He did not ask his lieutenant if he were sure about the place; there was no need. From where the Duke now stood, surrounded by a strong force of his mounted men, he could see and smell the carcass of a giant landwalker. The dead beast lay forty meters or so away among some more trees, and now that the Duke looked carefully in that direction he could see a dead man lying close to the dead dragon, and a little farther on one of his own cavalry mounts stiffened with its four feet in the air.
The pestilential aftermath of war, thought the Duke, and stretched again, and started walking unhurriedly closer to the scene of carnage. With a war coming, indeed at hand already, he decided it would be wise to reaccustom his senses as soon as possible to what they were going to be required to experience.
As he walked, with his right hand he loosened Coinspinner in its fine scabbard at his side. "And where," he asked his lieutenant, "is the wagon you were chasing? Did you not tell me that it tipped over in the chase, and then the dragons sprang out and attacked you before you could gather up the people who were in it?"
"That's how it was, Your Grace." And the pair of survivors of that ill-fated patrol who were now accompanying the Duke began a low, urgent debate between themselves as to just where that cursed wagon had been and ought to be. The Duke listened with impatient attention, meanwhile using his eyes for himself though without result. According to the best magical advice he had been able to obtain, that wagon might well have had another of the swords hidden in it somewhere — possibly even two of them.
Before his subordinates argument was settled, the Duke's attention was drawn away from it by a rider who came cantering up with the report that another kind of wagon was arriving on the road that led from the southwest. This, when it presently came into sight, proved to be a humble, battered vehicle, a limping farm-cart in fact, pulled by a pair of loadbeasts even more decrepit than itself. The Duke at first was mystified as to why some of his advance guard should have doubled back to escort this apparition into his presence.
And then he saw who was riding in the middle of the one sagging seat, and he understood, or began to understand.
"Gentle kinsman," said the Lady Marat, as she held out her hand for the Duke's aid in dismounting. His voice and gesture were as casual as if her humiliation did not concern her in the slightest. But her words indicated otherwise. "I want you to promise me certain specific opportunities of vengeance, on the day that the castle that I left yesterday lies open to your power."
Fraktin bowed his head slightly. "Consider the promise made, dear lady. So long as its fulfillment does not conflict with my own needs, with the necessities of war. And now, I suppose it likely that you have something to report?"
But before he could begin to hear what it might be, a trumpet sounded, causing the Duke to turn away from the lady momentarily. He saw that the head of the long column of his main body of infantry, approaching at route step along the road from the northeast, had now come abreast of the place where they were talking. Duke Fraktin returned the salute of the mounted officer who led the column, then faced back to his discussion with the Lady Marat. And all the while that they were talking there, the ragged, heavy tramp of the infantry kept moving past them.
The Duke offered the lady refreshment. But she preferred to wait until, as she said, she had made her preliminary report, and thus a beginning toward obtaining her revenge. She had plans for everyone in that castle, but particularly for the knight who had stolen her coach and treated her with such total disrespect.
Duke Fraktin listened with close attention to her report, learning among other things that the dragonhunters' wagon had indeed gone on to Sir Andrew's rather than being destroyed by dragons here.
He asked: "My courier did get away from Sir Andrew's castle with one sword, though? You are sure of that?"
"Yes; good cousin. Of that fact I am very sure. Though I cannot be sure which sword it was."
The Duke, not for the first time, was beginning to find this lady attractive. But he put such thoughts aside, knowing that right now he had better concentrate on other matters. "Then where is this flying courier now? It has never reached me."
The lady could offer no explanation. The Master of the Beasts, when summoned from his place among the Duke's staff officers, gave his opinion that such a dragon ought to be able to fly easily and far, even after being stabbed once or twice with an ordinary sword. The Master of the Beasts had no explanation for the absence of the courier either, except that, as everyone knew, dragons could be unreliable.
Now the Duke turned to consult with yet another figure, who had just dismounted. "What have you to say about my luck now, Blue-Robes? What of the supposed power of this sword I wear?"
The magician spread his hands in a placating gesture. "Only this, Your Grace: that we do not know what your luck might be now, if you did not have Coinspinner there at your side."
"I find that answer something less than adequate, Blue-Robes. I find it… what are you gawping at, you fish?" This last was directed aside, at one of the retainers of the Lady Marat. This man had been driving the farm wagon when it arrived. Having been somewhat battered in the lady's service over the past few days, he was now receiving treatment for his wounds from the Duke's surgeon.
The surgeon looked up at the Duke's voice, and stilled his hands. The man who had been addressed started to say something, took a second look at the Duke's face, and threw himself prostrate, bandages trailing unsecured. "A thousand pardons, Your Grace. I was remembering that I… that I thought I had seen you at the fair."
"What? At… " And even as the Duke spoke, there came in his brain the remembered echo of the voice of someone else, telling him that he had been seen in some other place where he had never been. "Explain yourself, fellow."
The man began a confused relation of what had happened at Sir Andrew's fair, on the night when he and the Duke's other secret agents had got their hands on Dragonslicer. He told some details of that sword's subsequent loss, and of the uncanny, magically changing appearance of the courier dragon as it had soared away.
The Duke nodded thoughtfully. "But me? Where did you think that you saw me?"
"Right there in the fairgrounds, sire. As surely as I see you now. I understand now that what I saw must have been only an image created by magic. But I saw you running toward the courier when it first flew up, and I heard your voice calling it down. And then I saw you stab it."
