The Sword of the South

  The sentry vanished, and Bahzell’s hand cut air. Walsharno sprang to instant life, sweeping wide to sweep into the camp out of the sunset with Wencit and Byrchalka behind him, and Kenhodan cursed aloud.

  He was barely able to see through red waves of mental anguish, but his sword was in his hand somehow as Glamhandro bolted forward under him like an uncoiling spring. Chernion’s mare thundered behind, and his sword was an inert, heavy slab of metal in his hand. Glamhandro’s hooves struck sparks of pain in his head, and he felt himself falling into darkness. Wind whipped his face as he charged the camp, and the setting sun glared into his eyes. He fought to cling to awareness as he slithered into the waiting void, but it was useless. A brigand loomed before him, black and stark in his red vision. The man’s mouth opened in a shout, but Kenhodan rode in silence, sealed away from the noise about him. He broke free of the world, spinning into a dark cocoon shared with no one, and he felt his sword move as if it were someone else’s. Steel glittered and the shouting mouth was silenced forever in a spray of blood. Then Kenhodan spiraled down, down, into the pit of his own mind and darkness.…

  Chernion blinked in amazement as Kenhodan thundered by. He released her mare as planned, but he didn’t wait for her to mount. Glamhandro swept on past, showering her with dirt as his hooves spurned the grassy slope. His tail floated like a streak of smoke and Kenhodan rode easily, shoulders back, spine straight, sword hand resting on his knee. She watched him hurtle into the astonished bandits like a boulder with no support, no one to cover his flank or back.

  Not that the bandits were ready to receive him. Bahzell’s plan had brought himself and Wencit into the attack first, fixing the outlaws attention on them, and when Kenhodan charged, most of them were looking the other way. Some fought to draw steel, others raced for the picketed horses, but their movements had barely begun when Bahzell and Walsharno began to kill.

  The hradani’s sword moved lightly as a saber, singing through his foes like lightning. Blood hung in its wake, sparkling like rubies in the sunset, and Walsharno fought like another arm. The most superbly trained warhorse in all the world was no match for a courser, for coursers were as intelligent as any of the Races of Man, and the warriors among them—warriors like Walsharno and Byrchalka—trained as hard in their own combat arts as any human or hradani. He and Bahzell weren’t simply rider and mount; they were one. Two hearts, two minds, two souls fused by the bond between them into a single, lethal entity. Anything to the right was Bahzell’s concern; anything to the left was Walsharno’s, and steel shod hooves and jaws that snapped arms like sticks let few escape his wrath.

  Wencit curved out of Bahzell’s wake to cut the bandits off from their horses, and half a dozen brigands turned at the pound of Byrchalka’s hooves. They stared at the thundering courser and the wizard’s flaming eyes in horror, but they had no option, and swords shone in their fists as they leapt to engage him, fighting for their lives.

  He and Byrchalka weren’t the equal of Bahzell and Walsharno, for they lacked the fusion of the adoption bond, and Wencit was no champion of Tomanāk. Walsharno knew what Bahzell knew, saw what Bahzell saw, just as Bahzell shared what he saw and knew. He and his rider moved as one, each understanding the other’s intent in the moment that intent was born, and they fought with a smooth, polished efficiency not even another wind rider and courser could have rivaled, for it was founded upon eighty years’ shared experience in more battles than most men could even have counted.

  Byrchalka and Wencit were more than horse and rider, yet less than wind rider and courser. In truth, there was no comparison between their capabilities and those of Bahzell and Walsharno…except that no other warrior and no warhorse, however willing and however schooled to battle, could possibly have matched them. If Wencit’s sword was of merely mortal dimensions, it moved with equal, flashing speed and the first two bandits to face him found themselves equally if less spectacularly dead. The others tried to work around and hamstring Byrchalka, but too late.

