evenings together. He encountered Kelder occasionally and found that, once the little man was no longer telling him who to kill, he was pleasant company. He came actively to dislike Captain Dumery, who seemed to resent having Valder removed from his authority. In this latter opinion he was joined wholeheartedly by several of the men in Tandellin’s barracks, but few agreed with his assessment of Kelder, who was generally considered to be a fool.
The summer of the year 4997 arrived, and, by the fourteenth of Summerheat, Valder’s count had hit eighty, give or take one. He lay alone in his room for a long time, staring at the vaulted ceiling and considering this.
He had killed eighty men. With the connivance of the old hermit and his enchanted sword, he had ended fourscore lives. Most soldiers never actually managed to kill anybody. In his six years of regular service, he had never been certain he had killed anyone. He had drawn blood on occasion in skirmishes or with his bow, but he had never known whether anyone he had struck had died.
Wirikidor, on the other hand, never left any room for doubt. He had killed eighty men and sent eighty souls to wherever northerners’ souls went — Hell, presumably. Those men might have been anything — good, evil, or somewhere between. He had no way of knowing anything but that they had been the enemies of the Holy Kingdom of Ethshar.
Why, he wondered, was it called a kingdom? So far as he knew, there had never been an actual king. He had never been very clear on just how the civilian government did operate, having spent his entire life under martial law in the lands outside the traditional boundaries where there was only the military, but he thought he would have heard of a king if one existed.
What would the gods think of a man who had killed eighty men? Would they condemn him as a murderer or praise him for doing so much to rid the world of the demon-guided enemy? Everyone agreed that the gods favored Ethshar over the Empire, but not all agreed on why they did not directly intervene in the war, even when petitioned. One school of thought maintained that they were, in fact, waging war on an entirely different level, but were being countered so exactly by the demons aiding the Northern Empire that no sign of this conflict penetrated to the world. Another school argued that the gods were so pure that they could not take, were actually incapable of taking, any aggressive action; that they found violence so repugnant that they could not bear to help even their chosen people in the violence of war. There were dozens of variations. If the gods were repulsed by violence, though, then had Valder damned himself by wielding Wirikidor?
If he had, it was far too late to do anything about it now. He wished that he had never drawn the sword or that he had never told anyone how he had come to kill the shatra on the plain that day.
His thoughts were interrupted by someone shouting in the corridor outside his room; the words were unintelligible, and he tried to ignore the noise.
He was, he told himself, a young man, scarcely twenty-three. He owned a magic sword that would, supposedly, prevent him from dying indefinitely. Yet, less than a year after acquiring this wonderful weapon, less than a fourth of the way through his term of service in the military, he had used up four-fifths of his ownership of the sword.
That, he told himself, was stupid. It was idiotic to go on squandering his life in this manner. His life was tied to his ownership of the sword; with each killing a part of his life slipped away. His superiors were forcing him to throw it away.
He would refuse, he promised himself, to continue doing so. As politely as he could, he would tell General Gor at the first opportunity that he, Valder of Kardoret, had done his duty, contributed his fair share to the war effort, and would no longer be available for assassinations. After all, they could not kill him; only Wirikidor could do that.
The shouting in the corridor was still going on, and now someone was pounding on his door. Annoyed, he rose and lifted the latch.
Tandellin tumbled in, panting. “Valder, have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“The enemy has broken through on the eastern front, clear into the homeland! Old Ethshar itself is under attack by demons, they say, real demons, not just shatra! General Terrek is dead, and the Kingdom is in retreat. Everyone is to be ready to leave on a moment’s notice; the wizards are getting spells ready, and we expect to be sent to the new front at any time.”
“Demons?”
“Oh, there are hundreds of stories about them! There’s definitely something new happening!”
“Demons.” Wirikidor would be of no use against demons. He knew of nothing that would be — but then, he did not know what wouldn’t be, other than his own sword with its insistence on killing men. Nobody, so far as he knew, had ever actually fought a demon before. Even the very few Ethsharitic demonologists, or the theurgists who worked both sides, never directly fought the demons they conjured up, but instead controlled them through complex magical restraints and elaborate prayers that only the original summoner could use. If the northerners had really unleashed demons on Ethshar, the war might well end very soon — perhaps with no victor at all.
This, he thought, would be a good time for the gods to intervene if, by some chance, they had been waiting for the right moment, like the magicians in the songs who always appeared in the last stanza to rescue the doomed heroes.
He strapped on his sword and headed for General Gor’s office to see if he had any orders. This was not, he knew, a good time to try resigning from his job as an assassin.
CHAPTER 17
Valder sat in the bare stone antechamber feeling stupid. Naturally, Gor had been besieged with questions, advice, requests, demands, and information; he had no time to spare just now for an assassin. Valder knew that, had he given it any thought, he would have realized as much. What could an assassin do in a battle against demons?
Having come to offer his services, however, he was not about to slink back to his room. Instead he sat and waited while officers and messengers ran in and out, so that he might be ready if summoned and so he might catch a few bits of information in passing. All the magicians in the Fortress and some brought from elsewhere were busily gathering information — the wizards by various spells, the theurgists by prayer, the witches and the lone sorcerer by arcane methods Valder did not understand. Gor’s two demonologists had utterly failed to make contact with anything, or so rumor had it, which seemed to confirm that quite literally all the demons of Hell were loose in the east.
As people hurried in and out, Valder could catch snatches of conversation, and every so often someone would pause to rest, or be asked to wait, and might be willing to answer a hurried question. Nobody seemed very sure of what was happening. A steady babble poured out through the door of the inner chamber, but Valder could make sense of none of it. Then, abruptly, the babble died. In the sudden silence as the echoes from the stone walls faded, Valder heard a single voice exclaim, “Gods!”
He heard questioning voices raised, and the silence was washed away as quickly as it had come by officers and men demanding to know what had silenced the magicians.
Valder could not make out the reply and was astonished by an outburst of wild cheering. He could stand it no longer. He rose and marched up to the door.
“What’s happening?” he demanded of the guard posted there.
“I’m not sure, sir,” the soldier said, deferring to Valder’s special uniform.
“You couldn’t hear what was said, what started the cheering?”
“I’m not sure, sir — I think he said something about a counterattack, that the gods themselves had counterattacked. I don’t really know. The gods couldn’t do that, though, could they?” The soldier’s voice was pleading and uncertain, though he struggled to maintain the properly stolid expression a sentry was expected to have.
“I don’t know,” Valder said. “I’m no theologian.” The whole affair seemed unreal. He knew very well that gods and demons existed, had always existed, but, aside from the halfbreed shatra, they had always been aloof
