Oath of Swords

against Harnak’s guardsmen. It was only a matter of time until one of those patrols caught up with them, and when it did-

“You know you’ve . . . got to leave me behind, don’t you?” Brandark whispered, and Bahzell looked down quickly. He opened his mouth, but Brandark shook his head with another of those tight smiles. “D’you think . . . I don’t know I’m dying?”

“Hush, little man! There’s no need to talk of dying yet.”

“Give me . . . a couple of days . . . and I won’t have to ‘talk’ about it.” Fever left Brandark’s weak voice hoarse and frayed, but it still held a trace of his usual tartness. “I know you’re . . . an idiot, but don’t . . . prove it. ’Thout me . . . to slow you, you might break through yet.”

“And what sort of champion of Tomanak goes about abandoning his friends, then?” Bahzell shot back, wiping the Bloody Sword’s face once more. “A fine way to act that’d be!”

“Oh . . . hog turds.” Brandark’s strength was ebbing quickly, but he shook his head again. “Don’ han’ . . . me that,” he muttered. “Nev’r wanted . . . be a champion ’n th’ firs’ place, you . . . idio’ . . . .”

He trailed off in incoherent mumbles, and Bahzell stared out into the night and bit his lip. He’d never felt so helpless, so useless. He rested one hand lightly on Brandark’s right shoulder for a long, silent moment, then rose and stumped across the fireless camp to the one pack of rations he’d hung on to. He started to open it, then stopped, and his ears flattened as he glared down at a long, cloth-wrapped bundle.

It was Harnak’s sword, shrouded in the dead prince’s bloodstained cloak. Its fire had faded when Harnak died, yet Bahzell had sensed the power and hatred lying quiescent in it, waiting only for a hand to lift it once more. He’d dared not leave it behind-gods only knew what it would do to anyone mad enough to touch it!-but what was he supposed to do with it now?

He straightened his aching spine and growled in bleak, exhausted bitterness. He hadn’t dared touch the thing with his bare hand, but he’d held it in a fold of Harnak’s cloak to examine it and found the scorpion etched into its guard. He would have liked to think that simply marked it as an assassin’s blade, but what he’d seen-and felt-it do in battle made that nonsense. No, he knew why it bore Sharna’s symbol . . . and that it proved things were even worse in Navahk than he’d believed. Gods! Did Churnazh even suspect what was using him as its opening wedge? It seemed impossible. Crude and brutal Churnazh was, but surely he had cunning enough to know what would happen if any of his neighbors came to suspect him of trafficking with Sharna! Yet if Sharna’s church could reach as high as Navahk’s crown prince, who knew who else it had reached? Or where?

Bahzell scrubbed his face with his palms, feeling sick and exhausted and used up. He was the only one with proof of how far evil had reached into Navahk. That made it his job to do something about it, but he was so tired. So very, very tired and sick at heart.

“So,” he muttered bitterly into his palms, “why not be telling me what I should do now , Tomanak?”

“Do you really want to ask me that?”

Bahzell snatched his hands down and stared around in shock, but the night was still and quiet, free of apparitions, and he swallowed, then drew a breath.

“As to that,” he told the darkness, “it’s new at this championing I am. I’ve no real notion what it is I can or can’t be asking of you.”

“You may ask anything you wish of me,” that deep voice murmured within him. “What I can give you, I will.”

“Will you, now? And what of him? ” Bahzell cried in despair. “It was me brought him to this, and not a thing at all can I do for him now!”

“I think we had this conversation once before,” Tomanak said quietly, “and I told you then that I can heal through my champions.” Bahzell stiffened and sensed an unseen smile. “You’ve destroyed a nest of black wizards, rescued a mage, slain a demon, saved an entire village’s homes, and bested a servant of Sharna armed with a cursed blade far more powerful than you’ve guessed even yet, Bahzell. After all that, is it so hard to believe I’d help your friend if you asked it of me?”

“You can heal him?” Bahzell demanded, disregarding the catalog of his own accomplishments.