  Kenhodan exploded into their backs just as the coursers began to slow. One outlaw heard him and turned to shout a warning, and Chernion watched in disbelief as Kenhodan struck like an adder and the bandit’s head flew. She’d never seen a sword move so quickly! And, a corner of her mind noted, she’d never seen a man literally beheaded with a one-handed, backhand blow. Then she was clapping her heels to her mare’s flanks and pounding along in Kenhodan’s wake, her own sword chopping and thrusting.

  Kenhodan crashed past Bahzell on an opposite course, his blows splashing the hradani’s surcoat with blood. Then he and Chernion broke clear and wheeled—she to join Wencit; he to slash back into the main freight.

  The outlaws fought, for they had no choice, but Bahzell and Kenhodan sliced through them like a double-edged sword. The hradani’s great war cry rang, and the sounds of his blows were like axes, but foremost—and silent—in the slaughter was Kenhodan.

  Even Bahzell’s destruction—even Walsharno’s—paled beside the havoc the red-haired man wrought. His swordplay lacked the fire which had characterized it before, but its deadly efficiency chilled the heart. Overhand, underhand, backhand—straight thrust or lunge—none of that mattered. His blade moved in every direction, and each blow flashed straight to its mark and ended a life. Twice he struck down bandits behind him, invisible to him at the moment he killed them, and Glamhandro, infected with the same murderous efficiency, reaped a harvest to rival Walsharno’s. They broke through into the open once again and wheeled once more, the gray stallion rearing with a whistling scream before they crashed back in upon their foes.

  Shrieks and the wet crunch of steel filled the evening for a very brief time. Then it was over.

  Yet nothing was over. Kenhodan jerked his steel from the chest of the last bandit and spun Glamhandro on his hocks to confront his companions. A dozen bodies sprawled before Wencit and Chernion, felled as they tried to break through to their horses. Chernion had dismounted to clean her sword, but she looked up as the sudden silence fell and her hands froze in mid-motion. She shivered as she saw Kenhodan’s eyes, for they flamed with a green fire to haunt her dreams, and his lips worked silently as he touched Glamhandro with a heel. Hardy soul that she was, she gave back a step as the gray raised his head proudly and paced towards Wencit with the high, measured step of the parade ground.

  Wencit sat quietly and watched them come. Kenhodan was blood to the elbow, and more blood dripped from his blade. Glamhandro was scarlet to his knees, and the stench of death rode with them across the field. They halted before the wizard, and Kenhodan shook his sword at him.

  “How long, wizard?” His voice stunned them all, for it hissed and gusted with a passion they’d never heard from him. Blood from his sword splashed Wencit and the blade quivered with the power of his grip, but the wizard was silent.

  “How long?!” Kenhodan’s voice became a shout. “How much longer?! Answer me, damn you!”

  “I have answered you,” Wencit said softly at last, and Kenhodan’s head turned slowly. His gaze pivoted to the west, his eyes flashing at the blood-red horizon while the bones of his face stood out in bold relief, strange and alien and ancient in the ashes of the day’s dying light.

  “So you have,” he whispered in a voice more like his own, but only for a moment. Then his lips locked in a terrible rictus and his sword thrust skyward as if to spear the bleeding sun. Blood spattered from the blade, and he rose in his stirrups under that grizzly shower.

  “Damn you, Herrik!” His throat muscles corded, straining with the power of his despairing scream. “Daamnnnn yooouuuuuuu!”

  And he hurtled from the saddle to the ground.

  * * *

  Bahzell and Chernion stared at one another as Kenhodan slammed to the bloody earth, but Wencit sprang down from Byrchalka’s saddle and bent over him. He rolled him onto his back and felt the strong, slow pulse in his throat.

  “Gods, Bloody Hand! What was that about?” Chernion whispered.

  “As to that,
I’ve no least idea Border Warden,” Bahzell replied almost absently. “They do say as how strange things follow wizards about.”

  “Strange!” Chernion was shaken to the core. “Bloody Hand, I don’t want to know any more—not now. I’ll go make certain no one escaped. Then I’m going to keep watch while you sort this thing out!”

  “As you wish.”

  Bahzell watched her canter off, and he didn’t blame her for her fears.

