The Destiny of the Sword (15 page)

Wallie yielded mask and foil back to the First and accepted a towel. Wiping and panting, he headed toward his companions, expecting smiles. Instead he saw warning looks and glances to his rear. He spun around. Two Sevenths stood behind the far hurdles.

Damnation!

He almost lost Shonsu’s diabolical temper on the spot.

True, he had revealed his style and his abilities to Tivanixi, but that had been a fair exchange. He had not planned on giving a free demonstration to these two. They were quite within their rights in being there, but he felt as if he had been spied upon. A surge of fury came burning up his throat and red fringes flickered inside his eyelids. He made a huge effort to force that berserker madness back down again, balling his fist to keep it from making the sign of challenge.

One of the Sevenths could be dismissed at a glance, but the other...

The popular favorite was somebody called Boariyi, Nnanji had said. The other Seventh was taller man Shonsu, and that was unfair; Wallie had met almost no one taller than himself in the World. He was also younger. Unfair again; Shonsu was a very young Seventh, and Wallie was proud of that.

This must be a Boariyi. He was a human mantis, a basketball player, obviously built from a sutra on giraffes. His kilt was a thin blue tube around gibbon hips and thighs like baseball bats. He had a jaw too big for his head and a mouth too wide for his jaw and a single dark slash of eyebrow across the top of his ugly face, and he was standing with one leg vertical and the other sloped, with golf club arms crossed over a birdcage chest, head slightly tilted to one side, gazing at Wallie with a supercilious smirk on oversize rubbery lips.

In mat moment of fury the decision was made.

You sneaky, arrogant young lout! Wallie thought—and it was all he could do not to shout the thought aloud. Think you can take me, do you? Well, Mister Boariyi, if that’s your name, I’ll tell you this: You’ll be leader of this tryst only over my dead body!

For a moment longer Wallie stood alone in the middle of the fencing area, aware that his fury must be blazing in his face and obvious to the crowd. Then the tableau was broken by the older of the two newcomers. He drew his sword and made the salute to an equal... Zoariyi, swordsman of the Seventh.

He was a slight, short, and wiry man, gray hawed, well into middle age. However great his skill, his speed would be deserting him now, which was why Shonsu’s instincts had rejected him as a

threat. He wore the unadorned garb of a free and he was conspicuously scarred. He had die same continuous eyebrow as his younger companion and his name was very similar—father and son?

Wallie grabbed a foil from the startled First and made his response with it. It was intended as an insult, and Zoariyi frowned.

Then the beanpole beside him drew bis sword—a very long sword, of course—and perfunctorily saluted without shifting from his slouched, hip,tilted stance. His smirk did not change. He was indeed Boariyi, the popular favorite. With those arms the reason was obvious.

Wallie used the foil again. The kid’s contemptuous amusement increased. One of his facemarks was not quite healed.

He might be little older than Nnanji, and that was ridiculous for a Seventh. Thirty was normal. Indeed the system was designed to prevent youngsters from advancing too quickly. Systems always are. By the time a man had mastered eleven hundred and forty,four surras, fought his way up through the six lower ranks, found a Seventh as mentor, and then could manage to find two Sevenths together as examiners—which must be extremely rare—he had to be at least thirty. How Shonsu had managed it sooner, Wallie could not guess. Nnanji was going to do better, because of his memory, and because he had found a mentor who really cared, and who could teach well.

All of which suggested that Zoariyi was the power behind Boariyi.

Wallie took another look at the older man and decided that, yes, he might be a great deal shrewder than that smirking pituitary malfunction beside him. Then he swung around and strolled over to the bench behind which Nnanji was standing. “My sword now, please,” he said loudly.

Nnanji was staring in doubt at his mentor, but he was about to hand over the seventh sword...

“Let me see that!” Tivanixi demanded sharply. Nnanji reacted instinctively to the tone of authority and handed the seventh sword to the castellan.

