An Empire Unacquainted With Defeat (23 page)

Fetch wasn't herself. Healthy she would have screeched and argued like a whole flock of hens at feeding time. Instead, she just glanced at Lord Hammer and shrugged. "I'm too tired and sick to care much, Will. But don't. It won't change the past. It won't change the future, either. He's chasing a dead dream. And it won't do you any good now." She leaned back and closed her eyes. "I hated him for a while, too. I lost people in the wars."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. He lost people, too, you know. Friends and relatives. All the pain and dying weren't on our side. And he lost everything he had, except his knowledge."

"Oh." I saw what she was trying to say. Lord Hammer was no different than the rest of us leftovers, going on being what he had learned to be.

"Is there anything to eat?"

"Chenyth. See if you can get her something. Fetch, I know all the arguments. I've been wrestling with them all morning. And I can't make up my mind. I was hoping you could help me figure where I've got to stand."

"Don't put it on me, Willem Potter. It's a thing between you and Lord Hammer."

Chenyth brought soup that was mostly mule. He spooned it into Fetch's mouth. She ate it like it was good.

I decided, but on the basis of none of the arguments that had gone before.

I had promised myself that I would take my little brother home to his mother. To do that I needed Lord Hammer's protection.

I often wonder, now, if many of the most fateful decisions aren't made in response to similarly oblique considerations.

I need not have put myself through the misery. The Fates had their own plans.

When Lord Hammer woke, I went to him. He was weak. He barely had the strength to sit up. I squatted on my hams, facing him, intimidated by the stallion's baleful stare. Carefully, I drew the Harish kill-dagger from within my shirt. I offered it to him atop my open palms.

The earth shook. There was a suggestion of gargantuan mirth in it.

"The Dragon mocks us." Lord Hammer took the dagger. "Thank you, Willem Potter. I'd say there are no debts between us now."

"There are, Lord. Old ones. I lost a father and several brothers in the wars."

"And I lost sons and friends. Will we fight old battles here in the cupped hands of doom? Will we cross swords even as the filed teeth of Fate rip at us? I lost my homeland and more than any non-Tervola could comprehend. I have nothing left but hope, and that too wan to credit. The Dragon laughs with cause, Willem Potter. Summon Bellweather. A journey looms before us."

"As you say, Lord."

I think we left too soon, with too many wounded. Some survived the forest. Some survived the plains. Some survived the snows and precipices of the Dragon's Teeth. But we left men's bones beside the way. Only eight of us lived to see the plains of Shara, west of the mountains, and even then we were a long way from home.

It was in Shara that Lord Hammer's saga ended.

We were riding ponies he had bought from a Sharan tribe. Our faces were south, bent into a spring rain.

Lord Hammer's big stallion stumbled.

The sorcerer fell.

He had been weakening steadily. Fetch claimed only his will was driving him toward the laboratories where he would make use of the dragon's blood . . . .

He lay in the mud and grass of a foreign land, dying, and there was nothing any of us could do. The Harish dagger still gnawed at his soul.

Immortality rested in his saddlebags, in that black jar, and we couldn't do a thing. We didn't know how. Even Fetch was ignorant of the secret.

He was a strong man, Lord Hammer, but in the end no different than any other. He died, and we buried him in alien soil. The once mightiest man on earth had come to no more than the least of the soldiers who had followed him in his prime.

I was sad. It's painful to watch something magnificent and mighty brought low, even when you loath what it stands for.

He went holding Fetch's hand. She removed the iron mask before we put him into the earth. "He should wear his own." She obtained a Tervola mask from his gear. It was golden and hideous, and at one time had terrorized half a world. I'm not sure what it represented. An animal head of some sort. Its eyes were rubies that glowed like the eyes of Lord Hammer's stallion. But their inner light was fading.

A very old man lay behind the iron mask. The last of his mystique perished when I finally saw his wizened face.

And yet I did him honor as we replaced the soil above him.

I had taken his gold. He had been my captain.

"You can come with us, Fetch," Chenyth said. And I agreed. There would be a place for her with the Potters.

Chenyth kept the iron mask. It hangs in my mother's house even now. Nobody believes him when he tells the story of Lord Hammer and the Kammengarn Dragon. They prefer Rainheart's heroics.