  Walsharno said silently in the caverns of his mind.

  “And no more have I,” Bahzell replied.

  He dismounted slowly and cleaned his blade, one shoulder resting against Walsharno’s tall, solid side as he did so, and he needed that contact. He’d recognized Kenhodan’s lethality from the very beginning, but this was different. There’d been a smoothness, a deadly efficiency such as he’d never seen from anyone to the younger man’s swordplay. It wasn’t simple perfection of form, either, for there’d been no form, no use of learned and practiced parries, cuts, thrusts, ripostes. Kenhodan’s sword had simply been there, wherever it needed to be at the exact instant it needed to be there. There’d been no waste motion, no hesitation, not even any thought. It hadn’t even been instinct, for whatever it was, it went deeper even than that, beyond muscle memory into something almost…supernatural.

  Bahzell Bahnakson knew his own worth with a blade, exactly as he’d advised Kenhodan to learn that first night in the Iron Axe. Yet as he finished cleaning his sword, he realized that even he—champion of Tomanāk and victor in twice a hundred fights though he might be—could never have equaled what he and Walsharno had just seen Kenhodan accomplish.

  the courser said.

  “Aye?” Bahzell smiled briefly, ears half-flattened, and sheathed his sword. “I’d not take a bit of a hint amiss my own self. Still and all, it’s in my mind as how himself’s already told us what it is we’re truly after needing to know.”

 

  Bahzell snorted in agreement and walked forward slowly to kneel beside Kenhodan and stare at the wizard. Walsharno followed him, standing at his back, and Wencit looked up.

  “Wencit.”

  Bahzell’s voice was as implacable as the wild wizard had ever heard it, and he recognized the storm of questions wrapped up in his name.

  “That…wasn’t Kenhodan,” he said finally, carefully.

  “What?” Bahzell sat back on his heels, staring at him, ears flattened.

  “It was a shadow of his past, Bahzell.” Wencit had placed one of the brigands’ packs under Kenhodan’s head. Now he smoothed hair from Kenhodan’s forehead, his touch gentle as a lover’s, and looked down at him. “He chose his name to mock his ignorance, but what he was remains, fighting to get out. It never will—not entirely—but…parts will still break through. That’s what happened this time.”

  “But what—?” Bahzell began, then stopped as Wencit’s witchfire eyes rose like leveled arbalests.

  “Shall I tell you that and not him?” the wizard asked sternly, and Bahzell shook his head quickly.

  “No,” he said. “But is it all right he’ll be, Wencit?”

  “‘All right’?” Wencit shook his head, his mouth bitter. “For as long as I can remember, people have asked me if someone or something was ‘all right’! Not everyone can be whatever that’s supposed to mean, Bahzell!” The hradani recoiled from the savage despair in Wencit’s voice. “Some people aren’t given the opportunity to ever be ‘all right’ again. They don’t have that option, that blessing. All they can be is who—and what—they have to be, usually for others, and all too often those others never even guess what they’ve given—what they’ve lost—for them. I would destroy worlds for Kenhodan, Bahzell. I’d heap the bodies of his enemies from here to Kontovar and back to restore what he’s lost, and I can’t! Only one person in all the world may ever be able to help him rebuild from the ruins, make him whole once more, and even then, the man he becomes will never be the man he was. And I know that, Bahzell. I know that, and I can’t share it with him, and what does that make me?”

  Bahzell gazed into the face of Wencit of Rūm’s anguish, then reached out across Kenhodan, resting one hand on each of the wizard’s shoulders.

  “It’s hearing you I am.” His deep voice was deeper even than usual, his eyes dark. “But I’ll ask you now to be telling me if there’s aught as Walsharno and I can be doing. We’ll not have him take further hurt from this if there’s anything at all, at all, as we might do to prevent it.”

  “There isn’t,” Wencit said softly. “He won’t even remember it. He wasn’t here.”

  “What?”

  “Shadows of the past, Bahzell,” the wizard murmured, then shook his head slowly. “Pay me no heed; he’ll recover.