He studied the griffon on the hilt, the sapphire in its beak, and then the blade; especially the blade. Wallie passed his foil back to

die First, returned a grin from Katanji and a smile from Jja, and continued to wipe at himself with the towel. The crowd waited.

“Shonsu!” Thana whispered urgently, and he looked at her in surprise. She was staring past him, toward Boariyi. “Don’t challenge!” she hissed.

Wallie resisted the temptation to turn around.

“No matter what!” she added in the same whisper.

“This is a remarkable sword, Lord Shonsu!” The castellan had a strange expression on bis face.

Wallie smiled and nodded.

“May I ask where you got this?”

It was given me,” Wallie said.

Tivanixi directed a calculating stare at him. “It looks as if it came fresh from the forge yesterday.”

Wallie smiled blandly. “Not quite—one previous owner.”

Tivanixi paled. “Do you mean what I mink you mean?”

“Yes.”

The castellan gazed at him hard and long. “Yet you will not join the tryst?”

Wallie shook his head. “I’m still considering.”

Tivanixi’s eyes shifted toward Boariyi and Zoariyi, then back to Wallie. “I would not wear this,” he said quietly.

Wallie thought of young Arganari and the Chioxin topaz. The boy would have borne mat priceless heirloom for only a few minutes after it was formally given to him. Then he would have been quickly given another to wear.

“We all must bear our burdens,” Wallie said. He took the seventh sword back from Tivanixi, who continued to stare at him in bewilderment.

A voice said: “The name of Shonsu is well known in this todge.”

Wallie turned around to face Boariyi and unobtrusively sheathed his sword.

“The name of Boariyi, however, is not.”

The kid’s eyes narrowed. “Not all reputations are good.”

“But nothing is still nothing.”

Boariyi’s hand twitched and the older man growled something quietly. There was a forest of green Sixths behind those two Sevenths, and a desert of red,kilted Fifths behind them—and they

were not pressing in to the barricades as the rest of the audience was. They were standing in proper military form, behind their superiors. Boariyi, as popular favorite, had collected a large following—and disciplined it.

Wallie tinned back to face his own entourage. Nnanji was frowning and moving his lips as if reviewing sutras. Katanji had lost his grin. Thana flashed another warning glance at Wallie and went back to studying the opponents.

“His uncle,” Tivanixi remarked quietly, to no one special. With a warm rush of relief, Wallie realized that the castellan was now on his side.

Boariyi called across the fencing ground once more. “You have come to join the tryst, I suppose, Lord ShonsuT Wallie turned again. “No.”

That was a surprise, and Boariyi glanced down at the man who must be his uncle, if Tivanixi’s remark meant anything. “It is an honorable cause, for honorable men.” “I am sure it is,” Wallie replied calmly. “Afraid of the sorcerers?”

The audience gasped in unison. That was grounds for opening arteries.

Wallie’s hand had started to rise before he remembered Thana’s warning and lowered it again. Was this to be the combat for leadership—no formalities, just a vulgar squabble escalating to challenge? Then he understood. He was going to be baited into making the challenge—and Boariyi would refuse it, claiming that Shonsu was not a man of honor. In the absence of witnesses and a prepared case, a denunciation would be dangerous, for if an accuser failed to prove his charges, then he must pay the penalty. This way was safer because Tivanixi, as host and interim leader of the tryst, would have to judge. All Boariyi would be risking, at worst, was having to accept the challenge, while in the meantime he would have been able to drag out all the unsubstantiated rumors in support of his position. It was a sneaky plan, obviously the brainchild of die older, more experienced Zoariyi. If Wallie refused to rise to the bait, he would be exposed as a coward. His only defense was to try to force a challenge out of Boariyi, for

mat would be an admission that Wallie was a man of honor. Not mat it would work, but it was all he could do.

He walked slowly across to the middle of the fencing area, letting die tension build, frantically trying to think up some ammunition, and unhappily aware that a fight was almost inevitable now... and that Boariyi thought he was the better man.

