The Ninth Talisman (33 page)

“I'll have them on in a moment,” Sword replied.

“We'll meet you downstairs, then.”

The door was closed again before Sword even saw Boss move.

He sighed, and pulled on his boots.

A moment later he joined the two women at the door, and followed them out onto the street, where they turned right and headed toward the plaza in front of the Winter Palace.

It was late afternoon, and the sun was in the west, so the cliff towering over Winterhome was in bright daylight; Sword looked up at it, and saw the trail winding its way up the cliff face, saw the canyon that led to the Uplands.

From this distance it looked like a small notch.

He turned his head, trying to spot the Summer Palace, but the shape of the cliff was such that it was not visible here; it was around the curve
to the north, on a stretch of cliff that had
not
crumbled enough to climb, but was instead a sheer wall of rock, thousands of feet high.

The Wizard Lord was presumably still up there, going about his business, listening to messengers and sending his men on their various errands, mundane or murderous—and that meant he wasn't in Barokan, where he belonged, protecting its people from criminals and the vicissitudes of nature.

On the other hand, he might do less damage up there, if he had really been sending his soldiers out to kill wizards. And no catastrophes had occurred in his absence. Yes, the weather was hotter than usual, rains less predictable, but was that so very important? The Wizard Lord was building roads, organizing people, trying to make life better.

And, it seemed, killing wizards.

But then, the last Wizard Lord had gone mad, and slaughtered an entire town in the southern hills. Killing half a dozen wizards—or even all seventeen besides himself, if that was the present Wizard Lord's intention—was less horrific than that.

After all, the original purpose of a Wizard Lord was to control rogue wizards, and there hadn't been any real rogue wizards in centuries. Traditionalists said that meant the system was working, but Sword suspected it simply meant there weren't enough wizards left to be worth worrying about. Killing the few that remained would certainly eliminate any possibility of future rogues, and every wizard had been warned, when he first took up the study of magic, that the Wizard Lord had the right to serve as judge and executioner, with no appeal, should he use that magic in forbidden ways.

The possibility that the Wizard Lord would abuse that power had never been denied. It was a risk every wizard lived with.

And eliminating wizards would mean that this Wizard Lord would be the last; there would be no one to serve as his successor. Sword thought that might be a good thing. He had no great fondness for wizards; they meddled with dangerous magic and lived like hermits, outside the normal society of the towns and priesthoods. Remembering the story of Tala, he knew that for eight hundred years wizards had been a menace. For seven hundred, they had been restrained by the Wizard Lord, but they were still a potential problem. If they were being exterminated,
no one seemed to mind except the wizards themselves; it would remove a danger that had threatened Barokan since the dawn of recorded history.

Given that, did the Chosen really want to depose this Wizard Lord?

Boss seemed to think so. She wanted a Wizard Lord running Barokan, minding everyone's business but leaving the wizards alone, not one hiding in the Uplands while his soldiers disposed of his potential successors, and taking advice from the man who had raped and enslaved her. Perhaps she thought that if the Wizard Lord was doing his job, he wouldn't be listening to Farash inith Kerra, and that if the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills had been doing his job then Farash could never have ruled Doublefall in the first place.

Or was it perhaps that she wanted an excuse to exercise her
own
power, her own magic, more freely? She had the ability to sway crowds, persuade foes, make snap decisions with unnaturally good odds that they would be the
right
decisions for whatever she wanted to accomplish—and she was only supposed to use these talents to remove Wizard Lords who broke the ancient compact with the Council of Immortals, the agreement that the Wizard Lord would control most of the magic in Barokan in exchange for abiding by the rules the Council had set down over the centuries. This Boss, more than any other, would not want to abuse that power the way her predecessor had—but at the same time, she surely wanted revenge on Farash and any who befriended him.

