The Ninth Talisman (36 page)

“I was?” Lore replied. “I don't remember anything of the sort.”

“But you . . . ” Sword frowned. “You don't remember it?”

“No.”

“Oh. Then he was lying.” Sword glanced at Boss. “That's not good.”

“If you're really sure I heard him say it, then yes, he must have been lying,” Lore agreed. “All the same, I personally would be satisfied if he simply agreed to stay in Barokan and promised not to harm anyone else, or to pry any further into this talisman business. Killing him would not be popular. And frankly, I
like
him.”

“I'm not eager to kill anyone,” Boss replied. “I was thinking of a letter, not an arrowhead or sword point. We tell him that we want an explanation for the dead wizards, and that his oath requires him to be able to use his magic, and we go from there. If he says, ‘Oh, I'm terribly sorry, I didn't realize,' and agrees to stay down here and leave the remaining wizards alone, then that's fine, for the present—though of course we'll keep an eye on his actions to make sure he's behaving himself. If he won't cooperate, we'll remove him.”

“So I'm to pass up the opportunity to shoot him on the way
down
the cliffs, tempting as it might be,” Bow said, “but if I see him going back up the cliffs, I'm free to take him down?”

“More or less,” Boss acknowledged. “But I'm not sure I'm any more eager to see him killed than Lore is. As Sword and Lore have both told us, people love him.”

“And for another thing,” Sword said, “his successor may be worse—the pool of eligible candidates must be pretty small.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Boss said. “Why are there so few wizards left, anyway? In the old songs and stories there are hundreds of them.”

“There are several reasons,” Lore said. “Probably the most important is that wizards have such a bad reputation that they no longer attract competent apprentices. Nobody likes wizards, so nobody wants to be one. And among the wizards themselves, the masters worry about
training someone who goes rogue, or is appointed Wizard Lord only to become a Dark Lord, so they're very, very selective, and most applicants are deemed unsuitable. Many wizards,
most
wizards, live out their lives without ever training a single apprentice, so for centuries, their numbers have been dwindling.”

“Have
they.” Despite the phrasing, Boss clearly did not intend this as a question.

Lore continued, “The current Wizard Lord said that one reason he wanted to set up a system that doesn't use magic is because he believes in another century or so there wouldn't be
any
wizards to run things the old way, in any case.”

“That's . . . interesting. It explains a great deal,” Boss said thoughtfully. “So he thinks he's just hurrying the inevitable.”

“But we aren't going to allow it, are we?” Bow asked.

“I don't know,” Boss said, “but we aren't going to let the Wizard Lord make these changes unilaterally. If he wants to change the basic rules we operate by, then he needs to consult the Chosen and the Council of Immortals first.”

That sounded sensible to Sword, but at the same time he did not think the Wizard Lord would agree to it; Artil's opinion of his fellow wizards was not particularly high.

“He accepts messages, doesn't he?” Boss demanded.

Lore hastened to assure her that the Wizard Lord did indeed receive and personally read a great many messages at the Summer Palace.

“Then we'll write a polite little note asking him to return to Barokan for a consultation,” she said. “We'll set a reasonable deadline. We'll be completely reasonable.”

“And what if
he
doesn't think it's reasonable?” Sword asked.

Boss shrugged. “We are the Chosen, and we know our duty.”

“You killed the last one,” Bow said, looking at Sword. “Now it's my turn.”

“If it's necessary,” Boss said.

“You're more than welcome to do any killing that has to be done,” Sword said. “Yes, I killed the last one, and it was . . . not something I'd care to repeat.”

“Regrets? Nightmares?” Boss asked, looking him in the eye.

“No,” Sword said.

“Then what?”

Sword looked at her for a long moment, then answered truthfully. “A sense of futility, actually—and of anticlimax. Here we are facing a new Wizard Lord who may be going dark; what, then, did we accomplish by killing the last one? And it took months of fighting our way across Barokan to reach the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills, but my final confrontation with him, the meeting that led to his death, lasted only seconds, not even as long as it takes to tell you this. The
ler
guided my hand so surely he stood no chance at all, so it felt not so much like honorable combat as like swift murder, and there is nothing I nor anyone else can do now that will undo any of it. A man is dead who deserved to die, and I am left feeling—almost nothing, only the certainty that I should feel more.”

“Indeed,” Boss said, eyeing him carefully.

“Is that why you didn't kill any of those guardsmen?” the Seer asked over Sword's shoulder.

Startled, he turned to her. “No, Azir,” he said. “I didn't kill any of them because there was no
need
to kill any of them; they had done nothing to justify killing them. They were doing their job, not harming innocents.”

“I like to think of myself as an innocent,” Boss said wryly.

“And they didn't harm you,” Sword said. “Their commander signaled them to do something, probably to capture you, but none had yet touched you, or threatened you. I wished them no ill; I simply wanted to make clear to them that they were outmatched.”

“There were
twenty-five
of them!” the Seer exclaimed. “You were
knocking arrows out of the air!”

“I am the world's greatest swordsman,” Sword replied. “The Chosen Swordsman, defender of Barokan, gifted by the
ler
of muscle and steel with the skill to defeat any foe. And I had surprise on my side, as well. Disarming them was easy. I probably should have done it without drawing blood, but I wanted to discourage them quickly, and prevent them from regrouping before I got to them all. A cut on the arm or hand lets a man know he has been bested without making him feel he is fighting for his life. If they had had time to consider their situation and had
come at me sensibly I might have found myself facing real volleys of arrows, too many to block.”

