided using glass due to its high cost and breakable nature, but Valder was convinced that strong spirits did not taste right in anything else and had gone to considerable expense to have a wizard shatterproof his glassware. He had thought the expense was worthwhile, as his customers appreciated such nice little touches. Some of them did, anyway.

He arranged the tankards on a tray and headed back into the main room, where he found the big man standing on a chair on the hearth, tugging at Wirikidor.

Since Valder had had no intention of ever taking the sword down, he had wired it securely to pegs set into the stonework. He suspected that, if he had not, the two would already have gotten it down and vanished into the snow.

“Oh, demons drag you to Hell!” he said. He did not want to deal with this sort of unpleasantness. He put the tray down on the nearest table and demanded, “Leave that sword alone! You can’t use it anyway.”

At the sound of his voice the small man whirled, drawing his sword. The big man heaved at Wirikidor’s scabbard, and with a twang of snapping wire ripped it from its place.

“Oh, we can’t?” the small man said.

“No, you can’t,” Valder replied. “Ever hear of the Spell of True Ownership?”

“No,” the little thief said. “And I wouldn’t believe it if I did. If that sword’s magic, I can use it.”

“Go ahead and try,” Valder replied. “Try and draw it.” He suppressed a sudden flash of terror at the possibility that Darrend and his compatriots had somehow miscalculated the duration of the sword’s attachment to him.

The smaller man did not move. He remained facing Valder, his sword at ready, as he said, “Draw it, Hanner.”

Hanner was trying to draw it, without success. “I can’t,” he said. “I think he’s glued it into the scabbard.”

“No glue,” Valder said. “Magic. It’s part of the enchantment on it.”

“I think we’ll take it anyway,” the small thief said.

“It will come back to me; that’s part of the spell.”

“Oh, is it? How nice for you. What if you’re dead, though? We didn’t come here just for the sword, innkeeper. You must have a tidy little heap of money tucked away somewhere. I don’t think you’ll be getting much business tonight; if we kill you now, we’ll have until dawn to find where you hide it. And even if we don’t find it, we’ll still have the sword and we can sell that for a few bits of gold, whether we can draw it or not. If you help us out, make the sword work for us and tell us where your money is, we might let you live.”

“You can’t kill me,” Valder replied.

“No? What’s going to stop us? There are two of us, with swords that aren’t enchanted but they’ve got good edges nonetheless. You’re all alone and unarmed, unless you’ve slipped a kitchen knife under your tunic. We’ve been watching this place. You haven’t got a single customer, and your helpers left hours ago.”

Valder felt a twinge of uneasiness. His situation did look bad. The only thing in his favor was the magic of a sword that had not been drawn in more than a dozen years — and an untested aspect of the enchantment, at that. The army wizards had said that he could not be killed, but he had naturally never put it to the test. He stood for a moment, trying to think of something to say. Nothing came.

“Hanner,” the small thief said, “I think it’s time we convinced Valder of the Magic Sword to help us out, don’t you?”

Hanner grinned. “I think you’re right,” he said. He took Wirikidor in his left hand and drew his own sword with his right. Side by side, the two thieves advanced slowly across the room, winding between the tables without ever taking their eyes from Valder’s face.

Valder watched them come, tried to decide whether there was any point in retreating into the kitchen, tried to think of something he might use as a weapon, and watched Wirikidor, clutched in the big man’s hand. The thief, Valder thought, was making a mistake; the smart thing to do would have been to leave Wirikidor behind somewhere, well out of reach. He remembered the odd compulsion that had made people bring him the sword whenever it left his possession back in General Karannin’s camp and wondered if Hanner was aware that he was holding the scabbard.

Idiotically, he also found himself wondering what the smaller thief’s name was.

As the two drew near, Valder moved as quickly as he could, snatching up the tray of oushka and flinging it at the pair. Two swords flashed, and tray and tankards were knocked harmlessly aside, spraying good liquor across the floor. The crystal vessels bounced in a truly alarming manner, but the thieves were not distracted by this unnatural behavior. Either they had seen enchanted glassware before, or they were so intent on their victim that they had not even noticed anything unusual.

All Valder’s effort had done was prove that both men knew how to use swords and that the wizard who had charmed the tankards had not cheated him. He stepped back, not toward the kitchen, but toward the wall.

The two advanced another few steps, then stopped. Hanner’s sword inched up to hover near Valder’s throat, while the other’s blade was pointed at his belly.

“Now, innkeeper,” the small man said, “tell us about that sword and, while you’re talking, tell us where you keep your money.”

Valder watched from the corner of his eye as Hanner’s left hand moved forward, apparently without its owner’s knowledge; his own right hand was open and ready. “The sword’s name is Wirikidor, which means ’slayer of warriors.’ Nobody knows exactly what the spells on it are, because the wizard who made them vanished, but they’re all linked to a Spell of True Ownership, so that nobody can use it except me, until I die.” He was talking primarily to keep the two thieves occupied; Wirikidor’s hilt was less than a foot from his hand.

Suddenly he lunged for it, calling out, “Wirikidor!”

Hanner tried to snatch it away as he realized what was occurring. Valder was never sure exactly how it happened, whether the sword had really leaped from its sheath under its own power or whether he had made a lucky grab, but the sword was in his hand, sliding smoothly out of the scabbard.

Banner reacted with incredible speed, chopping at Valder’s wrist with his own blade. Wirikidor twisted about in a horribly unnatural fashion, so that Valder felt as if his wrist were breaking, but it successfully parried the thief’s blow.

The smaller thief was not wasting any time; his sword plunged toward Valder’s belly. Valder dodged sideways, but not quite fast enough; the blade ripped through his tunic and drew a long, deep cut in his side. Blood spilled out, and pain tore through Valder’s body. He hardly saw what happened next.

Wirikidor, now that it was free again, seemed to be enjoying itself. It flashed brilliantly in the lamplight as it swept back and forth, parrying attacks from both thieves. Valder made no attempt to direct it; his hand went where the sword chose to go.

The character of the fight quickly altered; rather than two swordsmen bearing down on a mere innkeeper, it became two swordsmen fighting for their lives against a supernatural fury.

Hanner’s guard slipped for an instant; Wirikidor cut his throat open. A return slice removed his head entirely, spraying blood in all directions.

With that, Wirikidor lost all interest, and Valder found himself in a duel to the death with a swordsman smaller than himself but far more skilled and obviously much more practiced, not to mention partly armored. Realization of his peril helped him to ignore the intense pain in his side as he concentrated on parrying a new attack.

The small thief, noticing a change, grinned. “You’re getting tired, innkeeper — or has the sword’s magic been used up?”

Valder tried a bluff. “Nothing’s used up, thief,” he said. “I just thought you might prefer to live. Go now, and I won’t kill you. Your partner’s dead; isn’t that enough?”

“Hanner’s dead?” In the intensity of his concentration on the fight the thief had failed to comprehend that. He glanced at his comrade’s headless corpse and was obviously shaken by what he saw.

Valder seized the opportunity and swept Wirikidor in under the other man’s guard, aiming just below the breastplate.

What should have been a killing stroke was easily deflected as the man recovered himself and made a swift downward parry. Still, the attack disconcerted him, and he stepped back.

Valder pressed his advantage, but the thief met his onslaught easily. Even so, Valder noticed that the man was no longer taking the offensive, but only defending himself.

“I’m holding the sword back,” Valder lied. “But the demon in the steel is getting stronger. I don’t like feeding it more than one soul at a time; it might get too strong someday. Go now, while I can still control it.” He was grateful for the popularity of legends about vampiric swords.

The thief glanced at Wirikidor, then at the body on the floor, and his nerve broke. “Keep it away from me!” he screamed as he turned and ran for the door.

Valder let him go, but quickly wiped Wirikidor’s blade on Hanner’s tunic, then picked the scabbard up off the floor and sheathed the weapon. If the thief returned, he wanted to be able to draw the sword again and use its magic.

The thief showed no sign of returning. The pain in his side was growing with every movement, but Valder made it across the room and slammed the door that the fleeing man had left standing open. He leaned against it, tempted just to slide down into oblivion on the floor, but he forced imself to pull off his tunic and wrap it around himself, forming a makeshift bandage over the wound. That done, he looked around the room, at the broken wires on the pegs above the mantel, at the severed head rolled into one corner, at the lifeless corpse by the kitchen door, and at the blood, Hanner’s and his own, that was spattered everywhere. He looked down at the sheathed sword he held.

“Damn that hermit,” he said.

Then he fainted.

CHAPTER 24

The door hit him in the side and he awoke in agony. He rolled over, groaning, away from the door and whatever was pushing in against it.

Tandellin slipped through the opening and looked down to see what was blocking him.

“Gods!” he said. “What happened?” He bent down to try and help.

Valder looked up at him and feebly waved him away. “I’ll be all right, I think,” he said. “I need something to drink.”

“Right,” Tandellin said, “I’ll get you some ale.” He looked up to see where the nearest keg might be, and for the first time noticed the rest of the room.

“Gods!” he said again and then decided that that wasn’t strong enough. “By all the gods in the sky, sea, and earth, Valder, what happened here?”

“Ale,” Valder said. He did not feel up to explaining yet.

“Oh, yes,” Tandellin agreed. He stood and headed for the kitchen, making a careful detour around Hanner’s corpse and the surrounding pool of blood. Valder sank back and closed his eyes until he heard footsteps returning. He opened his eyes and tried to sit up, with his back to the wall. After a brief struggle, he managed it and accepted the mug Tandellin offered.

The ale helped. After he drank it, his throat no longer seemed to be stuffed with felt and his breath was no longer actively painful, if he kept it shallow. His side was still roaring with pain, and his head throbbed, but he felt better.

“More,” he said, holding out the mug.

Tandellin fetched more.

After that, Valder felt almost human again. He arranged himself more comfortably against the wall. “Know any healing spells?” he asked.

Tandellin shook his head.

“Know any good wizards who might? Or witches, or theurgists?”

“I can find someone — but healing spells are expensive.”

“I have money,” Valder said. “That’s not a problem.”

“You weren’t robbed? There was just the one man?”

“There were two, but the other one ran. I don’t think he took anything, unless he sneaked in the back way while I was unconscious, and I doubt that he did that, because, in that case, he would have tried to finish me off.”

“Oh. Well, you certainly took care of that one; his head’s clean off. Was he the one who wounded you?”

“I know his head is off, Tan; I’m the one who took it off, remember? And it was the other one who cut me; they both attacked at once.”

“Oh,” Tandellin said again. “How sporting. What should we do with this one? We can’t just leave him there.”

“Of course not. Look, get me another mug of ale and see if there’s something I can eat cold, and then you can start cleaning up. I think we can bury him out back; I don’t want to take the trouble and the wood to build a proper pyre. I’m not very concerned about seeing that his soul is freed to the gods, if you see what I mean.” He glanced down at Wirikidor, lying innocuously at his side, and a thought struck him.

“Leave the head, though. I think we’ll put that on a pike out front, to discourage any other thieves who get ideas about this place.” He had not seen a head on a pike in years, not since he was a boy, but he thought it would make for a fine warning.

“We’ll probably have to sand down that floor to get the bloodstains off,” Tandellin remarked.

“Might be easier just to replace the boards, or paint over them,” Valder suggested.

The door behind him opened again, admitting Sarai. As was her custom, she had arrived later than Tandellin because she took charge of feeding their daughter, Sarai the Younger, before leaving home.

She looked down at Valder, sitting on the floor bare-chested with the bloodstained remnants of his tunic wrapped about his middle, then looked around the room, taking in the headless corpse, the spattered blood, and the general mess.

“I take it you had a rough night,” she said.

Valder stared up at her for a moment, then burst out laughing. The laughter was cut short by renewed pain in his side, but he smiled up at her and said, “You could say that, yes.”

After that, his problems somehow seemed less serious. He pulled himself up into a chair and supervised the cleaning up, the disposal of Hanner’s body, and the disposition of the head. No pikes could be found anywhere in the inn, but Tandellin improvised one from a boathook from the landing and set it up outside, near enough that its connection with the inn would be apparent, but far enough away that odor would not be a problem. Below the head he tacked up a sign that read, “THIEF,” in large black runes, in case anyone might miss the point.

When the inn was again fit for customers, Tandellin set out to find a wizard who could heal Valder’s wound, leaving Sarai to attend to the handful of travelers who drifted in, despite the cold and slush. Valder himself did not feel up to moving about much. Instead, he sat back and watched and thought.

He had not expected anyone to try to steal Wirikidor, or for that matter to try robbing him at all, though he did keep a goodly supply of coin securely hidden in his own bedchamber. The possibility had simply never occurred to him.

That, he realized, had been foolish.

The thief’s head would probably serve to discourage further attempts for a time, but it would also remind people that there might be something worth stealing. Something would have to be done about that.

He had heard that there were people in Ethshar of the Spices who would guard one’s money, for a small fee; they called themselves bankers. That suddenly seemed like a good idea. He had enough gold and silver tucked away to tempt an entire horde of thieves, he realized. He had nothing in particular that he wanted to spend money on, now that the inn was properly finished and supplied, so it just accumulated. He would do something about that.

The only other theftworthy item, really, was Wirikidor. It was far too late to quash the stories of his magic sword, and he would never convince anyone it was gone while a sword still hung over the mantel: That meant he would have to dispose of it somehow, if he didn’t want some young idiot to cut his throat while he slept in order to steal the fabled Valder’s weapon. He would not die of a cut throat, if Wirikidor’s enchantment held true, but he doubted he would enjoy the experience.

That was rather a shame; he had liked having it on display above the hearth.

