dagger he bore an ornate ceremonial knife and wore a soft green cap instead of a helmet. Valder assumed him to be a wizard, though he had not actually seen the man perform any spells. These two stood on either side of him as the clerk brought out the sword.
“That’s it, is it?” Darrend asked.
“Yes,” Valder answered without hesitation. “That’s Wirikidor.” Darrend glanced at him, then took the sword from the clerk. “We’ve heard your story, of course, so we know a little about how this sword behaves, but how is it you can be so certain that this is in fact your sword and not another?”
Valder shrugged. “I don’t know, but I am sure.”
“It’s inactive as long as it’s sheathed; we tested that right after you were delivered here. Do you know anything about what it’s likely to do when someone draws it?”
“Ah... not really,” Valder said unhappily. “But each time I drew it, I was unable to sheathe it again until it had killed a man.”
“Was it in any great hurry to kill someone?”
Valder’s unhappiness grew. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “Each time I drew it, the next person I saw was an enemy, and each time I killed him as quickly as I could — or the sword did.”
“That doesn’t help much. Perhaps we had best assume that it will demand a victim immediately.”
“It might,” Valder agreed.
“We need to draw it in order to examine it, so I think we had best find ourselves a prospective victim.”
“How are you going to do that?” Valder asked. He quickly wished he hadn’t, as he remembered the northern prisoners he had seen on the road south.
“I’ll have to talk to General Karannin,” Darrend replied. “Until then, I think perhaps you should carry the sword again; you’d look out of place around camp without it, and if it does carry an ownership spell, as I suspect, keeping you apart for much longer might be dangerous.” He handed Valder the scabbarded weapon.
Valder accepted it gravely and restored it to its accustomed place on his belt.
“Until we find a prisoner, I don’t think we’ll be needing you,” Darrend said. “You’re free to go where you please, so long as you don’t leave the camp, but be back here at dusk.”
“Thank you,” Valder said. Darrend nodded a farewell and then strolled away. The clerk and the other wizard, after a moment’s hesitation, also moved off, leaving him alone in the magicians’ circle.
For a moment he was not sure what to do. He had no friends in this camp; although his old unit was scattered, none had wound up this far inland, and he had not had time since arriving to meet anyone but his interrogators. It was faintly possible, though highly unlikely, that a cousin or other kin could be in the camp, but he had no idea where any such relatives might be found.
That meant there were no people he wanted to see, but that did not leave him utterly without purpose; after three months of near-total isolation, more than anything else he wanted news — and he would have no objection to wine and women — song would be strictly optional, as he had never been particularly musical. He had picked up a few bits of information in conversation with the wizards and witches, but only enough to whet his appetite for real news. His meals had included only water or weak beer, and the idea of a good drunk, on wine or something stronger, was appealing. The various female magicians or magicians’ helpers he had encountered had been unavailable, unattractive, or both.
If this camp followed the pattern of every other camp he had ever been in, he knew exactly where to go for what he wanted — but it was not technically in the camp, nor was he likely to return by nightfall.
What the hell, he told himself; he deserved a little relaxation. He had been cooperative enough since his capture. He turned south and headed for the rear of the encampment, where the camp followers and hangers-on were sure to have a camp of their own.
Sure enough, as he had expected, the tents and shacks of the camp followers were strewn across the plains south of the main camp; and, as he had expected, the largest structures were all either bars or brothels. The others catered to different interests; some even sheltered soldiers’ families, which was the official reason such camp-towns were tolerated. Valder ignored the freelance seers, officers’ wives, and other respectable or semirespectable people and headed directly for a large, tan-colored tent hung with red lanterns.
News, he decided, came first, since it was still only mid-afternoon. He suspected he might not remember the evening and he did not want to forget anything important. With that in mind he settled at a table in the half- empty, improvised tavern in the front of the tent, ignoring what lay beyond the bead curtain. He ordered a mild wine, since he intended to start off slowly.
As he had hoped, there were a few other people in the place; and as might be expected so early in the day, they included some serious drinkers. It was not difficult to get one of them started talking. Valder asked questions whenever the stream of words seemed to be slowing and sipped at his wine every so often to keep the taverner happy.
He started the conversation off with the usual banter about how miserable military life was, but quickly brought up the fact that he had been cut off for months.
“Did I miss anything?” he asked, half-jokingly. “Any generals drop dead, or anything?”
“Nope,” his drinking companion, a lieutenant by the name of Sidor, replied, “It’s still Gor and Terrek and Anaran and Azrad running everything — them and their flunkies, like our own dear General Karannin, sitting here in the middle of nowhere because he doesn’t want to cause trouble.”
That sounded interesting; Valder prompted the lieutenant, asking, “How do you mean that?”
The resulting tirade was not always clear, but the gist of it seemed to be that the enemy was in a state of near-collapse and General Karannin was failing to take advantage of it. The northerners’ drive to the sea, which had cut Valder off from his unit in the first place, had apparently been a desperate gamble that had not paid off; the Empire had put everything it could muster into a highspeed attack that had supposedly been intended to sweep around the western end of the Ethsharitic army, down the coast and back across toward Old Ethshar itself — or at least toward Admiral Azrad’s home base. The attack had failed; the Ethsharitic resistance had been enough to wear away the northern assault force until, by the time it ran up against General Gor’s coastal fortress, there was almost nothing left of it.
Naturally, realizing the enemy’s weakness, Ethshar had counterattacked along a broad front, advancing up across the plains and meeting virtually no resistance. The few scattered northerners they did encounter appeared to be simply scouts, sentries, and remnants of the assault force’s supply line that had been left behind when the attack collapsed.
It was obvious to anyone with any wits, the lieutenant said repeatedly, that the Empire had finally run out of troops and launched their last attack while they still had men to do their fighting. Everyone had seen that the northern soldiers had gotten younger and younger of late. All Ethshar’s army had to do to end the war was march straight on into the Empire’s capital and take over.
The generals, of course, would not do that. Sidor got quite sarcastic on that point. The generals, he claimed, were afraid the whole thing was a trap or trick of some sort, when anybody could see that it was nothing of the kind. General Karannin, in particular, had insisted on advancing with what Sidor considered truly absurd caution. The very fact that his camp had stayed in one place for the two days Valder had been in it was, to Sidor, proof that Karannin was wasting a golden opportunity to put an end to the interminable conflict.
For his own part, Valder had some doubts. The Empire still appeared, from what he had seen, to have a good many sorcerers and shatra on hand, even if they were running short of regular infantry; furthermore, nobody knew what other surprises the northerners’ tutelary demons might provide, should shatra prove inadequate. Besides, the war had been going on for centuries. It seemed unlikely to Valder that, of all the generations that had fought in his family, he should happen to be the one lucky enough to have it end during his lifetime.
Of course, he was the first in his family to own a magic sword — but that was a minor thing, really, where the end of the Great War would mean an entirely different world.
He had managed to nurse his single cup of wine for over an hour of Sidor’s diatribes and gossip, but it was gone at last, and he decided it was time to move on to more serious drinking. He ordered a mug of oushka and took a sip as Sidor raved about why the war should have already been won.
The drink burned going down; he coughed. It had been a long time since he had drunk oushka, and, he realized, he had lost his taste for the stuff. That took most of the fun out of the prospect of getting drunk — and now that he thought about it, he did not really want to get drunk in the first place. That had been what he always
