Swords & Dark Magic (50 page)

“Cheers and a hale life!” cried the killer, and downed a large cupful in one gulp.

All present, with the exception of Zire, echoed the toast in fast fellowship. And some of them added, for good measure, “And hale life to you,
too,
Razibond!” “Yes, long life. That dolt had it coming to him.”

Razibond, satisfied, belched. Then his small eyes slid straight to Zire, still poised in the doorway. Those little eyes might just as well have been two more greasy blades. If looks could kill, they might.

“And
you,
” said Razibond. “What do
you
say, Copper-Nod?”

“I?” Zire smiled and shrugged. “About what?”

“Oh, you’re blind then, as well as carrot-mopped. Come, let’s have your opinion. You saw I slew him.”

“That? True, I did see.”

“You seem offended,” said Razibond, ugly voice now sinking to an uglier growl. “Want to make something of it, eh?”

If Zire had been in any doubt as to what Razibond meant, further evidence was instantly supplied, as all the other drinkers withdrew in haste, plastering themselves to the walls, some even crawling beneath the long tables. Even the fire crouched down abruptly on the wide hearth, while the girl who had been tending a roast there sprinted up the inn stair with a flash of bare white feet.

“Well?”
bellowed ugly Razibond, seemingly further incensed by Zire’s speechlessness.

“Really,” said Zire, “what you do is your own affair. After all, perhaps the man you stabbed had done you some terrible wrong.”

“He had,” Razibond declared. “He refused me use of his wife and daughter.”

“Or, on the other hand,” continued Zire smoothly, “you are, as I suspected, merely a drunken thug who throws his weight about, that being considerable since he is now running to podge, and slaughters at random. One day you will answer in the afterlife, to an uproar of furious ghosts. Don’t think I joke there, friend Razi. Another life exists than this one, and we pay our dues once we are in it. I imagine your reckoning will be both long and tedious, not to mention painful.”

Razibond’s face was now a marvelous study for any student of the human mood. It had passed through the blank pink of shock to the crimson of wrath, sunk a second in superstitious, uneasy yellow, before escalating into an extraordinary puce—a hue that would have assured any dye-maker a fortune, had he been able to reproduce it. More than this, Razibond had swollen up like a toad. He cast his wine cup to the ground, where it shattered, being unwisely made of clay, and, disdaining his knife, heaved out a cleaverish blade some four feet long.

Zire raised his eyes to heaven, or the ceiling. Next instant, he, too, had drawn a sword, this one fine almost as a wand, and going by the name of Scribe. As Razibond lumbered at him, Zire moved, easy as smoke, from his path, extending as he did so a booted foot. This brief gesture sent the homicidal guardsman crashing, at which Zire leapt onto his back, landing with deliberate heaviness and knocking the breath right out of him. Then, with a casualness truly awful to behold, Zire drove his own bright sword straight in, through Razibond’s leathers, skin, flesh, muscle, and heart. Blood spurted like a fountain, and decorated the blackened beam above.

At the inn once more, only silence held sway. Zire did not wipe the sword, he kept it ready in one hand. He looked contritely about at the stricken faces.

“My apologies,” said Zire. “But I object to dying at this late hour. I would prefer supper. Oh, and my horse needs shoeing. Otherwise, if you want, we can continue the violence.”

No one answered. None moved. The landlord himself, who had ducked below his counter then reemerged to witness the short fight’s climax, stared with mouth agape.

Then there came the sound of bare feet, and down the stair hurried the inn-girl. She alone seemed able to move, and now, too, proved capable of speech, although it came out in a sort of a quavering shriek.

“Rash sir, you know not what you’ve done!”

“But I do know,” said Zire. “Let me see, killed a killer. Maybe all you here loved him, and now wish to attack me. If so, let’s get on. As I said, I’m hungry.”

“
Love
him?” wailed the girl. “
Razibond?
He was a fiend.”

At this, the strange inertia that had held the room broke in pieces. Voices from all sides honked and whispered: “He was a monster—” “A bully—no woman left alone, no man of honor safe—” “May he rot in the swampmost belly of the worst-devisable hell—”

“But,” yelled the girl on the stair, “he was one of the False Prince’s guardsmen. None must harm
them
no matter what their crimes. Or the False Prince will seek obscene vengeances. He is in league with dark magic, too, and will already know you have trespassed against his soldiers.”