The next question was what to do with the sword. Its magic was still strong and still as quirky and inconvenient as ever. He had not died, as the spell had promised he would not, despite losing an incredible amount of blood — but he had been seriously wounded. The sword would still fight for him, but only against men and only until he had killed one. The ownership spell still linked it to him; he was not sure whether it had actually jumped into his hand, but Manner had been unable to draw it, and he could not imagine any reason the thief would have been stupid enough to bring Wirikidor within reach had the spell not been working.

He shifted in his chair, and his side twinged. That reminded him of his wound all over again. What good was a magical spell that guaranteed his life, if he could still be cut to pieces? That might be worse than death. That infernal old hermit had promised the sword would protect him, but he thought he might well have been better off without any such protection as this. He smiled bitterly.

He should, he thought, have been able to avoid the blow. The little thief was a good swordsman, true, but Valder had once been at least competent, and he had possessed size, strength, and reach in his favor. He sighed. He was getting older and out of shape. He had not drawn a sword in more than a decade; no wonder he was out of practice! His reflexes had slowed, as well; he was thirty-seven, no longer a young man.

Not that the thief had been much younger, but even a few years could make a difference. Besides, the thief had obviously kept in practice.

Thirty-seven — he had not thought about his age much, but he was undeniably growing older. What did that mean as far as Wirikidor was concerned? Obviously the sword would not prevent him from aging, any more than it had saved him from being slashed. What would happen when old age came? Would he just deteriorate indefinitely, unable to die, growing weaker and weaker, losing sight and hearing, until he was little more than a vegetable? He had heard tales of men and women still hale and hearty past a hundred years of age — probably exaggerated — but, as he understood Wirikidor’s enchantment, the spell had no time limit on it at all. He might live not just one century, but two or three or a dozen, if he never again drew the sword. No, not might live that long, but would. He could theoretically live forever — but would he want to, if he kept aging? That was an unpleasant line of thought, one that did not bear further exploration just at present. He was only thirty-seven; he had decades yet before the question became really important.

He would, however, want to be very, very careful to avoid maiming or blinding or any other sort of permanent injury. He had once asked himself what sort of a life one should lead when one could live forever; he answered himself, “A cautious one.”

For now, he intended to put Wirikidor somewhere out of sight, where it would tempt no one. He might bury it, or throw it in the river; he knew that the Spell of True Ownership would prevent it from being carried downstream away from him. He was sure that he would be able to recover it should he ever want to.

Perhaps, he thought, I should hire a wizard to break the spell and live out my life normally. The war is long over; why do I need a magic sword?

He remembered then that Darrend had thought the spell was unbreakable. Well, Darrend could have been wrong. It would undoubtedly take a very powerful wizard to break the spell, of course, and wizardry was expensive — not just because of the greed of its practitioners, but because so many of the ingredients needed for charms were so difficult to obtain. He recalled when a call had gone out, years earlier, for the hair of an unborn child, needed for some special spell Azrad had wanted performed; he wondered if any had ever been found. Other ingredients were said to be even more difficult to acquire. By ordinary standards he was well off, as the inn was successful, but, if he tried hiring high-order wizardry, his savings could easily vanish overnight.

He resolved to ask whatever wizard Tandellin might bring back about the possibilities of hiring powerful countercharms, but for the present he had no intention of actually having the spell broken. Wirikidor could be useful. Dangerous, but useful. He could safely draw it at least fifteen more times, perhaps as many as twenty-three, by his best count. That was still a safe margin.

When it dropped to single digits he might reconsider — or when his health started to go.

He would mention it to the wizard — assuming Tandellin did not bring a witch or theurgist instead — but for now he would simply bury the sword out back.

Two days later, his wounds magically healed, he did just that, working alone late at night by the light of a lantern, using a patch of ground that he had thawed with a bonfire that day.

The earthquake that followed a sixnight later was small and localized. It broke a few windows, emptied a shelf or two, sent a wine barrel rolling across the cellar floor, and, of course, split open the ground and flung Wirikidor up, to lie against the inn’s kitchen door.

Valder considered throwing it in the river only until he had estimated how much damage would be caused by a flood big enough to carry the sword half a mile up the slope to the inn. The flood might not come, but he was not willing to risk it.

He wondered idly what a concealment spell would cost, but finally just tossed the sword under his bed and forgot about it.

CHAPTER 25

The news of the death of Gor of the Rocks in 5034 sent Valder into a brief depression. He had admired Gor once, but that admiration had largely worn away, starting with the overlord’s request that Valder serve as his personal assassin in peacetime. The loss of the territory where Valder had served, when it became the Kingdom of Tintallion, had been another blow. The Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, which had once seemed so pure and all-embracing, had been corrupted and whittled down.

Gor’s part in putting Edaran of Ethshar on his father’s throne had not raised Valder’s opinion any; it had left the entire central region that Anaran had once controlled at the mercy of Gor and Azrad, who had taxed it heavily. Gor had gotten an edge over Azrad by marrying off his son and heir, Goran of the Rocks, to Edaran’s sister Ishta of the Sands in 5029, despite Ishta being eleven years older than the boy.

Over the years Gor had gone from being virtually an object of worship in Valder’s eyes to just another conniving tyrant, but still, his death was not welcome news.

It removed any possibility of further difficulty over Valder’s long-ago refusal to serve as an assassin, but it also removed the last vestige of his boyhood hero.

Gor had been only a dozen years older than Valder, at that, and yet he was dead of old age. Valder still felt strong and healthy, but Gor’s death was another reminder that he, too, was growing old and that Wirikidor was doing nothing to prevent it.

Goran was now overlord of Ethshar of the Rocks, a young man in the prime of life — and he had not even been born until thirteen years after Valder built his inn. The thought of that oppressed him as he sat in a corner staring at the half-dozen patrons in the dining room, every one of them too young to remember the Great War.

Perhaps, Valder mused, part of the depression was because he had never taken a wife and, to the best of his knowledge, had sired no children. He had had women, certainly, but none had stayed. When he had been a soldier, none of his pairings had been expected to last by either party, because most did not in a soldier’s life, and since becoming an innkeeper the only women he saw were those with the urge to travel. Some had stayed for a time, but all had eventually tired of the calm routine of the inn and had moved on.

It seemed a bit odd that Tandellin, who had always seemed rowdy and irrepressible as a youth, had been happily married for thirty-seven years, while Valder, who had always thought of himself as dull, ordinary, and predictable, had never married at all. It went against the traditional stereotypes.

He knew that he could have found a wife in Ethshar of the Spices, had he ever wanted to; but since the completion of the inn, he had never once returned to the city. He disliked the crowds and dust and knew that swords were no longer worn openly there, save by guardsmen and troublemakers, so that the necessity of carrying Wirikidor would mark him as a stranger.

He had always done well enough for himself without visiting the city. His lack of a family had never really bothered him; Tandellin and Sarai and their children had been his family in many ways.

He mulled all this over, sitting in the main room with a mug of ale that Sarai the Younger kept filled for him. As he glanced up to signal her for another pint, his eye fell on Wirikidor, hanging over the hearth.

The sword had lain neglected beneath his bed for scarcely a month before he restored it to its place. He had gotten tired of questions about its absence from familiar customers; too many had gone away convinced that the thieves had indeed gotten away with it, even if they had lost one of their number in doing so. Although that might have deterred thieves on the grounds that there was nothing left worth taking, it grated on Valder’s pride. Besides, Valder had gotten tired of seeing the empty pegs and could not think of any way to remove them short of sawing them off as close to the stone as possible.

So he had returned Wirikidor to its place of honor, but devised another approach to the problem of removing temptation. He held contests whenever the inn was crowded, offering ten gold pieces to any man or woman who could draw the blade. This served as good entertainment on many a night and demonstrated to all present just how useless the sword was to anybody else. Rather than suppressing details of the sword’s enchantment, as he had before, Valder made a point of explaining that it was permanently linked to him and that every time he drew it a man died. That had discouraged any further attempts at theft. After all, who cares to risk one’s life for a sword that nobody can use, knowing that, if it does leave its scabbard, someone will die — and that that someone will not be the sword’s owner?

He had not mentioned that the spell was limited to another score or so of uses, however, nor that it would then turn on him. He did not mention his theoretical immortality, lest someone be tempted to test it.

He stared up at the dull gray of the scabbard and the tarnished black hilt. Wirikidor was such a very ordinary-looking sword; how could it have such power over him?

That is, if in fact it actually did. At times Valder was uncertain whether he should so trustingly accept the assessment made so long ago by General Karannin’s magicians. Karannin was long dead; Valder had heard that he had been knifed ignominiously in a brawl in 4999 or 5000. He had no idea what had become of the wizards. Sometimes it seemed as if most of the world’s wizards had vanished after the war; once the army’s control was gone, the Wizards’ Guild’s compulsion for secrecy, which had done so much to restrict wizardry’s effectiveness in the war, had taken over unrestrained. Now even simple spells could be difficult to obtain or prohibitively expensive. Certainly there were still wizards around, but most seemed to be severely limited in what they would undertake.

That virtually eliminated the possibility of having Wirikidor’s enchantment removed, even if he decided he so wanted. When last he had sent an enquiry to the city, he had been told that no wizard in Ethshar would attempt to remove an eighth-order spell for less than a thousand pieces of gold. Valder was not sure whether Wirikidor’s enchantment was in fact eighth-order, but he remembered a mention of that number. A thousand pieces of gold was considerably more money than he had ever had in his life and far more than he had at present, as business had trailed off slightly. Furthermore, as he grew older, he turned more and more of the work over to his helpers, which meant he needed more helpers — all three of Tandellin and Sarai’s children now worked for him — and that meant more money. He had more than enough to live comfortably on, but he was not rich.

Karannin was dead. Gor was dead. Anaran was dead. Terrek was dead. It seemed as if all the men who had fought the war were dead or dying. Valder had not seen a man in a wartime uniform in decades; the soldiers of the Hegemony, such as were posted in the guardhouse at the bridge, had long ago switched to a new one, with a yellow tunic and a red kilt replacing the old familiar brown and green and with no breastplate at all.

Azrad was still alive, of course, and still ruled over the seas and the southwestern portion of the Hegemony, from the Small Kingdoms halfway to Sardiron — but he was a doddering old man now, three-quarters of a century old and showing it. He had not aged well.

And Valder of Kardoret still lived, no longer the young scout, or the desperate assassin, but the aging proprietor of the Thief’s Skull Inn — the skull had fallen and been buried years ago, but the name still lingered. Valder wondered if his younger customers even knew the name’s origin; he rather expected that the name would soon change again, perhaps back to the Inn at the Bridge.

He finished his ale and put down the mug, signaling that this time young Sarai was not to refill it. A pleasant young woman, that, more like her father than the mother she was named for.

Life was still good, Valder told himself, and as long as it remained so, he need do nothing about Wirikidor. Gor’s death did not change anything.

Still, he could feel himself growing older. He knew that he would have little chance in a fair fight, either with swords or unarmed, against almost anyone. He would not stay healthy forever.

When the time came that his health was irretrievably going, he promised himself, he would take decisive action to free himself from Wirikidor’s curse. There was always a way out; he had only to find it. He reminded himself of that resolve periodically from then on and even wrote it down, lest he forget. When the time came, six years later, that he could no longer deny that he was losing his sight, he made his decision.

He could put it off no longer. His vision was slowly deteriorating, and he was certain that in a year or two he would be blind. The thought of spending an eternity helpless in the dark was more than he could take, particularly when he realized that he would become a perpetual invalid, with no prospect of dying, and that Tandellin and his family would be forced to care for him indefinitely. He had heard — his hearing was still good — his patrons speak with scorn of old Azrad, who still clung to his life and his throne despite his eighty years of age and poor health. He did not care to engender similar scorn. Azrad could abdicate, if he so desired, and be taken care of in luxury for as long as he lived; Valder did not have that option. Tandellin and Sarai were not his family and had no obligation to stay on if he fell ill, but he was sure, nonetheless, that they would. They were far from young themselves, as evidenced by the recent birth of their second grandchild; where else would they go? They had lived their lives as his helpers at the inn; it was all they knew. If he became an invalid, they would have little choice but to tend him for as long as they could. He would not saddle them with a blind old fool who would live forever; that would be unforgivably unfair.

And if he were to reach a point where death became preferable to living on, how could he die, if he had grown too old and feeble to draw Wirikidor?

He saw only one course of action. He would take Wirikidor and go to the city. He would seek out a wizard there, or several wizards, and learn whether Wirikidor’s enchantment could be removed, allowing him to live out a normal life. Once that was done, finances permitting, he would also have his fading eyesight restored, so that he might live out his remaining years more pleasantly. He was ready and willing to pledge everything he owned toward the cost of such spells.

If the enchantment could not be broken, then he saw no option but suicide. He refused to live out all eternity as a blind, senile cripple. Blindness alone he might learn to live with, were he still young and healthy, but in time he knew his other faculties would go. He would have to kill himself with Wirikidor while he still had the strength to do so.

If Wirikidor would not kill him immediately, he knew he might have to kill however many other men it would take to use up the spell. That might be difficult, but he was sure he could manage it somehow.

With that firmly resolved, he made his plans and preparations. On the third day of the month of Greengrowth, in the year 5041, he set out for Ethshar of the Spices, riding as a paying passenger on an ox-drawn farm wagon, with Wirikidor on his hip.

