An arm, long as a tree-limb, pointed. "This one here is responsible for taking the arm. We didn't tell him to do that." And the towering figure standing beside Vulcan (Mark hadn't recognized Vulcan till the instant he was pointed out) clapped the Smith on the back. It was a great rude slap that made Vulcan stagger on his game leg and snarl. Then the speaker, his own identity still obscure, went on: "Do you suppose, young mortal, that we went to all the trouble of having Clubfoot here make the swords, make all twelve of them for our game, never to see them properly used? They were a lot of trouble to have made."
For a game… a game? In outrage Mark cried out: "I think I'm dreaming all of you!"
None of the gods or goddesses in the circle thought that was worth an answer.
Mark cried again: "What are you going to do about the sword? If I refuse to keep it?"
"None of your business," said one curt voice.
"I suppose we'd give it to someone else."
"And anyway, don't speak in that tone of voice to gods…"
"Why shouldn't I speak any way I want to, I'm dreaming you anyway! And it is my business what…"
"Do you never dream of real persons, real things?"
Smoke from the fire blew into Mark's face. He choked, and had to close his eyes. When he opened them again the circle of tall beings was still there, surrounding him.
"And, anyway, if we gods wish to play a game, who are you, mortal, to object?" That got a general murmur of approval.
Mark was still outraged, but his energy was failing. His muscles seemed to be relaxing of themselves. He lay weakly back on rock half-warmed by fire. Despite all he could do, his eyelids were sagging shut in utter weariness. He whispered: "A game…?"
A female voice, that of a goddess who had not spoken until now, argued softly: "I say that this Mark, this stubborn son of a stubborn miller, deserves to die tonight for what he's done, for the disrespect he's shown, the irresponsible interference."
"A miller's son? A miller's son, you say?" That, for some reason, provoked laughter. "Ah, hahaaa!.. anyway, he's protected here by the fire that he's kindled, using magical materials and tools. Not that he had the least idea of what he was doing when he did it."
"What is so amusing? I still say that he must die tonight. He must. Otherwise I foresee trouble, in the game and out of it, trouble for us all." "Trouble for yourself, you mean."
And another new voice: "Hah, if you say he must die, then I say he must live. Whatever your position is in this, I must maintain the opposite."
They're just like people, Mark thought. His next thought was: I'm almost gone, I'm dying. Now the idea was not only acceptable, but brought with it a certain feeling of relief.
During the rest of the night — his gentle dying went on for a long, long time — Mark kept revising — his opinion of the wrangling gang of gods who surrounded him on his deathbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that they were conducting their debate on a high level, using words of great wisdom. At these times he wanted to make every effort to remember what they said, but somehow he never could. At other times what they were, saying struck him as the most foolish babble that he had ever heard. But he could not manage to retain an example of their foolishness either.
Anyway, he completely missed the end of the argument, because instead of dying he finally awoke to behold the whole vast reach of the sky turning light above the great bowl of rock that made the world. The near rim of the bowl was very near in the east, almost overhead, while the northwest portion of the rim was far, far away, no more than a little pinkish sawtooth line on the horizon. And to the southwest the rim was so distant that it could not be seen at all.
Mark was shivering again, or shivering still, when he woke up. Now he was cold on both sides. The fire was nearly out, and he immediately started to rebuild it. Somewhat to his surprise, his body moved easily. For whatever reason, he had awakened with a feeling of achievement, a sense that something important had been accomplished while he lay before the fire. Well, for one thing, his life had been preserved, whether by accident or through the benevolence of certain gods. He was not at all sure of the reality of the presences he'd seen. There was no sign of gods around him now, nothing but the mountain and the sky, and the high, keening wind.
Except for the obscure symbols on the wall of stone, and the remnants of that large and ancient fire.
The need for food had now settled deep in Mark's bones, and he thought, with the beginning of fear, that soon he might be too weak to make his way back down the mountain. He had to implement his final decision about the sword before that happened; so as soon as he had warmed himself enough to stop his shivering, he turned his back on his renewed fire and the old forge-place of the gods. Keeping the blanket wrapped around himself, he slung bow and quiver on his back again, and took up Townsaver. He carried the blade as if he meant to fight with it.