“This inn,” intoned the landlord, gripping the counter white-knuckled, “may be burned to the earth, and all of us whipped. As for you, sir, he will hang you by your feet above a pit of snakes, whose poison dispatches in the slowest, most heinous stages—”

“Or else—” vocalized another, “he will sentence you to the death of two hundred hornets, each the size of a rat—”

“Or the live burial amid fractious scorpions—”

“Or—”

“Yes, very well,” interrupted Zire, apparently tired. “I have inferred the correct sting-laden picture of my proposed fate.”

“Run—” shrilled the pale girl from the stair. “It’s your only chance! We dare not shield you.”

Zire grimaced. He sat down on a bench. “First serve me some dinner,” he said. “Also my poor starved horse must eat. Both he and I refuse to run on an empty stomach.”

Silence once more submerged the room. The noise of the river, always angrier after moonrise, filled it instead.

Some half-mile below, at a second inn, whose name was the Quiet Night, and which directly adjoined the thunderous River Ca, Bretilf the Artisan sat over the remainder of his dinner, thoughtfully slicing the last roast meat from a bone. Beside him rested a jug of Cashloria’s black ale. His tankard stayed full. He was concentrating equally on the bone and on a shape he could detect in the bone’s surface. Once all the meat was gone, he intended to carve the figure free, but an interruption came.

Two drunken bravos, belonging—judging by their cross-swords-and-diadem insignia and studded-leather garments—to some guard militia of the city, had begun to quarrel.

Bretilf watched them sidelong through narrowed, tawny-amber eyes. His hair was of a similar shade, a type of ginger-amber, marking him out through the gilding of a stray lamp. He was otherwise young, tall, and well-made, and, had he but known it, bore a definite resemblance to another man, who only some minutes earlier, and half a mile above on the promontory, had stuck a sword straight through the heart of space-wasty Razibond.

“Damn it all, Kange,” ranted the bigger of the quarrelers, “I say we
shall
.”

“I don’t deny we have a perfect
right
. But the house walls are high and she is protected by loyal servants and hounds, the latter of which will snap off a man’s leg soon as make water on it.” This was the retort of the smaller though no less repulsive Kange.

Bretilf could hear all clearly, even through the general din. He suspected others in the room heard the dialogue, too, but pretended deafness.

“Pahf!” went on the first guard. “No need for that. We’ll knock at the gate and remind the girl the False Prince has given us permission to delve any wench we fancy. Besides, when she sees our beauty, how can she not succumb? Failing that we’ll poison both servants and dogs, and burn the house to show we called.”

“True, you’re wise, Ovrisd,” relented Kange. “But before we set forth on our mission, let’s see what money we can squeeze out of that foreigner over there, with the pumpkin-colored mane.”

Bretilf put down the meat bone.

The guardsmen were advancing, smiling winningly upon him, carefully ignored on every side by the rest of the inn.

“Greetings, stranger,” said the unpresentable Kange.

“Welcome, stranger,” added the revolting Ovrisd.

“To you also,” replied Bretilf, rising. “I believe you wish me to render you something,” he presumed.

“Oh, indeed! How perceptive. We would like all of it!”

“And pretty fast.”

“Perhaps not all, but certainly a great deal. All that you deserve,” said Bretilf. He finished mildly, “Nevertheless, once is enough. To seek me later for more will not be to your liking.” And, leaning forward, he grasped both their unlovely necks and, in one sleek, quick movement, smashed their heads together. Like two halves of a severed pear, each guardsman fell, thumpingly senseless, to the floor.

Instantly, every person in the inn, including the landlord, his slim wife, and large cat, fled the premises.

Bretilf placed coins in generous amount on the counter, and toting the jug and the sculptable bone, walked off into the riverine night.

A golden moon howled radiance like wild music in the sky. The insane river answered. Bretilf sat awhile on the bank and started the carving of the bone. But his own bones guessed the night’s difficulties were not done.

Sure enough, about an hour later, two sore-headed and bleary-eyed guardsmen came staggering to the bank with drawn blades and antisocial motives.

“I said,” gently reminded Bretilf, as once again he rose to his feet, “it was not advisable that you ask for more.”