CHAPTER 26

The wagon’s owner knew nothing about magicians of any sort and, in fact, expressed doubts as to the authenticity of most spells, so Valder thanked him politely and disembarked as soon as they reached Westgate Market. The guards at the gate were more helpful, but the directions they gave him to reach the Wizards’ Quarter were not as detailed as he had hoped. He was to follow High Street for half a league or so — he had forgotten the city was that big — and then turn right onto a diagonal cross-street, a big one called Arena Street, and follow it past the Arena itself and on into the Wizards’ Quarter, down toward Southgate. That sounded simple enough, but there were so very many cross-streets that he was not at all sure he would know the right one when he found it.

The guards had also strongly advised him against carrying his sword openly on his belt. The overlord did not approve of such martial displays, and some people took it upon themselves to enforce the old man’s whims, even though at the moment there was no valid decree in effect on the matter. Valder thanked them, but left Wirikidor where it was. He thought that the sword might discourage thieves who would otherwise be tempted to attack an old man with a fat purse. He had brought all his accumulated funds from forty-odd years as an innkeeper; magic, he knew, did not come cheap.

The crowds and dirt and noise were overwhelming at first, particularly as he was already weary from his long ride. Oxen were slow-moving beasts, and the farmer had been in no great hurry, so the trip had taken a day and a half. He had arrived at mid-afternoon of the second day, the fourth of Greengrowth, his back aching from toes to shoulders. He had not realized, sitting around the inn, just how much age had affected him.

Objectively, he knew at a glance that the crowds were nothing compared to the mobs that had overwhelmed the city when first he saw it, but he still found them daunting as he made his way along High Street, watching for the diagonal cross-street the guards had described.

He passed inns and taverns clustered around the gate-side market and assorted disreputable lodgings. He passed block after block of varied shops, built of stone and wood and brick, selling everything imaginable, from fishhooks to farm wagons and diamonds to dried dung — but very little magic, and none of the signboards boasted of wizardry or witchcraft. A passing stranger, when asked, told him that these shops made up the Old Merchants’ Quarter; there was also a New Merchants’ Quarter to the south. The Wizards’ Quarter was much further on.

He came to a broad diagonal avenue that he took at first for Arena Street, but it was angled in the opposite direction from what the guard had led him to expect, so once again he asked, this time inquiring of a shopkeeper dealing in fine fabrics. The shopkeeper explained that this avenue was Merchant Street and that Arena Street was further on, past the New City district.

Valder trudged on along High Street and found himself passing mansions. Some faced upon the street, their rich carvings and gleaming windows plain to be seen, while others were set back and hidden behind walls or fences. A few stood surrounded by gardens, and one boasted an elaborate aviary. The streets in this area were not crowded at all, and most of the people he did see were tradesmen; only rarely did he spot someone whose finery was in accord with the opulence of the buildings.

The fine houses stopped abruptly, replaced by a row of shops facing onto a diagonal avenue, and Valder knew he had found Arena Street. He paused in the intersection to look around.

Far off to his left, at the end of the surprisingly straight avenue, he could see the overlord’s palace. He had caught quick glimpses of it once or twice before on Merchant Street and again on one of the streets in the New City, but had not stopped to look at it.

That was where Azrad the Great lived, now more than eighty years old but still holding on to his absolute power as overlord of the city and triumvir of the Hegemony. He was said to suffer from bouts of idiocy, to have lost his teeth, and to drool like a baby in consequence. Valder shuddered at the thought. It was not that Azrad’s current condition was so very unpleasant, but that it had come upon him in a mere eighty years or so, while Wirikidor could perhaps keep Valder alive for eighty centuries.

And for that matter, how pleasant could Azrad’s life actually be? His elder son Azrad had died as a youth, in the waning days of the Great War. His wife was long dead. His surviving son, Kelder, was middle-aged and said to be a dreary sort. One grandson had died at the age of fourteen of some unidentified disease, and another was just coming of age. There were three granddaughters as well.

How happy a family could it be? Did any of those still living really care much for the old man? Kelder was surely waiting to inherit the throne, and the others had known Azrad only as a sick old man, never as the brilliant leader he had once been. Still, he had a family. Valder had only employees.

He hunched his shoulders and turned onto Arena Street. The guards had not said how far it was to the Wizards’ Quarter; he hoped it was not far. The sun was already low in the west.

The Arena itself, a large and impressive structure, was roughly a mile from High Street, Valder discovered. A block beyond it, he saw the first sign advertising a witch’s shop. A witch, of course, would be able to do nothing against a sword enchanted by a wizard, but it provided encouragement.

In the next block was a theurgist’s shop, and Valder was tempted. The gods, after all, could do anything — if they could be convinced to pay attention at all, and if you contacted the right god. He was unsure just how effective theurgy actually was since the gods had gone into their self-imposed exile, however, and he preferred to stick to the more straightforward approach.

The next two blocks were full of gaming houses, but, beyond that, Valder’s search was abruptly rewarded with greater riches than he had anticipated. The street was suddenly lined with magic shops of every description, advertising all manner of wizardry, witchcraft, theurgy, even demonology and sorcery, as well as arcane arts Valder could not identify, on a profusion of boastful signboards. “Abdaran of Skaia,” one read, “Miracles of Every Description.”

“Intirin the White,” the next read, “Your Prayers Answered or Your Money Back.” One bore no boasts but simply a black outline of a hand superimposed on a red eye and the name Dakkar — Valder thought that was rather ominous and probably represented a demonologist.

He walked on, following what seemed to be the thickest grouping around a corner to the right, and finally spotted, “Tagger, Tagger, and Varrin, Counterspells and Cures for Every Purpose.” That sounded like exactly what he was after.

The iron-studded door was closed, the windows draped with heavy dark velvet; he hesitated, but then knocked loudly.

He waited for what seemed a reasonably long time and was about to knock again when the door swung open and he found himself facing a small, black-haired man in a red robe and hat.

“Hello,” Valder said, “I need to have a spell removed.”

“Oh,” the red-clad man said. “Come in, then. I’m afraid the others are both out just now, but I’ll see what I can do. I’m Tagger the Younger.”

“Valder the Innkeeper,” Valder replied, nodding politely.

“The one with the magic sword?” Tagger asked.

Startled, Valder nodded.

“Ah! Come in, come in! What can I do for you?” He swung wide the door and escorted Valder inside, leading him to a comfortable, velvet-upholstered chair. He then sat down in a similar chair on the opposite side of a small table.

It took Valder a few seconds to gather his wits sufficiently to reply. He looked around the shop, which was furnished much like a small parlor, with many dark woods and rich fabrics, predominantly red. “Since you already know about the sword,” he said when he had composed himself, “I don’t suppose I need to explain everything after all. I want the spell removed from the sword.”

It was Tagger’s turn to be disconcerted. “Why?” he asked. “I thought the sword protected you and made you a formidable warrior!”

“It does to some extent, but what does an innkeeper need with that? It also happens to include a sort of curse that I’d like to be rid of.”

“Ah, I see! What sort of a curse? Do you know?”

“Do you really need to know?”

“It would probably help considerably.”

Valder paused. “Could we leave that for later?”

“I suppose. In that case, what can you tell me about the sword? Do you know who enchanted it or what spells were used?” “The spells were put on it by a hermit in the coastal marshes north of what is now Tintallion...” Valder began.

“After it was forged?” Tagger interrupted.

“Oh, yes, of course; it was just a standard-issue sword for at least three years.”

“Ah. Good, then we shouldn’t have to destroy it. Go on. Did you know this hermit’s name?”

“No; he never told me. I don’t believe I told him mine, either, for that matter.”

“And what was your name at the time? Surely you weren’t an innkeeper then.”

“No, I was Valder of Kardoret, Scout First Class.”

“Go on.” Tagger shifted in his chair.

“I saw part of his work when he was enchanting the sword, but I didn’t pay close attention, and he never explained any of it to me or told me anything about it. Even if he had, it’s been more than forty years now, and I wouldn’t remember much. When I got back to Ethshar, the army wizards tried to analyze it and they said that it included the Spell of True Ownership and some sort of animation; that’s all I remember. Oh, yes, I think they said it was eighth-order magic.”

Tagger started. “Eighth-order?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, dear.”

Valder did not like the sound of that. He waited for the wizard to continue.

“I can’t do anything for you, I’m afraid. My father might be willing to try, though, if you can pay enough; he’d stand a good chance of succeeding, I think, and would almost certainly survive the attempt, but I’ll admit frankly that you might not.”

“Why?”

“Because your life-force is linked to the sword by the Spell of True Ownership; tied to it, as it were, by an invisible knot. The wizard who made the connection in the first place, or any really extremely powerful and skilled wizard, might be able to untie that knot — but you don’t know who the original wizard was, and I don’t know of any wizards skilled enough to handle an eighth-order linkage properly, which is what it would be if the True Ownership were applied as part of the eighth-order spell rather than as a separate enchantment. If my father were to make the attempt, he wouldn’t be untying so much as cutting the knot, and that would mean possibly cutting away part of your life. To carry the analogy a step further, the severed ends are likely to lash about, and one might strike him and harm or kill him. Naturally, that means a high price is called for.”

Valder was already pretty certain that he did not want to pursue this route, but asked, “How high?”

“I can’t speak for him, really; at least ten pounds of gold, though, I’m sure.”

That settled the matter, since Valder did not have that much.

“Would you by chance know of anyone who might attempt it for less?”

Tagger shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, but I really don’t. High-level magic is expensive. Besides, you know, the really powerful wizards don’t need to make money by selling their talents; they provide for themselves by other means. I don’t suppose I should admit it, since it’s hardly good business, but since I’ve already told you we probably can’t help you, I might as well go on and tell you that we’re all second-raters here, all of us shopkeepers in the Wizards’ Quarter. If I could untangle an eighth-order spell, I could probably conjure up a castle in the air and live in luxury for the rest of my life, instead of spending my days removing impotence curses or curing baldness and scrofula and so forth.”

That made a great deal of sense, but also presented another possibility. “But such powerful wizards do exist?” “Oh, yes, there’s no doubt about that; the ones who can still be bothered with mundane affairs run the Wizards’ Guild, so I’ve met a few — but never by their true names, and probably not even wearing their true faces.”

“Where could I find such a wizard?”

Tagger shrugged eloquently. “I haven’t any idea at all. Certainly not running a shop in Ethshar of the Spices, unless you find one visiting to remind himself what he need no longer tolerate. And before you get any high hopes built up, let me remind you that a truly great wizard would have no particular reason to help you by removing the enchantment from your sword.”

“He’d have no particular reason not to help me, though.”

“Laziness comes to mind — and even for a really powerful wizard, undoing an eighth-order spell is likely to involve considerable difficulty and even some risk.”

“I see,” Valder said. He started to rise.

“Before you go,” Tagger said, “would you mind explaining to me just what this curse is you’re so eager to avoid? Perhaps we can find a way around it.”

Valder settled back again. “What do you mean?”

“Well, for example, we had a client once who had been cursed with what seemed like a simple enough spell; he had been given a really unpleasant odor, so that nobody could stand to go near him for very long. It’s a standard little curse, useful for revenge or blackmail — but in this case, the wizard had been feeling particularly vengeful, and had booby-trapped the spell, linking it to some very complicated wizardry we couldn’t be bothered untangling for any price the victim could pay, so that we couldn’t use the usual countercharm. Instead, we put another curse on the poor fellow, one that stopped up the sense of smell of anyone near him — and just to be sure, we gave his wife a love potion strong enough that she wouldn’t mind the stink, even if it reached her. There are still some effects — for example, dogs and other animals can’t go anywhere within a hundred feet of him, so he has to travel entirely on foot — but at least he’s not totally isolated.”

Valder considered, looking at the little wizard’s face; the man seemed quite sincere, and there was always some way out, if only it could be found.

“All right,” he said. “The curse is that I can only die when slain by the sword, Wirikidor; nothing else, not even old age, is supposed to be able to kill me. That’s what Darrend of Calimor and the rest of General Karannin’s wizards said, at any rate. However, I still age, can still be wounded, and I’m still going blind.”

“We can cure the blindness, I think,” Tagger said.

“That’s not the real point, though. I’m still going to age; I’m going to get older and older, weaker and weaker, and I won’t die. Ever. I don’t think I can face that.”

“You can kill yourself with the sword, though.”

“Not if I get too weak to lift it.”

Tagger looked thoughtful. “That’s a good point. I’m not sure how that would work, not knowing the exact spell.”

“I’m not sure either — and it’s my life that’s in question here.”

“Have you tested your supposed immortality?”

“No; how can I test it? I can still be harmed, after all.”

“You might take poison and see what it does.”

“And perhaps spend the rest of my days with my belly burnt away? That’s just the sort of thing I want to avoid.”

“Oh, come now, there are plenty of deadly poisons with no long-term side effects. Still, I see your point. You haven’t tested it, in short.”

“No.”

“And you want some way out of your current situation, where you believe you will age normally, but never die of it.”

“Exactly.”

“You would consider suicide acceptable?”

“I am not enthusiastic about it, but it seems preferable to the alternative.” Tagger stared at him thoughtfully. “Could you really find it in yourself to do it? Killing oneself with a sword is not easy.”

Valder shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.

“You could hire someone to kill you, I suppose.”

“No, not really; nobody else can use the sword while the spell holds, and the spell still has several deaths to go.”

“Several deaths? How do you mean that?”

“Oh, I didn’t explain the whole enchantment; it’s complicated. Between my acquisition of the sword in its enchanted form and my death, every time I draw it, it must kill a man, up to about a hundred times, and then it will turn on me and kill me. I had figured that I could live forever by simply not drawing it any more — but now I think that looks worse than death, as I’ve told you.”

