Masques (17 page)

A hand went up.

She stopped and tilted her head, inviting a dirty girl with two mismatched braids to speak.

“He didn’t do it to get rich,” she said. “It was because the war made food expensive. And if he didn’t make swords and stuff, his family would have starved.”

Aralorn nodded. “These things he did so that he would have money to live, for food was scarce and dear. But at night, in the privacy of the forge, he created other things. Sometimes they were practical, like rakes and hoes or buckles. Sometimes, though, he made things whose only purpose was to be beautiful.”

“The war god,” said a boy, one of the younger ones, jumping to his feet. “The war god comed. He comed and tried to take the beautiful thing for himself.”

“Hands, please,” said Aralorn.

The boy’s hand shot up.

“Yes?”

“The war god comed,” he said in a much more polite voice.

“So he did,” she agreed. “Temris, the god of war, broke his favorite sword in battle. He heard of the smith’s skill and came to the village one night and knocked upon the smithy door.

“The smith had been working on a piece of singular beauty—a small intricately wrought tree of beaten iron and silver wire bearing upon each branch a single, golden fruit.” It had always sounded to her like something a gold-smith or silversmith might make, but it was an old story. Maybe back then a smith did all those things: shod horses, made armor and jewelry. “Temris saw it and coveted it and, as was the custom of the gods when they wanted something from a mortal, demanded it.”

“’Cause he was greedy,” someone said.

She looked around, but no hands went up, so she ignored the comment. They were all old enough to know proper protocol for storytelling. “The smith refused. He said, ‘You who are creator of war cannot have something that is rooted in the hope of peace.’ ”

Stanis raised his hand. “How come a tree with fruit is rooted in the hope of peace?”

Tobin said, “My father said it was because during a war there aren’t any fruits on any trees.”

Aralorn looked at the solemn little faces and wished Tobin had chosen a happier story. “The smith cast the statue to the ground, and such was his anger, he shattered it into a thousand thousand pieces. Temris was angered that a lowly smith would deny him anything.” Aralorn dropped her voice as low as she could and spoke slowly, as befitted a god of war. “ ‘I say now, smith, that you will forge only three more pieces, and these will be weapons of destruction such as the world has never before seen. Your name will be forever tied to them, and you will be known forever as the Smith.’

“The smith was horrified, and for many days he sat alone in the forge, not daring to work for fear of Temris’s words. During this time, he prayed to Mehan, the god of love, asking that he not be forced to build the instruments of another man’s destruction. It may be that his prayer was answered, for one day he was seized by a fit of energy that left all the village amazed. For three fortnights he labored, day and night, neither eating nor sleeping until his work was done.”

“My ma said that if you spent six weeks not eating, you’d starve to death,” said one of the older girls.

“Not if the gods don’t want them to,” said Tobin fiercely. “Not if they have things to do that are important.”

“Quiet, please,” Aralorn told them. “Raise your hand if you have something to help me.”

They settled down, so she resumed the story. “The weapons he created could only be used by humans, not gods. He made them to protect the weak from the strong. He built Nekris the Flame, which was a lance made of a strange material: a red metal that shimmered like fire.”

A hand was raised. “It kills sea monsters,” Aralorn’s newest helper informed her.

Aralorn nodded. “It was Nekris that King Taris used to drive the sea monster back into the depths when it would have destroyed his city.

“The second weapon was the mace, Sothris the Black. The weapon that, according to legend, was responsible for one of the nine deaths of Temris himself. It was used during the Wizard Wars to destroy some of the abominations created in the desperate final days.

“The last weapon was the sword, Ambris, called also the Golden Rose. There are no stories about Ambris. Some say that it was lost or that the gods hid it away for fear of its power. But others, and I think they are right, say it was hidden until a time of great need.”

“Donkey warts!” exclaimed Stanis wide-eyed. “Your sword is a rosy color and kind of gold.”

She raised her eyebrows and pulled it out so all the children could see it. “Well, so it is.”

“It’s kinda puny, though,” said one young boy a year or two older than Stanis, after careful inspection.

She nodded seriously. “I think you’re right. Ambris is big enough that only a strong warrior could hold her. This sword was built for a small person—like me or you.”

The boy gave her a little grin of solidarity.

“A big strong warrior like our King Myr?” asked someone else.

She sheathed her sword before someone decided to touch it and got cut. “Exactly like our King Myr.”

Stanis, evidently deciding the topic of Ambris had been covered enough, said, “Do you know any other stories? Other ones about swords an’ gods an’ stuff? I like ’em with blood an’ fight’n, but Tobin says that it might scare the young’uns.”

Aralorn grinned and started to reply, but noticed that Wolf was waiting nearby. Beside him was Edom. “It looks like I’ll have to wait and tell you a story another time. Remind me to tell you the one about a boy, his dog, and a monster named Taddy.”

Edom came up to her. “Thank you for the break,” he said with a short bow. “I am most grateful. But Wolf says he needs you more than Myr needs another hand at the trenches.”

“Watching the children is better than digging?” she asked.

He grinned. “Absolutely. Hey, Stanis, how about you help me get a game of Hide the Stone going?”

And a moment later they were all running for the bushes to search for just the right stone.

“So you wield Ambris now?” Wolf commented, walking toward her when Edom and the children were gone.

She hopped to her feet. “Of course. I am Aralorn, Hero of Sianim and Reth, didn’t you know?”

“No.” She heard the smile in his voice. “I hadn’t heard.”

She shook her head and started for the caves. “You need to get out more, have a few drinks in a tavern, and catch up on the news.”

