Swords: 08 - The Fifth Book Of Lost Swords - Coinspinner’s Story (2 page)

      
For that there was no answer. Even the eyes of the bold young lieutenant fell in confusion before the Princess’s gaze when she turned back to him.

      
Once more she faced the delegation’s leader. “Come, good Murat, can you number them, or tell me their names?”

      
The tall man only bowed in silence.

* * *

      
One of the several diplomats on hand quickly managed to change the subject, and talk went on until eventually the delegation from Culm withdrew to their assigned quarters. In there, servants reported, they were conversing seriously and guardedly among themselves.

      
In the evening, when the sun had set behind the inland mountains, the visitors from afar were once more entertained with Tasavaltan hospitality. There was music, acrobats, and dancers. To Kristin’s relief the subject of the Sword had been laid to rest. This was now the third day of the Culmians’ stay, and they expressed a unanimous desire to depart early in the morning.

      
During the evening, more than one Tasavaltan remarked to the Princess that the guests from Culm seemed to be taking their refusal as well as could be expected. Certainly they had now said and done everything they honorably could to persuade Princess Kristin to change her mind.

* * *

      
With some of the guests pleading weariness, and with the necessity for an early start hanging over them all, the party broke up relatively early. Before midnight the silence of the night had claimed the entire Palace, as well as most of the surrounding city.

      
At about dawn on the following morning—and, through a strange combination of unlucky chances, not before then—Kristin was awakened, to be informed by an ashen-faced aide that the Sword of Healing had been stolen from its place in the White Temple at some time during the night.

      
The Princess sat up swiftly, pulling a robe around her shoulders. “Stolen! By whom?” Though it seemed to her that the answer was already plain in her mind.

      
Awkwardly the messenger framed her own version of an answer. “No thief has been arrested, ma’am. The delegation from Culm reportedly departed about two hours ago. And there are witnesses who accuse them of the theft.”

      
By this time Kristin was out of bed, fastening her robe, her arms in its sleeves. “Has Rostov been aroused? Have any steps been taken to organize a pursuit?”

      
“The General is being notified now, my lady, and I am sure we may rely on him to waste no time.”

      
“Let us hope that very little time has been wasted already. If Rostov or one of his officers comes looking for me, tell them I have gone to the White Temple to see for myself whatever there may be to see.”

      
Only a very few minutes later she was striding into the Temple, entering a scene swarming with soldiers and priests, and aglow with torches. With slight relief she saw that her chief wizard, Karel, who was also her mother’s brother, was already on hand and had taken charge for the moment.

      
Karel was very old—exactly how old was difficult to determine, as was often the case with wizards of great power, though in this case the figure could hardly run into centuries. He was also fat, spoke in a rich, soft voice, and puffed whenever he had to move more than a few steps consecutively. This last characteristic, thought Kristin, had to be more the result of habit—or of sheer laziness, perhaps—than of disease. For Karel, like the more mundane citizens of the realm, had had the benefits of Woundhealer available to him for the past several years.

      
Karel reported succinctly and with deference. After a few words the Princess was in possession of the basic, frightening facts. Last night, as usual, the Temple had been closed for a few hours, beginning at about midnight. Ordinarily a priest or two remained in the building while it was closed, ready to produce the Sword should some emergency require its healing powers; but last night, through a series of misunderstandings, none of the white-robes had been on duty.

      
An hour or so past midnight, the chance passage of a brief summer rainstorm had kept off the streets most of the relatively few citizens who might normally have been abroad at such a time. And so, incredible as it seemed to Kristin, apparently no one outside the Temple had witnessed the assault, or raid.

      
Kristin at first had real difficulty in believing this. There was always someone in that square. “And what of the guards inside the Temple?” she demanded. “Where were they? Where are they now?”

      
The old man sighed, and gave such explanation as he could. Inasmuch as White Temple people were notoriously poor at guarding such material treasures as came into their hands from time to time, the rulers of Tasavalta had never trusted the white-robed priests to guard the Sword. Instead, a detail of men from an elite army regiment protected Woundhealer.

      
At least two of these soldiers were always on duty inside the Temple’s supposedly secure walls and doors. But last night, at the crucial hour, one guard of the minimal pair, though a young man, had collapsed without warning, clutching his chest in pain, and died almost at once. A few moments later the victim’s partner, reaching into a dark niche to grasp the bell rope that would summon help, had been bitten on the hand by a poisonous snake, and paralyzed almost instantly. The soldier’s life was still in danger. The snake was of a species not native to these parts, and so far no one had been able to explain its presence in the Temple.