“If I understand you, I feel obliged to warn you that I don’t think you will be able to kill yourself with the sword. I’m familiar with spells of that type, though not quite that form; they were discovered right about the time the Great War ended. The sword is semianimate, with a will of its own, is it not?”

“Yes.”

“Then it will not permit you to kill yourself until it has served out its full quota of deaths in your hands; your own determination aside, it’s physically impossible for you to commit suicide with that sword; I’m sure of it. You will have to kill however many men remain to the predetermined allotment, and then the sword will claim a new owner, who will kill you; no other outcome is possible while the sword and spell exist.”

Valder mulled that over; somehow, he was not surprised. He thought that he might have suspected it to be true all along, on some unconscious level, or perhaps had once heard it explained, long ago, by a wizard studying the sword.

At last he rose, saying politely, “Thank you for your help; I have one more favor to ask. Could you direct me to a good diviner or seer?”

Tagger, too, arose. “Certainly; I would recommend either Sella the Witch, across the street and down two blocks to the east, or Lurenna of Tantashar, four blocks west.”

“Lurenna is a wizard, or another witch?”

“A wizard. There are also a few theurgists who deal in prophecy and divination...”

“No, a wizard is fine.” Valder bowed and departed.

He paused for a moment at the door, noticing for the first time that full night had arrived while he spoke with the red-clad wizard; he was footsore and weary, feeling his age, and he considered for a moment simply finding a place to sleep and continuing in the morning.

The streets, however, were torchlit and inviting, the shop-windows mostly aglow, and he decided he would pursue matters now, having delayed so long already. He would find Lurenna of Tantashar, not in hopes that she might remove the sword’s enchantment, but rather that she might be able to locate for him a more powerful wizard who could. Tagger had said that such wizards existed.

True, he had little to offer in compensation — but he would deal with that problem when he had to. He would find a way.

Tagger watched the old man with the sword march away, then returned to the shop parlor to find that Varrin had slipped in the back way, unnoticed.

“Who was that?” the older man asked.

“Oh, an old veteran with a magic sword with a curse on it — nothing I wanted to deal with, though. Eighth-order, he said.”

Varrin shook his head. “Those idiots during the war didn’t know what they were doing, throwing around spells like that; it’s amazing we survived, let alone won.”

Tagger, who had not yet been born when the war ended, shrugged. “I wouldn’t know,” he said, reaching for the candy jar.

CHAPTER 27

Valder found Lurenna’s shop only with difficulty; reading signs by the flaring, uneven torchlight was more than his weak eyes could handle readily, and hers was small and discreet, a simple panel reading, “Lurenna of Tantashar: Your Questions Answered.”

Fortunately, the window was still lighted, behind heavy wine-red draperies. The blue-painted door, however, was securely locked; he knocked loudly.

It was a long moment before the latch slid back and the door swung in. A thin woman in a lavender gown — a color Valder had never before seen used for an entire garment — peered out at him.

“I have closed for the night,” she said.

“My apologies for disturbing you, then, but I have come a dozen leagues today to find answers to my questions.”

“Then you must be Valder the Innkeeper, here to ask about Wirikidor.” She seemed to hesitate for a moment, then said, “Come in — but I warn you, I can’t help you.”

“I have not yet said what I want.”

“I know — but I know that whatever it might be, although I will answer your questions, the answers will not be the ones you seek.”

“How can you know that?” Valder said before he could stop himself; no wizard, he still knew exactly what her reply would be.

“It’s my business to know things; why else would you come to me? I can answer my own questions as well as anyone else’s and I like to know who my customers will be and whether I will please them — though I had neglected to ask when you would come and had not expected you until morning. Now, come in and be seated.”

Valder followed her into a small room hung with wine velvet and sat down in a velvet chair by a small table. Lurenna seated herself opposite him and reached for a small velvet pouch.

“My price is fixed; I will answer three questions for a gold piece and guarantee the answers to be correct and complete. For a silver piece I can answer one question with no guarantees save that what I then tell you will be the truth.”

Valder hesitated; that was more than he had expected to pay. Still, he needed answers. He fished out one of his carefully hoarded gold pieces and tossed it on the table.

“Good; now, what are your questions?”

“Are there any limitations? Must answers be yes or no?”

“No, of course not — I would not dare charge gold for that! However, be careful just what you do or don’t ask; I will probably answer only what you say, not what you intended to say.”

That seemed fair enough. He thought for a long moment, composing his question.

“Who,” he said at last, “of all those alive today, is capable of removing the enchantment from the sword Wirikidor, which I carry?”

“And your second question?”

“Will depend upon the answer to my first.”

The wizard looked displeased. “That makes it more difficult for me, but I’ll get your answer. Wait here.” She rose and vanished behind one of the velvet draperies.

Valder waited, growing ever more bored and ever more aware of the pain in his overworked feet and his general weariness; finally, after what seemed like days, Lurenna emerged.

“I have a list of some eighty or ninety names here,” she announced. “Do you want them all?”

“I might,” Valder said, pleased.

“Have you decided upon your second question?” Lurenna asked.

“No; I hadn’t expected so long a list.” “If I might make a suggestion, what would be the consequences of removing the enchantment?”

“I had been thinking rather of where I might find the one of those ninety wizards most willing to perform the removal, but I have two questions left; very well then, what would be the consequences?”

“I have already asked that, in anticipation and to satisfy my own curiosity, you would die, and, of the wizards listed, only one, a hermit living on the Plains of Ice beyond the old Northern Empire, stands any chance of survival. The number of innocents in the area who would also die could reach as high as thirty-three.”

Valder sat, stunned.

“I told you that you would not be pleased by my answers; when the first seemed so promising I could not resist asking my own questions.” The wizard seemed almost to be gloating.

“This hermit in the far north — what of him?”

“Is that your third question?”

“No! No, it isn’t. Wait a moment.”

“The hermit knows you of old, apparently, and would probably refuse to aid you in anything whatsoever. Furthermore, because his surprisingly powerful magical aura interfered with my spells, I could not determine the extent of harm that might be done to you or to him if he were to try to remove the sword’s spells. I give you this answer free of charge, and you have one question left.”

Valder sat for a moment, then finally asked what he realized should have been his first question. He had more gold, if necessary, and could ask further questions.

“My question is this: What are all the possible ways in which I might be freed of the enchantment linking me to the sword Wirikidor?”

Lurenna smiled. “That’s a much better question; it may take some time, however. Would you prefer to return tomorrow?”

“I’ll wait,” Valder replied.

“As you wish,” she said as she rose and again vanished behind the drapery.

The wait this time seemed even longer than before — and in truth, it was longer than before. Unable to sit still, Valder at last rose and went to the door, only to discover that outside the street was dark and empty, the torches doused or burned out, the shops shuttered tightly, their lamps extinguished, and the people gone to their homes. The sky was clouded with the city’s smoke, so that he could not judge the hour from the stars, but Valder guessed it to be midnight or later. He had, he remembered, arrived at this shop shortly after full dark; whatever spells Lurenna might be working, they obviously took time.

There was nothing to see on the deserted street; he returned to his chair and waited.

He had dozed off before Lurenna returned; he awoke with a start to find her staring at him, a sheet of parchment in her hand.

He stared back for a moment, then said, “Well?”

“No, I’m afraid it is not well at all.” She held up the parchment. “I had to ask a second question, for which I will not charge you. The answer to your original question was very brief, very simple; you may only be free of Wirikidor with your death. No other possibility exists anywhere that wizardry holds sway — and wizardry, of course, holds everywhere. My second question, then, was by what means might you die — I promised you a complete answer, after all, and you paid me on that basis. There are only two ways in which you can die; I was surprised, I will admit, to find that out, since most men may die in any number of ways. You, however, may be slain only by another’s hand drawing and wielding Wirikidor, or by a magical spell powerful enough to break the enchantment, thereby killing you, destroying the sword, and slaying the spell’s wielder in an explosive release of the arcane forces pent in the sword. The wizard who cast the original spell, whether intentionally or not, booby-trapped it quite effectively.”

Valder continued to stare at the wizard for a long moment. “You’re certain?”

“Absolutely. I’ll swear it by any terms you might choose.”

“You said that I might be slain only any another’s hand; can I not kill myself?”

“No; the sword must be drawn and wielded by another — and a man, at that.”

“But no one else can draw the sword!”

“Not until you have slain another nineteen men.”

“Nineteen? Exactly?”

“Could be eighteen, could be twenty, but it’s probably nineteen.”

“Darrend wasn’t that exact.”

“Darrend analyzed the sword a long time ago, without the spells I know, and when the spell was fresher and more chaotic.”

“I’m sixty-six years old; how am I going to kill nineteen men?”

“One at a time,” Lurenna replied with a shrug.

“There is no other way out?”

“None known to wizardry.”

“Damn wizardry!” Valder said as he turned and headed for the door.

He had forgotten, in his anger, how late it was; he looked at the empty streets in annoyance, then headed back toward Westgate, looking for an inn. He knew that he might be closer to inns near the city’s other gates, but preferred not to wander randomly in search of them.

As he walked, his anger cooled; and as his anger cooled, he thought over possible courses of action.

He could, of course, let things remain as they were and sink gradually into senility and decay that would last for as long as wizardry remained effective — forever, in short.

Or he could find one of the eighty or ninety high-level wizards capable of undoing the spell and perhaps convince him to make the attempt, thereby condemning himself, the innocent wizard, and probably others to a messy death. That assumed, of course, that one of those eighty or ninety wizards would be foolish enough to make the attempt, which seemed unlikely; surely they would be able to do their own divinations and would see the danger. The possibility that one of that group might be suicidal was too slim to bother pursuing.

That left dying on Wirikidor’s blade as the only way out, unappealing as it was; and, according to the wizards, he could not kill himself, but must use up his ownership of the weapon and then wait to be murdered. He resolved to test that theory — but not immediately. He did not feel quite ready to die yet. Besides, if he drew the sword and the wizards were right, someone else would have to die, and he had no good candidates.

If the wizards were right — and he believed that they were — he would have to kill nineteen more men, give or take a few. In peacetime that was not going to be easy.

He could, of course, do what he had been asked to do so often and go join one of the warring armies in the Small Kingdoms — but wars could cripple and maim as well as kill. Besides, old as he was and with poor eyesight, what army would want him, magic sword or not? And he did not care to kill people just because they were fighting a war; he would want to be on the side that deserved his help and he had no idea how to go about choosing the morally superior side in a petty border war where the truth about the causes of the conflict would be almost impossible to get at.

There must, he told himself, be some way of finding people who deserved to die and killing them.

That was an executioner’s job, of course, killing convicted criminals. Once before, he had slain a prisoner with Wirikidor and, although he had found it repulsive, he could think of nothing better. He resolved that, come morning, he would go to the Palace and apply for a job as an executioner.

He reached this decision somewhere in the Old Merchants’ Quarter but was distracted temporarily by the necessity of finding an inn still open for business at this late hour. By the time he found a rather dirty and unappealing one a few blocks from Westgate, its sign weathered blank but shaped in a rough approximation of a gull, he had so thoroughly accepted the idea of becoming a headsman that he was wondering about such trivia as how much the job paid and what the perquisites accompanying the post might be.

CHAPTER 28

He awoke late the next morning with innumerable itches and the unclean feeling that comes from sleeping in a bed already inhabited by a great many assorted vermin; as he alternately scratched and pulled on his clothes, he thought over the events of the night before.

He had been exhausted, he realized — perhaps so much so that he had been too tired to realize just how tired he was. Still, in reviewing what he had said and done, he could find nothing he would have done very differently, had he been more alert. His questions to Lurenna might perhaps have been better used, and he wondered whether he might have talked down the price, but what had been done was done, and he had the answers he needed. Although his outlook on the world was somewhat different, now that he had slept and been eaten by bedbugs, and would presumably change somewhat more when he had himself eaten, he had no doubt of the wizard’s veracity. She had been recommended by Tagger, after all, whom Valder had trusted because he had not claimed to be able to do more than he could. For that matter, were Lurenna less than she claimed, she would most likely have given him more encouraging answers and would not have stretched his three questions to the five she had actually answered.

That meant that there was no easy way out of his situation; he would have to kill nineteen men before he himself could be murdered, and the only way he could see to do that without the slaughtering of innocents or undue hardship for himself was to become an executioner.

In the cold light of morning, however, as he struggled to pull his boots onto swollen feet, becoming an executioner did not seem quite so simple. Just how did one become an executioner? To whom did he apply? Could he just walk up to the Palace and ask? Or was that a military job, in which case he should ask at the gatehouse?

The gatehouse was certainly closer than the Palace; once he was dressed and had gathered his belongings, he headed downstairs with every intention of proceeding directly to the gate — until the smell of cooking bacon reached him and reminded him that he had not eaten, save for some stale bread and cheese at bedtime, since reaching the city. He had doubts about any food that this inn might provide, but decided to take the risk.

In the actual event, the food was not bad at all, and the few patrons of the Gull who were awake and present were pleasant enough. The ambitious had risen early and were already gone, while the unsavory still slept. Valder considered asking one of his more talkative tablemates about the city’s executioners, but never found an opportunity in the conversation; beheading criminals was not a subject that sprang readily to mind in cheerful breakfast chatter. Before he had managed to bring up the topic, the sitting was over and the guests departing on their various errands, making way for the remaining late risers. He found the innkeeper, a huge, surly fellow, standing over him, a cleaver in one fist, and took this as a hint that his seat, too, was wanted — though he hadn’t realized the inn held that many people that it would be needed.

The innkeeper, however, seemed as likely an informant as any, and the cleaver brought the subject up as nothing else had.

“No need to use that thing, I’ll be going,” Valder said, trying to sound lightly amusing. “You’ve no call to chop off my head.”