Seething and blathering, Kange and Ovrisd leapt ungainly at him. Bretilf flipped back his cloak. The moon splashed like hot lava on a sudden broadsword, that had the name Second Thoughts.
Swish, swish
went the two severed heads of Kange and Ovrisd, plunging off the land’s edge into the hungry river. Their now leaderless bodies slumped, this time conclusively, to the earth.

Bretilf strode away into the slinks of Cashloria. It was his creed never to kill, if at all possible, at an initial encounter. But so many people were determined to try his patience. Reticence and extremity coexisted always with him. Presently, he found a much less clean, and more secluded, inn where he might spend the night in peace asleep, or carving the figure of a militant stag.

Bretilf awoke to find, with some bemusement, he was staring at himself in a mirror. Zire awoke to find exactly the same thing.

Neither man recalled a mirror placed before him, in either of the inns they had last night occupied. In fact, Zire had fallen asleep at the table in the Plucked Dragon, after his first cup of wine. Bretilf had done much the same in his own inn, the Affectionate Flea. Besides, the mirrors were unreliable. Bretilf immediately noted that his own reflection rubbed its eyes, which Bretilf had not done and was not doing. Zire noted that, though he had rubbed his eyes, his reflection refused to copy him. In any case, said reflection’s eyes, in both instances, were the wrong color.

“Oh,” said Zire then, boredly, “are you some sorcerous fetch summoned up to haunt me?”

“No,” returned Bretilf. “I think rather your—or possibly my own—father played his flute away from home. And I, and you therefore, are half-brothers.”

“Hmn,” said Zire. “You may be correct. We’re certainly nearly doubles.”

Then each got up, conscious as they did so of three further things. First, that in height and build they were also neatly matched. Second, that the faint bee-ish buzzing in their skulls, and taste of dry wool in their mouths, was very likely the result of their having been drugged. The third revelation was that, rather than remaining at an inn, whether wholesome or squalid, they were now in a cramped stone room with iron bars across the window.

Glancing at each other, they observed as one: “Dead guards. Royal disapproval. The False Prince.”

A moment later, the door was opened, and several more guards, these ones with whom Zire and Bretilf were unacquainted, bundled into the space. They seized, then dragged Bretilf and Zire, the foray ornamented by a selection of punches and kicks, up many stairs and into another cell, plain but less prisonlike.

“Lie there, you scum,” the guards instructed. “And prepare for horrors. The prince will arrive soon to judge you.” They departed, slamming the door.

“Do you have a knife or sword?” inquired Bretilf.

“Yes, my knife. And Scribe is still with me.”

“My Second Thoughts, also,” said Bretilf. “And with my knife, the carving even that I was fashioning with it.”

“Not disarmed then.”

“Nor bound.”

“It would seem,” said Zire, “this prince has enough magical power to deal with us, whatever we try. A great shame,” he added. “I had hoped to visit Traze next, over the river. And then the Red Desert.”

“And I to finish my carving.”

A spinning began in one of the cell walls. The two men watched attentively as it grew black, then electric, and roiled away, leaving an opening into a vast white marble chamber, its ceiling high as a full-grown oak. This was easily gauged, too, since live oak trees formed a colonnade along it. But they had trunks and boughs like twisted ebony, and blue leaves that quivered on their own, filling the air with a serpentine rustling.

At the room’s far end rose a tall black chair upholstered in violet velvet. On either side of this squatted a fearsome beast, something like a wolf crossed with a raccoon. In the chair sat a stooped, thin man. He was a young man, but with an old man’s face, and weaves of gray and white ran through his own light-colored hair. His eyes were like shards chipped from something blue and long-dead. But he wore fine clothes, and on his head a silver circlet. He pointed with a long, thin finger.

“You are here for punishment. You have slain my men, my chosen guards. For this, only the worst deaths are given. What do you say?”

“Oh, dear,” said Zire.

Bretilf added, “Since Your Highness has already decided, what point for us to say anything?”

“I will have you speak.”

Zire said, “It would be redundant to attempt to placate, please, or obey you. We’re dead. We can be as rude as we like.”

“Yet,” said Bretilf, however, “why are you called the
False
Prince? Or is that only because all Cashlorians hate you? Just as they hate your guards, who seem, all told, a pack of cowards, rapists, thieves, and cutthroats.”