“My man down in the hole? I think he will. Oh, not intending to use it on us!” Mars laughed. “I doubt he’ll be that arrogant. But there are some vermin down there, bats and such, that are probably bothering him already. He’ll want the best tool he can get to fight them off.”
Hermes shook his head. “Those flesh-eating bats? They may have finished him by now.”
Mars frowned. “You think so? He was carrying a little dagger of his own.”
“But getting back to this Sword, Soulcutter-what about the effect on us? We’ll be nearby, won’t we, when your subject draws the weapon?”
“Bah, nothing we can’t overcome, I’m sure. And I understand that Soulcutter’s effect on humans, whatever it may be precisely, spreads comparatively slowly.”
Keyes continued to listen intently when the two voices stopped, not far above him. He was startled, and immediately suspicious, when a moment later he heard some object, obviously dropped by one of the beings above, come providentially bouncing and sliding down into the cave, landing with a thump practically at his feet.
Without loosening his grip on the hilt already in his possession, he groped his way forward to where he could put his free hand on the fallen object, and identify it as another sheathed Sword.
Only now, it seemed, did the pair of gods above really take notice of the man who was trapped below, and of the sprinkling of dead and mortally wounded bats around him. Only now did they observe that their subject was already holding a drawn Sword.
Mars’s companion pointed down, in outrage. “Look at that! Where in the world did he get that?”
And Mars himself, gone red-faced, bellowed: “You down there! Drop that Sword at once! It doesn’t belong to you, you have no business using it!”
Keyes needed all his resolution to keep from yielding to that shouted command. But instead of dropping his Sword, he raised its point in the general direction of his enemies, as if saluting them, and turned his blind face up to them at the same time-let them do their damnedest. He had naught to lose.
He called out, in a voice that quavered only once: “You have just given me another Sword-why?”
“Impudent monkey!” the Wargod shouted back. “Draw it, and find out!”
They have given me Soulcutter now-it is the only Blade one would give to an enemy.
But trapped as he was, his life already forfeit, Keyes saw no other course than to accept the gamble. Silently he bent again, swiftly he pulled the second Sword out of its sheath. Doubly armed, he straightened to confront his tormentors.
The sun was shining fully on the man’s face, and in an amazing moment he was once again able to see the sun. Whatever magic spell had blinded him was abruptly broken, and his lids came open easily. His eyes were streaming now with pent-up tears, but through the tears he could see the two gods on the high rim of the cave.
He could see the two tall, powerful figures quite clearly enough to tell that they were gods-and also that they were stricken, paralyzed with Soulcutter’s poisonous despair, turned back on them by Doomgiver. The strands of their own magic had come undone. Keyes could recognize Mars, who’d captured him, and now Mars abruptly sat down on the rim of the pit, for all the world like a human who suddenly felt faint. The Wargod slumped in that position, legs dangling, for a long moment staring at nothing. Then he buried his face in his hands.
The other god-Keyes, seeing the winged sandals, now knew Hermes-took no notice of this odd behavior, but slowly turned his back on the cave and his companion, and went stumbling off across a rocky hillside. Now and then Hermes put out one hand to grope before him, like a blind man in the sun. In a moment his mighty figure had vanished from Keyes’s field of view.
Doomgiver had prevailed! The Sword of Justice had turned Soulcutter’s dark power back upon the one who would have used it against Keyes, while immunizing the mere man who had been the intended target. Both gods on the rim of the pit had been caught in the dark force, as must everyone else in range of its slow spread.
Keyes almost cried out in triumph, but the hard truth restrained him. He was still a prisoner. His own eyes, searching the smooth cave walls, now confirmed that neither Lo-Yang nor Mars had lied about the hopelessness of his trying to climb out.
He was beginning to feel dizzy, and ill-at-ease, a normal reaction in one holding any two naked Swords simultaneously. Now he could easily see the symbol, a hollow white circle, on Doomgiver’s hilt. To keep himself from collapsing he had no choice but to put away the other Blade, the unmarked one. He slid the Sword of Despair back into its sheath, and his rising dizziness immediately abated.
In this case, at least, Doomgiver’s power had been dominant over that of another Sword. There was at least a chance that some of the other Swords might also prove inferior to Doomgiver. That anyone hurling Farslayer would be himself skewered by the Sword of Vengeance. That Sightblinder’s user would see a terrifying apparition, but would himself remain vulnerably visible. That the wielder of the Mindsword would be condemned to worship his would-be victim. And Coinspinner’s master would suffer excruciatingly bad luck.
But of Shieldbreaker’s overall dominance there could be no doubt. And the unanswered question still gnawed at Keyes: Which god had Shieldbreaker? Or might that Sword have somehow come into the hands of another human?
After Soulcutter was muzzled again, a minute or two passed before Mars, who was still sitting on the rim of the cave, took his hands down from his face. The Wargod’s expression was blank, and he appeared to be sweating heavily. His great body swayed, and Keyes thought for a moment that the god was going to topple into the pit. But instead Mars, taking no notice of the man below, shifted his weight and turned. Quietly, on all fours, he crawled away from the cave’s mouth and out of sight.
Keyes knew that Soulcutter’s effects ought to linger for several days, at least, in humans. Probably the stunned gods would recover somewhat more quickly, but how soon they might come back to deal with him, Keyes did not know. When they did, he would have to risk drawing the Sword of Despair again-even though Doomgiver might not protect him next time. This time Soulcutter, though in his own hands, had really been a weapon directed against him by another.
What now?
Pacing nervously about in the confined space, trying desperately to imagine what he might do next, Keyes paused to look down into the hole from whence the demon’s muffled groans still rose. Far below, almost lost in shadow, something moved. Something as big as a milk-beast, but truly hideous to look at, like a mass of diseased entrails. In a moment Keyes realized that Korku on attacking him had suffered Doomgiver’s justice-the demon had promptly found himself folded painfully into his own gut, in effect turned inside out. When that had happened, the self-bound and helpless thing, still almost immortal, had gone rolling away to plunge into the deeper pit.
Now the creature in the pit, perhaps sensing that the man was near, was turning its muffled, barely audible threats to equally faint pleas and extravagant bargainings for help. Keyes made no answer. Probably he could not have done anything, if he had wanted to, to relieve the demon’s doom.
Some minutes later, Mars, who was still in the process of gradually regaining his wits, and his sense of divine purpose, was having speech again with Hermes. They were standing fifty meters or so from the cave.
“What happened?” demanded Hermes, who seemed to be recovering somewhat more rapidly.
Mars stood blinking at him. Then he proclaimed defiantly: “To me? Nothing. A little test of the Sword called Soulcutter. As you see, there was no great harm done.”
His companion stared at him in disbelief. “No great harm? We both of us were stupefied! You should say that nothing happened to your human in the cave-except that his sight was restored, when your magic came undone. Oh, and he still has his Sword-no, now he has two of them!”