No matter. The world goes on whether geared by truth or fiction.

The last shovelful of earth fell on Lord Hammer's resting place. And Chenyth, as always, had a question. "Will, what happened to his horse?"

The great fire-eyed stallion had vanished.

Even Fetch didn't know the answer to that one.

There was some serendipity associated with the publication of this story. It appeared in the special Fritz Leiber issue of
Whispers
in October 1979. But it was written in September1969, in Fritz's two-room apartment in Venice, California, during several weeks I spent there with him after the death of his wife, Jonquil. We wrote back to back, sometimes using one another's characters in walk-ons, he producing much of the very dark stuff that became part of
Swords Against Death
.
The manuscript of this bears the title "Keeper of Shadows." I don't recall the reason for the change.

He thought he would never see the day, but, when Bragi Ragnarson reached Itaskia's South Fortress, he could not restrain a sigh of pleasure. His adventure in the south, that had included a forced march back through dark jungles and strange dangers, made him realize just how safe he felt in a city he knew. Once despised Itaskia seemed a suburb of Heaven.

He wandered slowly through the slums of Wharf Street South, his immediate destination the Red Hart Inn at the intersection of Wharf and Love Lane. He smiled hugely as he entered.

Yalmar glanced up from his mug-washing. "I see ye're back, freeloader. Ye lose yer meal ticket somewhere else?" Though it had been a year the man made their parting seem like it had been yesterday.

"Yalmar, you're beautiful," the shaggy blond mercenary boomed. He tossed a coin. "How's that? A stoop of your best."

Yalmar filled a mug, not with his finest.

"Where's my change?" the big man asked as he lifted it.

"What change?" Yalmar pulled a box from beneath his counter, extracted a long, tattered account sheet. "Subtracting the value of one new obol of Hellin Daimiel, ye still owe two sovereigns gold, three crowns silver, and tuppence. A small fortune. If yer father hadn't been a friend. . . . "

"Bah! Gotta find a tavern where the keeper's illiterate."

"Them's the kind where they want cash in advance," Yalmar countered. "And where's yer knavish accomplices, Mocker and Haroun?" Yalmar obviously hoped they had perished somewhere along the way.

"Went to Portsmouth. A woman. They'll be along."

Yalmar groaned.

A tall, thin, gray, nervous man oozed into the tavern. With a hand raised high, finger pointing at the ceiling, he started toward the mercenary. "Mr. Ragnarson? . . . "

"Yes?" Someone must have heard he was coming. Curious.

"Uh . . . "

"Something to drink? Yalmar, just don't stand there."

"Ain't heard the ring of his money . . . ."

The thin man glanced around distastefully. The Red Hart was no upper-crust watering hole. He mumbled, "Oh, I think not."

"So what do you want?" Ragnarson was in an amiable mood, though this type usually spelled trouble.

"You return at an opportune moment. My Lord . . . uh . . . " The thin man leaned close to whisper, "My Lord, the Duke Greyfells, would be grateful and generous, if you'd undertake a most delicate piece of work."

"Greyfells?" The Duke was a bad man to deal with. A political manipulator for whom he had worked previously and as near an arch-villain and arch-traitor as Itaskia's recent history boasted. And a treacherous master. One risked the evidence-erasure of the assassin's blade if one's task were politically motivated.

Yet Ragnarson needed money, and Greyfells' favor. His departure from Itaskia had been clouded by the demands of creditors and the displeasure of this same Duke. Many dangerous men had to be satisfied if he were to stay on long.

He laughed thunderously, slapped the thin man's back. "Hah! Good! Who does he want murdered this time?"

"Ssshh! It's nothing illegal."

"He wants me to do something legal? Remarkable! Will wonders never cease? Yalmar, you ever heard of anybody coming down here looking for honest men? Hey, why not hire me through the Mercenaries' Guild?"

"Ssshh! Too many people would become involved. We have to keep a low profile on this. It's politically sensitive."

Ragnarson wondered if Greyfells had ever so much as futtered a Love Lane strumpet without agonizing over the political considerations. "Well, what is it, man?"

"He'd like you to go into the Forest of Night . . . ."

"The who?"