“Let me ask you a question, sonny, before I answer that. Have you ever seen a sorcerer?”

“Well, I have!” Wallie shouted. “And I will answer your question. Yes, I am afraid of sorcerers. Have you seen that?” He pointed up at the line of kilts hanging over the court behind Boariyi’s head. “Any man who knows what mat means and yet is not afraid of sorcerers is too dumb to be allowed out of the womb. But being afraid doesn’t mean that you can’t fight them! We killed fourteen at Ov, my young friend, so I haven’t quite paid off the score yet. But I’m fourteen ahead of you.”

“No, Shonsu! You’re thirty,five behind.”

Ouch! The kid was not as dumb as he looked.

“You plan to be leader of the tryst, do you, sonny?”

“If that is the will of the Goddess.” Boariyi was obviously confident that it was.

Almost the whole tryst must be present now, standing in silent fascination at this confrontation between Sevenths.

“You’d better learn to count better than that, then,” Wallie roared, hearing his voice booming back from the walls. “Eleven years ago in Aus: eighteen swordsmen killed by twenty sorcerers wielding thunderbolts, and at least another dozen killed mere since. Four years before mat, in Wal: thirty,two swordsmen killed by twenty,eight sorcerers. And about two years ago a party of four swordsmen came ashore...”

He had learned how to do without notebooks—he used Nnanji, and the two of them had been over these numbers a hundred times. One by one he went around the cities of the loop, calling out the ghastly toll... Aus and Wal and Sen and Cha and GOT ... the whole garrison with one thunderbolt at Gor. Perhaps this was all recorded somewhere in the libraries of Vul, but he was certain that no swordsman had ever worked it out before. He had gathered this information—Katanji and Honakura and the

sailors had gathered it, quietly asking questions and listening in the sorcerer towns. Fifteen years of sorcerer infiltration and fifteen years of rank stupidity by swordsmen. None of them had learned a thing in fifteen years. And Amb and Ov... forty men ripped to pieces in Ov...

“So add it all up, sonny,” he concluded. “Add in the forty,nine and you’ll come up with three hundred and thirty dead swordsmen. That’s the best estimate I can make. How many did you make it? Will you try for thirteen hundred and thirty?”

The echoes died away into stunned silence. Boariyi and his uncle looked as shocked as anyone. Everyone was shocked. Lord Shonsu had scared the kilts off the entire tryst of Casr with his litany of death. It was Zoariyi who recovered first.

“You were castellan here, Lord Shonsu! Why did you not act sooner? Why did you not call this holy tryst?”

For a moment Wallie considered challenging him instead of his nephew, but the same problem arose: He would refuse.

“Thank the Goddess I did not, Lord Zoariyi!” Again he pointed to the pathetic line of kilts hanging over the court. “It would have been a thousand kilts mere, not fifty. I did not know how to fight sorcerers! But now I do. I proved that at Ov!”

He turned and stalked away. Hopefully they would let it rest now, while they thought about it. Tavanixi’s face was pale— Shonsu was imperiling his tryst.

He had barely moved when Boariyi spoke again: “But you wouldn’t attack the tower in Ov? What sort of leader calls off his men when he has victory within his grasp?”

Ov was safer ground. Wallie beckoned to Katanji, who jumped in shock and clattered his cast against a rack of foils, men reluctantly came forward. Wallie faced him toward Boariyi and stood behind him with his hands on his shoulders, looking over his head.

“This, my lords, is Novice Katanji, my oath brother’s protegg, and therefore mine, also. I shan’t present him, because he can’t salute with an injured arm.” And you might not respond, which would force me to challenge. “It was broken by a sorcerer’s thunderbolt.’ He raised his voice even higher, over die sudden clamor. “All of you, take note! This boy is the bravest man in this courtyard. He has been ashore in every one of the sorcerer towns,

risking a terrible death every time. He was captured at Ov, and we rescued him. He has been inside one of the towers and has seen what is in there—probably he is the only swordsman in the history of the World who has done that and lived.”