“We can heal him,” Tomanak corrected, “if you serve as my channel, but it won’t be an instantaneous process. That would require too direct an intrusion on my part.”

“I’m not caring about ‘instant,’ ” Bahzell shot back. “Just you be telling me what to do and how to go about it!”

“You have a unique mode of prayer,” Tomanak said so dryly Bahzell blushed, but then the god chuckled in his brain. “No matter. It’s the way you are, and difficult as you can be, I wouldn’t change you if I could.”

Bahzell’s face burned still hotter, but Tomanak only chuckled again and said, “Draw your sword, Bahzell. Hold it in one hand and lay the other on Brandark, then just concentrate on your friend. Think of him as you remember him and see him that way once more.”

“And is that all there is to it?” Bahzell asked incredulously.

“You may find it a bit more difficult than you assume, my friend,” Tomanak told him. “And don’t get too confident. How much we accomplish will be up to you as much as to me. Are you ready?”

Bahzell hesitated in sudden, acute nervousness. It was one thing to fight demons and cursed blades. Fighting, at least, was something he understood; this notion of healing was something else again, and the idea that he could do it was . . . disconcerting. And, he admitted, frightening. Another step into whatever future he’d embraced when he entered the War God’s service, yes, but an uncanny one that would make his acceptance of that future more explicit and inescapable. He stood motionless for a few seconds longer, then sighed and drew his sword. He held it in his right hand and knelt beside his friend, then laid a tentative hand on Brandark’s wounded arm.

“Ahem!” Bahzell’s ears flicked as a throat cleared itself soundlessly in his brain. “You’ll have to do a bit better than that,” Tomanak informed him.

“Better?”

“Bahzell, we’re not going to hurt him, but how well this works will depend in no small part on how thoroughly you enter into it. Now stop being afraid he’s going to break-or that you’re going to turn into a purple toad-and do it!”

Bahzell blushed more brightly than ever, but his mouth twitched in a small smile at the asperity in the god’s mental voice. He drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, and fastened one huge hand on Brandark’s slack shoulder. No one had told him to, but he bent his head, resting his forehead against the quillons of the sword in his other hand, and tried to empty his mind of Brandark as he now was. It was hard-far harder than he’d anticipated-for the image of his dying friend haunted him, and something deep inside jeered at the thought that he could do anything to change that. This wasn’t the sort of battle Bahzell Bahnakson had ever trained to fight. It wasn’t one where size or strength mattered, and he didn’t know the moves or counters, but he clenched his jaw and threw every scrap of will and energy into it.

Sweat beaded his brow, and his fingers ached about his sword, but slowly-so slowly!-he forced his mental picture of Brandark to change. He drove back the slack-faced, gray-skinned reality, fighting it like some living enemy, and a new picture replaced it. Brandark lounging back on the deck of the ferryboat leaving Riverside in his dandy’s lace shirt and flowered waistcoat, smiling down into the deck house at Zarantha and Rekah, ears aquiver and eyes alight as he sang his maddening Lay of Bahzell Bloody- Hand to them. The spritely notes of the balalaika, the smile on Brandark’s face, the sense of energy and deviltry which were so much a part of him-Bahzell brought them all together, welding them into what Brandark ought to be. What he was , Bahzell told himself fiercely-and what he would be again!

Sweat rolled down his cheeks, and then, suddenly, his mind snapped into focus. It was like the release of an arbalest bolt, an abrupt, breathless flash of vision, and in that instant he truly heard the music, Brandark’s voice, the slap and gurgle of water under the ferry’s bow. It was as if he could reach out, touch that moment once more. And then, in some strange fashion he knew he would never be able to describe, he did touch it, and became a bridge, a connection between the image and this wretched, fireless camp. Something crossed that bridge, flowed through him, burned in his veins like agony, and something else came with it- something fierce with war cries and the clash of steel, terrifying with the thunder of heavy cavalry, grim with purpose and glorious with the bright, defiant sound of bugles. His closed eyes couldn’t see the brilliant blue light