He whispered: 'A game…?'
A female voice, that of a goddess who had not spoken until now, argued softly: 'I say that this Mark, this stubborn son of a stubborn miller, deserves to die tonight for what he's done, for the disrespect he's shown, the irresponsible interference.'
'A miller's son? A miller's son, you say?' That, for some reason, provoked laughter. 'Ah, hahaaa!.. anyway, he's protected here by the fire that he's kindled, using magical materials and tools. Not that he had the least idea of what he was doing when he did it.'
'What is so amusing? I still say that he must die tonight. He must. Otherwise I foresee trouble, in the game and out of it, trouble for us all.' 'Trouble for yourself, you mean.'
And another new voice: 'Hah, if you say he must die, then I say he must live. Whatever your position is in this, I must maintain the opposite.'
They're just like people, Mark thought. His next thought was: I'm almost gone, I'm dying. Now the idea was not only acceptable, but brought with it a certain feeling of relief.
During the rest of the night — his gentle dying went on for a long, long time — Mark kept revising — his opinion of the wrangling gang of gods who surrounded him on his deathbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that they were conducting their debate on a high level, using words of great wisdom. At these times he wanted to make every effort to remember what they said, but somehow he never could. At other times what they were, saying struck him as the most foolish babble that he had ever heard. But he could not manage to retain an example of their foolishness either.
Anyway, he completely missed the end of the argument, because instead of dying he finally awoke to behold the whole vast reach of the sky turning light above the great bowl of rock that made the world. The near rim of the bowl was very near in the east, almost overhead, while the northwest portion of the rim was far, far away, no more than a little pinkish sawtooth line on the horizon. And to the southwest the rim was so distant that it could not be seen at all.
Mark was shivering again, or shivering still, when he woke up. Now he was cold on both sides. The fire was nearly out, and he immediately started to rebuild it. Somewhat to his surprise, his body moved easily. For whatever reason, he had awakened with a feeling of achievement, a sense that something important had been accomplished while he lay before the fire. Well, for one thing, his life had been preserved, whether by accident or through the benevolence of certain gods. He was not at all sure of the reality of the presences he'd seen. There was no sign of gods around him now, nothing but the mountain and the sky, and the high, keening wind.
Except for the obscure symbols on the wall of stone, and the remnants of that large and ancient fire.
The need for food had now settled deep in Mark's bones, and he thought, with the beginning of fear, that soon he might be too weak to make his way back down the mountain. He had to implement his final decision about the sword before that happened; so as soon as he had warmed himself enough to stop his shivering, he turned his back on his renewed fire and the old forge-place of the gods. Keeping the blanket wrapped around himself, he slung bow and quiver on his back again, and took up Townsaver. He carried the blade as if he meant to fight with it.
Testing the wind, he tried to follow the smell of sulphur to where it was the strongest. It took him only a few moments to stumble right against what he was looking for, in the form of a chest-high broken column of black rock. The middle of the broad black stump was holed out, as if it were a real treestump rotting, and up out of the central cavity there drifted acrid fumes, along with some faintly visible smoke. At certain moments the smoke was lighted from beneath with a reddish glow, visible here at close range even in broad daylight. A breath of warmth came from the fumarole, along with something that smelled even worse than sulphur, as foul as the breath of some imagined monster.
Somewhere far below, the mountain sighed, and the wave of rising heat momentarily grew great.
Mark lifted the sword. He used both hands on the hilt, just as his brother Kenn had held it with two hands during the fight. But no power flowed from the weapon now, and Mark could do with it as he liked. Without delaying, without giving the gods another moment in which to act, he thrust the sword down into the rising smoke and let it fall. Father, Kenn, I've done it.
The sword fell at once into invisibility. Mark heard the sharp impact that it made on nearby rock, followed by another clash a little farther down. Holding his breath, he listened a long time for some final impact, perhaps a splash into the molten rock that an Elder had once told Mark lay at tire bottom of these holes of fire. But though he listened until he could hold his breath no more, he heard no more of the falling sword.
Mark looked up into the morning sky, clear but for a few small clouds. They were just clouds, with nothing remarkable about them. He realized that he was waiting for a reaction, for lightning, for something to embody what must be the anger of the gods at what he had just done. He was waiting to be struck dead. But no blow came.
What did come instead was, in a sense, even worse. It was just the beginning of a sickening suspicion that his throwing the sword down into the volcano had been a horrible mistake. Now he had made his gesture, of striking back at the gods for what they had done to him. And what harm had his gesture done them? And what good had it done himself?
In thirteen years, Jord had never made this awful trek, had never thrown the gods' payment for his right arm back into their teeth. For whatever reason, Mark's father had kept his arm-price hanging on the wall at home instead. Never trying to use it, never trying to sell it, not bragging about it — but still keeping it. Mark had never really, until this moment, tried to fathom why.
One thing was sure, Mark's father had never tried to rid himself of the sword.
The spell of shock that had been put on Mark in the village street by the evil magic of violence began at last to lift. He realized that he was alone upon a barren mountainside, almost too weak to move, many kilometers from the home to which he dared not return. And that he'd just done something awesome and incomprehensible, completed a mad gesture that would make him the enemy of gods as well as men.
He hung weakly on the edge of the smoking, stinking stone stump, growing sicker and more frightened by the moment, until he began to imagine that the voices of the gods were coming up out of the central hole along with the mind-clouding smoke. Yes, the gods were angry. In Mark the feeling grew of just having made an enormous blunder. The feeling escalated gradually into black terror.
Only his lack of energy saved him from real panic. Doing what he could to flee the wrath of the gods, leaning shakily on the black rocky stump, Mark started round it to reach its far side, from which the mountainside went rather steeply down. As Mark moved onto the descending slope, the stump he leaned on turned into a high crooked column, the way around it into a definite descending path.
Mark had not followed this path for twenty steps before he came upon the sword. It was lying directly in his way, right under a jagged hole in the side of the crooked chimney-column, through which it had obviously dropped out. One bounce on rock, the first impact that he'd heard, then this. Altogether the sword had fallen no farther than if he'd dropped it from the millhouse roof.
Even in that short time it had encountered heat enough to leave it scorching. Mark burned his fingers when he tried to pick it up, and had to let it drop again. He had to wait, shivering in the mountain's morning shadow, and blowing on his fingers, until the unharmed metal had cooled enough for him to handle it.
Chapter 3
'I am still amazed at the extent of your recent failure, Wearer-of-Blue,' Duke Fraktin said. 'Indeed, the more I think about it, the more amazed I grow.'
The blue-robed wizard's real name was not the one by which he had just been addressed. But his real name — or, indeed, even his next-to-real name — were not to be casually uttered; not even by the lips of a duke; and the wizard was used to answering to a variety of aliases.
The wizard now bowed, though he remained seated, in controlled acknowledgement of the rebuke; he had a way, carefully cultivated, of not showing fear, a way that made even a very confident master tread a little warily with him.
'I have already said to Your Grace,' the blue-robed one responded now, 'all that I can say in my own defense.'
There was a small gold cage suspended from a stone ceiling arch not far above the wizard's head, and inside