“You seem to have given this some thought,” Boss remarked.

“I have spent an hour every day for eight years practicing my swordsmanship and preparing for every eventuality—mentally as well as physically.” He shrugged. “I assume you have given some thought to the best ways to use
your
magic. Especially after your memories of how it could be abused returned.”

“I have,” Boss admitted.

“Mine . . . doesn't work like that,” the Seer said. “It's not under my conscious control—I just
know
certain things.”

“As do I,” Lore said. “When I'm in Barokan I remember every true thing I have ever been told, and it takes no skill, no thought, no planning—the information is simply there.”

“I practice and plan,” Bow said.

“I hear what I hear, whether I will or not,” Babble said, “but what I say, to whom and to what, is mine to decide. I do no planning, give it no thought, but do as seems best when the time is upon me.”

“I am always the Beauty,” the Beauty said, “but I can control the pitch of my voice and the tilt of my head to strengthen or weaken my effect on men. It takes no real practice.”

Sword nodded—and noticed that the eighth member of the party had not spoken. He looked at Snatcher.

“Oh, I practice,” the Thief said, acknowledging Sword's gaze. “And I plan. And I keep my mouth shut about it—people have an entirely understandable distaste for thieves.”

No one had a good response to that, and for a moment the eight were silent; then Boss clapped her hands together and said, “I suppose writing the note is
my
job this time. Beauty, where do you keep pen, ink, and paper?”

“I could hit him,” Bow said calmly, as he stared at the line of tiny figures making their way down the cliff face. One of them wore red robes. “I'm sure of it.”

“I'm sure you could, too,” Sword said, “but we don't want to kill him.”

“Speak for yourself;
I
want to kill him.”

“Well, don't. Not yet.”

It had been almost a month since Boss had sent a message up to the Wizard Lord, and half as long since she had received a reply saying that he would be happy to meet and discuss matters when he returned to Barokan. The Leader had made plain her displeasure with the delay, but had not deemed it sufficient to allow the Archer his head.

“Talk first,” she had said. “We can kill him later if we need to. If we kill him first, talking isn't likely to do much good.”

So they had waited, crowded into the Beauty's little house, running short on funds and food and getting on each other's nerves, until at last rumors reached them that the Wizard Lord's household was preparing to leave the Summer Palace for Winterhome.

And one morning not long after, the Seer had suddenly announced, “He's back! He's on his way down the cliff.” Bow and Sword had hurried out into the street to watch the Wizard Lord's descent, while Boss and Lore and Azir made their way to the Winter Palace to arrange an audience.

“I really think we should just kill him now,” Bow said. “If we wait, we're giving him a chance to make it difficult. Remember last time, slogging halfway across Barokan in the rain?”

“I remember,” Sword said. “But Winterhome is not the Galbek Hills. This Wizard Lord isn't some murderous lunatic living out in the
wilderness; he's a sensible man trying to make the world a better place. And people love him.”

“Maybe,” Bow said. “But he kills wizards, and he may have other surprises for us, as well. Remember the traps in the cellars beneath the last one's tower?”

“Of course I do,” Sword said, slightly startled; usually Bow did not care to remind anyone of those traps, since he had walked right into one of them and been caught. He had only been freed after Sword slew the Wizard Lord.

“Can you honestly tell me that you are
absolutely sure
there aren't traps like that under this Winter Palace of his?”

Sword blinked, and turned his attention from the tiny figures wending their way down the cliff to the graceful facade of the Winter Palace. He had been inside there, of course, had even spent a day or two living in it when he first arrived in Winterhome, but he knew he had only seen a small portion of it, and that portion had not included any of the cellars.

He remembered how very cautious Artil had been about the Chosen, demanding that Sword be stripped naked before being allowed into his presence. And there had been his determined and lethal inquiries about the possibly nonexistent ninth member of the Chosen. Clearly, the Wizard Lord, no matter how good his intentions might be, feared that the Chosen might want to remove him, and if Lore had told the truth, then Artil did not intend to resign if asked. He presumably intended to fight to the death.

And equipping his soldiers with earplugs demonstrated that he had given some thought to just how he might counter the Chosen, and had implemented some of those ideas.

With all that in mind, Artil
might
have built traps and dungeons in there; it wasn't by any means out of the question.

“No, I'm not absolutely sure,” he admitted.

“Then maybe he's not so very different from the last Dark Lord after all, eh? Maybe he's just better at disguising his evil schemes. Maybe he's trying to lure us in, make us trust him.”

“Then he wouldn't have taken this long to come back down and talk
to us,” Sword retorted. “Or let us find out so easily about some of the things he's done.”

“Ah, he doesn't want to be too obvious about it, that's all.”

“How did you ever
stand
living under the Lord of Spilled Basket?” Sword asked, referring to the Wizard Lord who had preceded the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills. “He never did anything that even the most suspicious mind could point to as indicating evil intent.”

“But he was an old man,” Bow said. “I knew he wasn't the one I was destined to kill.”

“What makes you so sure you're destined to kill
anyone?
None of the
other
Archers ever killed a Wizard Lord.”

“Well, then it's our turn, isn't it? Four Swordsmen, a Beauty, and a Leader have killed Dark Lords—isn't it about time someone got some use out of the world's greatest archer?”

“You're being ridiculous,” Sword said, turning away.