“I’m finished with your sword, I said. It’s carrying all the enchantments I could put on it under the circumstances. If it won’t get you home safely, then nothing I know will. Take it and go. And don’t draw it until you’re over the horizon.”
Still befuddled, Valder accepted the sword and looked at it stupidly for a moment before hanging it in its accustomed place on his belt. It looked no different, as far as he could see by the fire’s faint glow, from what it had been when he arrived. When it was securely in place, he reached for the hilt to check the draw; a soldier needed to be able to get his blade out quickly.
“No, I said!” the wizard barked at him; a bony hand clamped around his wrist. Irrelevantly, as he looked at the hand, Valder noticed that the last traces of the Sanguinary Deception had vanished. “You mustn’t draw it here! It’s dangerous! Don’t draw it until you need it, and you won’t need it until you’re well away from here.”
“Whatever you say,” Valder said, taking his hand off the sword.
The wizard calmed. “That’s better. Ah... I gave it a name.”
“What?” Valder was still too sleepy to keep up with this apparent change of subject.
“I gave the sword a name; it’s to be called Wirikidor.”
“Wirikidor? What kind of a name is Wirikidor?”
“An old one, soldier. It’s from a language so old that the name of the tongue is forgotten and no trace remains of the people who spoke it. It means ’slayer of warriors,’ and it was part of the spell I put on the thing, so now that’s its name.”
Valder glanced down and resisted the temptation to grip the hilt again. “I was never much for naming swords; some of the men do, but it never seemed to do them any good.”
“I didn’t say it will do you any good, but that sword’s name is Wirikidor now, and I thought you ought to know, since it will be yours. Ah... that is, it should be. It’s got an untriggered spell on it, a variant of the Spell of True Ownership; whoever draws it next will be its owner for as long as he lives. Make sure that’s you, soldier, and the blade will protect you.”
“Protect me how?”
“Ah... I’m not quite sure, actually.”
“It will protect me once I draw it, but I mustn’t draw it until I’m leagues from here?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s to protect me until then?”
The wizard glared at him. “Your native wits, of course — except that leaves you unarmed, doesn’t it? We’ll just have to hope you won’t need protection, I guess.”
Valder was becoming more awake and alert, awake enough to decide that arguing with the wizard might not be wise. Still, he asked, “That’s all you can tell me about it, that it will protect me?”
“That’s all I’m going to tell you, you blasted fool! Now take your sword and get out of here!”
Valder looked around at the darkness surrounding them; the fire’s glow faded within a yard or two, and the clouds were thick enough to hide the moons and stars. He saw no trace of the sun’s light to either east or west.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“How should I know? I finished the spell at midnight exactly, or at least I intended to, but you’ve kept me here arguing long enough that I have no idea what time it might be. It’s after midnight, and it’s not yet dawn.”
Valder said, “I don’t know what time it is either, old man, but I do know that I’m not going anywhere until dawn. An enchanted sword isn’t going to do me much good if I trip and drown in this stinking marsh.”
The wizard glared at him for a long moment, then growled. “Please yourself,” he said as he turned and stalked off.
Valder watched his back fade into the gloom, thinking how absurd so small a man looked when angry, then sat down and looked at the familiar scabbard on his belt. He saw nothing different about it, yet the wizard had undeniably worked over it for a day and half a night, with indisputably real magic. The urge to draw it and see if the blade was visibly altered was strong, but Valder had a healthy respect for magic of all sorts; if the old man said it was dangerous, it probably was dangerous. Perhaps enough magic lingered in the air from the spell-making to react with the sword’s enchantment.
Or perhaps, the thought crept in, the wizard had decided to retaliate for the destruction of his home, and the sword would work some terrible vengeance when drawn, a vengeance the old man did not wish to see.
Valder drove that idea back down; he had little choice but to trust the hermit. He settled back against the hump of ground and was quickly asleep.
CHAPTER 4
His legs were stiff and cramped when he awoke; he unfolded them slowly, then flexed them again, working out the stiffness as best he could. When he felt up to it, he pushed himself up onto his battered feet and looked around.
The sun, he was appalled to discover, was halfway up the eastern sky; he had not intended to sleep so long as that. He saw no sign of the old hermit.
He told himself that the wizard had probably gone off to fetch water or food. He decided to wait for the old man’s return so that he might say his farewells before heading southward. With that resolved, his next concern was breakfast. He glanced about casually.
The handful of crabs that had not been eaten the day before were gone; Valder supposed they had served as the old man’s breakfast. The broken jar was also gone, which supported his theory that the hermit had gone after water. As he continued to look, however, it gradually sank in that everything that might be of use was gone. Nothing remained on the site of the destroyed hut but ash and broken glass. The piles of salvaged magical paraphernalia had vanished with their owner.
An automatic check told him that his sword was still securely in its sheath on his belt; he was relieved by that.
He could not imagine how the old man could have cleared everything away so completely, or where he might have gone with it all. Puzzled, he clambered up the rim of the crater, wincing at the scratching of shards of glass against his bare feet.
Runes were gouged into the ash in the center of the crater, showing black against white. They were nothing magical, but merely a message in common Ethsharitic runes.
“Found new place,” they said. “Not returning. Good luck.”
No signature was included, but one was hardly necessary under the circumstances. Valder stared at the words for a moment, then shrugged. It might be that the wizard was actually somewhere nearby and would return as soon as Valder was gone, he thought, but if so it was none of his concern. The hermit obviously wanted him to leave without further contact, and he saw no reason to argue about it. He took a final look about, then marched southward into the marsh.
He reached dry land without incident. By noon he could no longer see or smell the salt marsh, though a faint whiff of the sea could still be detected on the breeze from the west. Although he was eager to return to his comrades in the south and get out of the wilderness, he stopped when the sun was at its zenith and sat down abruptly on a moss-covered log.
His feet were blistered and would carry him no further without a rest; the day’s walk of a mere two or three hours was not so much responsible as was the prior day’s abuse and the lack of footwear. He had not taken the time to rig any sort of substitute for the boots that had been burned to ash in the wizard’s hut, and his weight was distributed differently without them, putting pressure on parts of his feet that were not accustomed to it.
He was not sure what sort of a substitute he could improvise; he had never before lost a pair of boots while out in the country. It was not a subject that he remembered hearing discussed, either in his training or in barracks chatter; when a pair of boots gave out, they were replaced with another pair of boots. That was one item that had never been subject to shortage, so far as he knew.
His socks, which he had left on for lack of replacements, had worn down to absolute uselessness, their soles consisting of a few stray threads; he peeled them off and hurled them away.