"The Forest of Night."

"That's what I thought. You'd better start making sense." It was becoming hard to maintain a cheerful outlook. The sordid, scheming side of Itaskia was one he had overlooked in his joy of return.

"Alright. One who is called the Keeper of Shadows is holding the Heart of Lorraine, which belongs to the Duke's daughter. He has it locked away in the Castle of Tears in the Forest of Night. The Duke requires its return. The girl lies in enchanted sleep whilst . . . ."

"Gah! Yalmar, give us a quart here. This crap can't be listened to sober." He was well-traveled. He had heard of none of these before. A quirky little nervous moth began fluttering about in his stomach.

"Hrumph! See here! The Duke
must
have his daughter back. She's pledged to the Lord of Four Towers. It's a union of such potential that My Lord dares not lose it."

"So fetch up a ransom."

"The ransom would have to be Lorraine herself, so to speak."

"I don't understand."

"Neither do I. I merely report what My Lord tells me."

"Another mug, damn it, Yalmar." The taverner had not delivered the quart. "Go away, skinny man."

"Would this change your mind?" The whisperer angrily slapped five gold sovereigns onto the counter.

Ragnarson didn't look up, though the sum was magnificent. But Yalmar recognized the set of his shoulders. He scooped three coins into his cashbox, made change.

"Ye're on the right path," he told the thin man. "Prime the pump." To Ragnarson, "We're even. But there's the others." And, "One on the house." He drew a quart of the good ale this time.

Five more sovereigns appeared. In Itaskia's barter economy this was a fortune. But Ragnarson rolled his shoulders in a mighty stretch and yawn, as if bored. He had left a lot of debts. Five more sovereigns. Bragi combed his golden hair with his fingers. Coins. The mercenary picked his nose.

"Right, then," the thin man snapped in exasperation. "How much?"

"Two hundred?"

The messenger sputtered, mumbled incoherently, then gasped, "I'm not buying a regiment! I want just one reliable man. Thirty, tops. Then I go elsewhere."

"Done," said Ragnarson, who would have taken the job for the original five if the man hadn't been so eager and his creditors so numerous and bloodthirsty.

"There're conditions."

"That figures. Let's hear them."

"First, the job must be completed within forty-three days. The wedding cannot be delayed longer. Second, you have to return the Heart to Castle Greyfells. It is there Lorraine lies enchanted. Don't waste time and don't fail your trust. My Lord isn't a forgiving man."

"All right. Where's this Forest of Night?"

"I don't know."

"What? How the hell am I supposed to lift something I don't even know where it's at?"

"That's why you're being paid."

"I knew there'd be a catch. All right. Castle Greyfells in forty-three days. Now go away and let me get drunk."

The money was gone, scattered hopelessly in a frenzy of drinking, wenching, and debt-paying. A week of the six had vanished as well. And he had done nothing yet. Could he explain a failure to the Duke's man, whom he had seen watching him more than once? Not likely. And there was no backing out now. The Duke's vengefulness was widely known and farther reaching.

Where to begin? Who knew about the places unknown? A sorcerer, perhaps.

"I'll try Visigodred," he mumbled to himself as he rose from the curb where he had spent the night.

A second week had passed before, riding a "borrowed" horse, he spied the gothic spires of Castle Mendalayas, home of the sorcerer Visigodred. Shivers ran down his spine. What would his welcome be? Warlocks were notoriously unpredictable.

Nervously, he used the great brass death's head knocker. A minute passed. Then the gate swung inward on hinges which groaned like souls in torment. A muted, melodious voice said, "Come in, come in."

A groom awaited him. Saying nothing, the man took Bragi's horse, indicated another man waiting on the steps of the inner fortress. The latter guided Ragnarson to the wizard.

To his surprise, Bragi found Visigodred pleased to see him. "I get so few visitors, you know," said the tall, longly bearded man. "Scared, I suppose. It's been too peaceful since last you visited. But why should you fear me? That business is done. How are your friends?"

Ragnarson shrugged. "Haven't seen them for a while. They have their own interests."

"What brings you here, then? Business, I presume. This's no pleasure palace."

"Business, yes. In a place called the Forest of Night. If I can locate it. I hoped you could help."