      
Scarcely had Kristin finished listening to this most unlikely story when more news came, a fresh discovery almost as difficult to believe. A lock on one of the Temple’s doors had accidentally jammed last night when the door was closed, effectively preventing the door from being secured in the usual way. The defect was a peculiar one—highly improbable, as the locksmith kept insisting—and it must have seemed to the woman who had turned the key at the hour of sunset that the door was securely locked as usual.

      
Karel gave a slight shrug of his heavy shoulders. “The theft was accomplished by means of magic, Princess,” he said in his soft voice. “There’s no doubt of that.”

      
“And a very powerful magic it must have been.” After a momentary hesitation, she asked: “A Sword?” Already she thought she knew the answer; and it would not be hard, she thought, to guess which Sword had been employed.

      
“Very likely a Sword.” The old man nodded grimly. “I feel sure that Coinspinner has been used against us.”

      
Once more their talk was interrupted. Now at last a witness had been discovered, one besides the poisoned guard who could give direct testimony. A shabby figure was hustled before the Princess. One of Sarykam’s rare beggars, who had spent most of the night huddled in a doorway on the far side of the square, and who now swore that at the height of the rainstorm he had seen a man wearing the blue-and-orange uniform of Culm carrying a bright Sword—it had certainly been no ordinary blade—carrying it drawn and raised, into the White Temple. Meanwhile, the beggar related, others in the same livery had stood by outside with weapons drawn.

      
“This man you saw was carrying a Sword into the Temple, and not out of it? Are you quite sure?”

      
“Oh, oh, yes, I’m quite sure, Princess. If I’d seen a foreigner taking something out, I would’ve raised an alarm.

      
Thought of doing so anyway, but—you see—I’d had a bit too much—my legs weren’t working all that well—”

      
“Never mind that. Did you see him come out of the Temple again?”

      
“Yes, ma’am, I did. And then he had two Swords. I tried to raise an alarm, ma’am, like I said, but somehow—somehow—” The ragged man began to blubber.

      
After hearing this testimony of the sole witness, Kristin made her way into the inner sanctuary, and carried out her own belated inspection of the actual scene of the crime. There, on the very altar of Ardneh, she beheld the crystal repository in which the Sword of Healing had been kept, a fragile vault now standing broken and empty under the blank-eyed marble images of Draffut—doglike, but standing tall on his hind legs—and Ardneh, an incomprehensible jumble of sharp-edged, machinelike shapes.

      
The actual breaking of the crystal vault and carrying away of the Sword would have been simple, and staring at this minor wreckage told her nothing.

      
Leaving the Temple now, the Princess went to survey the status of the Swords still kept in the royal armory, beside the Palace and only a short walk distant.

* * *

      
If the Princess and her people were able to speak of Coinspinner with a certain familiarity, it was because the Sword of Chance had reposed for some time within the stone walls of the armory’s heavily guarded rooms. But about seven years ago that Sword had vanished from the deepest and best-watched vault, vanished suddenly and without explanation. Under the circumstances of that disappearance there had been no need to look for thieves. One of the known attributes of the Sword of Chance was its penchant for taking itself spontaneously and unpredictably from one place to another. Forged by the great god Vulcan, like all its fellow Swords, Coinspinner scorned all obstacles that ordinary human beings might place in opposition to its powers. Coinspinner was subject to no confinement, and to no rules but its own, and exactly what those rules were no one knew. By what progression, during the last seven years, the Sword of Chance had passed from the Tasavaltan armory to somewhere in Culm would probably be impossible to determine, and would be almost certainly irrelevant to the current problem.

      
Deep in the vaults Kristin encountered the senior General of her armed forces. Rostov was a tall and powerful man in his late fifties, whose curly hair had now turned almost completely from black to gray. The black curve of his right cheek was scarred by an old sword-cut, which his perpetual steel-gray stubble did little to conceal.

      
Rostov was taking the theft personally; he was here in the armory looking for weapons of particular power to take with him in his pursuit of the thieves, who had several hours’ start. A number of people could testify to that. Everyone in Sarykam had been expecting the delegation from Culm to leave this morning anyway, so no one had thought much of their moving up their departure time by a few hours. It had seemed only natural that after their unsuccessful pleading they would want to avoid anything in the nature of a protracted farewell.

