The room was inhabited by a small, white-haired man who invited them to sit down. He himself was perched on a stool, so that, when Valder and Kelder took the two low chairs provided, he could, short as he was, still look down on his visitors.
“You’re Valder?” he asked. His voice was thin but steady.
Valder nodded.
“That’s Wirikidor?”
“Yes,” Valder said.
“It works the way Darrend says it does?”
“It seems to.”
“Good. Then we want you to kill the Northern Emperor.”
Valder stared up at the old man in silent astonishment. Kelder started and said, “You’re not serious!”
The white-haired man shrugged. “Oh, well, maybe I’m not. If we can locate him, however, I think this man might be our best shot. After all, that sword is like nothing anyone has ever had before, so far as I know, and they probably have no defense against it. They can defend against just about everything else we throw at them!” He sighed. “Unfortunately, we can’t locate him. Never could. So we’ll be sending you against anyone important we can locate, Valder. Any problem with that?”
“Ah,” Valder said, trying to give himself time to think.
“You know, I assume, that the sword is going to turn on me eventually, after a certain number of drawings.”
“Yes, of course — but you have a long way yet to go. Darrend told me that it would take a hundred or so deaths before it could kill you, and you’ve only used up what, maybe five?”
“Seventeen,” Valder corrected him.
“So many? Ah, well, that still leaves us with eighty-three, give or take a couple.”
Valder was desperately unhappy at the sound of this, but could not think how to phrase a protest. Before he could work out what to say, the white-haired man raised a hand in dismissal. “I’ll call you when we need you,” he said. “My secretary will tell you where to go.”
Valder started to speak, but Kelder shushed him and hurried him out of the room.
CHAPTER 16
While Valder remained inside the fortress walls, life as General Gor’s assassin was not unpleasant. The food was good and plentiful, where the meals in General Karannin’s camp had not been, although a far larger portion of it was seafood than Valder might have liked. The floors were dry stone, rather than dirt or mud, and most of them had some sort of covering, whether carpets, rush matting, or at least strewn straw, so that they were not unpleasantly cold and hard underfoot. He had been assigned his own little room deep in the bowels of the stronghold, with a tiny slit of window letting in air and, for a few hours a day when the sun was in the right part of the sky, light. He could not see out of the opening, which was eight or nine feet from the floor, but he judged it to be facing southwest.
To keep him from being called upon for menial duties, he had been issued new clothing. His worn and weathered old uniform was disposed of, and he was instructed that from now on he was to wear the gray-and-black tunic and black kilt that indicated the wearer to be performing some special service for General Gor. This outfit was more practical for sneaking about at night and had a certain drastic elegance, but Valder thought it uncomfortably reminiscent of northern uniforms; he was reluctant to be seen in it until he had observed other people in the Fortress, including Kelder, similarly attired.
He quickly discovered that the new uniform had one very definite advantage: it attracted women. Valder, unsure just what special services Gor was in the habit of demanding, was not sure why this was so, but it was undeniable that women who had scarcely glanced at him in his old green kilt and battered breastplate now stared at him with hungry eyes and looked for excuses to speak with him. Since he did not know when he might be sent off on a mission that could easily end in capture or mutilation, he refused to make any sort of long-term arrangements, but did spare an hour now and then to accompany a particularly eager or attractive young woman back to her quarters.
He hoped that such women were not disappointed, that the black-and-gray uniform had not led them to expect something more than an ordinary man.
He had been in the Fortress for almost a day before he managed to find Tandellin. The youth’s barracks was nowhere near the areas Valder found himself frequenting; but once he had taken care of the minimal necessities of settling in, he took the time to track down his former bunkmate.
Tandellin had been permanently posted to the Fortress as part of the garrison; he stood a watch on the ramparts for six hours a day and was on call as a messenger and errand boy for six more. Calls came frequently. Still, he was able to find time for a quiet drink and conversation with Valder in a seldom-used storeroom on the evening of the day following Valder’s arrival.
When they had exchanged a few polite phrases, Valder asked, “How are things going? Still running errands for that wizard?”
“Sharassin? No.”
The answer seemed uncharacteristically brief. “What happened?” Valder asked.
Tandellin grinned crookedly. “If you must know, she found out where I had been spending some of my time when I was off duty and she wasn’t. She didn’t take it well. Just as well; she was transferred out a few days ago, anyway.”
Valder grinned back. “So where were you spending that time — or wasn’t it always the same place?”
“Oh, it was the same place all right. Her name is Sarai of the Green Eyes.”
Valder waited, but Tandellin did not continue. “What’s this?” he asked. “No description? No suggestion that I really must meet her? Could there be something special about Sarai of the Green Eyes?”
Tandellin’s grin turned sheepish. “Maybe there is.”
“Ah, well, congratulations, my boy, if it’s true.” Valder was genuinely pleased. He was a great believer in love and marriage, or so he had always said — though he had, as yet, no particular inclination in that direction for himself. It delighted him to see Tandellin showing signs of settling down, giving up the wildness of youth. The world needed more quietly settled people, he was convinced, something to provide stability and offset the chaos of the eternal war.
That thought brought to mind his own part in the war, systematically trying to produce chaos among the enemy by killing the men who kept order. He wondered whether any northerners were attempting similar missions in Ethshar. If so, they did not appear to be very successful, since the approximate whereabouts of the commanders, Azrad, Gor, Terrek, and Anaran, were common knowledge, yet no assassins had killed any of them.
Given a choice, Valder decided, he would much have preferred to be maintaining order in Ethshar, rather than creating chaos in the Empire — but since acquiring Wirikidor he had had no choice. Wirikidor was very much an agent of chaos, it seemed, and his superiors would not allow him to keep the blade sheathed and ignore it, as he wanted to. Some time soon, when they had found a target worthy of him, he would once again be sent out to wield Wirikidor. That took a great deal of the pleasure out of life in the Fortress.
It was three days after his arrival that Captain Dumery’s secretary found him and led him to his first briefing.
That first mission went well; he was able to kill the enemy general they had chosen quickly and without killing anyone else. That brought his total to eighteen.