Testing the wind, he tried to follow the smell of sulphur to where it was the strongest. It took him only a few moments to stumble right against what he was looking for, in the form of a chest-high broken column of black rock. The middle of the broad black stump was holed out, as if it were a real treestump rotting, and up out of the central cavity there drifted acrid fumes, along with some faintly visible smoke. At certain moments the smoke was lighted from beneath with a reddish glow, visible here at close range even in broad daylight. A breath of warmth came from the fumarole, along with something that smelled even worse than sulphur, as foul as the breath of some imagined monster.
Somewhere far below, the mountain sighed, and the wave of rising heat momentarily grew great.
Mark lifted the sword. He used both hands on the hilt, just as his brother Kenn had held it with two hands during the fight. But no power flowed from the weapon now, and Mark could do with it as he liked. Without delaying, without giving the gods another moment in which to act, he thrust the sword down into the rising smoke and let it fall. Father, Kenn, I've done it.
The sword fell at once into invisibility. Mark heard the sharp impact that it made on nearby rock, followed by another clash a little farther down. Holding his breath, he listened a long time for some final impact, perhaps a splash into the molten rock that an Elder had once told Mark lay at tire bottom of these holes of fire. But though he listened until he could hold his breath no more, he heard no more of the falling sword.
Mark looked up into the morning sky, clear but for a few small clouds. They were just clouds, with nothing remarkable about them. He realized that he was waiting for a reaction, for lightning, for something to embody what must be the anger of the gods at what he had just done. He was waiting to be struck dead. But no blow came.
What did come instead was, in a sense, even worse. It was just the beginning of a sickening suspicion that his throwing the sword down into the volcano had been a horrible mistake. Now he had made his gesture, of striking back at the gods for what they had done to him. And what harm had his gesture done them? And what good had it done himself?
In thirteen years, Jord had never made this awful trek, had never thrown the gods' payment for his right arm back into their teeth. For whatever reason, Mark's father had kept his arm-price hanging on the wall at home instead. Never trying to use it, never trying to sell it, not bragging about it — but still keeping it. Mark had never really, until this moment, tried to fathom why.
One thing was sure, Mark's father had never tried to rid himself of the sword.
The spell of shock that had been put on Mark in the village street by the evil magic of violence began at last to lift. He realized that he was alone upon a barren mountainside, almost too weak to move, many kilometers from the home to which he dared not return. And that he'd just done something awesome and incomprehensible, completed a mad gesture that would make him the enemy of gods as well as men.
He hung weakly on the edge of the smoking, stinking stone stump, growing sicker and more frightened by the moment, until he began to imagine that the voices of the gods were coming up out of the central hole along with the mind-clouding smoke. Yes, the gods were angry. In Mark the feeling grew of just having made an enormous blunder. The feeling escalated gradually into black terror.
Only his lack of energy saved him from real panic. Doing what he could to flee the wrath of the gods, leaning shakily on the black rocky stump, Mark started round it to reach its far side, from which the mountainside went rather steeply down. As Mark moved onto the descending slope, the stump he leaned on turned into a high crooked column, the way around it into a definite descending path.
Mark had not followed this path for twenty steps before he came upon the sword. It was lying directly in his way, right under a jagged hole in the side of the crooked chimney-column, through which it had obviously dropped out. One bounce on rock, the first impact that he'd heard, then this. Altogether the sword had fallen no farther than if he'd dropped it from the millhouse roof.
Even in that short time it had encountered heat enough to leave it scorching. Mark burned his fingers when he tried to pick it up, and had to let it drop again. He had to wait, shivering in the mountain's morning shadow, and blowing on his fingers, until the unharmed metal had cooled enough for him to handle it.
"I am still amazed at the extent of your recent failure, Wearer-of-Blue," Duke Fraktin said. "Indeed, the more I think about it, the more amazed I grow."
The blue-robed wizard's real name was not the one by which he had just been addressed. But his real name — or, indeed, even his next-to-real name — were not to be casually uttered; not even by the lips of a duke; and the wizard was used to answering to a variety of aliases.
The wizard now bowed, though he remained seated, in controlled acknowledgement of the rebuke; he had a way, carefully cultivated, of not showing fear, a way that made even a very confident master tread a little warily with him.