The innkeeper stood and glared silently; Valder stood.

“Ah... speaking of chopping off heads, I’m looking for work as a headsman — I’ve been trained in the art. Whom would I speak to about such employment?”

His only training had been the standard army training in combat and his rushed indoctrination as a scout, but he saw no need to limit himself to the absolute truth.

The innnkeeper’s glare turned from simple resentment to puzzlement and wariness. “A headsman?” he said, uncomprehendingly.

“An executioner, then.”

For a long moment the Gull’s master stared in open disbelief at the master of the Thief’s Skull. “An executioner?”

“Yes; whom must I talk to?”

“The Lord Executioner, I guess,” the innkeeper said, still baffled.

“Where do I find him?”

The city-dweller shrugged. “Don’t know; the Palace, I guess.” He turned away, losing interest.

Valder watched him go, wondering how the man had ever become an innkeeper when nature had plainly intended him to be a thug of some sort, then shrugged and departed. He glanced in the direction of the gate wistfully as his boots struck the packed dirt of the street, but headed for the Palace.

Half an hour later he stood in the Palace Market, on the only stone pavement he had yet encountered in Ethshar of the Spices, staring at the home of Azrad the Great.

The Palace was immense; Valder could not see all of its facade from where he stood, but it was several hundred feet long and three stories high for its full length. It was gleaming white and appeared to be marble, ornamented with pink-and-gray carved stone. It stood on the far side of a small canal from the marketplace, connected by a broad, level bridge; at each end of the bridge stood huge ironwork gates, and at each gate stood a dozen guards.

The gates were closed.

That puzzled Valder; surely, he thought, there must be some way for people to get in and out in the ordinary course of day-to-day business, without having to open the immense portals. He could see none, however; the canal turned corners at either end of the Palace grounds, wrapping itself all the way around. The bridge was the only visible entrance.

With a mental shrug, he decided that the direct, honest approach was likely to be the most effective. He walked up to the gates and waited for the guards to notice him.

When they gave no acknowledgment of his existence before he came within arm’s reach of the iron bars, he revised his plan and cleared his throat.

“Hello there,” he said, “I have business with the Lord Executioner.”

The nearest guard condescended to look at him. “Business of what nature?”

Valder knew better than admit the truth. “Personal, I’m afraid — family matters, to be discussed only with him.”

The guard looked annoyed. “Thurin,” he called to one of his comrades, “have we got anyone on the list for the Executioner?”

The man he addressed as Thurin, standing in front of one of the great stone pillars that supported the gates, answered, “I don’t remember any; I’ll check.” He turned and lifted a tablet from a hook on the pillar. After a moment’s perusal, he said, “No one here that I can see.”

Before anyone could shoo him away, Valder said, “He must not have known I was coming; Sarai sent a message, but it may not have reached him in time. Really, it’s important that I see him.”

The guard he had first spoken to sighed. “Friend,” he said, “I don’t know whether you’re telling the truth or not, and it’s not my place to guess. We’ll let you in — but I warn you, entering the Palace under false pretenses has been declared a crime, the punishment to be decided jointly by all those you meet inside, with flogging or death the most common. If you meet no one, it’s assumed you’re a thief, and the penalty for robbing the overlord is death by slow torture. And that sword isn’t going to make a good impression; we can keep it here for you, if you like. Now, do you still want to get in to see the Lord Executioner?” With only an instant’s hesitation, Valder nodded. “I’ll risk it; I really do have to see him. And I’ll keep my sword.”

“It’s your life, friend; Thurin, let this fellow in, would you?”

Thurin waved for Valder to approach; as the innkeeper obeyed, the guard knelt and pulled at a ring set in the stone pillar.

With a dull grinding noise, one of the paving stones slid aside, revealing a stairway leading down under the great stone gatepost; trying to conceal his astonishment, Valder descended the steps and found himself in a passage that obviously led, not over the bridge, but through it. He had never encountered anything like this before; in fact, he would not have guessed the bridge to be thick enough to have held a passageway and he wondered if magic were involved.

The pavement door closed behind him, and he realized that light was coming from somewhere ahead; he walked on and discovered that in fact the bridge was not thick enough to conceal the corridor, but that the corridor ran below, rather than through, the center of the bridge; this central section of the passageway consisted of an iron floor suspended from iron bars. It seemed rather precarious but gave a pleasant view of the canal beneath.

At the far side of the bridge, another set of stairs brought him up beside another stone gatepost, facing another guard.

“Destination?” the soldier demanded.

“I’m here to see the Lord Executioner.”

“You know the way?”

“No.”

“In the left-hand door, up one flight, turn left, four doors down on the right. Got that?”

“I think so.”

“Go on, then.” The guard waved him on, and Valder marched on across the forecourt.

Three large doors adorned the central portion of the Palace facade; Valder followed the guard’s directions, through the left-hand door, where he found himself in a broad marble corridor, facing ornate stone stairs. He could see no one, but heard distant hurried footsteps. As instructed, he went up a flight, turned left at the first possible opportunity into another corridor — not quite so wide or elegant as the first, but lined with doors spaced well apart, with figures visible in the distance. He found the fourth door on the right and knocked.

For a long moment nothing happened, save that the people at the far end of the corridor disappeared. He knocked again.

The door opened, and an unhealthy young man peered out at him.

“Hello,” Valder said, “I’m here to apply for a job as an executioner.”

The young man’s expression changed from polite puzzlement to annoyance. “What?”

“I’m an experienced headsman; I’m looking for work.”

“Wait a minute.” He ducked back inside, closing the door but not latching it; a moment later he reappeared, something clutched concealed in one fist. “Now, are you serious?”

“Yes, quite serious,” Valder answered.

“A headsman, you said?”

“Yes.”

“From out of town, obviously.”

“Yes.”

“Headsman, let me explain a few things to you that you don’t seem to know, though any twelve-year-old child in the streets could tell you. First off, the Lord Executioner is the only official executioner in the city and has no interest in hiring others; if he did, he’d hire his friends and family first, not strangers who wander in. Understand?”

“But...”

“But what?”

“This is the largest city in the world; how can there be just one executioner?”

“That brings us to my second point. The post of Lord Executioner is not a very demanding one; after all, no nobleman likes to work. It’s true that the Lord Executioner could hire assistants, as his father did before him, but there’s no call for them, because hardly anybody manages to require an official execution. Generally, captured thieves and murderers are disposed of quite efficiently by the neighborhood vigilance committees; they don’t come to us. All we get are the traitors and troublemakers who have contrived to offend the overlord himself, and the occasional soldier guilty of something so heinous that his comrades aren’t willing to take his punishment into their own hands and that can’t just be dealt with by throwing him out of the guard and out of the city. This comes to maybe one execution every two or three sixnights, and it will be a long time before the current Lord Executioner is too feeble to deal with that himself. Which brings me to my third point — you don’t look like much of an executioner in any case. You must be sixty, aren’t you?”

“Sixty-six.”

“Did your former employers retire you, perhaps? Well, in any case, the Palace is not a village shrine for old men to gather at.”

“I didn’t think it was, but I can guarantee that I would have no difficulty in carrying out the job.”

“Ah, but there remains my fourth and final point, which is that we have no use for a headsman in any case. Were the Lord Executioner too old or feeble or ill or lazy to do his own work, or were there a hundred convicts a day to be disposed of, and were you forty years younger, we would still have no use for a headsman; the last beheading in this city was more than thirty years ago, when the first Lord Executioner was still in office and his son too young for breeches. Lord Azrad long ago decided that beheadings were too messy and too reminiscent of the Great War; we hang our criminals here. I had thought that custom had become the fashion almost everywhere by now. Our own headsman’s axe has hung undisturbed on the wall behind me for as long as I can recall. Now, are you satisfied that there’s no place for you here? Leave immediately and I won’t have you arrested.”

Dismayed, Valder stepped back. “A question, though, sir — or two, if I might.”

“What are they?”

“Who are you, and what have you got in your hand? How am I to know that what you say is true? I confess I don’t really doubt it, but I am curious.”

“I am Adagan the Younger, secretary to the Lord Executioner, and incidentally his first cousin. I hold a protective charm — you might have been a madman, after all, and you’re obviously armed. As for how you know what I say to be true, ask anyone; it’s common knowledge, all of it.”

“And you wouldn’t know of any place that does need a headsman? This sword I carry is cursed, you see; I can only remove the curse by killing nineteen men with it.”

“Perhaps you’re a madman after all...”

“No, truly, it’s cursed — it happened during the war.”

“Well, maybe it did; many strange things happened during the war, I understand. At any rate, I can’t help you; I know of no place that still beheads its condemned, let alone with a sword rather than an axe.”

Reluctantly, Valder admitted himself defeated. “Thank you, then, sir, for your kindness.” He bowed slightly and turned to go.

“Wait, old man; you’ll need a safe conduct past the guards on the bridge. Take this.” He held out a small red-and-gold disk. Valder accepted it, noting wryly that the man’s other hand still held the protective charm.

“Thank you again.” He bowed and marched off down the hallway. He heard the clunk of the door closing behind him, but did not look back.

The guard at the inner gate demanded the little enameled disk before allowing him into the tunnel under the bridge and gave him a slip of paper in its place, which was in turn collected by the guard at the outer gate when Valder knocked on the paving and was released into the marketplace once again. It struck him as odd that it was more difficult to get out of the Palace than in, though he could see the logic to the system; after all, someone with legitimate business might be unable to obtain a pass to enter, but anyone who departed without some sign of having had such business could be safely assumed to be a fraud or worse. It still seemed odd, though.

He managed to distract himself with such trivia for the entire trip out of the Palace and across the market square; it was only when seated in a quiet tavern and sipping cold ale that he allowed his thoughts to return to his problem.

One reasonably positive aspect of his situation had occurred to him rather belatedly. If he could not kill himself, but must wait to be murdered, then he might live for a good long time after he had killed all his nineteen victims; he had no intention of being a willing victim, and that meant that his killer might not be able to get at him until he had sunk irretrievably into senility, or blindness, or some other incapacity, by which time he thought he would prefer to die in any case. He would, he thought, be a rich enough victim to attract a cutthroat fairly quickly, once he was known to be helpless, so that he probably would not be left to linger unreasonably long. He might even leave instructions with Tandellin that he was to be killed when he had sunk far enough, without hope of recovery, to make his life miserable.

That was an interesting idea, actually; he rather liked that. The idea of suicide was one that had never really appealed to him, nor had he cared for the idea of allowing some scoundrel to do him in and take possession of Wirikidor. Allowing Tandellin or some other worthy fellow to put him out of his misery, however, was not so bad.

That still left him with the necessity of killing nineteen men. He might yet find a job as a headsman, he supposed, but it would mean travel, extensive travel, to find such a post. He was not at all sure he felt up to any such travel; he felt his age, though perhaps not as much as most men of his years. It would be far more pleasant to find his victims here in Ethshar.

A thought struck him. He was not able legally to dispatch condemned criminals, but if what Adagan had told him was correct, there were neighborhood vigilance committees that didn’t always bother with legalities. He might join such a group, perhaps — or perhaps he could simply track down criminals on his own and let their removal be credited to the vigilantes. That was an idea with great promise.

When the taverner came by with a refill, he asked, “What do they do with thieves around here, anyway? One almost got my purse this morning.”

“Depends who catches them,” replied the taverner, a heavy man of medium height, bristling black beard, and gleaming bald pate. “If it’s the city guard, by some miracle, they are hanged — assuming they can’t bribe their way out of it. Usually, though, it’s just the neighbors, and they’ll beat a little honesty into them, even if it means a few broken bones — or broken heads.”

“The neighbors, you say?”

“That’s right; the landowners have the right to defend their property, old Azrad says.”

“Landowners only, huh?”

“Yes, landowners; can’t have just anyone enforcing the law, or you’ll have riots every time there’s a disagreement.”

“So if I were robbed here — I can see you run an honest place, but just suppose some poor desperate fool wandered in off the street and snatched my purse — what should I do? Call you?”

“That’s right; we’d teach him a lesson, depending on what he’d stolen, and from whom, and whether we’d ever caught him before; if he lived through it, that would be the end of it — assuming he gave back your money, of course.”

“What if I caught him myself?”

“Well, that’s your affair, isn’t it? Just so you didn’t do it in here.”

Valder nodded. “Good enough.” It was, indeed, good enough. If he could contrive to be robbed or attacked, then he would have every right to defend himself. He was an old man, with a fat purse — or fat enough, at any rate. If he were to wear his purse openly, instead of beneath his kilt, and were somehow to make Wirikidor less obvious while still ready at hand, he would be very tempting bait. It would be unpleasant, and he might receive a few injuries, but it seemed the quickest and best solution to his problems.

He thanked the taverner, finished his ale in a gulp, paid his bill, and left. He turned his steps back toward Westgate; he was heading for Wall Street.

CHAPTER 29

Wall Street had changed in detail since Valder had spent a night there forty years earlier, but not in the essentials. The law still required that no permanent structures be erected between Wall Street and the city wall itself, and that meant that the Hundred-Foot Field was still there and still the last resort for the homeless. Those had been confused veterans when Valder had first seen it, men suddenly displaced from the only life they had known since childhood, but the majority had still been honest men who simply had not yet found their places. Now, however, all such had long since departed, either finding themselves better homes or dying, leaving behind the human detritus of the city and the Hegemony, the beggars, cripples, outcasts, and simpletons. The tents and blankets of the veterans had given way to shacks and lean-tos; where the soldiers had been almost exclusively young men, the current population came in both sexes and all sizes, shapes, and ages.