  He stroked the red hair once more, and then rose. His movement was brisk, focused, deliberately restored to purpose.

  “Enough! We won’t mend matters standing around till he wakes up. We have decisions to make. Like—” he turned to the mules “—what to do with this.”

  “Aye.” Bahzell accepted the subject change as best he could and began opening packs, though his eyes returned often to his friend.

  “It’s in my mind we’ve a problem,” he said presently. “There’s after being a fortune here, and no mistake.”

  “Indeed.” The wizard was inspecting another pack. “Gold, silver, spices, silk—and something more. A scroll of the Dorfai of Saramantha’s verse in his own hand, Bahzell.”

  “Tomanāk!” Bahzell shook his head. “Brandark would be after killing for such as that! I’ve no least idea at all, at all, what to be doing about it.”

  “Pardon me, but aren’t you the champion of the God of Justice around here?” Wencit asked quizzically.

  “Aye, so I am. And would you be so very kind as to be telling me just how it is Walsharno and I can be dealing with such as this in the middle of Kolvania?”

  “You could always claim it by right of conquest,” Wencit suggested with a smile. “I seem to recall that Tomanāk doesn’t exactly frown on the spoils of combat honestly gained from thieves and murderers.”

  “That’s as may be, but we’ve no mind as to be coming all over greedy for such as this.” Bahzell gestured at the heap of pack frames. “I’m thinking as Tomanāk wouldn’t be so very happy if we were after doing anything of the sort.” He shook his head. “No, we’d best be returning it somehow.”

  “No rest for the wizard, I see,” Wencit sighed. “I’ll see to it.”

  “How?”

  “With a word of returning, if you must know. It’s a simple spell, but it’ll take them to their proper owners. Still, I’d best give each of them an avoidance spell, too, so no one will notice them until they get home.”

  “Well…” Bahzell said, then shrugged. “As to that, you’re the one’s after being the wizard around here.”

  “You’ve noticed,” Wencit said tartly. “And now, if you don’t mind?”

  He made shooing motions, and Bahzell backed away with a wry grin, then turned to examine the fallen, though he was certain there were no survivors. While he busied himself, Wencit found his own relief from concern over Kenhodan by considering how best to phrase his spells. Wand magic was always literal, so it was best to think these things through carefully.…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Music by Night

  Kenhodan awoke.

  The western sky showed just a trace of crimson, and clouds hung in the south in black waves. He lay still, considering the night, making no effort to move.

  He was alive, so he knew they’d won. He had vague memories of combat, and his right hand tingled, yet he could form no clear picture
of the fight. Some further inner realignment had occurred, but he felt strangely incurious about it. He filled his lungs with the sweet smell of grass and the tang of wood smoke and gazed at the gathering cloud mountains, and all he truly felt was washed out and clean.

  Twin pools of light flickered beside him, and he smiled up at them.

  “Good evening, Wencit.”

  “Good evening.” The wizard’s calm voice was like an echo of the wind as he blended from the darkness and sat on the grass beside him. “How do you feel?”

  “Alive. Peaceful.” Kenhodan drew another deep breath and watched the first stars peek out in the north like scattered gems.

  “A beautiful feeling, peace,” Wencit said softly. “Some people are born to it; others aren’t. Yet the one constant I’ve observed is that those who experience it least value it most.”

  “You’re waxing philosophical.” Kenhodan pillowed his head on his arms. “That’s a bad sign. Something unpleasant always happens when you start philosophizing, Wencit.”

  “Not always. At least, what happens isn’t always unpleasant.”

  “No?” Kenhodan’s smiled gleamed in the dimness. “Well, let it go.” He drew another breath. “Where are we, anyway?”

  “A few miles south of the last place you remember, near the Bellwater. It’s just over there.” Wencit pointed south.

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No—thanks in no small part to Bostik’s mail. Our border warden got a scratch, and Bahzell got a few cuts that are scratches on him, though they wouldn’t be on me. Other than that, they’re fine, and neither of the coursers—or Glamhandro—got even that.”