The shatra was not surprised. He smiled as Valder came toward him and raised his own drawn sword with leisurely grace.
Seeing the sword, Valder knew that the shatra either had no magical weaponry or preferred not to use it. He swung Wirikidor at the northerner’s throat.
As he had expected, the shatra’s sword snapped up and deflected Wirikidor.
As he had not really expected, however, Wirikidor responded on its own, twisting around the intercepting blade and striking down diagonally, stabbing into the shatra’s shoulder. Something hissed strangely, and sparkles of yellow light spat from the wound before ordinary red blood appeared.
Valder stared in delight. He had drawn first blood from a shatra! Wirikidor would save him after all! He tried to relax and let the sword do his fighting for him.
Wirikidor, however, did not cooperate. It swung back from the shoulder wound as if forced back by a blow, though the shatra, as surprised as Valder, had reacted by stepping back and assuming a defensive posture, without making any attempt to knock Wirikidor away.
Startled, Valder looked at his blade, and the two of them stood, scarcely four feet apart, both warily watching Wirikidor.
Naturally, the shatra was the first to recover. He brought his blade darting down toward Valder’s groin, apparently not troubled at all by his bleeding shoulder.
Wirikidor did nothing, but Valder managed to fall back out of the blade’s path. He lost his balance as he did so and landed in a sitting position. As he struggled to regain his feet, the northerner’s sword flashed toward his throat.
Wirikidor flashed up to meet it, then beat it back and slipped around the shatra’s hand and into the inside of his elbow.
There was no sound this time as the blade penetrated, but a single yellow flash preceded the first oozing blood. Wirikidor seemed to hesitate. It did not revert to lifeless metal but rather paused in mid-air, seeming to vibrate slightly.
The shatra was not so indecisive. The two wounds to his sword-arm, while scarcely more than pricks, nevertheless seemed to have affected his control; accordingly, he shifted his stance and tossed his sword from his right hand to his left before renewing the attack. This gave Valder time enough to rise to one knee.
For a moment Valder was unable to follow what happened, even though his own right hand was a part of it. At first the shatra was attacking, and then he was defending as Wirikidor met every attack and retaliated, pressing home its own assault, all in a blur of motion far too fast for a mere human like Valder to follow, never allowing so much as the fraction of a second the shatra would have needed to step back out of reach. Blood flowed redly down the northerner’s black tunic and spattered the grass.
Then, abruptly, it was over, and Valder found himself still on one knee, not yet having managed to arise, but with his sword thrust through the northerner’s heart. The northerner’s own sword had fallen from his hand, the blade still gleaming and unstained.
Shatra, however, were not mere mortals, and the northerner was not dead. He looked down at the sword that had impaled him and reached for it with both hands. The right was unsteady.
Valder stared in horror. He had no doubt that Wirikidor had found the shatra’s heart; the blade was buried in the northerner’s chest just left of center, yet he still lived.
Perhaps, Valder thought, he had no heart. He was shatra, not human, after all.
Valder tried to pull his sword free, but human reactions could not match shatra; the hands grabbed Wirikidor’s blade.
Wirikidor writhed, ripping open the shatra’s chest, and that was the end of it; the hands fell away and the northerner toppled backward, sliding off the enchanted blade. He lay in a heap on the trampled grass.
Valder sank back to a sitting position and stared at the corpse, half-afraid that it would return to life. He could see the proof of its inhumanity in the gaping chest wound, where something smooth and slick and black gleamed, something that was definitely not human flesh or bone. He shuddered. On the outside the thing had seemed human enough — tall and pale and fair-haired, like most northerners.
Finally, he looked at Wirikidor, drooping in his hand. His wrist ached; his hand had been dragged along, willy-nilly, in the sword’s movements, and, as a result of moving so much faster than it was meant to do, his wrist was now very sore indeed.
The sword had saved him. It had seemed hesitant at first, but it had saved him. He wiped the blade clean on a corner of the dead northerner’s tunic, then sheathed it with a sigh of relief. It was good, very good indeed, to have it on his belt instead of naked in his hand.
He wondered why the sword had not immediately been enthusiastic. Surely, there could be no doubt that a shatra was a true warrior! The very name was said to be an old word for a great warrior — though apparently not in the same tongue as his sword’s name.
The sword had seemed to hesitate after each of the first two wounds it had inflicted, he thought, as he stared at the body of his enemy. Those two wounds had almost seemed to strike sparks; perhaps the blade had encountered a demonic part of the shatra and had been daunted by it. Shatra were half man and half demon; perhaps Wirikidor was not up to handling demons.
Valder decided that that made a certain amount of sense.
As he sat gathering his wits and regaining his breath, he heard a faint rustling and something that sounded like distant voices. His hand went to his sword hilt, but he resisted the temptation to draw; he did not want to be stuck carrying Wirikidor unsheathed again should he manage to avoid fighting. Carefully, he got to his feet and looked back along his tracks, expecting to see more northerners.
There were none.
The rustling continued, and the voices grew louder. Valder realized they were coming from the opposite direction. He turned around and saw half a dozen men advancing toward him through the grass; others were visible behind them, and still more on the horizon. His hopes shriveled within him. Wirikidor would handle the first one without any difficulty; but if his one-warrior-per-drawing theory was correct, he would be on his own after that, and he knew he would stand no chance at all against so many. He must have come upon the entire northern army!
“You there!” one of the advancing men called, in good Ethsharitic. “Stay right where you are!”
Valder glanced at the corpse at his feet. At least, he told himself, he had killed a shatra. That was something that not very many could say. He sighed, trying to decide whether to surrender or go down fighting; he was sure that he would die in either case. He did not want to die, but he could accept it if he had to.
The sun was sinking in the west, and its light was reddening; the shadows were long, and he had been alone, surrounded by enemies, for months. Perhaps that was why it took him so long to realize the true situation. It was not until the six men of the advance party came within a hundred yards that he recognized their uniforms.
The new arrivals were not northerners; they were an advance guard of the Ethsharitic army.
He had made it. Wirikidor had brought him home.
PART TWO
The Reluctant Assassin
CHAPTER 9
They took away his weapons, of course. Despite the trouble it had caused him with its mysterious behavior, he found himself reluctant to let Wirikidor go; it was not so much an attachment because it had saved his life as it was a wordless feeling of unease at the thought of someone else handling it.
The soldier who confiscated his weapons seemed reluctant to handle the sword, but obeyed his orders and accepted it along with Valder’s dagger, sling, and broken-stringed crossbow.