And among these derelicts, Valder had heard, hid the worst of the city’s criminals. The guard did not willingly come into the Hundred-Foot Field, and there were no land-owning vigilantes, since it was entirely public land, so that it served as a final refuge for scoundrels and blackguards who had been driven from all the more comfortable places.

With that in mind, it was Valder’s intention to stroll the length of Wall Street with his purse plain on his belt and Wirikidor serving as a cane. That, he was sure, would attract thieves, and any such lurking along Wall Street might reasonably be assumed to be no great loss to anyone, should he kill them in self-defense. Whether he would be able to lure nineteen of them to their deaths he did not care to guess, but he did expect to make a good start.

He walked south from Westgate Market an hour or so after the sun passed its zenith, a good meal in his belly and feeling reasonably rested. The day was warm but not hot, and a strong wind blew from the east, tugging at his clothes and keeping him cool. He expected the first attack within an hour.

It did not materialize; rather than being attracted by the harmless old man, the people who noticed him at all stared and actively avoided him.

Perhaps, he thought, he was being too obvious about it. Thieves would suspect a trap of some sort. He tucked the purse into a fold of his kilt, as if he were unsuccessfully attempting to hide it, and trudged onward.

Another few minutes brought him to Newgate Market in the city’s southwestern corner; although far smaller and less active than Westgate Market, the square was lined with inns and taverns, and he stopped into one for a drink and a rest. He intentionally chose the one that looked worst, in hopes that a drunken brawl might start and provide an opportunity for swordplay. He promised himself he would not be the first to draw a weapon in such a situation and that he would not actively provoke a fight — but should one begin, he was ready and eager to join in, sixty-six or not.

No fight began, and after an hour or two he moved on, heading from Newgate into Southwark. This gave every appearance of being a quiet and respectable residential area, despite its proximity to Wall Street and the Hundred-Foot Field, where Westgate, Westwark, Crookwall, and Newgate had all been more colorful. The population of the Field seemed thinner here, and the shacks and huts fewer and more substantial.

Another hour found him still plodding along unmolested, well on his way to Southgate and inwardly fuming. He had decided that Wirikidor was too obviously a sword, rather than a cane. From what little he knew of the city’s geography, he judged himself to be nearing the southern end of the Wizards’ Quarter — assuming that district reached the southern wall, which he doubted. He began mulling over the possibility of purchasing a concealment spell or an illusion to hide Wirikidor or make it appear something other than itself.

Although the idea had a certain appeal, he marched onward down Wall Street rather than turning aside; he had no desire to become lost in the city’s tangled streets.

It also occurred to him that perhaps he overestimated the boldness of the city’s thieves in expecting an attack by daylight; he resolved that the next time he came to a tavern or inn he would settle in, eat an early dinner, and wait until dark.

The next inn, however, did not turn up until almost half an hour later, in Southgate, as he drew near Southgate Market. There he paused, glanced at the sun sinking behind him, down nearly to the rooftops; with a shrug, he stepped inside.

It was indeed well after dark when he stepped out again, and he was slightly the worse for drink, but his belly was full and his feet did not hurt quite so badly as before, whether from the rest or from the liquor he was not sure.

With fresh resolve, he strode onward toward Southgate Market, past innumerable cookfires scattered among the ramshackle shelters in the Field, and beneath the torches that lighted Wall Street.

He had gone perhaps two blocks when a thought suddenly struck him; would a thief approach him on Wall Street itself, where there were torches and campfires lighting the way and any number of possible witnesses in the Hundred-Foot Field who might be bribed into identifying an attacker?

Far more likely, he decided, they would look for their prey in alleys and byways that were uninhabited and not as well lighted. With that in mind, he turned left at the next opportunity, into a narrow unlighted street.

He wanted to remain in the vicinity of Wall Street, however, so he doubled back at the next intersection.

For the next hour or so, he wandered the back streets of Southgate; several times he sensed that he was being watched, though no one was in sight, and once he thought he heard stealthy footsteps, but no one accosted him. Still, he was encouraged.

He was also tired; he sat down on the stoop of a darkened shop and caught his breath.

He reviewed his actions of the day and evening and decided that he had done the right thing so far — save that it had taken him far too long to realize that dark alleys were better places to find cutpurses than Wall Street, even if Wall Street might be their home. He wished he had thought of it sooner, if only for the sake of his poor abused feet and tired legs. He stretched them out, feeling the muscles twinge as he did so, and rubbed his calves.

If he were to be attacked, he thought, he wasn’t certain he would be able to draw Wirikidor fast enough to prevent injury to himself when he was this tired.

It was with that in his mind that he heard a scream, suddenly cut off, and thrashing sounds from around the corner nearest him.

He leaped to his feet with the trained response of a man who had spent much of his life breaking up drunken brawls before they could damage the furnishings; without consciously intending it, he found himself rounding the corner into the alley whence the sounds came.

A smile twitched across his face as he saw what was happening; here he had been roaming the city looking for a robbery, and one had come to him while he rested. The light was poor, coming primarily from torches in a neighboring avenue, and his eyesight was not what it once was, but he could still plainly see that two men were attacking a woman. One held her from behind, one hand holding a knife to her throat and the other clamped over her mouth, while the other man was pawing at her skirt, searching for her purse or other valuables.

Valder had found himself a target and without luring anyone to himself. He drew Wirikidor, dropping the scabbard to the road and hoping that the second man would flee, rather than fight.

Hearing his approach, the man who had been kneeling at the woman’s skirt whirled and lost his balance, tumbling awkwardly to the street. The other released the woman, flinging her aside and whipping a sword from its sheath.

He had time to get a good look at Valder in the flickering torchlight before the two swords met with a clash of steel. “Ho, old man,” he said, starting a jibe of some sort; Valder never heard the rest of it, as Wirikidor whirled back to the side and slid under the thief’s guard so fast that he probably never even saw it coming and certainly had no time to parry. The blade, sharper than any razor, sliced through leather tunic, flesh, and bone with ease, spraying blood in an arc across the entire width of the alley.

Valder could not see the thief’s face; the light was behind him. All he saw was a black outline that slowly crumpled to the ground, the sword still clutched in the dead fingers. He brought Wirikidor up into guard position and looked for the woman’s other assailant.

That man had scrambled to his feet even as his comrade fell and had out his own sword now. Valder watched him warily.

The thief looked down at his dead companion, then back at Valder. “I don’t know how you did that, old man,” he said. “I guess you surprised him. I’m ready for you, though; you won’t take me by surprise. Maybe you’re better than you look, but you’re still old and weak and slow.”

Valder forced a grin. “I’ve killed fourscore better men than you, fool; run while you can.”

“So you can hit me from behind, perhaps? No, I’ve a friend’s death to avenge and avenge it I will!” With that, he lunged forward, sword extended.

Valder stepped back, suddenly realizing just how much trouble he was in as the other’s blade slid past his neck; he was old and slow, just as the man had said, and yes, without Wirikidor’s aid, he was almost defenseless. The sword sagged in his grip as he flailed helplessly, trying to fend off the next attack. He wouldn’t die — the curse assured that — but it looked to him very much as if he were about to be badly cut up, with eighteen men yet to kill. He saw the blade approaching and knew that his parry would not stop it before it drew blood and weakened him further; he tried to duck and felt himself losing his balance.

Then everything vanished in a sudden violent blaze of intense golden light; he staggered and fell, dazed, to the street.

He lay there for a long moment on his back, staring up at the polychrome aftereffects of the flash, streaks and stars of every color superimposed on the smoke-stained night sky of the city; then a shadow slid over him.

“Are you all right?” a woman’s voice asked.

“I’m not sure,” he managed to reply.

“Can you move?”

Valder tried and discovered he could; he forced himself up on his elbows. “I think so. What happened to the man I was fighting?”

The woman gestured. “I took care of him.”

Valder sat up and looked where she indicated, but could distinguish nothing but a vague black shape. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Here, let me give you some more light.” She gestured again, this time not pointing at anything, but making a curious pass in mid-air with her hand. A white glow appeared in her palm, lighting the whole alleyway.

“You’re a wizard?” Valder said.

He could see her face now in the light that came from her hand; it was a young, attractive face. She smiled. “Yes, I’m a wizard.”

He looked again where she had indicated and saw that the black shape was exactly that, a charred black lump roughly the length of a man, with protruding fragments that resembled arms, legs, and a head. Valder gagged as he saw the distinctive shape of a human skull beneath a coating of ash and realized that this was all that remained of his foe.

“Not very pleasant, is it?” she remarked. “But then, they weren’t very pleasant people; I suppose they were going to rape me and kill me, if I resisted.”

“Did they know you were a wizard?”

“No, of course not; I don’t walk the streets wearing a sign proclaiming my profession, after all.”

“Why didn’t you fry them both right away?”

“They caught me by surprise; I couldn’t reach any of my magics, or move my hands to gesture, once they grabbed my knife and held it at my throat.” She held up the dagger that Valder’s first opponent had used, and he noticed for the first time that it had the white gleam of silver rather than the gray of steel and that the hilt was carved of bone.

“What were you doing in this alley in the first place, and without any protective spells?”

“Well, if you must know, I took a wrong turn; I’m lost. I had hoped this alley was a shortcut. I was sightseeing, you might say, reacquainting myself with the city; it’s been quite some time since I last visited Ethshar of the Spices. As for protective spells, I had forgotten that I might need them. Foolish of me, I know — but I never claim to be free of human foolishness.” She sheathed the dagger on her belt, then asked, “For that matter, what were you doing here?”

That reminded Valder of his own situation; he looked about, spotted Wirikidor’s scabbard, and got to his feet to retrieve it. The sword itself, under the influence of the Spell of True Ownership, had never left his hand. When he had the sheath, he turned back and answered, “I was looking for thieves and murderers.”

“It would seem you found them,” she replied with a smile. “You’ll have to tell me all about it — but not here. Do you have any idea where we are?”

“Roughly; Wall Street lies three blocks that way, if I’m not mistaken, and we’re not very far from Southgate Market.”

“Ah! Lead on, then.”

“You haven’t any magic to find your way?”

“Not with me; I didn’t expect to need it. I grew up in this city, back when it was called New Ethshar; I hadn’t realized how much it had grown and changed.”

Valder looked at her curiously at that; he had judged her to be in her early twenties, from what he had seen of her, and, though he knew well enough that the city had changed greatly in his own lifetime, he had not thought that any great part of the change had been in the past two decades. Furthermore, he had never heard it called New Ethshar.

That was none of his concern, though. He buckled the scabbard to his belt, sheathed the sword, and then led the way to Southgate Market. They arrived there without further incident, and the wizard then took the lead, in her turn. Valder followed without protest, but did ask, “Where are we going? From what you’ve said, you don’t live in the city.”

“No, but one of my former apprentices does.”

Once again, Valder found himself puzzled; how could so young a wizard have a former apprentice? She seemed scarcely older than an apprentice herself. Still, he walked on in amiable silence, his feet aching with every step, discovering bruises from his fall that had not been immediately apparent.

He had lost track of time, but it was obviously quite late, once they were two blocks from the market, the streets were deserted, and the torches were burning low, some already out. He felt rather burned out himself; it had been a very long and trying day. For a moment, he wondered why he was following the wizard, but that passed; after all, she owed him a favor for his help and might at least save him the price of a night’s lodging.

They arrived, finally, at the door of a small shop in the Wizards’ Quarter, whose sign read “Agravan of the Golden Eye, Wizard Extraordinary.” A light still burned in the window. Valder’s guide knocked twice, and a moment later they were admitted to a young man who did, indeed, have one golden eye, the other being a watery blue.

“Mistress!” he exclaimed. “What kept you? And who is this?”

“I will tell you all about it, Agravan, but first, something to drink, and I think a soft bed would not be amiss — would it, friend? Your questions can wait until morning.”

Valder, who was only semiconscious by this point, managed to nod agreement; he made it up a flight of stairs, then collapsed upon the offered cot and was instantly asleep.

CHAPTER 30

Valder awoke, uncertain of where he was. The night’s events returned gradually, and a glance around reminded him that he was in the loft room of a wizard’s shop. The room was cluttered with books and arcane paraphernalia, jammed on shelves and overflowing from tables; his cot was squeezed into one corner. An unreasonable surge of hope welled up briefly; here he had found himself with a wizard in his debt. Perhaps something could be done about Wirikidor!

That hope faded quickly, however, as he recalled Lurenna’s words. There was nothing that could be done about the sword.

He might, however, have his eyesight restored, if the wizard he had rescued were really grateful. That would be a relief and might stave off the day when death would be preferable to an enforced life.

He got to his feet and wished he hadn’t; he had done far too much walking in the past few days and had slept with his boots on. His legs and feet were aching, itchy, and swimming in sweat. He found a filled pitcher his host had thoughtfully provided and pulled off his boots to swab his feet.

He was involved in this inelegant task when Agravan appeared on the stairs.

“Good morning, sir,” the young wizard called.

“Hello,” Valder replied. “And my thanks for your hospitality.”

“Oh, it’s nothing; I owe Iridith more than I can ever repay, and you’ve put her in your debt, it seems.”

“It’s kind of her to say so.”

“Would you care for breakfast? Iridith is awake, and I’m sure we all have much to tell one another.”

“I would be delighted,” Valder replied, though he was unsure just what he would have to say that would interest the wizards. He pulled his boots back on and followed his host downstairs.

The breakfast was good, but Valder found himself carrying the conversation, explaining in detail Wirikidor’s nature and how he had come to have his sword enchanted in the first place and his attempts to remedy his situation.

When he had finished, Iridith asked, “Do you really want to die?”

