“My Sword is gone!” one of the distant voices bellowed, expressing utter outrage.
“And mine!” another answered, yelling anguish.
The protest swelled into a chorus, each with the same complaint. Keyes could not interpret the wind-blown, shouted words. But he needed only a moment to deduce their meaning. Mars acting in the Council’s name and with its authority had assaulted a man who held Doomgiver, by trying to deprive the man of his Sword, and intending to fling that Sword away-and Doomgiver had exacted its condign retaliation. The Council of Divinities had lost all of their Swords instead. The great majority of Vulcan’s armory had been flung magically to the four winds, and lay scattered now across the world.
The uproar mounted, as more deities realized the truth. A number of gods at no great distance were violently cursing the name of Mars, and the Wargod was not one to let them get away with that. He listened for a moment, then rose in his divine wrath and mounted swiftly from the cave.
His mind was now wholly occupied with a matter of overriding importance-the names the others called him. So he had forgotten Stonecutter, which still lay where he had dropped it.
Several more hours had passed, and the westering sun was low and red, before Demeter returned to the cave in which she had hidden the Sword of Justice. She had wanted to get it out of the way for a time, so that her colleagues should not nag her with questions when they saw her carrying a Sword.
Demeter had spent most of the day thinking the matter over and had come to a decision. The Game still did not greatly appeal to her, and it would be best if she gave Doomgiver to someone else.
On her approach to the cave, Demeter observed the tracks of a pair of riding-beasts, both coming and going, and when she looked in over the edge of the deep hole, she beheld a set of crude steps, more like a ladder than a stair, freshly and cleanly hewn out of one solid wall. Human beings! No other creatures would carve steps.
Rising wind whined through the surrounding rock formations. The only living things now in the cave were a helplessly immortal demon, strangely trapped in a lower pit, and a few mortally wounded bats.
No need to look in the place where she had hidden her Sword, to know that it was gone. Well, why not? Let it go. Perhaps the humans needed Justice more than any of Demeter’s divine colleagues did.
Perpetually at odds with each other as they were, the members of the Council needed some time to realize that their terrible Blades had been scattered across a continent, perhaps across the whole earth, among the swarms of contemptible humans. As that realization gradually took hold, the gods met the crisis in their usual fashion, by convening to enjoy one of their great, wrangling, all-but-useless arguments.
The only fact upon which all could agree was that their Swords had all been swept away from them. All the Swords, that is, except for Shieldbreaker, which remained, as far as could be determined, immune to the power of any other Sword, and thus would not have been affected by Doomgiver’s blow.
But whichever divinity still possessed the Sword of Force was obviously refusing to reveal the fact, doubtless for fear it would be taken away by some unarmed opponent.
For good or ill, the Great Game was off to a roaring start.
Woundhealer
Walter Jon Williams
The horn echoed down the long valley, three bright rising notes, and it seemed to Derina-frozen like an animal in the bustle of the court-as if the universe halted for a long moment of dread. A cold hard fist clenched in her stomach.
Her father was home.
She went up the stone stair by the old gatehouse and watched as her father and his little army, back from the Princes’ Wars, wound up the mountain spur toward her. The cold canyon wind howled along the old flint walls, tangled Derina’s red-gold hair in its fingers. The knuckles on her small fists were white as she searched the distant column for sign of her father and brothers.
Derina’s mother and sister joined her above the gatehouse. Edlyn carried her child, the two of them wrapped in a coarse wool shawl against the wind.
“Pray they have all come home safe,” said Derina’s mother, Kendra.
Derina, considering this, thought she didn’t know what to pray for, if anything, but Edlyn looked scorn at her mother, eyes hard in her expressionless face.
When Lord Landry rode beneath the gate he looked up at them, cold blue eyes gazing up out of the weatherbeaten moon face with its bristle of red hair and wide, fierce nostrils. As her father’s eyes met hers, the knot in Derina’s stomach tightened. Her gaze shifted uneasily to her brothers, Norward the eldest, gangly, myopic eyes blinking weakly, riding uneasily in the saddle as if he would rather be anywhere else; and Reeve, a miniature version of his father, red-haired and round-shouldered, looking up at the women above the gate as if sizing up the enemy.
Derina’s mother and sister bustled down the lichen-scarred stair to make the welcome official. Derina stayed, watching the column of soldiers as it trudged up to the old flint-walled house, watched until she saw her father’s woman, Nellda, riding with the other women in the wagons. Little darkhaired Nelly was sporting a black eye.
Mean amusement twisted Derina’s mouth into a smile. She ran down the stair to join her family.
Nelly was halfway down the long banquet table and her eyes never left her plate. Before the campaign started she’d sat at Landry’s arm, above his family.
Good, Derina thought. Let her go back to the mean little mountain cottage where Lord Landry had found her.
The loot had been shared out earlier, the common soldiers paid off. Now Landry hosted a dinner for his lieutenants, the veterans of his many descents onto the plains below, and the serjeants of his own household.
The choicest bit of booty was Lord Landry’s new sword, won in the battle, a long magnificent patterned blade, straight and beautiful. Norward had found the thing, apparently, but his father had taken it for his own.
“In the hospital!” Landry called. His voice boomed out above the din in the long hall. “He found the sword in the hospital, when we were cutting our way through their camp! It must have belonged to one of their sick-well,” bellowing a laugh, “we helped their shirkers and malingerers on to judgment, so we did!”
Derina gazed at her untouched meal and let her father’s loud triumph roll past unheeded. This war sounded like all the others, a loud recitation of cunning and twisting diplomacy and the slaughter of helpless men. Landry did not find glory in battle, but rather in plunder: he would show up late to the battlefield, after giving both sides assurances of his allegiance, and then be the first to sack the camp of the loser. Sometimes he would loot the camp without waiting for the battle to be decided.
“What does Norward need with a blade such as this?” he demanded. “His third campaign, and as yet unblooded.”
“M-my beast fell,” Norward stammered. He turned red and fought his disobedient tongue. “T-tripped among the, the tent lines.”
“Ta-ta-tripped in the ta-ta-tents!” Landry mocked. “Your riding’s as defective as your speech. As your blasted weak eyes. Can’t kill a man? — I’ll leave my land to a son who can.” He gave a savage grin. “I was a younger son-but did it stop me?”
Reeve smirked into his cup. Lord Landry had been loud in the praise of his younger son’s willingness to run down and slay the helpless boys and old men who’d guarded the enemy camp.
Reeve was strong, Derina thought, and Norward weak. What had her own feelings to do with it?
Landry put the sword in its sheath, then hung it behind his chair, above the great fireplace, in place of his old blade. He turned and looked over his shoulder at his family. “None of you touch it, now!”