A magician chimed in. 'And, once he has the Sword of Force, he might be able to trade or sell it to someone else. Someone who does have an army, and ambitions.'
'What was that other sword that he was wearing, I wonder? An ordinary blade, maybe, or-?'
'You are the magicians, not I. Discover the answer if you can, and tell me. If you cannot, I must make up my mind without knowing.'
Mark had answered firmly, but he felt a chill. Complications, unpleasant possibilities, were piling up. Things he hadn't thought of before, in his absorption with the problem of his son. Still, he remained stubbornly unwilling to give up the idea of the trade.
He could think of at least one argument to put in on the other side. 'We know how to fight against Shieldbreaker.' Ben scowled. 'Aye, and so must many others. Including Amintor himself, even if he hasn't yet shared the secret with his followers. Are you trying to say the Sword of Force is of little value? Consider how well it served you yesterday.'
There was no arguing with that. But Mark would not let himself be argued out of trying to make the trade. He said: 'It's vital to the whole realm that Adrian should be healed. It's not just that he's my son.'
The others were silent. But he could see in their faces the grudging admission that the point was valid.
Ben was not through arguing. 'Is there any reason to think that Amintor does not know how to fight against the Sword as well as we do?'
'Those troops he left to ambush us-'
'When he set up the ambush I'll bet he didn't yet know who was following him, and he didn't have any idea that he was up against the Sword of Force. You'll find he deploys his people differently the next time he tries it. There'll be two men, at least, unarmed so the Sword can't hurt them, ready to jump on you and drag you from your mount. Others, well-armed, close around those two, to protect them from your armed friends.'
Mark forced himself to smile. 'You make it sound easy.'
Ben shook his head stubbornly. 'Not easy, but it would be possible. If Vulcan could be overcome that way, you're not too tough.'
The Prince and his old adviser argued on while the rest of the council, though agreeing still with Ben, sat by in stubborn silence. The more the arguments went on, the more Mark favored trying to make the trade. None of those who objected to it were able to suggest another way in which he might obtain the Sword of Healing for his son.
Ben got up angrily at last, turned his back on the Prince, and walked away.
Mark glared after him in black anger. But he did nothing about the snub. Instead he mounted and rode back to the approach to the cliff where he had last communicated with Amintor. Reining in his mount, he called out in a great voice.
There was no answer. He called again, roaring in a voice even louder than before.
Stung by a sudden apprehension, he rallied his people to him and spurred up onto another rise of land nearby.
There, in the distance, through oncoming mist and rain, he could see a group of riders that must be Amintor's band, traveling at good speed along a road.
Even as Mark was getting his column slowly into motion again, a flying scout came in to report that the enemy were making good time into the distance and gave no sign of wanting any more conferences.
'After them!'
But within the hour it became apparent that as long as Mark's troops were hampered by the litter, he had no hope at all of overtaking the other party.
CHAPTER 13
NEAR midnight in a high tower of the Palace at Sarykam, Karel, the chief wizard of the house of Tasavalta, dreamed.
Karel's dreams were often very much stronger and stranger than those of other men, and the visions he endured this night were no exception.
He saw the small Prince Adrian lying as still and pale as death in his small bed inside a tent. He saw Prince Mark riding into battle, surrounded by a furiously spinning profusion of Swords, all the Swords there were in the universe and more. And in his dreams the wizard Karel heard the roaring of an unseen river in flood and saw young Prince Zoltan struggling against strange monsters.
Then came darkness and silence. Not the cessation of the dream, but an interval of empty night contained within it. And then, presently, as if he were emerging from deep shadow, the powerful wizard Karel beheld huge trees, of a kind that even his waking eyes had never seen; and now he could see the river that had roared in flood, and the serpent Yilgarn that lay in wait for everyone at the end of the world to swallow gods and men together. The serpent in the dream was trying to swallow the mightiest river in the world, and in turn the river tried to strangle the serpent and kept on running always to the sea.
That scene faded. Karel twitched in his bed, in his high lonely chamber in the royal Palace of Tasavalta; and the benevolent guardians that never left him by day or by night, the invisible powers that he, like other wizards good and evil, relied upon against his enemies, tried to keep the worst of his dreams from gaining too much hold over him. But there were limits on how much his powers could do.
The wizard, as helpless in his own sleep as ordinary men might be in theirs, dreamt on. Against a sky aglow with fantastic stars and comets, he saw the griffin that flew by midnight, and he saw who rode upon the griffin's back.
Karel woke up when his dream showed him that. His body jolted upright in a moment, and he was screaming like an abandoned child.
For a long moment he did not know who he was or where he was. Fear had dissolved everything. He sat there in his narrow bed, trying to control his sobbing breath and listening to the night wind that howled around the high stone corners of the Palace tower that held his room.
It had been only a dream. Only a dream. But the wizard was still afraid, still terrified, because he knew what the dream meant.
Once upon a time it had been possible to confine the worst things in the world in a dungeon under the world. But no one, not even an Emperor's son, could do that now.
Princess Kristin, too, was wakeful on this night. There were no dreams for her unless they came in the mere sound of the wind as it moaned around the carven stones. To keep her thoughts from being snatched away by the wind she listened to the surging surf of autumn crashing remotely in the darkness. As a child she had loved falling asleep to the sound of that autumnal surf.
But tonight sleep was far away. She got out of bed, went to look in on little Stephen, and found him sleeping peacefully, as ever untroubled by what the night side of the world could do. On her way back to her own chamber the Princess paused to glance at another small bed, this one empty. The scrolled-up storybook that everyone had forgotten to pack for Adrian lay on the bedside table. His mother, gazing at the bed and book, was mortally certain that Adrian, wherever he and his father might be at the moment, was having a seizure. And she was not there to hold and comfort him.
That was a foolish thought. How could she be there?
She had just returned to her own room and was about to get back into bed when a familiar tap came at the door. One of her maids was there to tell the Princess that her uncle Karel was at the door of the royal suite saying it was vital that he see her now.
Suppressing her fears, Kristin quickly put on a robe over her nightdress and went to greet her uncle in a sitting room, where the servant had already brought out an Old-World lamp.
By that mellow and steady light, a signal that the world could somehow be controlled, the old man first hastened to reassure her that the things she must fear most had not happened, it was not irredeemable disaster to her husband or her oldest son that brought him to her door at such an hour.
The old man sighed. 'Still, certain things have happened. I have had visions, and I decided that the telling of them had better not wait until morning.'
'Then tell them to me. I am ready to hear them.'
He sat opposite her, on the other side of a small table, with the lamp turned to a subtle glow, almost between them. 'Kristin. I am going to say some names. Tell me if any of them mean anything to you.'
'Say on.'