“No,” Valder admitted. “But it does seem preferable to the alternative.”

“Is there only one alternative, though?”

“I told you that I consulted wizards on the matter and was told that the spell can’t be broken without killing me.”

“That’s probably true; certainly I wouldn’t know how to go about it,” Iridith said, spreading butter on a biscuit. “However, as Tagger the Younger told you, there must be a way around it. I’ve never met the lad, but he sounds like a sensible person.”

“How can there be a way around it? I’ll live as long as I own the sword and I’ll own the sword for as long as I live; there isn’t any way out of that. I’ll just grow older and older forever unless I kill another eighteen men and allow myself to be murdered. I don’t mind the idea of living forever, but not if I continue to age.”

“Ah, but then why should you continue to age?”

Valder wondered if the woman was being intentionally dense. “I don’t have a great deal of choice in the matter,” he retorted.

“That’s where you’re wrong, though. You do have a choice. Others might not, but you do; you just don’t know it.”

Valder was not sure if the wizard was speaking in riddles or just babbling outright nonsense. “What are you talking about?” he asked politely. He was tempted to be harsher, but the wizard had saved him from injury the night before, as much, as he had saved her, and besides, offending wizards was never a good idea.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked.

Playing along with the apparent nonsequitur, Valder answered, “Oh, twenty-one or so.” An honest reply would have been twenty-five.

She smiled, and Valder, who had not really had a chance to see her clearly the night before, was startled by how beautiful her face became when she smiled. “I’m two hundred and eighty-eight.”

Valder could think of nothing to say in reply to such an outrageous claim. He had heard tales of immortal wizards, of course — everybody had — but he had never paid much attention to them. He had seen wizards die and knew them for mere mortal humans; two of his childhood friends had taken up careers in magic, one as a theurgist and one as a wizard, yet both had remained ordinary people outside of their magical abilities.

“I don’t think you believe me,” Iridith said, reading his face. “But it’s true. I served as a combat wizard for a century under Admiral Sidor and Admiral Dathet; I was retired long before Azrad came to power, and before you were born. I grew up here before the city wall was built, before the Palace was built, before the New Canal was dug. There are spells to restore or preserve youth indefinitely.”

“Why haven’t I ever heard of them, then?” Valder asked skeptically.

“You’ve never heard of wizards centuries old?”

“Certainly I have, but just rumors — and most of those wizards were supposed to look old, not young and beautiful.”

She smiled again. “My thanks for the compliment; my face is my own, only my age is of thaumaturgical origin. Not all wizards who can restore youth choose to do so; many prefer to stay the outward age at which they learned the spells that prevent aging. Since that’s usually not until one is sixty or seventy years old, many of the ancients like myself still look old. I was vain enough — and weary enough of eating with false teeth — that I chose otherwise. I was... let me see... seventy-four when I learned the secrets.”

“That doesn’t explain why I never heard more about these spells, though.”

“They were secret, of course — the Wizards’ Guild saw to that. Even during the war, when we let the army know so many secrets, we kept that one for ourselves.”

“But why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not to me.”

“The spells are very difficult, the ingredients very expensive, and they consume an inordinate amount of magical energy. If everyone knew that such spells existed, everyone would want them; who wouldn’t want to be young forever? However, that’s not practical. First off, if no one were to die of old age, the world would become very crowded very quickly. And besides, we simply couldn’t enchant everyone; there isn’t enough to go around of some of the ingredients, and the spells would use up so much magical energy that it might affect the whole balance of reality. But do you think most people would believe that? Most people distrust wizards enough as it is. In the face of something like eternal youth being denied them, they’d surely accuse us of keeping it for ourselves out of evil motives.” She paused, then added, “Besides, there are plenty of people around I’d just as soon not see still alive a century hence.”

Valder had to agree with that sentiment, but asked, “What about some of the really important people, though? Why haven’t you restored Azrad’s youth, if it’s possible? He’s a great man and, as overlord of the world’s richest city, he could certainly afford to pay for the ingredients, however rare they are.”

“Oh, certainly, we could restore his youth, and he could afford to pay for it — but we don’t want to. He’s been a good enough overlord, and a good admiral before that, but, if he were to live forever, he might not stay one. What sympathy would he have for ordinary people once he, himself, were free of the fear of death? Besides, he would then have an unfair advantage in his competition with his fellow triumvirs, don’t you think? He would have all eternity to plot and plan and carry out his schemes; what mortal ruler could compete? In a century or two, he’d rule all the world — including the wizards, perhaps, and we don’t want that. Nor do we care to treat all rulers equally with our youth spells; we’d be preserving the bad along with the good and isolating them from their people. This is without even mentioning that we could scarcely keep the spells secret if we used them on Azrad or any other public figure. If old Azrad were to appear in the next parade looking like a man of thirty again, that would make it rather obvious that youth spells exist, wouldn’t it? Assuming, that is, that everyone actually believed him to be Azrad and not a brash young imposter.”

Valder had to admit the truth of these arguments.

“Well, then, you see that there is a way around your curse; all you need is a perpetual youth spell.”

“And just how am I to get one? Why would these immortal wizards you speak of allow me, a mere innkeeper, what they would not permit Azrad? And just who are these people, anyway? Plenty of wizards grow old and die; I’ve seen it happen. Who decides who will be made young?”

“Oh, that’s simple enough; anyone who can handle the spells is permitted to use them. After all, how could we stop them? The difficulty is that the spells involved are all of a very high order; the one that I used was an eleventh-order spell. From what you’ve said of your difficulties with Wirikidor, I’m sure you know that very few wizards ever become capable of handling such spells in the course of a normal lifetime. Among those who do, the spells are not secret; in fact, any member of the Wizards’ Guild who asks is given whichever recipe he might choose. In most cases, since failure usually results in a messy death, wizards wait until they are either capable of handling the magic involved or are old enough to be desperate.”

“You mean all the wizards know about these youth spells?”

“Most of them, anyway.”

“How can you keep secret what so many know?”

“Oh, well, that’s an advantage of being wizards; the Guild has ways of keeping secrets that don’t bear explaining.”

“Why don’t the wizards object to not being given immortality, then?”

“But they all have the opportunity to earn it, you see, if they’re good enough at their craft. Most aren’t — but that possibility is always there. If we were to cast the spell on every poor fool who manages to survive an apprenticeship, the world would fill up with wizards until there was no room for anyone else.”

“And how am I to earn it? Are you suggesting I become a wizards’ apprentice at the age of sixty-six and hope that by some miracle I live long enough to learn an eleventh-order spell?”

“It would hardly take a miracle, with Wirikidor involved; but no, that’s not at all what I propose. I intend to enchant you myself.”

“But you just finished explaining why the spell wasn’t given out!”

“It’s not given out to just anyone, Valder, but you’re a special case. You saved my life last night, and, after two hundred and eighty-eight years, I consider my life rather precious. Besides, for forty years you’ve lived quietly, despite owning a sword that could have put you on a throne in the Small Kingdoms or otherwise cut a swathe in the world’s affairs; I don’t think the Guild need worry too much that you’ll upset anything or take unfair advantage of extended youth. In fact, you already have immortality, and that’s the hard part; all I’ll be doing is restoring your youth, not extending your lifespan. I’ll be saving eighteen other lives, as well; you’ll have no need to draw Wirikidor again, no reason to want to be murdered. More than eighteen, since after your death the sword would take a new owner, who would have to kill his own quota before he could die. That’s a very nasty sword you have there, and I’m sure that taking it out of circulation indefinitely is a good enough reason to grant you your youth. I’m certain my Guild colleagues will agree.”

“Just because I haven’t done anything stupid? A life is a life, that’s all, and I never saw any reason to treat mine differently because of Wirikidor.”

“Ah, but that’s what makes you special! Most people would have shaped their lives around the sword.”

“You can’t just remove the spell somehow?” Valder was not sure whether he wanted to be young again; the idea was strange, unfamiliar, and he needed time before he could accept it fully.

“I could, actually, but we would both die as a result, and I am not in the least interested in dying.”

Valder was not interested in dying, either. Here, finally, was his way out, if he could only accept it. He would be young again — he would live forever, if he chose. He could not help but think that there was some trick to it, some hidden catch; it had been wizardry that had complicated his situation in the first place, when the hermit had wanted to get rid of him. Now another wizard was volunteering to interfere with his life, and he was sure there would be drawbacks — but he could not think of any. After several minutes of thought, he reached a decision. He would not be deterred by his previous experience. He would accept this incredible gift being offered him. Perhaps with new youth, his eyesight would return to what it had once been; he would like that.

“All right,” he said, pushing his chair back from the breakfast table. “What do we do now?”

Iridith smiled. “Come with me.”

CHAPTER 31

The house by the seaside was pleasant enough, with its covered porches and wooden walkways down to the beach, but it was not at all what Valder had expected of a centuries-old wizard capable of eleventh-order magic. He had been expecting a glittering palace, not a ramshackle old house with walls of rough wood and fieldstone and a roof of thatch.

He mentioned this to Iridith, who replied, “I had a palace once; it seemed the thing to do at the time. This is more comfortable.”

Valder found that hard to believe at first, looking over the cobwebbed furnishings and feeling the cool, damp sea breeze blowing through the chinks, but he had to admit that, after Iridith had cast a restorative spell or two and conjured up a blazing fire, the house was quite cozy.

The main structure, not counting the sprawling verandas and terraces, contained just four rooms — an immense workshop filled with the arcana of the wizardly trade occupied the entire western end, a fair-sized bedroom the southeast corner, a small kitchen the northeast, and a small parlor faced south toward the sea at the center. Each room was equipped with a vast stone hearth and cavernous fireplace; when all four were lighted, the moist chill that had bothered Valder vanished in a matter of moments.

They had arrived shortly before midday; the flight from Ethshar of the Spices had been quite brief, just across the peninsula to the southern shore. It had been Valder’s first flight in more than forty years and quite a refreshing experience; he had forgotten how exciting it was to soar above the landscape and remembered wryly how he had taken it for granted during his time as an assassin.

“You’ll sleep in the parlor,” Iridith told him, “if you have no objection.”

“I’m scarcely in a position to object,” he replied. “But how long do you expect me to be staying here?”

“I can’t really say; until I’ve gotten the approval of the elders of the Guild and gathered the ingredients I need for Enral’s Eternal Youth Spell.”

“Oh? What are the ingredients?”

“I don’t remember them all; I’ll need to look it up. I do know that I’ll want powdered spider, blue silk, cold iron, dried seaweed, candles colored with virgin’s blood, and the tears of a female dragon; I don’t recall the others offhand.”

“Virgin’s blood and dragon’s tears?”

“I think you’ll be staying for a while; those are the easy ones.”

“Oh.” He looked around. “The parlor should do just fine.”

He had been at the wizard’s house for five days, days spent strolling along the beach enjoying the fine spring weather or reading the many strange books that she loaned him from her workshop — in addition to assorted grimoires and magical texts, she had a wide variety of histories and books of philosophy. She, in turn, spent her time in the workroom, consulting with other wizards by various magical methods and trying to locate the needed ingredients for the spell. In addition to those she had remembered, she needed the ichor of a white cricket, the heart of an unborn male child, and the hand of a murdered woman.

“It could be worse,” she had told him at dinner that first night, a dinner she had prepared herself by perfectly natural methods and which they ate in the kitchen. “Any woman killed by another person will do, I think. She needn’t have been a virgin, or a mother, or whatever. I should be able to find one eventually. And an aborted or miscarried child should work.”

He had agreed without comment.

“Don’t worry,” she said, sensing unease. “I’m not going to kill someone myself just to help you. I’m not that sort of wizard.” ’

That had relieved him somewhat; the remainder of the meal had passed in amiable silence for the most part.

Since then he had seen only brief glimpses of her, other than at meals. At breakfast she would usually be planning the day’s investigations, and by supper she would be too tired to talk much, but at luncheon she chatted freely, exchanging reminiscences of the war and the changes that they had both seen in their lifetimes. She reacted to his admission that he had been an assassin with a sort of horrified fascination, even while admitting that it was certainly no more morally repugnant, logically, than her own wartime work of more straightforward wizardly slaughter. After that first dinner, his own longstanding habits prevailed, and he played host, preparing and serving the meals.

Between meals she was always in her workshop, using various divinations to try and locate what she needed. Powdered spider, cold iron, and candles colored with virgin’s blood she had on hand; she explained that all three were useful in many spells. The iron was meteoric in origin, but, she assured him, that could only add to its efficacy. Blue silk was easily acquired in a short jaunt back to the city. The seaweed Valder provided himself after a walk on the beach, bringing back a mass of dripping weed to hang over the workshop hearth and dry.

That left the dragon’s tears, cricket’s ichor, baby’s heart, and severed hand. Iridith was cheerfully optimistic about all of them. “I found them once,” she said repeatedly.

That was how things stood on the fifth day, when she emerged unexpectedly from the workshop in the middle of the evening, holding a small pouch. “What’s that?” Valder asked, looking up from a book that purported to describe the now-dead religion of the ruling class of the Northern Empire. “Find something?”

“No,” she answered. “But I now have explicit consent from enough of the Guild elders to go ahead with the spell, and besides, I thought I needed a break, so I made this as a sort of celebration and a token of my esteem.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a bottomless bag, made with Hallin’s Spell.”

“What’s a bottomless bag?”

“Well, I’ll show you. I noticed that that sword seems to get in your way sometimes, but that you don’t like to leave it lying around — and as you probably noticed back in Ethshar, it’s not the fashion these days to wear a sword, in any case. So you can put it in this.” She held up the tiny pouch, smaller than the purse he wore when traveling.

