Malden shook his head. “Well, here, when you attack six men in a tavern with an axe-”
“Come now, I didn’t kill any of them.”
“-the watch will send as many men as it takes to cart you away. Then they put you in gaol to wait for a trial.”
“I would have died before they put me in a cage,” Morget said.
“Or afterward, when they hanged you. They would have probably arrested Croy for helping you, and detained me on pure suspicion because I happened to be nearby.”
“Thanks to Malden it did not come to that,” Croy said, and slapped the thief on the back.
“I suppose I owe you at that,” Morget admitted.
“Think nothing of it. But perhaps you’ll tell me one thing. Why did that fight start in the first place, and how did it get so out of hand? Normally a tavern fight ends with bruised knuckles and maybe a chair being broken over someone’s head, not axes and maces and faces getting chopped off.”
Morget shrugged. “A man insulted me. He besmirched my honor.”
Croy nodded in understanding but Malden had to look away.
“You Ancient Blades and your honor will get me killed one of these days. All right, what did he say? What was such a dreadful blasphemy?”
“He saw me drinking milk and said I was the largest babe he’d ever clapped eyes on. I thought it a nice jest, and saw no harm in it.”
“Men in taverns often joke and make sport,” Malden said. “It means nothing.”
“But among clansmen, one must always respond to a jape with another. So of course I had to tell him that in my country, even infants were bigger than the men that I’d seen in this city. He didn’t like that much.” Morget shrugged. “He tried to grab my arm-as I have said, that is forbidden to strangers in my land. So I picked him up and threw him against a pillar. I thought that was the end of it, until I saw his friends drawing their knives.”
Malden made a mental note never to try to shake the barbarian’s hand again. “All right,” he said, “that explains how we all came to meet. But now, tell me, pray thee, what you’re doing in the Free City of Ness in the first place. We don’t get… ah, that is to say, a man of your people is a rare sight this far west.” Malden had grown up hearing horror stories of the barbarians, of how they ate their own babies and that their women were all seven feet tall. As an adult he’d often heard them spoken of in hushed tones, as it was commonly believed that the barbarians would sweep over the mountains any day and invade Skrae and enslave them all. It was all hearsay, of course. He had never met a barbarian before, nor ever expected to.
“Ah!” the barbarian said, and looked like he might start laughing again. “I am glad you asked. I am looking for Sir Croy.”
Malden was confused. “Well, you found him-but did you expect to find him in that tavern? It’s not the sort of place he normally frequents.”
Croy himself was still trying to catch his breath. His eyes were locked on Morget’s face.
“I knew nothing of him, until now, except his name. Perhaps I spoke wrong,” Morget said with a frown. “I am looking for another Ancient Blade. I am looking for the help of an Ancient Blade. It did not matter which one. I have sought them for a very long time, looking anywhere men with swords gathered. Until today my search was fruitless. From town to town I wandered, asking everywhere. Few men would even speak to me, but in the town of Greencastle I was told there was not one, but two such men in Ness. Sir Croy, and Sir Bikker-champions of your king, each of them bearers of a puissant sword. Ghostcutter and Acidtongue, they are called. I was told that Sir Bikker would be found in a place where ale is sold, if he could be found anywhere.”
Malden and Croy traded a glance. Until a few months ago that might have been true. Bikker had been in Ness-though that man had fallen a long way since he’d been one of the king’s champions. He’d hired himself out as a sell-sword to the sorcerer Hazoth and the traitor Anselm Vry. And then he’d put himself at odds with Malden and Croy. That had nearly ended in both their deaths. Instead “I’m afraid Bikker is dead,” Croy said, still a little out of breath.
“Dead?” Morget asked.
“He broke his oath,” Croy said, nodding, as if that explained everything.
Apparently it did, as far as Morget was concerned. “Ah. So you had to strike him down. I understand. It is part of our duty, our sworn duty, we who bear the Blades.”
Malden didn’t want to talk about Bikker. The dead man had caused him a great deal of trouble once. “Well, you found the other one, anyway. The other Ancient Blade in Ness. Now, what do you want with Croy?”
“There is a task I must perform. The other part of our oath must be fulfilled.” The barbarian’s eyes had gone out of focus, as if he was looking at nothing but the inside of his own skull. As if his thoughts were very far away.
Malden scratched at an eyebrow. “If you specifically need the help of an Ancient Blade, that suggests just one task I can think of.”
“Indeed. I am hunting a demon.”
Croy jumped to his feet, all sign of weariness gone from him. “Where?” he demanded.
Chapter Nine
There was no word Malden knew that could get Croy’s attention better than “demon.”
The world had its share of monsters. Up in the Northern Kingdoms there were still bands of goblins on the loose, and the occasional troll for a knight to test his steel on. Malden himself had met an ogre, and knew stories of everything from the dread Longlegs of the Rifnlatt to the dragons of the Old Empire. All such creatures could be felled by good swords or by magic, it was said. Demons were different.
They were not of the world. They did not belong there. Instead they were creatures of the Bloodgod, and they abided in his Pit of Souls, that place where all men were eventually judged and punished for their sins. Demons were normally trapped down there with eight-armed Sadu, but they could be summoned to the mundane realm by sorcerers who sought to tap their incredible power. Such a pact was illegal and utterly forbidden, and with good reason. Demons did not hail from the world of living men, and in that world were unnatural things, unbound by natural law. They were enormously powerful and almost impossible to kill. The sorcerer Hazoth had called up two of them before he died, and either one of them might have destroyed all of Ness if they had not been stopped.
Luckily for Malden and his fellow citizens, Croy had been there to slay them. Ghostcutter had prevailed against them, just as it had been made to do. The Ancient Blades had been forged for just that purpose.
And over the last eight hundred years they’d been quite successful at it. The men who wielded them often died in the process, but the swords had all but eliminated demonkind from the world. Now the existence of a single demon anywhere on the continent was a rare-but utterly fearful-occurrence. If the barbarian had encountered one, Croy had no choice but to go and slay it.
“You must tell me everything,” Croy said.
The barbarian nodded. “And so I shall. Two years ago I was hunting in the mountains at the western end of our land,” he said, squatting down on the tiles. “I was after a wild cat that had already tasted human blood, and found it to be good. I went into the hills with only a knife and three days’ food in a sack. Just having a bit of fun, you know.”
“Yes, of course,” Malden said. “Fun.”
Morget squinted at the sky. “I followed the cat’s trail until I ran out of food, and then for five days more. Its spoor took me ever higher, up to a place where the trees grew no taller than saplings, and then to where they thinned out until there was nothing but lichens to eat, and springwater to quench my thirst. From time to time I found the remains of some creature the cat had killed-or so I thought. The carrion was broken open, crushed and sucked dry.
“On the sixth day I found the cat itself, and all its bones ground to dust. There was not much left of it save the head and one paw. The rest had been… dissolved, yes, I think that is the word I mean. Eaten away as if by acid. It was then I knew I hunted bigger prey than I thought.
“I made a hunting blind in the cave of a raven, and sat me down to wait. It was another seven days before I caught my first good sight of the thing I tracked. It came to me at twilight, moving along the bare rock face of a