The Duke turned to look at the Lady Marat, who nodded in confirmation. She said: "Those are essentially the details that I was about to add in my own report."
Next the Duke looked at his wizard, whose eyes were closed. The blue-robed one muttered, as if to himself: "We knew there was another of the swords involved, located at Sir Andrew's castle. And now we know which one it was. That called Sightblinder, or the Sword of Stealth. It is…"
The Duke jogged his arm, commanding silence. "Wait."
Something was going on, up in the vaguely dripping sky. The Master of the Beasts, with head tilted back, was calling and gesturing. Now a reptilian messenger of some kind — the Duke was unable to distinguish the finer gradations of hybrid dragons and other flying life — could be seen in a descending spiral. Alas, thought Duke Fraktin, watching, but this creature was too small to be the courier that had disappeared with one of the swords. This was some smaller flying scout reporting.
In fact it was small enough to perch upon the Master's wrist when it came down. He carried it to some little distance from the gathering of other humans, that the Duke might be able to receive its news, whatever it might be, with some degree of privacy.
In a hoarse whisper the Master translated the report for the Duke a few words at a time, first listening to the dragon's painfully accomplished, almost unintelligible half-speech, then turning his head to speak in human words. "Your Grace, this concerns the dragonhunter, the man whose human name is Nestor."
"Aye, aye, I know of him. He wronged me once. But what has he to do with our present situation?" Passing this query on to the dragon was a slow and difficult process also. Sometimes the Duke thought that his Beast-Master, indispensably skilled though the man was, had grown half-witted through decades of conversation with his charges.
At length a reply came back. "It is that this Nestor has been carried off into the Great Swamp, sire. By a great flying dragon, not one of ours."
"A grown man, carried off by a flyer? Preposterous. And yet… but what else is it trying to say?"
Another guttural exchange took place between trainer and beast. "It says, the Gray Horde, sire. It tells me that the Gray Horde is raised, and marches toward Sir Andrew's lands."
There was silence, except for the drip of water from the trees, and the eternal background tramp of marching soldiery. At last the Duke breathed: "Someone has taken a great gamble, then. Raised by whom?" Although he thought that he could guess.
There was another exchange of bestial noises. Then the Beast-Master said: "By humans who follow a woman, sire. A woman mounted on a warbeast, and leading a human army through the swamp."
Duke Fraktin nodded slowly, and made a gesture of dismissal. The Master rewarded his charge with a small dried lizard, laced with a drug that would give the flyer a sleep of delightful dreams.
Meanwhile the Duke, walking the short distance back to where his staff and the Lady Marat were waiting for him, prepared to call a major conference. Things had changed. What confronted him now was no longer the simple conquest of a smaller power that he had planned.
It appeared to him that the gods were once more actively entering the affairs of humankind.
The screaming of the sword had seemed to Nestor to go on at its full voice for centuries. But then at last it had declined to a low whine, and now it was dying down to silence. And the life, the power that still flowed from the hilt into Nestor's shaking hands was gradually dying too.
Gasping with exhaustion, his skin slippery everywhere with sweat and in places with his own blood, he took one staggering step forward. The long, sloping hill of rubble was still before him, and he still stood at the top of it alive. He looked round him for something, some deadwood figure, to strike at with the sword. But none of those that were still in sight were still erect.
He could still hear, starting to fade with distance now, the myriad whining voices of the larvae-army. Those gray ranks had split around the temple and gone on. But not all of them. Over a broad, fan-shaped area of the slope immediately in front of Nestor, the hill had gained a new layer of rubble. It was the debris of a hundred gray bodies, hewn by Townsaver into chunks of melting mud.
Those fallen bodies were all quiet now. Nothing but the returning rain moved on the whole slope.
Stray drops of rain touched Nestor's face. And he turned round slowly in his tracks, looking dazedly at the equally dazed people who had been fighting beside him, and covering his back. He saw that two of the men had gone down, their clubs still in hand. And one of the women had been butchered, along with her small child. But all of the other people were still alive. They were mostly cowering in corners now, and some of them were hurt. Townsaver's shrieking blur had covered almost the whole wide doorway.
…hard walls it builds around the soft
Only now did Nestor become fully aware of the small wounds he himself had sustained, here and there. He had tried when he could to use the sword to parry, to protect his own skin as much as possible. But the magic power that drove the sword in combat had been in ultimate control, and it had been less interested in saving him than in hacking down the foe.
A dart was still stuck loosely in Nestor's shirt, scratching him when he moved, and drawing blood. As he pulled the small shaft loose and threw it away he wondered whether it might be poisoned. Too late now to worry about it if it was.
At least he could still move; in the circumstances, he could hardly ask for more. He looked once more at the stunned survivors, who remained where they were, numbly looking back at him. Then he scrambled down across the slope that was littered with the bodies of his foes, and up another hill of ruins. He was heading for the highest remaining point of the temple's roof. From up there he should be able to see a maximum distance across the swamp in every direction.
Clinging to that precarious remnant of a roof, Nestor could see in the distance the waves of the larvae-army that had broken on his strongpoint and then rolled on, rejoining like waves of water when they were past the temple. The sight gave him a strange feeling. The hundred larvae that he had destroyed were suddenly as nothing.
From this high place Nestor could see something else as well. It was a sight that made him hurry down, passing as quickly as he could the people he and the sword had saved, and who had now decided that they wanted to prostrate themselves before him as before a god. His body shaking now with fatigue, relief, and perhaps with poison, Nestor made his way down to the ground level of the temple, and then out of the building to the south.