'Come fight me,' said the Duke. 'Or refuse, and die more slowly. It is all one to me.'
The man hesitated a moment longer, then picked up the knife.
The Duke walked forward to the attack. The prisoner did what he could to defend himself, which, given the disparity in arms and armor, was not much.
When it was over, a minute later, the Duke wiped the long blade clean himself, and with a gesture dismissed his troops, who bore away with them the prisoner's body.
'I felt no power in it, Blue-Robes. It killed, but any sharp blade would have killed as well. If its power is not activated by being carried into a fight, then how can it be ordered, how controlled? And what does it do?'
The wizard signed humbly that he did not know.
The Duke bore the cleaned blade back into the concealed room behind the arras, and replaced it in the magically protective chest. Still his hand lingered on the black hilt, tracing with one finger the thin white lines of decoration. 'Something like a castle wall on his sword, the fellow said.'
'So he did, Your Grace.'
'But here I see no castle wall. Here there's nothing more or less than what we've seen in the pattern since that woman brought me the sword a month ago. This shows a pair of dice.'
'Indeed it does, Your Grace: ' 'Dice. And she who brought it to me from the Red Temple said that the soldier who left it with her had been wont to play, and win, at dice.' Annoyingly, that soldier himself was dead. Stabbed, according to the woman's story, within a few breaths of the moment when he'd let the sword out of his hands. The killers who'd lain in wait for him had evidently been some of his fellow gamblers, who were convinced he'd cheated them. Duke Fraktin had sent Sir Sharfa, one of his more trusted knights, out on a secret mission of investigation. 'Am I to cast dice for the world, Blue-Robes?'
The wizard let the question pass as rhetoric, without an answer. 'No common soldier, Your Grace, could have carried a sword like this about with him for long. It would certainly have come to the attention of his officers, and then…'
'It would be taken from him, yes. Though quite likely not brought here to me. And well, it's here now.' And the Duke, sighing, removed his finger from the hilt. 'Tell me, Blue-Robes, is it perhaps something like our lamps, some bit of wizardry left over from the Old World? And is the miller's tale of how he came by it only a feverish dream that he once had, perhaps when his arm was amputated, perhaps after he'd caught it clumsily in his own saw or his own millstones?'
'I am sure Your Grace understands that none of those suggestions are really possible. Much of the miller's tale is independently confirmed. And we know that the Old World technologists made no swords; they had more marvelous ways to kill, ways still forbidden us by Ardneh's Change. They had in truth the gun, the bomb… '
'Oh, I know that, I know that… but stick to what is real and practical, not what may have happened in the days of legend… Blue-Robes, do you think the Old World really had to endure gods as well as their nonsense of technology? Ardneh, I suppose, was really there.'
'It would seem certain that they did, Your Grace. Many gods, not only Ardneh. There are innumerable references in the old records. I have seen Vulcan and many others named.'
The Duke heaved a sigh, a great sincere one this time, and shook his head again. As if perhaps he would have liked to say, even now, that there were no gods, or ought to be none, his own experience notwithstanding.
But here was the sword before him, an artifact of metal and magic vastly beyond the capabilities of the humans of the present age. And it had not been made in the Old World either. According to the best information he had available, it had been made no more than thirteen years ago, in the almost unpeopled mountains on the eastern edge of his own domain. If not by Vulcan, then by whom?
Gods were rarely seen or heard from. But even a powerful noble hardly dared say that they did not exist. Not, certainly, when his domain adjoined the Ludus Mountains.
Chapter 7
Mark awoke lying on damp ground, under a sky much like that of the day before, gray and threatening rain. Still, blanketed and fed, he was in such relative comfort that for a moment he could believe that he was dreaming, back in his own bedroom at the mill, and that in a moment he might hear his father's voice. The illusion vanished before it could become too painful. There was Ben, a snoring mound just on the other side of the dead fire, and there was the wagon. From inside it the little dragon had begun a nagging squall, sounding almost like a baby. No doubt it was hungry again.
And now the wagon shook faintly with human stirrings inside its cover; and now Ben sat up and yawned. Shortly everyone was up and moving. For breakfast Barbara handed out stale bread and dried fruit. People munched as they moved about, getting things packed up and ready for the road. Preparations were made quickly, but fog was closing in by the time everything was ready to travel. With the fog, visibility became so poor that Nestor entrusted the reins to Ben, while he himself walked on ahead to scout the way.
'We're near the frontier,' Nestor cautioned them all before he moved out. 'Everybody keep their eyes open.'
Walking thirty meters or so ahead, about at the limit of dependable visibility, Nestor led the wagon along back lanes and across fields. Before they had gone far, they passed a gang of someone's field workers, serfs to judge by their tattered clothes, heading out with tools in hand for the day's labor. When these folk were greeted, they answered only with small waves and nods, some refusing to respond at all.
Shortly after this encounter Nestor called a halt and held a conference. He now admitted freely that he was lost. He thought it possible that they might not have crossed the frontier last night after all — or that they might even have recrossed it to Duke Fraktin's side this morning. Mark gathered that the border hereabouts was a zig-zag affair, poorly marked at best, and in places disputed or uncertain. However that might be, all they could do now was keep trying to press on to the south.
The four people in and around the wagon squinted up through fog that appeared to be growing thicker, if anything. They did their best to locate the sun, and at last came to a consensus of sorts on its position.
'That way's east, then. We'll be all right now.'
With Nestor again walking a little ahead of the wagon, and Ben driving, they crossed a field and jolted into the wheel-ruts of another lane. Time passed. The murky countryside flowed by, with a visibility now of no more than about twenty meters. Nestor was a ghostly figure, pacing at about that distance ahead of the wagon.
More time passed. Suddenly, seeming to come from close overhead, there was a soft sound, quickly passing, as of enormous wings. Everyone looked up. If there had been a shadow, it had already come and gone, and no shape was revealed in the bright grayness. Mark exchanged looks with Barbara and Ben, both of whom looked just as puzzled as he felt. No one said anything. Mark's impression had been of something very large in flight. He had certainly never heard anything like it before.
Nestor, who had heard it too, called another halt and another conference. He didn't know, either, what the flying thing might have been, and now he was ready to curse the fog, which earlier he had welcomed. 'It's not right for this part of the country, this time of the year. But we'll come out of it all right if we just keep going.'
This time Nestor stayed with the wagon and took over the driving himself. The others remained steadily on lookout, keeping watch in all directions as well as possible in the fog.
The lane on which they were traveling dipped down to a small river, shallow but swiftly flowing, and crossed it in a gravel ford. Nestor drove across without pausing. Mark supposed that this was probably another bend of the same stream that they'd just camped beside, and that this crossing might mean a new change of territory. But no one said anything, and he suspected they were all still confused about whose lands they were in.
Slowly they groped their way ahead, through soupy mists. The team, and the dragon as well, were nervous now. As if, thought Mark, something more than mere fog were bothering them.
There was the river again, off to the right. The road itself moved here in meandering curves, like a flatland stream.
Suddenly, from behind the wagon and to the left, there came the thudding, scraping, distinctive sound of riding-beasts hard footpads on a hard road. It sounded like at least half a dozen animals, traveling together. It had