Maybe she was just looking for an excuse to
use
her magic for its intended purpose, an excuse to remove the Wizard Lord. She wouldn't be the first of the Chosen to feel that way—Bow had admitted, six years before, that he was
eager
to kill the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills, while Beauty and Babble had both seemed to find the march toward the Galbek Hills very satisfying.

Sword had not been eager or satisfied—yet it had been Sword who slew the Dark Lord while Bow was locked in the dungeons under his tower.

Farash inith Kerra had found another way to use the Leader's power, by subjugating the town of Doublefall and bending its inhabitants to his will, turning them into his slaves. He had betrayed the other Chosen
and sided with the Dark Lord in order to maintain his power, and that was why Sword had insisted he give up his role.

But this woman, this
girl
he had chosen as his successor—how fit was she for the role? How sound was her judgment? She herself said that Farash had thought choosing her was a joke; what if he had been right, and she was unsuited to lead the Chosen?

Certainly, she was nothing like Farash had been in the position.

Over the past few days Sword had spoken with the other Chosen. Babble was guided by . . . well, everything; she could hear the spirits, the
ler,
of everything around her, living or otherwise, and said she would do what the
ler
wanted; she did not have a fixed opinion on the Wizard Lord or the new Boss or anything else. Azir shi Azir, on the other hand, practically worshipped Boss, and would do anything she said—though she also seemed devoted to Sword himself, and it was hard to be certain which she would choose should Sword and Boss settle firmly on opposite sides.

Snatcher claimed to have no opinions on the subject but a willingness to abide by the consensus of the others.

Beauty did not trust the Wizard Lord, but hoped his removal could be avoided; she had seen how much her neighbors appreciated the roads and canals, how industrious and happy the young men recruited into the army and the work gangs were.

And Bow wanted an excuse to kill someone, after missing his chance in the Galbek Hills.

Sword wanted to give the Wizard Lord the benefit of the doubt, give him a chance to explain himself. He hoped that Lore would provide a voice of reason, equipped with arguments as to why they should
not
kill Artil, despite the dead wizards.

He was not confident, though, that the Scholar would be that voice. He really did not know what to expect from Lore.

And then there was the whole question of the ninth talisman.
Was
there a ninth talisman, or was it just something the Wizard Lord had invented so that he would have an excuse to have his soldiers kill wizards who refused to talk about it? The captain's account of the Blue Lady's death seemed to suggest that there was such a talisman, but then why
hadn't the Chosen known about it? Why hadn't the Seer observed the whereabouts of the ninth Chosen—did this mysterious person always wear
ara
feathers, perhaps? Or might it be an Uplander? The Seer's magic did not extend above the cliffs.

But an Uplander would have been discernible during the winter, when the Uplanders sheltered in the great guesthouses of Winterhome. Azir had said she wasn't completely sure whether a ninth existed or not, because there had been a few occasions when she had thought she might have sensed something, but she couldn't be certain.

Lore might know something about that.

Sword looked up at the cliff again; there were people on the trail, heading down, but they looked like little more than specks at this distance. All of them appeared to be dressed in black, but that meant little—anyone bound for Winterhome might wear black. At any rate, Sword could not identify any of them as the Scholar. Lore might well already be far enough down to be out of sight behind the rooftops of Winterhome.

“Wait here,” Boss said, as they neared the edge of the plaza.

“Why?” Sword asked.

“Because we don't want to attract attention and you stand out. Now, shut up and wait here.”

Sword glanced at the Seer, who shrugged.

“As you say,” he said, and he and Azir stepped to one side, under an overhanging upper story, as Boss advanced toward the gate that led to the path up the cliffs.

There were guards there, of course; there were guards at every entrance to the Winter Palace, as there always were even in the Wizard Lord's absence, and even though that gate did not actually lead into the palace it had a pair of men in red and black standing ready, one to either side.

Sword watched as Boss strolled across the plaza, up to those two guards; he could not hear what she said to them, but he could see them leave their posts, hurrying across the plaza and vanishing into one of the streets radiating from it.

“Is he almost here, Azir?” Sword asked the Seer.