“I think,” he said, “even as isolated as we are here, I should have heard of the woman who wields Ambris.”

Aralorn laughed. “Half the young men in Sianim paint their maces black. And at the Red Lance Inn of the Fortieth’s favor, just a few blocks from the government building, there’s a bronze ceremonial lance on the wall that the innkeeper swears is Nekris. I guess we don’t have to worry about the ae’Magi, you and I. We’ll just take Nekris and Ambris to destroy him.”

After a few silent steps, she said, “I will admit, though, that when I found it in the old weapons hall at Lambshold, when I was a kid not much older than these, I used to pretend I’d found Ambris.”

She drew the sword and held it up for his inspection. It gleamed pinkish gold in the sunlight, but aside from the admittedly unusual color, it was plain and unadorned. “It was probably made for a woman or young boy, see how slender it is?” She turned the blade edgewise. “The color is probably the result of a smith mixing metals to make it strong enough not to break even if it is small enough for a woman. Even the metal hilt isn’t unusual. Before the population of magic-users began to recover from the Wizard Wars, there were many swords made with a metal grip. It has only been in the last two hundred years that metal hilts have become rare.” As if he needed her to tell him that. “Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “That’s what happens when I’ve been storytelling to the children.”

“How long did you pretend she was Ambris?” asked Wolf.

“Not long,” she said. “No magic in her. Not human, not green, not any. And I was forced to concede that the Smith’s Weapons would be rife with magic.” She gave him a rueful smile. “Not to mention bigger, as is fitting for a weapon built to slay gods.”

“She might not be Ambris, but”—Aralorn executed a few quick moves—“she’s light and well balanced and takes a good edge. Who can ask anything more than that? I don’t need a sword for anything else, so she suits my purposes. I don’t use a sword when a knife or staff will do, so I don’t have to worry about accidentally killing a magician.” She sheathed the sword and gave it a fond pat.

The route that they took from the cave mouth to the library was different this time. Aralorn wasn’t sure whether it was deliberate or just habit. Wolf traversed the twisted passages without hesitating, ducking the cave formations as they appeared in the light from the crystals in his staff, but she had the feeling that if she weren’t there, he wouldn’t need the light at all.

The library was as they had left it. Aralorn soon started skimming books rather than reading them—even so, the sheer volume of the library was daunting. Once or twice, she found that the book that she arrived at the table with wasn’t the one that she thought she had picked up. The fourth time that it happened, she was certain that it wasn’t just that she had picked up a different book by mistake: The book that she had taken off the shelf was unwieldy. The one that she set in front of Wolf to look over was little more than a pamphlet.

Intrigued, she returned to the shelf where she’d gotten the book and found the massive tome she thought she’d taken sitting where she’d found it. She tapped it thoughtfully, then smiled to herself—wizards’ libraries, it seemed, had a few idiosyncrasies. It certainly wasn’t her luck spell—that had dissipated a few minutes after she cast it.

Wolf had taken no notice of her odd actions but set the thin, harmless book on her side of the table and returned to what he termed “the unreadable scribbles of a mediocre and half-mad warlock who passed away into much-deserved obscurity several centuries before: safe from the curses of an untrained magician, however powerful.”

Aralorn, returning to the table, listened to his half-voiced mutterings with interest. The mercenaries of Sianim were possessed of a wide variety of curses, mostly vulgar, but Wolf definitely had a creative touch.

Still smiling, Aralorn opened the little book and began reading. Like most of the books
she
chose, this one was a collection of tales. It was written in an old Rethian dialect that wasn’t too difficult to read. The first story was a version of the tale of the Smith’s Weapons that she hadn’t read before. Guiltily, because she knew that it wasn’t going to be of any help defeating the ae’Magi, she took quick notes of the differences before continuing to another story.

The writer wasn’t half-bad, and Aralorn quit skimming the stories and read them instead, noting down a particularly interesting turn of phrase here and a detail there. She was a third of the way through the last story in the book before she realized just what she was reading. She stopped and went back to the beginning, reading it for information rather than entertainment.

Apparently, the ae’Magi (the one ruling at the time that the book was written, whenever that was) had, as an apprentice, designed a new spell. He presented it to his master to that worthy’s misfortune. The spell was one that nullified magic, an effect that the apprentice’s two-hundred-year-old master would have appreciated more had he been out of the area of the spell’s effect.

Aralorn hunted futilely for the name of the apprentice-turned-ae’Magi or even any indication when the book was written. Unfortunately, during most of Rethian history, it had not been the custom to note the date a book was written or even who wrote it. With a collection of stories, most of which were folktales, it was virtually impossible to date the book reliably within two hundred years, especially one that was probably a copy of another book.

With a sigh, Aralorn set the book down and started to ask Wolf if he had any suggestions. Luckily she glanced at him before a sound left her mouth. He was in the midst of unraveling a spell worked into a lock on a mildewed book as thick as her hand. She’d grown so used to the magic feel of the lighting, she hadn’t noticed when the amount of magic had increased.

He didn’t seem to be having an easy time with it, although it was difficult to judge from his masked face. She frowned at his mask resentfully.

“Doesn’t that thing ever bother you?” she asked in an I-am-only-making-conversation tone as soon as the lock popped open with a theatrical puff of blue smoke.

“What thing?” He brushed the remaining blue dust off the cover of the book and opened it to a random page.

“The mask. Doesn’t it itch when you sweat?”

“Wolves don’t sweat.” His tone was so uninterested that she knew that it was a safe topic to push even though he was deliberately avoiding her point. And he did, too, sweat—when he was in human form, anyway.