The Dark Lord's Demise (29 page)

Kurt scrambled toward the spot where he thought he had heard
the metallic sound. He felt around on the wet grass left and right. A
few feet away Andron cursed softly as he frantically searched for
his weapon. Kurt's hand touched a sharp edge and jerked away. He
reached more carefully. The sword blade! He felt along it. No, that
was the point. There, the handle! Kurt grabbed the sword and
stood up so fast he was dizzy. He shouted, "I've got Andron's
sword!"

In triumph Wes called, "And I have the Sword of Geburah!" He
remembered that when he drew the sword, rays of brilliant blue
light shot out from it. By that light he could see his enemies. Wes
tugged on the hilt of the great sword. It did not move. He pulled
again. Again it would not come free. Cold sweat broke out all over
him. The sword was stuck in its scabbard as surely as if it had
rusted there for a hundred years. He thought, The soldiers don't
know! They can't see! "I have the Sword of Geburah!" he called again, but his voice shook.

Dominicus shouted, "You idiot! You have failed!"

"The darkness fights against me!" Andron roared.

Kurt slashed toward Andron's voice. Then came an angry horse
squeal, a whack and a yell of pain. A heavy body hit the ground.
Lisa held back a cheer. She cheered in her heart. Philo must have
kicked Dominicus and sent him sprawling. The forest echoed with
a confusion of neighs and shouts.

Andron's voice shouted, "We must flee! Two swords against one!
They have the sword of magic!" Brush crashed, he cursed, and
more brush crackled and smashed.

"How did you lose your sword?" Dominicus demanded. "How
were you so stupid?"

Andron lashed back, "And you, you gave up your sword to a
girl!" Heavy feet splashed through water. Dominicus's voice was
desperate. "We dare not go back! We have our orders!" From
across the stream Andron's voice, muffled now, called, "Shall we
stay here and die?" No answer came. Andiron shouted, "Stay then,
you fool!"

"Wait!" Dominicus cried.

The Friesens heard rapid splashes, breaking brush and the violent curses of two men. The crashes and voices faded into the distance. Then only the sound of the stream as it burbled happily
through the dark.

Kurt sat down hard. He was flushed from exertion, cold with sweat,
out of breath, shaking and deliriously happy.

Lisa and Wes, however, were still in the dark-literally-about
how Kurt was or where he was. When she was sure the soldiers
were gone, Lisa asked quietly, "Kurt? Are you all right? Where are
you?"

"Here," he managed to say. Lisa left Wes and stepped carefully
forward until she found him. She collapsed next to him and held
her brother close. They laughed and cried at the same time. Wes
stumbled forward until his shins bumped into them. Quickly he
sat, but the scabbard of the Sword of Geburah stabbed into the
ground and threw him off balance. He hated the thing! He wanted
to unbuckle it and throw it into the darkness, but he was too afraid.
He adjusted the sword so he could sit cross-legged on the ground.

"We did it!" Kurt rejoiced. "Falk about teamwork! We didn't
make a sound, and they didn't know where we were. Lisa, if you'd
had a sword too, you'd have waded right into them!"

Violent ripping and grinding noises came from a few feet away.
Kurt shut up and gripped Andron's sword. Wes automatically
grabbed for the hilt of the Sword of Geburah. His heart sank as he
knew it would do no good.

"Hey! What are you doing?" Lisa scolded.

Kurt and Wes both thought Lisa meant them. "Shh!" they
breathed.

A deeper voice calmly said, "Grzing. Nice dew on th' grss. Lk
nighttm."

"Grazing!" Lisa shrieked. "How can you graze after what just happened?"

"No rsn to pass up gd grss smply 'cause some pepl are idiots. Gd
riddnc, I say."

Kurt and Wes were terrified and confused. What new voice was
this? Wes hissed, "Lisa! Who are you talking to?"

"Oh, sorry, we've been so busy I forgot to tell you. Philo can talk.
He tends to talk with his mouth full. The result of constant grazing."

The boys relaxed. Talking animals were nothing new to them, at
least, not in Anthropos. Kurt said to the horse, "That's fine, go
ahead and graze all you want. Oh, and thanks for kicking Dominicus or whatever you did. It helped."

Philo swallowed his grass and said, "Thank you. Horses are glad
to be of service, if we are treated with simple decency. Say, did
Dominicus leave his pack behind?"

"Probably," said Lisa absently. Something bothered her about
the fight. She wanted to ask Wes about it.

Kurt tested the weight of Andron's sword in his hand. It felt
good. He said, "Wes, you were right that we couldn't trust the soldiers. They were under orders to kill us! And I'll bet I know where
those orders came from. Her majesty, Queen Hisschi!"

"Then this whole honey-gathering mission is a fake," said Lisa.
"She doesn't care if Tiqvah gets well. She'd rather he died! She
only sent us on this trip so we'd get ambushed. By the way, Wes,
I've got to ask you something."

Wes dreaded Lisa's question. He knew what it would be. He was
glad when they heard the ping of breaking tent ropes and the whoomp of collapsing tents, followed by a disorderly racket of
something large rummaging through piles of cloth. Lisa called,
"Philo! What are you doing?" The disturbance stopped. It was
replaced by rhythmic grinding. The horse had found what he
wanted. Lisa ordered him, "Get out of that pack! That grain's for
the return trip!"

"Yng lady, if I am not sufficntly fed, thr may not be any rtrn trp."

"Okay, you can eat some of it, but if you're not careful, you'll eat
yourself sick."

Wes hoped Lisa had forgotten her question, but she hadn't. She
asked, "Wes, why didn't you use the Sword of Geburah?"

