Sword Brother

'You're tired,' Wencit said. Houghton looked at him, and the wizard smiled crookedly. 'Not physically, perhaps. But tired-so tired-of seeing the innocent killed.'

'What?' Houghton tried to rally. 'You're a mind reader, too?'

'No, I'm a wizard, not a mage. But I don't have to be able to read your mind. Not to see that truth, Gunnery Sergeant Houghton. Trust me,' the smile went even more crooked for a moment, 'even if we've never met before, I recognize the kind of man you are. I've known others like you. Too many of them, I think sometimes.'

'And?' Houghton said when the wizard paused again. A little warning bell was trying to sound deep inside Houghton's brain. Somehow the conversation was slipping out of his control, going places he'd never intended it to go. He'd intended to maintain his focus on the demand that he and Mashita be sent back to their own universe, yet something inside him knew it was going in another direction entirely. And something else inside him couldn't resist that changing destination.

'And I'm afraid I'm about to lose another one of them,' Wencit said. 'A good man, one with a sense of responsibility, who's already seen and faced enough evil for any other man's entire lifetime. I think you'd like him, if you ever met.'

'And you're about to invite me to do just that, aren't you?' Houghton said. It was a challenge, but without the edge of confrontation Wencit had half-expected. 'You're going to suggest that I ought to go ahead and help him-and you-out, like one good, responsible man to another.'

'Something like that,' Wencit admitted.

'I don't think so,' Houghton responded. But his tone wasn't quite as firm as he'd wanted it to be.

'You've said you're fighting an ugly war back home,' Wencit said. 'So am I, my friend, and I'll wager I've been fighting it even longer than you have. A lot longer, in fact. I know what it is to have blood on your hands. To lose friends, comrades. To see the innocent caught in the middle of all the carnage-to wonder if your efforts aren't actually making it worse. If at least a part of you isn't becoming the very thing you're fighting. That's what I'm doing out here in the middle of nowhere, the reason I cast the spell that ended up bringing you and your friend here, as well.'

'I'll take your word for it,' Houghton said. 'It's still not my war.'

'No?' Wencit cocked his head. 'Maybe it is. Surely, evil is much the same in every universe, isn't it? And-' he looked directly into Houghton's green eyes '- quite a lot of children have already died in my war, as well. And more of them will die very soon now, if it isn't stopped.'

'Shit happens.' It was supposed to come out hard, uncaring.

It failed.

'Yes, it does,' Wencit said. 'May I at least show you what I'm talking about here?'

Houghton knew better. He knew better, and yet someone else seemed to have control of his voice.

'Sure,' he said. 'Go ahead. Trot it out, but you're gonna have to go some to beat the kind of shit I've already seen.'

'Am I?'

Wencit smiled oddly, and then his hands moved. They sketched an immaterial square in the air, about chest height, four feet or so across, and two or three tall. Houghton frowned and started to open his mouth to ask him what he thought he was doing, but then the air in the square Wencit's hands had defined seemed to ripple abruptly.

The Marine's mouth snapped shut again as the ripple effect cleared as suddenly as it had appeared. In its place were images-sharp, as crystal-clear as any video screen or television Houghton had ever seen. And, as he saw them, Houghton felt a sudden, total confidence that what he was seeing was an actual, faithful record of what had truly happened.

It was one of the most horrific things he had ever seen.

Kenneth Houghton had seen men, women, and children mangled and mutilated by 'improvised explosive devices,' by mortar and rocket fire, by artillery shells, bombs, machine-gun fire, and small arms. He'd seen the horror napalm left behind, the indescribable burns of white phosphorus. Yet this . . .

He stared at Wencit's images and saw brutal combat with swords, axes, pikes and halberds-the sheer, personal butchery of edged steel cleaving flesh, close enough for an enemy's blood to spray into a man's face and eyes. He saw arrow storms, and thundering cavalry. He saw fountains of flame he somehow knew were born of the same sort of 'sorcery' which had brought him to this world, this place. And he saw other flames- the flames of burning cities and villages, their streets littered with the bodies of those who had once lived in those blazing homes. He saw the bodies of women, mothers, cut down as they fled with children in their arms. He saw the children they'd tried to save. He saw laughing warriors tossing screaming children into the flames. He saw blood soaked altars, surrounded by the butchered bodies of sacrificial victims while still more victims were dragged, fighting frantically, to their fates. And he saw . . . creatures he had no names for-creatures out of the darkest depths of nightmare-killing and maiming, devouring. He saw them being directed, controlled, in their slaughter.

And he saw the men-and women-who stood against the tide of butchery and darkness. He watched them, recognized the iron determination and raw courage which kept them on their feet, facing that avalanche of horror when simple sanity must have cried out for them to flee for their lives. Some of them seemed wrapped in glittering coronas of blue light, like some sort of lightning. Others were simply men and women, with no light, no special aura. Only men and women who could not let the darkness triumph unopposed. Who had to face it.

And who died fighting it.

He saw it all, and only much later did he realize that what seemed to have taken hours at the time could not have lasted more than a very few minutes.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it ended. The images disappeared, and he found himself staring into Wencit of Rum's wildfire eyes.

'That's my war, Gunnery Sergeant Houghton,' the wizard said very, very softly. 'And it's the war my friend is riding straight into all by himself.'

II

'I'm thinking as how something new's after being added to the pot,' Bahzell Bahnakson said to his horse.

Except, of course, that the magnificent roan stallion under his saddle wasn't a horse. In point of fact, Walsharno, son of Mathygan and Yorthandro, was a Sothoii courser, far larger than any mere 'horse,' and as intelligent as any of the Races of Man. And, like the fox- eared hradani in his saddle, a champion of the war god, Tomanak.

*And to just what sudden stroke of geniusdo we owe that particular observation?* a mellow voice asked deep inside Bahzell's brain.

'The fact that we're after seeing another entire batch of hoof prints joining up with them,' he replied, waving one hand at the trail of trampled grass leading steadily southeast from the slight rise upon which they had halted. A second trail had just joined it, angling in from the west.

*Oh, that.*

'Aye, that,' Bahzell agreed sardonically.

*Well, maybe there'll be enough of them that they'll get in each other's way,* Walsharno suggested.

'And if you're after believing that, I've some bottomland on the Ghoul Moor I could