out across the plain, but the commanding officer and his attendants had traveled in a tight little group, leaving the path behind them.
As Karn’s party moved on to the south, however, they passed an assortment of people heading north — supply wagons, fresh troops, messengers, and even curious civilians. They passed captured northerners and wounded men traveling south more slowly than themselves and were passed in turn by hurrying messengers. By the time they had gone a league, the path had become a road, the grass trodden into the dirt. This was a welcome relief for Valder’s tired feet after so long trampling his own paths — though any sort of walking was not something he welcomed. It did not help any that the soldier carrying Wirikidor kept stumbling and bumping into him.
Shortly after that they passed the smoking ruins of a small northern outpost; Valder stared in fascination, but the others, obviously not interested, hurried him on.
The sun was down and the light fading when Karn called a halt. “All right, boys,” he said. “We’ll take a break and see if we can hitch a ride on a supply wagon going back empty. Once the men at the front have had their dinner, there should be a few.”
“We aren’t stopping here for the night?” Valder asked.
Kam looked at him scornfully, the expression plain even in the gathering dusk. “No, we’re not stopping for the night. We’re on campaign, soldier!”
“I’m not,” Valder protested. “I’ve been barefoot for two sixnights or more and walking for three months, and I need my rest!” “Rest in the wagon, then.” Karn turned away.
As he had predicted, an empty wagon came trundling southward perhaps half an hour later, as Karn was showing his men how to make torches of the tall grass. Valder had refused to help with the instruction, so that he was the first to see the wagon’s own torches.
Once they were aboard the wagon, the rest of the journey was almost pleasant; the road was smooth enough that even a springless ox-drawn cart did not jolt excessively, and Valder was able to sleep off and on until dawn.
They reached the camp early in the afternoon. The first sight of it, as they topped a final hill, was impressive indeed; lines of dull green tents reached to the horizon in three directions amid hundreds of streamers of smoke from cooking fires, broken here and there by an open space. Of course, the camp lay in a narrow depression, so that the horizon was not as far away as it might have been, but Valder was impressed nonetheless. Certainly the encampment was far larger than any he had seen before; he judged that it must hold more than fifty thousand men, and at least one of the open spaces held a tethered dragon. Some of the others held horses or oxen.
He had several minutes to look it over as the wagon made its way up over the hill and paused, while the sentries at the perimeter met them with a perfunctory challenge. They were quickly allowed through and moved on down the slope past the outermost line of tents. At the third row, Sergeant Karn signaled the driver, who slowed the oxen to a halt and allowed his passengers to disembark.
After that, the party split up; besides escorting their prisoner, the detail had brought an assortment of papers and captured materials that were to be delivered to various places. Three of the soldiers were selected to take Valder and an assortment of magical or possibly magical devices to the magicians’ section, while Karn and the others went elsewhere.
Valder was led back into the depths of the camp, up over another hill, and around a corner, where he found himself looking, not at yet more straight lines of identical military-issue green, but at a circle of bright tents in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, clustered around a large area of open ground.
His escort stopped at a chalked line a dozen paces from the outer edge of the circle; Valder stopped as well, though he saw no reason to. The four of them stood and waited for several minutes. Valder was growing restless when a middle-aged woman in a blue gown came hurrying over to them.
“Stuff from the front,” one of the soldiers said before the woman could speak.
“I’ll take care of it,” she replied.
One of the others grabbed Valder by the arm and pushed him forward. “We found this man up there, too. He claims he got cut off from his unit and got back by using a magic sword. Tell your people to check him out. Here’s the sword.” He indicated Wirikidor, thrust into a sack with the rest of Valder’s possessions.
The woman looked at Valder with mild interest. “I’ll take care of it,” she repeated.
“Where do we put everything?”
She turned and pointed to a small pink tent. “On the table in there, as usual — the wards aren’t up, so you can go right in. And I’ll take care of this fellow and his sword myself, for now.”
“Right.” A soldier handed her the bag containing Valder’s belongings, Wirikidor protruding gracelessly from the top. “He’s all yours.”
“Come on, then,” she said as she led the way toward a red-and-white striped pavilion. Valder followed obediently.
CHAPTER 10
He had been in camp for two days before he was allowed outside the magicians’ section. During that time he was passed from hand to hand and subjected to various interrogations, magical inspections, analyses, and divinations, verifying that he was indeed who he claimed to be and had not been possessed by demons nor placed under any sort of sorcerous control — at least, no sorcery that the latest in modern wizardry and witchcraft could detect, as the camp did not have a competent sorcerer on hand.
Valder wondered anew at this omission; surely Ethshar had a few good sorcerers somewhere, enough to supply one to a camp of this size!
Other than these constant investigations, he was not mistreated. The blue-robed woman turned out to be a sort of clerk who acted as a general helper and liaison between the community of magicians and the rest of the world, but was not a magician herself. She found Valder a bunk in a gold-trimmed white tent otherwise occupied by an old man who did not stir out of his trance at any time during Valder’s stay, and it was she who scheduled his appointments with the various wizards and witches who were to study his case.
Shortly after his arrival, as he was checked out by a nervous young wizard who had been put in charge of his case for the moment, another wizard contacted his old unit — or what was left of it. A plump theurgist let slip shortly after contact was made that the unit had caught the brunt of the enemy’s drive to the sea and been badly mauled — in fact, it effectively no longer existed, the survivors having been distributed elsewhere. Fortunately, the survivors included men who knew Valder, such as his bunkmate Tandellin, and his identity was confirmed through dream images the night after his arrival in camp.
In what seemed an excessive precaution to Valder, they even double-checked the wizardly dreams by witchcraft, lest some unknown enemy wizard’s trick interfere.
Every test bore out his story, of course, since his every word was the truth, and eventually his interrogators were convinced of his honesty and accuracy. He had not realized until he had tried to explain himself to his rescuers — or perhaps captors — just how unlikely his story sounded. Surviving, lost and alone, behind enemy lines for two months, then being rescued from an enemy patrol that had him hopelessly outclassed by a mysterious hermit wizard nobody had ever heard of... Valder had to admit that, stated simply, it did sound unlikely, even before bringing Wirikidor into it. And then, to top it off, he had killed a shatra in single combat. Nobody would ever have believed that at all, had he not been found standing alone over the fresh corpse. He suspected that a great many people still did not believe it, even with witnesses and magical verifications.
Eventually, though, after two days of continuous probing, the whole thing was officially accepted, and he was allowed the run of the camp. That done, the various wizards turned their attention to Wirikidor. Until his identity was established, he had not been permitted weapons, naturally; and furthermore, no one had touched Wirikidor, lest it be booby-trapped. The sword had remained on the table in the pink tent with other unknown magical items. It still looked like any ordinary, standard-issue sword, but, when it was brought out into the open circle, Valder could somehow sense, beyond question, that this was Wirikidor and no other.
He was currently in the hands of a red-haired young wizard in a dull green robe who had refused to give her name and a man called Darrend of Calimor, dark haired and middle-sized, of indeterminate age, wearing a standard military tunic and kilt, but with no breastplate and carrying no sword. Instead of the usual simple soldier’s