He fumbled for words. "Well, we didn't need it. Kurt was doing
fine on his own. Kurt, that was brilliant how you found Andron's
sword in the dark!"

Kurt laughed. "Brilliant? I'd say desperate was more like it. He
was feeling around for it as frantically as I was, and only a few feet
from me. I didn't have time to wonder why you didn't draw the
Sword of Geburah. Now that I think of it, it would have come in
handy."

"Not in this darkness," Wes said quickly. "I couldn't see. I might
have cut your head off. Or Lisa's."

Lisa reminded him, "The sword shoots out blue light when you
draw it. You could have seen exactly where to strike."

"Of course it shoots out blue light! We didn't want light, remember? Dominicus still had his own sword."

"But the Sword of Geburah is more powerful than anything,"
Kurt protested. He didn't understand his brother's odd excuses.

"Maybe you needed to win this one by yourself, Kurt. To build
confidence," Wes suggested. As his arguments got weaker, his
throat hurt and his face went hot with shame. Why couldn't they
drop the subject?

"Wes? What's wrong?" Lisa asked, her voice carrying genuine
concern.

Wes ran out of excuses. Now he was glad for the dark so his
brother and sister couldn't see his face. "The truth is, I-I couldn't.
I tried to draw it, but it wouldn't come out of the scabbard." He
wondered if they understood the full implications of what he said.

Kurt remarked in a flat, low voice, "You don't mean you weren't
strong enough."

Wes's fear exploded into anger. "Of course I don't mean I wasn't
strong enough! You know what Uncle John told us! The Sword of
Geburah can't be drawn by one who is not in the service of Gaal!
And I couldn't-I couldn't!"

No one replied. Even the noise of Philo's big teeth stopped. The
stream's chatter filled what would have been terrible silence. Lisa
asked tentatively, "How could you not be in the service of Gaal?
Gaal told us to go on this journey. We know the queen is up to no
good, but Gaal still told us to go."

"It's not the journey," Wes moaned. "It's me. I've acted like a little
dictator this whole trip. Like I have to be in charge. That isn't how
Gaal and the Changer have taught us to do things. We're supposed
to help each other, not order each other around. I may be the oldest, but that doesn't make me the boss."

In the wet grass a cricket chirped. Kurt was about to strongly
agree with Wes and add a few examples of his bossiness. Embarrassment stopped his words. He recalled some of his own behavior
on the trail. "Wes, it's not just you. I bragged about how I finished
off that ogre, when you'd already done the worst part."

"Only because of the pigeon," Wes said. Near the stream some
tree frogs made a hesitant start at their chorus.

"And I was mad that you guys didn't make a fuss over me," Lisa
said. "I mean when I stole Dominicus's sword and poked the ogre
in the feet."

"That was awfully brave," said Wes. "By the way, shouldn't youwell, never mind."

"What? Oh, I know what you started to say. That I should thank
you for saving my life when that thing dangled me about ten feet
off the ground."

Wes laughed. "Kurt sure helped in that department too. Lisa, I
don't think you saw what he did. He didn't have a weapon, but he
ran up and kicked that thing in two of its heads."

Lisa giggled in nervous relief. "I was kind of busy right then."

"I kicked it in three heads," Kurt corrected Wes. He was laughing
too. Off in the woods a bird gave a short trill. Two or three others answered with lilting whistles. A breeze rustled the trees around
the campsite. Some small animal, perhaps a field mouse or chipmunk, disturbed the leaves on the ground as it scampered by.

"Hey!" Wes said. "You hear that? It's like nature decided to wake
up and act normal!"

As if in agreement, Philo started to grind his grain again. Lisa
stumbled over a collapsed tent to grab his halter and turn him
around. The horse grumbled only it little. "I was about to go get a
nice drink from the stream anyway."

"Go ahead. If I lead you there, you probably won't drink. In our
world we have a proverb about that-Look out!" The horse jerked
Lisa's arm and almost pulled her down. She let go of the halter and
stepped quickly back from the rolling and thrashing of a large body.

Philo grunted, "Itchy ... itchy. "

"It's those growths on your back again, isn't it," Lisa said with
sympathy.

"He won't have to carry the honey bottles anymore," Wes commented. "We don't need to take them any further. That is, if we get
any further in this darkness."

"Do you think Vulcanus will come back?" Kurt wondered. He
glanced upward. No huge bird shape loomed in the treetops. Only
a lacework of bare branches was superimposed against sky. Kurt
blinked, looked away and looked again. He could see the branches!
They were little more than gray on black, or perhaps black on
darker black, but he could see them. He yelled, "I can see trees! It's
getting light again!" Lisa and Wes looked up and joined Kurt's celebration: "Trees! I can see trees!" "The light's coming back!"

For a long breathless moment they watched the sky shift from
black to the deepest of deep blue. The branches stood out more
sharply. Beside the stream a misty white form materialized. It
moved and became more solid. Philo himself emerged from the
dark as he rose from his luxurious roll. Three shapeless brown
lumps became the collapsed tents. The ground went from black to
greenish gray. A green glow spread across the grass of the clearing.
A few sparkles danced from the stream. Then the sky flashed the
brilliant blue of midday. Light flooded the forest, so bright and
sudden that it hurt their eyes. The children shut their eyes against it but quickly opened them and drank in the glorious sunlight.

"I didn't know how much I'd missed it," Lisa said. They all
blinked back tears that were only partly from the sudden brightness. She pointed to the edge of the woods. "Look. There's the
path that leads on toward Lake Nachash." A clear trail climbed
away from the campsite into the forest, which now resounded with
birdcalls and the rat-a-tat-tat of woodpeckers.