“Oh, one of those!” he said, remembering. He had seen bottomless bags in use during the war, though he had never known what they were called; an entire army’s supply train could somehow be stuffed into one and then pulled out again as needed. It made transport over rough country much easier. The major drawback was that the only item one could retrieve was the one most recently put in, so that, if a great many items were stuffed into it, getting out the first one could take quite awhile. Careful planning was needed to use such a bag efficiently.

He accepted the bag and managed to slip it onto the end of Wirikidor’s sheath. He watched with amused wonder as the full length of the sword slid smoothly into the little pouch, vanishing as it went. When it had entirely disappeared, leaving only a small bulge, he tied the pouch to his belt.

“Much more convenient,” he said. “Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome,” Iridith answered.

He looked up at her; she was smiling warmly.

“I don’t really understand why you’re being so generous with me,” he said. “You’re doing far more than you need to.”

“Oh, I know,” she said. “But I like to be generous. I have everything I could ever want, you know; why shouldn’t I share it? I’ve spent too much time alone; wizards have a tendency to do that. So many spells require isolation or such strict concentration that one dares not allow anyone else near! And it’s so depressing to be around other wizards, who all distrust one another and want only to learn new spells without revealing any of their own little secrets, or around ordinary people, who are frightened half to death of me, and who I know will grow old and die in just a few years.”

“I’m an ordinary person,” Valder said.

“No, you aren’t! You aren’t going to die, are you? That sword won’t let you. And you aren’t afraid of me.”

“Why should I be afraid of you?”

“That’s just it, you shouldn’t! I could roast you in an instant with a fireball, just as I did that thief, but I’m not going to, any more than you would turn that unbeatable sword on a friend — but so many people don’t understand that. They only see my power; they don’t see that I’m still a person. The power isn’t important; you’d be just as dead stabbed with an ordinary pocketknife as with a wizard’s dagger, or killed in a brawl instead of mangled by some high-order spell. Anyone is dangerous — so why should people be scared of wizards more than of each other?”

“I don’t know,” Valder said, thoughtfully. “I suppose it’s just that it’s unfamiliar power, unfamiliar danger. Everyone understands a sword cut, but most people have no idea how wizardry works. I don’t have any idea how wizardry works.”

Iridith grinned. “Do you want to know one of the great secrets of the Wizards’ Guild? Most of us don’t, either.”

Valder grinned back.

CHAPTER 32

Iridith located the dragon’s tears the day after giving Valder the bottomless bag; a wizard in Sardiron had a bottleful and was willing to trade. The same wizard was able to direct her to a cave where white crickets could be found and had a friend with a bottled fetus on hand, taken from a woman dead of a fever.

That left only the hand of a murdered woman.

The two celebrated the evening of this discovery by drinking a bottle apiece of an ancient golden wine Iridith had stored away a century or so earlier. The stuff was past its prime, but still potable, and the wizard got quite tipsy, giggling like a young girl at Valder’s every word. Valder himself had long ago developed one of the necessities of the innkeeper’s trade, the ability to consume vast quantities of alcohol without suffering noticeably from its effects, and watched with great amusement as the usually calm and mature magician deteriorated into kittenish silliness. Around midnight she dozed off; Valder warily picked her up and carried her to her bed, his aged muscles straining. He had half feared that some protective charm would strike him for daring to touch her, but nothing of the kind happened.

He stared down at her, marveling that this handsome, fresh woman could be more than four times his own age, then turned and found his way to the divan where he slept.

The next morning Iridith was far less pleasant; her curative spells prevented an actual hangover, but she obviously regretted her juvenile behavior. “We haven’t got them yet,” she pointed out over breakfast. “I still have to go to Sardiron and fetch them. Something could go wrong.”

Valder shrugged. “Certainly it might,” he agreed.

She looked at him rather sourly, as if annoyed that he was agreeing so calmly, then realized how absurd that was and broke into a crooked grin.

“You know, Valder the Innkeeper, I like you; you don’t let things upset you.”

He shrugged again. “I learned long ago to accept things the way they are; usually, they’re pretty good. I’ve had a good life, overall, better than I expected — I never thought I’d live to see the end of the Great War, and here it’s been over for two-thirds of my life. If things go wrong now, I still don’t have any cause for complaint.”

“A healthy attitude — and a very, very unusual one.” She pushed her chair back. “I had best be going.”

The journey to Sardiron took three days in all, even flying; Valder found himself wandering aimlessly about the house on the shore, unable to interest himself in reading anything, while Iridith was gone. Meals seemed particularly lonesome.

He tried to tell himself that he was simply homesick and wanted to return to the Thief’s Skull, but he didn’t entirely believe it.

On the third day, Iridith returned safely, with the heart in a sealed jar, a flask of tears — Valder was surprised to see they were a faint yellowish green, rather than clear as he had always supposed tears to be, regardless of their origin — and a large, loudly chirping box of crickets. “I’m not sure how much ichor I need,” she explained.

With all but one of the ingredients, the two of them settled down to wait for an opportunity to arise to obtain the hand of a murdered woman. “People are killed in Ethshar every day,” Iridith said. “Sooner or later, I’ll find one that will do. I don’t know why I haven’t already.”

“I don’t either,” Valder replied. “Surely, a woman’s been murdered somewhere in the world in the past few days!”

“Oh, certainly,” Iridith answered. “But I need one whose family is willing to sell her hand; I mustn’t steal it. That sort of thing gives wizardry a bad name. The Guild wouldn’t like it. That baby’s heart was sold by the woman’s husband — I suppose he was the child’s father.”

“Oh,” Valder said, startled; he had not realized she was being so scrupulous.

For the next several days, she spent each morning in her workshop, checking her divinations, and then spent the afternoon with Valder, sitting about the house and talking, or walking on the beach, or levitating to an altitude of a hundred feet or so and drifting with the wind. On one particularly warm day, as they were strolling along the shore, Iridith suddenly stopped and announced, “I’m going swimming.”

“Go ahead,” Valder said. “I never learned how, really, and I’m too old to learn now.”

Iridith smiled as she pulled her tunic up; her face vanished behind the cloth as she tugged the garment up over her head, but her muffled voice was still audible. “You won’t always be,” she said.

“Then maybe I’ll learn, someday.”

“You’ll have plenty of time, Valder, I promise you that.” She had her tunic off and reached down to remove her skirt.

Valder watched admiringly. “Lovely,” he said. “If I were twenty years younger I’d do something about it.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You will be — but whether I let you do anything about it is another matter entirely.” With that, she tossed him her clothing and ran splashing into the surf.

On an evening a few days later, as they were walking up to the house with feet wet from splashing in the tidal pools, Iridith asked, “What are you planning to do when I’ve completed the spell?”

“I’ll go home, of course,” Valder replied.

“To Kardoret?”

Startled, he almost shouted, “No!” Calming, he added, “I’m not even sure it’s still there; it wasn’t much of a place to begin with. No, I meant my inn, the Thief’s Skull — or the Inn at the Bridge, as it was originally called.”

“Sounds dull.”

“Oh, no! It isn’t, really. We get travelers from all over, from Sardiron and the Small Kingdoms and all of the Hegemony, and hear their stories. Every sort of person imaginable stops at an inn sooner or later, and after a day on the road most are eager to talk, so it’s never dull. I hear news that never reaches the city and get many of the great adventures described firsthand. It’s a fine life. This house you have here, it’s a splendid house, but it’s rather lonely, isn’t it? Your nearest neighbors are fishermen a league down the coast in either direction, or farmers half a league inland.”

“I got tired of people decades ago,” she answered. “After the war, I didn’t think I ever wanted to see ordinary people again. I’ve taken on apprentices, of course; I wasn’t really lonely here.”

“I see,” Valder said as they reached the steps to the veranda.

They crossed the plank flooring of the porch in silence, but, as Valder opened the door to the parlor, Iridith said, “You know, nobody will recognize you when you go back. They know you as an old man, not a young one.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Valder admitted.

“You had best claim to be a relative of some sort — you’ll have a strong family resemblance, after all.”

“Will anyone believe that?”

“Certainly! Why shouldn’t they?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Of course, I don’t think I really have any relatives still alive; I haven’t heard from any in thirty or forty years and I’ve told people that.”

“All the better; none will turn up to dispute your story. Surely you could be an illegitimate son, or long-lost nephew, or something!”

“I suppose I could; I’ll want to warn Tandellin, though. He had probably thought that he would inherit the place; he may not be overjoyed to have a new heir turn up.”

“He’ll have to live with it. Nothing’s perfect; giving you eternal youth can’t solve all your problems for you.”

Valder smiled. “It’s a good start, though.”

CHAPTER 33

The eighth day of the month of Longdays, a sixnight after Valder made a visit to the inn to reassure his friends that all was well, was rainy and gray, but the wizard and innkeeper paid no attention to such trivia; Agravan had sent a message that he had at last acquired the final ingredient. A young streetwalker had run afoul of a gang of drunken soldiers and died in consequence; her body had been sufficiently abused that her brother saw no reason to object to further mutilation, if the price was right. The circumstances were depressingly sordid, but the precious hand was finally in their possession.

Valder was pleased to hear that the soldiers responsible were to be hanged; the Lord Executioner would have a busy day, for once.

The hand was safely delivered that evening, and Iridith then locked herself in her workshop, telling Valder to eat well and rest; the spell would require twenty-four hours without food or sleep and would make great demands upon both mind and body.

At midday on the ninth, while rain splashed from the eaves, Iridith called for Valder to join her in the workshop, and the spell began.

Most of it was meaningless to him; following the wizard’s directions he sat, stood, knelt, swallowed things, handled things, closed his eyes, opened his eyes, spoke meaningless phrases, and in general performed ritual after ritual without any idea of the underlying pattern. Around sunset he began to feel strange, and the remainder of the enchantment passed in a dreamlike, unreal state, so that he could never recall much about it afterward. All he knew, from about midnight on, was that he was growing ever more tired.

When he came to himself again, he was lying on his couch, feeling utterly exhausted. He looked out the nearest window and saw only gray skies that told him nothing save that it was day, not night — yet something seemed wrong. His vision seemed unnaturally clear.

He got to his feet, slowly, feeling very odd indeed. His every muscle was weak with fatigue, yet he felt none of his familiar aches and twinges; it was as if he had become another person entirely.

That thought struck him with considerable force; if he were another person, then was he still Wirikidor’s owner? He reached for his belt and found no sword. He looked down.

His hands were young and strong, fully fleshed, no longer the bony hands of an old man, and he seemed to see every detail with impossible clarity — yet the hands seemed completely familiar, and he found the little pouch at his belt that, he now remembered, magically contained Wirikidor despite its size. He opened the drawstring, reached in, and felt the familiar hilt.

He was obviously still Valder — but he was also obviously a young man. The spell had worked.

He found a mirror and spent several long, incredulous minutes admiring himself and being pleased, not just by what he saw but by how well he saw it. He appeared twenty-five or so — scarcely older than when Wirikidor was first enchanted.

Tandellin would never have recognized him; he congratulated himself on having taken Iridith’s advice and informed his employees on his recent visit that he was retiring and leaving the business to his nephew, Valder the Younger. Tandellin had not been happy about it and had in fact demanded to know why he had never heard of this nephew before, but he had conceded Valder’s right to do as he pleased with his property.

At last he managed to tear himself away from the mirror. He was, he realized, ravenously hungry — which was scarcely surprising, now that he had a young man’s appetite and had not eaten in at least a day. He strode into the kitchen, reveling in his firm, effortless stride.

Iridith was sitting at the table, devouring a loaf of bread and a thick slab of cheese.

“Catching up?” he asked, aware that she, too, had been unable to eat during the spell.

“Oh, I already did that, really; this is just breakfast.”

“Is it morning?” Valder was surprised; he knew the spell had been complete around midday on the tenth and had assumed that it was still that same afternoon, not the morning of the eleventh.

“Yes, it’s morning — and of the sixteenth of Longdays. Eat; you must need it.” She shoved the bread and cheese across the table toward him.

He accepted them and quickly began wolfing them down, while the wizard watched in amusement.

When he had taken the edge off his appetite, he slowed down in his eating and looked at his hostess. She looked back, then rose and crossed to the cupboard to fetch further provender.

He watched the movement of her body, remembering all the conversations he had had with her over the past month and more.

She returned with another loaf, a pitcher of beer, and assorted other items, remarking, “That spell does take quite a bit out of one, but it’s worth it, wouldn’t you say?”

Valder nodded, looking at her.

“Yes,” he agreed, “I would definitely say so.”

They both ate in silence after that; when they had eaten their fill, Iridith led the-way out to the porch, where they could watch the morning sun struggle to force an opening in the clouds.

“My debt is paid,” Iridith said. “And your problems with the sword are solved.”

Valder nodded agreement. “So they are,” he said. He watched a beam of sunlight stab through to the foam at the water’s edge, then added, “I have another problem, though — one that I never solved. I never found myself a wife, and now I’m young enough again to want one — but what kind of a life would it be, having a wife who would grow old and die while I stayed young?”

“It’s not pleasant,” the wizard agreed.

“If I could find a wife who wouldn’t grow old, of course, that would be ideal.”

“Of course,” she said. “Strictly for practical reasons.”

“Naturally, I would let her lead her own life if she chose; I’ve never believed in the theory that a wife should be a chattel. A companion, though, a comrade through the years, would be welcome.”

“I’m sure.”

He was silent for a moment.

“Do you think you might want to be an innkeeper’s wife?” he asked at last.

She smiled. “Oh,” she said lightly, “I think I could stand it for a century or two.”