      
Now, as Kristin ascertained with a few quick questions, three squadrons of cavalry were being made ready to take up the pursuit, which Rostov intended to lead in person. As far as she could tell, her military people were moving with methodical swiftness.

      
The Princess informed her General that Karel the wizard planned to accompany him; the old man had told her as much when she spoke to him in the Temple.

      
“Very well. If the old man is swift enough to keep up. If his wheezing as we ride do not alert the enemy.” Rostov was staring at the three other Swords kept in the royal armory, and his expression showed a definite relief that these at least were still in place. Dragonslicer would probably be useless in the kind of pursuit he was about to undertake, but he now asked permission of the Princess to bring Stonecutter, and thought he would probably want Sightblinder as well.

      
Kristin, after granting the General her blessing to take whatever he wanted, and leaving him to his preparations, returned to the Palace. There she gave orders for several flying messengers to be dispatched from the high eyries atop the towers. The winged, half-intelligent creatures would be sent to seek out the absent Prince Mark and bear him the grim news of Woundhealer’s vanishment.

      
By the time she had returned to the Palace, the sun was well up, but veiled in clouds. She could wish that the day were brighter. Then it would have been possible to signal ahead by heliograph, and there might have been a good chance of intercepting the fleeing Culmians at the border. But the clouds that had brought rain last night persisted, and if Coinspinner was arrayed against the realm of Tasavalta, today was not the day to expect good luck in any form.

      
At about this time, staring at the gray and mottled sky, Kristin began to be tormented by a truly disturbing thought: Was it possible that Murat’s whole story regarding a crippled consort had been a ruse, and that the Sword was really now bound for the hands of some of Mark’s deadly enemies?

      
The Princess’s only comfort was that no evidence existed to support this theory. The fact that no attempt had been made to steal Dragonslicer, Stonecutter, and Sightblinder, or do any other damage to the realm, argued against it. Apparently the Culmian marauders had been truly interested only in obtaining the Healer.

      
The rain was still falling when the pursuit was launched, a swift but unhurried movement of well-trained cavalry, flowing out through the main gate of the city, every man saluting his Princess as he passed. A beast master with his little train of load beasts, carrying roosts and cages for winged fighters and messengers, brought up the rear of the procession. General Rostov and the wizard Karel rode together at its head.

Chapter Two

      
At midday, under a partly cloudy sky and far from home, Prince Adrian, the twelve-year-old heir to the throne of Tasavalta, was standing at the top of a truncated stairway, a broken stone construction that curved up the outside of an ancient, half-ruined, and long-abandoned tower. A brisk wind blowing from the far reaches of the rocky and desolate landscape ruffled Adrian’s blond hair. He carried a small pack on his back, and wore a canteen and a hunting knife at his belt. His slim body, arched slightly forward, wiry muscles tense, leaned out from the upper end of the stairs over the broken stones meters below.

      
The boy, tall for the age of twelve, was gazing intently, with senses far more discerning than those most folk would ever be able to call into use, across a threshold so subtle that it was all but invisible even to him. He was trying to see into the City of Wizards, inspecting the way ahead as carefully as possible before advancing any farther.

      
The curving stairs on which Adrian was standing came to an abrupt end halfway up the side of the moss-grown and abandoned tower. Once the steps had gone up farther, but not now. They terminated at this point in abject ruin, giving no hint to ordinary eyes of any reasonable or even visible goal that they might once have had. An observer equipped with no more than the usual complement of senses, and standing in Prince Adrian’s position, would have seen nothing ahead but a bone-breaking drop to the nearest portion of the forbidding landscape.

      
In fact, the only other human observer on the scene had perceptions that also went beyond those of ordinary human senses—though not so far beyond as Adrian’s.

      
Trilby, the Princeling’s companion and fellow student in the arts of magic, was only two years older than he, but physically she was much more mature. With a pack on her back and a wooden staff in hand, she now came climbing the curved stairs to join him.

      
Reaching the top step, Trilby stood beside Adrian in momentary silence, gazing ahead to see if she could determine exactly what it was he found so fascinating; she knew that his extraordinary vision was almost always able to see more than hers. Having now shared approximately a year of study and occasional rivalry under the tutelage of old Trimbak Rao, the two young people had reached a plateau of mutual respect.

