“You’d best run, my boy. They want someone to blame-and you know you are responsible. You know it-and so do I.”
“I didn’t mean for all this to happen.” But Trav darted away as fast as his feet would take him, clutching the package Wyatt had forced upon him. The stumps of his toes, never well healed, turned bloody with his relentless flight, but he never stopped or looked behind him. If there was any pursuit, it fell behind. Slake was a world carried to the far side of the moon and beyond. His life was gone, his family, his friends, everything gone. He ran without knowing where his feet took him until he fell to the ground, exhausted.
It might have been the next morning or the next or even the next when he opened the package and realized where his destiny lay. The instant Trav touched the sword, he knew that Wyatt had told the truth.
On this plain, black hilt in bold relief there reared a small, white dragon, and the keen steel blade gleamed even in the pre-dawn darkness, catching the smallest ray of starlight and magnifying it until the weapon shone brightly. Even real jewels would have been superfluous. Trav, though no magician, could feel the latent power as he swung the Sword and listened to the shrill whine, a beautiful keening that tore at his senses and made him want to cry with pain. But he did not stop swinging the blade. Power flowed through him and grew until he knew he could stand against any beast, dragon or demon.
“Revenge,” Trav said, then fell silent. He shook his head and amended this. “Justice. It will be nothing more than justice.”
He whipped the blade, now feeling feather light, in a broad arc and created a new shrilling, a higher pitched wail that rose in frequency until he no longer heard it. But in the distance came a trumpeting reply he knew well.
“Piddling,” he whispered. Trav continued to whirl Dragonslicer about, the shrilling an allurement for his monster. When his arms began to tire, a deep rumbling approached and Trav saw his one-time pet.
Piddling stood half again as large as in the village, the diet of human flesh augmenting both bulk and height. The dragon moved with a litheness that astounded Trav.
Juliana. Their father.
“Come here. Piddling, come to me,” Trav urged. He swung Dragonslicer about his head and moved forward, his legs rubbery and feet bloody from the hard journey.
The dragon’s head bobbed about, its long black tongue snaking forth as it sampled the air. Tiny sparks ignited in its nostrils and flames leaped out, only to die a few meters short of Trav. He paid no heed to the dragon’s warning and surged forward, Dragonslicer moving with magic-driven power.
The blade touched Piddling’s chest scales and did not bounce off. The Sword cut deeply into the dragon’s body. Trav shoved as hard as he could, Dragonslicer gouging out a deep chunk of flesh. Piddling snorted, more in surprise than pain, and lowered his head, as if to butt Trav playfully.
The youth gripped the Sword of Heroes with both hands and drew the keening blade through a long swift arc that did not stop till it was more than halfway through the dragon’s neck, devastating flesh and bone. Piddling twisted and tried to escape, then dropped to the ground, mortally wounded. The huge beast twitched and kicked, and the fires of its nostrils faded to dull-burning embers.
“Got you,” Trav panted. “Damn you. You killed my father and sister and-”
Trav’s voice trailed off. An eyelid twitched and opened; one large yellow eye fixed on him. Piddling tried to reach out a taloned forelimb-as if, Trav thought, to ask a question. But the move did not get far before the dragon died.
For what seemed a long time, Trav could not move. He stood staring at the great corpse, which was already drawing insects. There were the pig-bugs Piddling had loved as a hatchling.
At last Trav turned away, conscious of the fact that Dragonslicer weighed down his arms and made them tremble. He hurled the blade from him. It spun through the air and landed point-down in the dirt a dozen paces away.
But Trav kept looking at the Sword. Slowly he realized the burden he had assumed. He hobbled to Dragonslicer and pulled it from the ground, gripping the black hilt with tired but steady hands. Now he must work to slay all dragons-as Wyatt had before him.
The Sword of Aren-Nath
Thomas Saberhagen
Aron felt the bite of the gray air in the openness where he perched. Head thrown back, he watched the gray clouds of the sky. They shifted and slid like silt heavy in the delta of the river of the gods. In a minute his head got light and he had to take his gaze downward for a moment to regain his balance. He locked his arms tighter about the Temple Icon and held to his spot. The Temple was the highest point of the town, and he sat upon the highest point of the Temple. But it was hard to feel too superior with the dark hill looking down. To his left the Grade rose steeply to the foot of the forest, where a mass of fat immovable trunks stood together in the fringes of a silent crowd of which no man could say he had seen the other side. But looking to the right and beneath him, Aron could see far. The soft earth fell gently downwards. Far down its side were only the gullies and rivulets made by the autumn rain. But closer up to where he perched he could see how the sparse walls of Aren-Nath were rooted in soft clay.
Thick splinters were starting to dig into the skin of his arm. He unclasped his hands for a moment to push back his hair and kicked his foot one last time along the wall below. Then he scrambled down awkwardly and stuck his feet tentatively back into the mud of the town.
When he came to the edge of the Templeyard, a black bird swooped down from the heights of forest. He followed its slow path downward through the town. A bell gave three plaintive cries, as if annoyed for being hit, and he heard the distant clamor of his friends bursting out of the Schoolroom. He was supposed to be with them.
As he walked he looked over the squat brick wall of the Templeyard and saw the bald head and upraised hands of Takani the Sage. When townsmen came to the Temple with furrowed brows, it was no god they sought, but the friendship and counsel of this short man.
But today the faces that greeted him were small and smooth. From the Master’s Stump, Takani told stories that no child of the town soon forgot. The Stump itself held a special meaning for each of them. It was the only sign that a tree had ever grown so far down the Grade, and the reason and time of its cutting remained mysterious.
Aron approached the garden and climbed up onto a bench so he could peek up over the wall. The buildings and the short quiet children who were gathered loosely about cast strange shadows in the faint daylight.
“…but the peril of the town aroused in his Sword the fury of the gods, and the Sword sang keenly, and Vassal Yordenko tightened his grip; and the Sword led his strokes into the creature’s spongy flesh; and the pieces of flesh flew out of the fray and burnt the flesh of the earth…”
Takani’s open, limp hands circled the air, drawing in his audience. His sparkling eyes glanced quickly at Aron, and he incorporated a beckon into the gestures of the song. But as Aron turned to come to the garden gate, the boys of the town swept through the street behind him and pulled him in their wake.
They ran so fast he knew that there was something they ran to see. He ran fast behind them, but couldn’t catch up. He watched their tiny, mud-covered bodies slipping and tumbling their ways Earthward. Those in back were not looking where they were going, but turning and shouting to one another as they ran.
Aron’s friend Klin led the pack, his head fixed forward in determination. Klin was always their leader, setting them into willful motion with a few quick threats or a few kind words. Klin would stand up to the meanest adults in the town and play tricks on anyone, even sometimes Takani.