Fiddler Fair (anthology)

Lyran jumped—he hadn’t sensed any presence at his side—yet there was a strange little man, scarcely half Lyran’s height; a dwarf, with short legs, and blunt, clever hands, and bright, birdlike eyes. And a kindness like that of the widow who had rented them her extra room, then brought every bit of covering she had to spare to keep Martis warm. “A sword,” Lyran said hesitantly. “This one needs a sword.”

“I should think you do,” replied the little man, after a long moment of sizing Lyran up. “A swordsman generally does need a sword. And it can’t be an ill-balanced bludgeon, either—that would be worse than nothing, eh, lad?”

Lyran nodded, slowly. “But this one—has but little—” The man barked rather than laughed, but his good humor sounded far more genuine than anything coming from the main street and marketplace. “Lad, if you had money, you wouldn’t be here, now, would you? Let me see what I can do for you.”

He waddled into the shop door, past the bins of rags and whatnot; Lyran’s eyes followed him into the darkness of the doorway, but couldn’t penetrate the gloom. In a moment, the shopkeeper was back, a long, slim shape wrapped in oily rags in both his hands. He handed the burden to Lyran with a kind of courtly flourish.

“Here you be, lad,” he said, “I think that may have been what was calling you.”

The rags fell away, and the little man caught them before they hit the paving stones—

At first Lyran was conscious only of disappointment. The hilt of this weapon had once been ornamented, wrapped in gold wire, perhaps—but there were empty sockets where the gems had been, and all traces of gold had been stripped away.

“Left in pawn to me, but the owner never came back, poor man,” the shopkeeper said, shaking his head. “A good man fallen on hard times—unsheath it, lad.”

The blade was awkward in his hand for a moment, the hilt hard to hold with the rough metal bare in his palm—but as he pulled it from its sheath, it seemed to come almost alive; he suddenly found the balancing of it, and as the point cleared the sheath it had turned from a piece of dead metal to an exten­sion of his arm.

He had feared that it was another of the useless dress-swords, the ones he had seen too many times, worthless mild steel done up in long-gone jewels and plating. This sword—this blade had belonged to a fighter, had been made for a swordsman. The balance, the temper were almost too good to be true. It more than equaled his lost twin blades, it surpassed them. With this one blade in hand he could easily have bested a twin-Lyran armed with his old sword-pair; that was the extent of the “edge” this blade could give him.

“How—how much?” he asked, mouth dry.

“First you must answer me true,” the little man said softly. “You be the lad with the sick lady, no? The one that claimed the lady to be from the Mage Guild?”

Lyran whirled, stance proclaiming that he was on his guard. The dwarf simply held out empty hands. “No harm to you, lad. No harm meant. Tell me true, and the blade’s yours for three copper bits. Tell me not, or tell me lie—I won’t sell it. Flat.”

“What if this one is not that person?” Lyran hedged.

“So long as the answer be true, the bargain be true.”

Lyran swallowed hard, and followed the promptings of his inner guides. “This one—is,” he admitted with reluctance. “This one and the lady are what this one claims—but none will heed.”

The dwarf held out his hand, “Three copper bits,” he said mildly. “And some advice for free.”

Lyran fumbled out the coins, hardly able to believe his luck. The worst pieces of pot-metal pounded into the shape of a sword were selling for a silver—yet this strange little man had sold him a blade worth a hundred times that for the price of a round of cheese! “This one never rejects advice.”

“But you may or may not heed it, eh?” The man smiled, showing a fine set of startlingly white teeth. “Right enough; you get your lady to tell you the story of the dragon’s teeth. Then tell her that Bolger Freedman has sown them, but can’t harvest them.”

Lyran nodded, though without understanding. “There’s some of us that never agreed with him. There’s some of us would pay dearly to get shut of what we’ve managed to get into. Tell your lady that—and watch your backs. I’m not the only one who’s guessed.”

* * *

 Lyran learned the truth of the little man’s words long before he reached the widow’s boarding-house.

The gang of street-toughs lying in ambush for him were probably considered canny, crafty and subtle by the standards of the area. But Lyran knew that they were there as he entered the side-street; and he knew where they were moments before they attacked him.

The new sword was in his hands and moving as the first of them struck him from behind. It sliced across the thug’s midsection as easily as if Lyran had been cutting bread, not flesh, and with just about as much resistance. While the bully was still falling, Lyran took out the one dropping on him from the wall beside him with a graceful continuation of that cut, and kicked a third rushing him from out of an alley, delivering a blow to his knee that shattered the kneecap, and then forced the knee to bend in the direction opposite to that which nature had intended for a human.

He couldn’t get the blade around in time to deal with the fourth, so he ducked under the blow and brought the pommel up into the man’s nose, shattering the bone and driving the splinters into the brain.

And while the fifth man stared in openmouthed stupefication, Lyran separated his body from his head.

Before anyone could poke a curious nose into the street to see what all the noise was about, Lyran vaulted to the top of the wall to his left, and from there to the roof of the building it surrounded. He scampered quickly over the roof and down again on the other side, taking the time to clean and sheath the sword and put it away before dropping down into the next street.

After all, he hadn’t spent his childhood as a thief without learning something about finding unconventional escape routes.

About the time he had taken a half a dozen paces, alarm was raised in the next street. Rather than running away, Lyran joined the crowd that gathered about the five bodies, craning his neck like any of the people around him, wandering off when he “couldn’t get a look.”