He could not see her face behind the hood and scarf of a Hostwoman,
but her voice sounded worried as she said, “Almost. He's on . . . on the slope of broken stone, not the cliff itself, but he still has . . .”

“Shhh!” Sword said. “Look!”

The Seer fell silent and looked.

The other guards had noticed the absence of the two who had been guarding the gate; they were calling back and forth, though Sword could not make out the words.

“They did that once before, when I was here,” the Seer told him. “Boss talked
all
of them into going away.”

“She did?” Sword looked around. “Do you know how? I mean, what she told them?”

“They all went over to see what was . . . what are they doing?”

Several of the other guards, one from each entrance, were indeed collecting into a group, but they were not approaching the Leader; instead they were gathering at one of the doors, and although it was difficult to see from where he stood, Sword thought the door was opening.

Then several more guards came spilling out, equipped not with swords, but with a mix of spears and bows. One man was obviously in charge—he
did
have a sword, and a polished golden helmet. He raised his blade and shouted, “Earplugs in!”

Each of the other guards then pressed his free hand first to one ear, then the other.

“This isn't right,” Sword said, drawing his own blade. He had been hesitant about even wearing it openly on the streets of Winterhome, but Boss had told him to bring it, so Lore would see it and recognize him that much more easily; now he was glad he had. These soldiers were far too reminiscent of the squads that had been sent to question wizards, and which had left the wizards' heads on pikes.

Sword did not want to see Boss's head, nor Lore's, on a pike.

“What's going on?” the Seer said. “This isn't what happened before!”

“Come on,” Sword said.

“But Boss told us to wait…”

“Boss may be in trouble. Come on!” His sword ready in his hand, Sword marched out into the plaza.

He made no hostile actions, nor any attempt to disguise himself; he
just walked out in front of the Winter Palace, making no move to threaten any of the guards. He noticed that Azir had not followed him; he dismissed that as unimportant.

Some of the soldiers glanced at him, but their commander was focused entirely on Boss and didn't notice the Swordsman.

“Leader of the Chosen!” the man in the golden helmet called.

“Leader of the guards!” Boss called back, her voice carrying astonishingly well for so small a woman.

“In the name of the Wizard Lord of Winterhome, I ask you what your business is here, and why you have sent two of my men away,” the helmeted guard shouted. He made an odd gesture with his empty hand, waggling two fingers—a signal, Sword realized, as the spearmen and archers formed into two lines.

Hand signals would be the only way to give orders, Sword knew, if those men did indeed have their ears plugged to defend them against the Leader's persuasive magic.

“I am meeting a friend, and did not wish our conversation to be overheard,” Boss replied, in a somewhat less stentorian tone. She stood by the gate, hands on her hips.

“Leader, it is our duty to
guard
that gate,” the man said. “We cannot do that if you send us away with your magic.”

“If I am here, the gate
needs
no guarding,” Boss replied.

“Nonetheless, we have our orders—the gate is to be guarded at all times, and none may pass through without the Wizard Lord's approval.”

“The Wizard Lord is claiming authority over the Uplanders now?”

“No, but you are no Uplander. You're the Leader of the Chosen.”

“And does the Wizard Lord claim authority over
me?”

The guardsman hesitated. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Sword, as well as the blade he held, and decided that this was getting out of hand. He raised his hand and made a grabbing gesture.

His dozen men began to move toward the Leader, lowering spears into thrusting position and drawing arrows from quivers. “We will talk when you . . . ” the commander began.

He did not finish the sentence; instead he stared in astonished horror as Sword sprang into action.

Sword had practiced with the sword for an hour of every day for almost
eight years now; he had been trained by his predecessor; and most importantly, he was magically bound to
ler
of muscle and steel who were sworn to make him the greatest swordsman alive. He did not hesitate; he did not even need to think as he went into action, beyond deciding that he was fighting to disarm, rather than to kill. He ran forward, blade raised, one man against a dozen.