      
Trilby was coffee brown of skin, with straight black hair, full lips, and dark eyes that displayed a perpetually dreamy look, belying her often acutely practical turn of mind. Her shapely and rather stocky body, dressed now like Adrian’s in practical traveler’s clothing—loose shirt, boots, and trousers—was physically strong. A more experienced student, she was still marginally superior to Adrian in one or two aspects of magic, though after a year of cooperation and competition she suspected that he had the potential to be ultimately and overall the greatest wizard in the world.

      
“What d’ye see?” she asked him presently.

      
“Nothing special.” The Prince almost whispered his reply. Then he withdrew his gaze from the distance, relaxed his pose somewhat, and spoke in a normal voice. “Just wanted to check everything out as well as I could, before we go in.”

      
Trilby took a long look for herself. Then she said: “The road is there, am I right? Just about at the level of our feet?”

      
“Right.” Adrian sounded confident. “As far as I can tell, it starts here, right at the place where we’ll be standing when we step through to it from the top of this stairs. Then it runs in a kind of zigzag way, but free of obstacles, for a couple of kilometers, until it gets close to the tall buildings.”

      
“That agrees with what I see.” The girl paused for another careful look before continuing. “The next question is, do we go in immediately, or take a break first?” They had already hiked for half a day since leaving the studio of Trimbak Rao, early in the morning.

      
Adrian hesitated, not wanting to appear reluctant to get on with the test they faced. But it was uncertain what problems they might encounter immediately on entering the City, and Trilby’s suggestion of stopping for food and rest soon won out in his mind.

      
Both of the young people were carrying canteens, as well as a modest supply of food. And each of them, if pressed, would have been able to create food by magical means. But that kind of magic was costly in time and energy; it would be much wiser to conserve both of those resources against a possible later need.

      
Sitting near the foot of the ruined stairs, they opened up their packs, retrieving sandwiches and fruit. There was no need for a fire, and neither explorer suggested making one.

      
Trilby and Adrian had taken their last meal early in the morning, before setting out on foot from the studio and workshop of Trimbak Rao. They had hiked a good number of kilometers since then, but the required path through the desolate terrain had included many turns; now, sitting at the foot of the half-ruined tower and looking back along the route they had come, they could just descry the buildings of the wizard’s complex halfway up a distant hillside. These were fairly ordinary-looking buildings—now, and most of the time. But appearances here, as in much else, could be deceptive. In fact, these structures had the habit of changing their appearance drastically, depending upon the viewer’s distance and angle, as well as the quality of his or her perception.

      
Chewing slowly on a sandwich, Adrian remarked: “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble actually getting in. Do you?”

      
Trilby shrugged. “I don’t see why we should.” She was not as totally confident as she sounded—she thought that perhaps Adrian wasn’t either—but they had discussed the situation many times before, and she had nothing new to add at the moment.

      
This field trip was part of an examination marking the end of their first year of study with Trimbak Rao. Trilby and Adrian had been assigned the task of entering the chaotic and mysterious domain called the City of Wizards, obtaining a certain object there, and bringing it back to their teacher.

      
The object desired by Trimbak Rao was an odd-shaped ceramic tile—rather, it was any one of a number of such pieces that were to be found uniquely in the pavement of one small square in a certain park-like space within the City.

      
Probably—the master had been vague about background and history—the space had once been part of a real park, the grounds of some great palace perhaps, originally built in a distant location somewhere out in the mundane world. By some unspecified power of magic a portion of the palace grounds had been transported to its present location. And in the process—like most of the other components of the City—it had probably been altered drastically.

      
Trimbak Rao had repeatedly warned his two students, before they set out, about several potential dangers. The chief of these, if the emphasis of his warnings meant anything, was the Red Temple that adjoined the present site of the park:

      
“The main room of that particular Red Temple was dedicated to a particularly abominable vice. But now it should be safe enough for you to pass nearby. If you are reasonably careful.” The magician hadn’t clarified the statement.

      
Also, before he dispatched the two apprentices upon their mission, the Teacher had called their attention to the east wall of his study. Hanging there, carefully mounted in a reconstructed pattern, were a series of tiles, dull brown and unimpressive at first glance, similar to the one they were to obtain. Only the pattern, still just beginning to emerge with the growth of that series, was interesting. It seemed to depict a human body, or more probably more than one.

      
The number of tiles, twenty or so, already collected by the Teacher might be taken as evidence, thought Adrian, that some substantial number of Trimbak Rao’s earlier students had successfully concluded missions similar to their own.