"I have already said to Your Grace," the blue-robed one responded now, "all that I can say in my own defense."
There was a small gold cage suspended from a stone ceiling arch not far above the wizard's head, and inside that cage a monkbird screamed now, as if in derision at this remark. The hybrid creature's ineffectual wings made a brief iridescent blur on both sides of its thin, furred body. But its brain was too small to allow it the power of thought, and neither of the men below it paid its comment the least attention.
Except for the slave girl who had just brought wine, the two men were quite alone. They were seated in one of the smaller private chambers of the rather grim and drafty castle that was the Duke's chief residence, and would have been thought of as his family seat if any of the duchesses he had tried out so far had succeeded in giving him some immediate family. The present Duke's great-grandfather had begun the clan's climb to prominence by taking up the profession of robber baron. He had also begun the construction of this castle. Much enlarged since those days, it clung to a modest but strategically located crag overlooking the crossing of two important overland trade routes. Trade on both highways had somewhat diminished since the days of the castle's founding, but by now the family was into other games than simple robbery and the sale of insurance on life, health, and business.
Rich wall hangings, in the family colors of blue and white, rippled silkily as a gentle breeze entered the chamber through the narrow windows let into its thick stone walls. In the Duke's father's day the women of the household had begun to insist upon some degree of interior elegance, and the hangings dated from that time. And today for some reason those rippling drapes gave the Duke a momentarily acute sense of the swiftness of time's passage — all the efforts of his ancestors had enabled him to begin his own life with great advantages, but his own decades had somehow sped past him and out of reach, and today his domain was little larger or stronger than when his father had left it to him — a gift rather unwillingly bestowed. The Duke still wanted very much to be king of the whole continent someday, but it was years since he had said as much aloud to even his closest advisers. He would have expected and feared their silent ridicule, because there was so little hope. Until very recently, that is.
He made a small gesture of dismissal to the slave girl, who rose swiftly and gracefully from her knees, and departed on silent feet, her gauzy garments swirling. Yes, in the matter of women too he thought himself unlucky-time passed, wives appeared, were found for one reason or another unsatisfactory, and departed again. The duty he felt he owed himself, of providing his own heir for his own dukedom, was still not accomplished.
The Duke poured himself a small cup of the wine. "I think," he said to his wizard, "that if you were to try, you might find a few more words to say to me on the subject." As if in afterthought, he poured a second golden cup of wine, and handed it across; he nodded meanwhile, as if confirming something to himself. His Grace was on the small side, wiry and graying, with a hint of curl still in his forelock. On the subject of beards and mustaches, as on much else, he had never been able to make up his mind with any finality, and he was currently clean-shaven except for a modest set of sideburns. The ducal complexion was on the dark side, particularly around the eyes, which made the sockets look a little hollow and gave him a hungry look sometimes.
He prodded his wizard now: "As you have described the sequence of events to me, this young boy first shot my cousin dead, then simply picked up the sword, the sword you had been sent there to get — and walked away with it. No one has seen him since, as far as we can determine. And you made no attempt to stop his departure. You say you did not notice it."
The wizard, apparently unruffled by all this, again made his small seated bow. "Your Grace, immediately after the fight, a crowd gathered in the street. There was much confusion. People were shouting all manner of absurd things, about cavalry, invasions — the scene was far from orderly, with people coming and going everywhere. My first concern was naturally for your cousin's life, and I did all that I could to save him. Alas, my powers proved inadequate. But in those first moments I did not even know whose arrow had struck him down. I assumed, reasonably, I think, that it had come from one of the attackers' bows."
"And of course when the fight was over you thought no more about the sword. Even though you'd just seen what it could do."
"Beg pardon, Your Grace, I really did not see that. When the fighting started I went to earth at once, put my head down and stayed that way. As Your Grace is very well aware, most magic works very poorly once blades are drawn and blood is shed. I was of course aware that some very potent magic was operating nearby; I know now that was I sensed was the sword. But while the fighting lasted there was nothing I could do. As soon as silence fell, I jumped up and…"
"Did what you could, yes. Which, as it turned out, wasn't very much. Well, we'll see what Sharfa has to say about these villagers of his when he gets back."