The next, three days later, was disastrous; Valder managed his part well enough, but it was a joint mission, involving himself, a wizard who provided magical transportation, and a cocky young thief, and the thief botched his part. Valder and the wizard made it back alive, though the wizard had a long scar to show for it and Wirikidor’s total was up to twenty-five, which did not include the intended target.
Twenty-five down, seventy-five to go — or seventy-three or seventy-seven. Valder almost began looking forward to his next task; if he kept on using Wirikidor at that rate, he would be forced to give up assassination in a matter of months. Dumery could not order him to draw the sword once the possibility of it turning on him became imminent. He would still be a soldier, but no longer an assassin; he could leave Wirikidor safely in its scabbard and fight with more ordinary weapons.
He had been resting up from that errand for a day or so when he was summoned, not to Captain Dumery’s little office, but to meet General Gor himself. With some trepidation, he went.
Gor of the Rocks was of medium height, but heavy, broad at shoulder and hip, with thick black hair and beard. He stood with his feet planted well apart, as if bracing himself, and wore the standard brown tunic and green kilt of the Ethsharitic army, his badges of rank hung in a bunch on a chain around his neck.
“Valder, is it?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Valder answered.
“From now on you take orders from me and nobody else; not Captain Dumery, not Kelder, not Azrad or Anaran or Terrek. You understand that? If I want you, I’ll send for you, but you take your orders for where to go and what to do when you’re outside this fortress from me and me alone. I don’t want you wasted on any more messes like that last one Dumery thought up. You did well enough — brought back Cardel, and the gods all know we need every wizard we can get at this point — but you shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Wasted seven out of a hundred!”
“Yes, sir,” Valder said with calm resignation.
“Good. You’re getting your food and pay on time?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. This war is finally getting somewhere, Valder, and we need all the help we can get, even swords with curses put on them by deranged hermits we can’t find, if they can be useful. You may not like what you’re doing, and I wouldn’t blame you. It’s not exactly glorious, sneaking in and killing people with an unbeatable magic sword — more like butchery than soldering, in a way. Still, remember, it’s useful. You’re doing something that may turn out to be essential.”
“Yes, sir.” He admired Gor’s estimate of his own thoughts and attempt to answer them. He did not agree with it; his objections were not rational but emotional and had nothing to do with glory or its lack. Still, the general was at least trying to help him accept his role, which was more personal attention than he had expected.
“Good luck, then. I’ll send someone when I need you.”
Valder nodded, bowed, and withdrew.
He was somewhat overwhelmed by General Gor, who had managed to cover everything essential within three minutes, including his little speech of encouragement. On consideration, though, assassination was not so much like butchery as like burglary, save that, rather than jewelry, Valder stole lives.
With Wirikidor’s talents and habits, it did seem very much like stealing.
It was ten days after that that Gor sent for him and gave him another assignment.
This one was planned very neatly and went off smoothly. That, Valder discovered, was to be the standard in his work for Gor. The general did not plan the assassinations himself, but he did review the plans and modify or reject them, if they were in any way flawed or incomplete.
From then on, it was a rare and difficult mission when Wirikidor was drawn more than once. The missions came less often, but seemed more important. Valder disposed of the Empire’s minister of transportation, assorted generals, and even a prince, as well as unidentified targets. Assignments came, on the average, one every three six-nights.
In between, he was free to roam the Fortress, spending Tandellin’s off-duty hours drinking and gaming with his old friend and spending most of the rest of the time either with women or alone in his bed, staring unhappily at the ceiling.
Winter came and went, and Valder continued his duties ever more reluctantly. The count of his victims mounted. He was horrified, after one exceptionally complex errand involving three related targets he took to be the entire family of a northern nobleman, to realize that he was no longer absolutely sure what the correct count was.
Occasionally, one of his brief liaisons developed into something more; the first was with a girl named Hinda, a few years younger than himself, who stayed in his room for almost a month before finding a more cheerful companion. She was followed by someone who called herself Alir; Valder suspected that that was not her real name, though the only reason for his suspicion was her excessively romantic nature. She seemed to be convinced that Valder was doing something very exciting and glorious whenever he was out of the Fortress; she finally departed when, even in bed, he refused to say just what it was that he did for General Gor.
He acquired friends of both sexes as well as lovers, though none were especially close. He grew to like Sarai of the Green Eyes, a vivacious girl of eighteen or so, and was glad when Tandellin included her in their evenings together. He encountered Kelder occasionally and found that, once the little man was no longer telling him who to kill, he was pleasant company. He came actively to dislike Captain Dumery, who seemed to resent having Valder removed from his authority. In this latter opinion he was joined wholeheartedly by several of the men in Tandellin’s barracks, but few agreed with his assessment of Kelder, who was generally considered to be a fool.
The summer of the year 4997 arrived, and, by the fourteenth of Summerheat, Valder’s count had hit eighty, give or take one. He lay alone in his room for a long time, staring at the vaulted ceiling and considering this.
He had killed eighty men. With the connivance of the old hermit and his enchanted sword, he had ended fourscore lives. Most soldiers never actually managed to kill anybody. In his six years of regular service, he had never been certain he had killed anyone. He had drawn blood on occasion in skirmishes or with his bow, but he had never known whether anyone he had struck had died.
Wirikidor, on the other hand, never left any room for doubt. He had killed eighty men and sent eighty souls to wherever northerners’ souls went — Hell, presumably. Those men might have been anything — good, evil, or somewhere between. He had no way of knowing anything but that they had been the enemies of the Holy Kingdom of Ethshar.
Why, he wondered, was it called a kingdom? So far as he knew, there had never been an actual king. He had never been very clear on just how the civilian government did operate, having spent his entire life under martial law in the lands outside the traditional boundaries where there was only the military, but he thought he would have heard of a king if one existed.
What would the gods think of a man who had killed eighty men? Would they condemn him as a murderer or praise him for doing so much to rid the world of the demon-guided enemy? Everyone agreed that the gods favored Ethshar over the Empire, but not all agreed on why they did not directly intervene in the war, even when petitioned. One school of thought maintained that they were, in fact, waging war on an entirely different level, but were being countered so exactly by the demons aiding the Northern Empire that no sign of this conflict penetrated to the world. Another school argued that the gods were so pure that they could not take, were actually incapable of taking, any aggressive action; that they found violence so repugnant that they could not bear to help even their chosen people in the violence of war. There were dozens of variations. If the gods were repulsed by violence, though, then had Valder damned himself by wielding Wirikidor?