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.
