Oath of Swords

doing it.”

“How many, do you think?” Brandark asked, and Bahzell shook his head.

“I couldn’t be saying, not for certain, but it’s surprised I’ll be if they haven’t doubled their strength.”

“Phrobus!” Brandark swore, and Bahzell nodded, then scratched his chin.

“Still and all, Brandark, it might be worse.” His friend looked at him incredulously, and he shrugged. “There may be more of them, my lad, but they waited here long enough for us to be making up time. We’re no more than an hour-two at the outside-behind now.”

“Wonderful. When we catch them, you can take the twenty on the right while I take the twenty on the left . . . and hope those poxy wizards don’t turn us into cucumbers for our pains!”

“As to that, I’m thinking we’d best take whatever chance we get and hope,” Bahzell returned with a wave at the lazily spiraling flakes. “If we don’t hit them soon, we’ll have snow enough to hide an army’s tracks. They’re easy enough to follow now, but if snow once hides the trail and they’re after changing direction, we’ll be needing hours to find ’em again-if we ever do.”

“Better and better.” Brandark straightened in the saddle, sweeping the horizon through the slowly thickening veil of flakes, then sighed in glum agreement and looked back at the Horse Stealer.

“Any more sign of our friend?”

“Not since morning,” Bahzell replied, “but he was bound southwest, so I’m thinking he’s looped out around them again. He’s up ahead somewhere, waiting for them, though how he’s after doing it is more than I can guess.”

“Why should he make any more sense than the rest of this?” Brandark demanded, waving an arm at the hills and low-growing scrub that dotted the snowy, half-frozen marsh.

“Aye, you’ve a point there.” Bahzell stood absently picking clots of ice from his packhorse’s mane while he gazed ahead at the tracks before him. He and Brandark were within striking distance at last, but there were too many unknowns for him to be happy about it. Zarantha’s wizard captors had at least forty men with them now, and even if the hradani somehow took them totally by surprise, those were steep odds. Then there was the mystery rider who wasn’t a Sothoii, whatever he was mounted on. Tomanak only knew what he was up to.

He snorted at his own choice of phrase. If Tomanak was so all-fired anxious to secure his service, then why couldn’t he at least make himself useful by providing some of the information Bahzell lacked?

“Among other reasons,” a deep voice said in the recesses of his brain, “because you haven’t asked me.”

“Will you stop that?!” Bahzell snapped, and Brandark looked up in surprise, then swallowed and edged his horse carefully away. Bahzell saw him go, and the Bloody Sword’s painfully neutral expression made him still angrier. This wasn’t Tomanak’s first communication since that night in the hollow, and Brandark had reacted far less calmly the first time Bahzell stopped dead to argue with empty air. It hadn’t taken him long to deduce who the Horse Stealer was really speaking to, yet he’d been very, very careful never to say a word about it. Bahzell supposed that was better than having his friend decide he was mad, but it didn’t feel that way.

“If you don’t want answers,” the deep, infuriatingly reasonable voice seemed to vibrate in his bones, “you shouldn’t ask questions.”

Bahzell drew a deep breath, exhaled half of it and held the rest, propped his hands on his hips, and glared up at the clouds.

“I wasn’t asking you a thing,” he said slowly and distinctly, “and it was in my mind as how you’d said you’d not plague me until I was after being ready to hear you?”

“I also said I’d be back,” Tomanak’s silent voice pointed out, “and you did ask me a question, whether you realized it or not. As for being ready to hear, if you weren’t ready, you wouldn’t be able to.”

“D’you mean to say that any time one of your ‘champions’ is after even mentioning your name you come yammer in his ear?” Bahzell demanded, and a deep, echoing chuckle rolled through him.

“Not normally, no,” the god said after a moment. “Most mortal minds aren’t up to sustaining this sort of contact for long. Magi can handle more of it, but too much would burn out even one of them.”

“Well, isn’t that reassuring!” Bahzell snorted, and Tomanak chuckled again.

“Oh, you’re in no danger yet, Bahzell. You have quite a strong mind, actually, and I wouldn’t be here if I were likely to damage it.”

“Now there’s a comforting thought.” Bahzell glowered up at the clouds a moment longer, then shrugged. “Well, if you’re here, why not be making yourself useful and tell me what’s happening up ahead?”

“I said your refusal to ask me was only one of the reasons,” Tomanak reminded him. “There are others.”

“Such as?”

“First, it would be entirely too close to direct meddling; it’s not the sort of thing even a god can do too often, so we save it for really important matters. Then, too, there are things you shouldn’t know. If I were to tell you everything, you’d come to rely on that and make your decisions based solely on what I told you. After a time, you’d be the very thing you’re so determined to avoid: a puppet, controlled by the information I provided.”

“Um.” Bahzell chewed his lip for a moment, then nodded reluctantly.

“What I can and will do for my champions,” Tomanak went on, “is strengthen them when they need it. Their decisions are their own to make. They know my Code and their own hearts, but it’s the exercise of their own wills and their reliance on their own courage which makes them champions. A warrior who’s led by the hand and protected from all danger becomes a shell. If I make them less than the best they can be I betray them . . . and leave them unsuited to the tasks for which I need them, like a blade that’s lost its temper.”

Bahzell nodded again, less reluctantly, then sighed.

“All right, that much I can see. But if that’s the case, then I’ll be thanking you not to gab away at me with no warning at all, at all.”

“That may be a bit difficult,” Tomanak said almost apologetically. “A part of my attention is attuned to you at all times, and when you have questions that may affect your ultimate decision, I owe you answers-or the reasons why there aren’t any. I realize what I’m asking of you, and you deserve the fullest explanation I can give you while you think things over. So until you make up your mind one way or the other, I’m afraid I’ll be ‘gabbing away’ at you any time you think a question at me.”

“But I’m not wanting you to!” Bahzell pointed out.

“Perhaps not, but I’m the god of justice as well as war, Bahzell, and it would be unjust not to explain whatever I can. If you don’t want to hear from me, then don’t think about me.”

“Oh, that’s a fine piece of advice! And just how is it I’m to stop thinking about you when you’re wanting to turn my life inside out?!”

“By making a decision, one way or the other,” Tomanak returned with a sort of implacable gentleness. “Until then-”

Bahzell had the strong impression of an unseen shrug, and then the voice in his mind was gone and there was only the wind moaning about him as it gathered strength and the snow fell more thickly. He growled under his breath, and a vast sense of ill-use filled him-one that was made even more infuriating by his own nagging feeling that he was childish to feel it. Maddening as the sudden, unexpected inner conversations might be, Tomanak was right; anyone who asked a man for his allegiance owed that man the fullest explanation he could give of what that entailed. It was just Bahzell’s cursed luck that a god could explain-or not, as the case might be- anything .

He growled again and shook himself. Discussions with gods might be very impressive, he thought grumpily, but they seemed to offer far less guidance than all the tales insisted. It was still up to him and Brandark to deal with the scum ahead of them, and he looked around for his friend.

The Bloody Sword had fallen back beside the pack animals, sitting his horse with a sort of studied nonchalance to emphasize his disinterest in Bahzell’s one-sided conversation. The Horse Stealer smiled sourly and walked across to him.

“I’m thinking we’d best be hitting them this afternoon,” he said, resuming the discussion Tomanak had interrupted. “It’s not the odds I’d choose, but they’ll not get better just for our wishing, and it’s in my mind we