      
Now, while Trilby and Adrian ate some food, and rested on the bottom steps of the stairs encircling the old tower, the young Prince wondered aloud whether there might be some special reason why Trimbak Rao himself was not allowed to, or chose not to, make repeated journeys to this mysterious City park, and bring back the whole paved square if he desired it.

      
“And I wonder what’ll happen when he has the entire pattern completed on his wall?”

      
“There must be some magical reason why he can’t go himself,” Trilby decided. She didn’t know what that reason might be, and she had no opinion to offer on the subject. It was better to keep one’s mind on practical matters. As the older and more experienced of the two students, she had been placed in command of this mission. But, as usual when teams were sent out, there had been a strong indication from the Teacher that all major decisions should be shared if possible.

      
Trilby had developed an ability to incinerate small amounts of garbage magically, and now she put that particular talent to use. Not so much a squandering of energy, she told Adrian, as a last trial to make sure that her powers were in working order.

      
Now, as the two advanced students busied themselves with the trivial chores of cleaning up after their meal, Adrian found he had to make a conscious effort to keep himself from reaching out with his magical perceptions to try to see what was going on with his parents and his brother at the moment.

      
His natural ability to maintain such occult contacts, once very strong, had been fading naturally over the past few years as he grew older. And on this subject his Teacher had counseled him: “Your parents have been making their own way in the world for some time now; you are almost old enough to do the same, and the cares of state with which they are now chiefly concerned will be yours soon enough. Right now your primary responsibility is to complete your schooling here, and to avoid unnecessary distraction.”

      
Trilby now talked with Adrian about her parents. Her father was a middle-class merchant, her mother’s family farmers in the domain of Tasavalta, with little or nothing in their background to suggest that one of their children would be extremely talented magically.

      
And Adrian talked of his family, and expressed his wish that he could see more of them.

      
Trilby assured the Prince, and not for the first time, that she did not envy him his royal status. In many ways prosperous commoners, like her own people, had things easier.

      
“Are we ready to go on?” the girl asked.

      
“Ready!” Adrian shouldered his pack again.

      
“On into the City, then.”

      
Adrian, because of the superior sensitivity of his magical vision, was one step in the lead when the pair climbed again to the top of the broken stairs.

      
But Trilby, as the senior member of the expedition, did not forget to remind the boy that it was her duty to go first when the time actually came to cross the threshold.

      
This time when they reached the top of the stairs, Adrian stopped, took one more look and nodded, then let her go ahead, both of them muttering the words that Trimbak Rao had taught them.

      
Neither apprentice fell or even stumbled when they stepped beyond the last stair and over the subtle threshold. Both had successfully made the transition, at that point, to a somewhat different plane of existence. Both were able to establish solid footing upon the road that went on into the City, away from the tower-—Adrian, turning to glance back at that structure, discovered that it existed in both planes. Here in the City it looked somewhat shorter, and did not appear to be so badly ruined after all.

      
The narrow road on which they now found themselves led forward crookedly, angling in long dogleg turns, toward the distant silhouette of the tall buildings clustered about the center of the City proper. The road was unpaved, of hard-packed earth, dry and yellowish, and at the moment it bore no traffic except themselves. The softer earth on either side of the way was reddish brown, stretching away in gentle undulations to a great smear of grayish dust that formed the whole circle of the horizon. Above that, the bowl of sky began as lemon yellow at the edges, and rose through shades of blue and green toward a small, gnarled cloud, quite dark and somehow hard to look at, around the zenith. The sun, thought Adrian, if it was anywhere, must be in concealment behind that cloud. The time of day, at least, had not changed greatly.

      
The young explorers kept walking.

      
“Well,” said Trilby in a quiet voice when they had covered a few score meters of the road, “here we are. Looks like we’ve done it.”

      
Adrian only nodded.

      
The explorers had now reached a point from which they could see that the thoroughfare on which they walked indeed led, after many turns, into the heart of the City proper.

      
And in that urban heart, which still appeared to be at least a kilometer away, they were now able to perceive in some greater detail the physical outlines of the City’s crowded structures. They were a strange collection indeed, of divers styles and shapes, as if they might have been gathered here from the far corners of the world. Close behind those silhouetted buildings the peculiar sky seemed to curve down to meet the dusty earth. And Adrian thought there was a strange richness, akin to electricity, in the very air that he and Trilby now breathed.

      
Trilby was nudging him with an elbow. She said: “Looks like a slug-pit over there.”