If he had, it was far too late to do anything about it now. He wished that he had never drawn the sword or that he had never told anyone how he had come to kill the shatra on the plain that day.
His thoughts were interrupted by someone shouting in the corridor outside his room; the words were unintelligible, and he tried to ignore the noise.
He was, he told himself, a young man, scarcely twenty-three. He owned a magic sword that would, supposedly, prevent him from dying indefinitely. Yet, less than a year after acquiring this wonderful weapon, less than a fourth of the way through his term of service in the military, he had used up four-fifths of his ownership of the sword.
That, he told himself, was stupid. It was idiotic to go on squandering his life in this manner. His life was tied to his ownership of the sword; with each killing a part of his life slipped away. His superiors were forcing him to throw it away.
He would refuse, he promised himself, to continue doing so. As politely as he could, he would tell General Gor at the first opportunity that he, Valder of Kardoret, had done his duty, contributed his fair share to the war effort, and would no longer be available for assassinations. After all, they could not kill him; only Wirikidor could do that.
The shouting in the corridor was still going on, and now someone was pounding on his door. Annoyed, he rose and lifted the latch.
Tandellin tumbled in, panting. “Valder, have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“The enemy has broken through on the eastern front, clear into the homeland! Old Ethshar itself is under attack by demons, they say, real demons, not just shatra! General Terrek is dead, and the Kingdom is in retreat. Everyone is to be ready to leave on a moment’s notice; the wizards are getting spells ready, and we expect to be sent to the new front at any time.”
“Demons?”
“Oh, there are hundreds of stories about them! There’s definitely something new happening!”
“Demons.” Wirikidor would be of no use against demons. He knew of nothing that would be — but then, he did not know what wouldn’t be, other than his own sword with its insistence on killing men. Nobody, so far as he knew, had ever actually fought a demon before. Even the very few Ethsharitic demonologists, or the theurgists who worked both sides, never directly fought the demons they conjured up, but instead controlled them through complex magical restraints and elaborate prayers that only the original summoner could use. If the northerners had really unleashed demons on Ethshar, the war might well end very soon — perhaps with no victor at all.
This, he thought, would be a good time for the gods to intervene if, by some chance, they had been waiting for the right moment, like the magicians in the songs who always appeared in the last stanza to rescue the doomed heroes.
He strapped on his sword and headed for General Gor’s office to see if he had any orders. This was not, he knew, a good time to try resigning from his job as an assassin.
CHAPTER 17
Valder sat in the bare stone antechamber feeling stupid. Naturally, Gor had been besieged with questions, advice, requests, demands, and information; he had no time to spare just now for an assassin. Valder knew that, had he given it any thought, he would have realized as much. What could an assassin do in a battle against demons?
Having come to offer his services, however, he was not about to slink back to his room. Instead he sat and waited while officers and messengers ran in and out, so that he might be ready if summoned and so he might catch a few bits of information in passing. All the magicians in the Fortress and some brought from elsewhere were busily gathering information — the wizards by various spells, the theurgists by prayer, the witches and the lone sorcerer by arcane methods Valder did not understand. Gor’s two demonologists had utterly failed to make contact with anything, or so rumor had it, which seemed to confirm that quite literally all the demons of Hell were loose in the east.
As people hurried in and out, Valder could catch snatches of conversation, and every so often someone would pause to rest, or be asked to wait, and might be willing to answer a hurried question. Nobody seemed very sure of what was happening. A steady babble poured out through the door of the inner chamber, but Valder could make sense of none of it. Then, abruptly, the babble died. In the sudden silence as the echoes from the stone walls faded, Valder heard a single voice exclaim, “Gods!”
He heard questioning voices raised, and the silence was washed away as quickly as it had come by officers and men demanding to know what had silenced the magicians.
Valder could not make out the reply and was astonished by an outburst of wild cheering. He could stand it no longer. He rose and marched up to the door.
“What’s happening?” he demanded of the guard posted there.
“I’m not sure, sir,” the soldier said, deferring to Valder’s special uniform.
“You couldn’t hear what was said, what started the cheering?”
“I’m not sure, sir — I think he said something about a counterattack, that the gods themselves had counterattacked. I don’t really know. The gods couldn’t do that, though, could they?” The soldier’s voice was pleading and uncertain, though he struggled to maintain the properly stolid expression a sentry was expected to have.
“I don’t know,” Valder said. “I’m no theologian.” The whole affair seemed unreal. He knew very well that gods and demons existed, had always existed, but, aside from the halfbreed shatra, they had always been aloof from human affairs, intervening in the world only when summoned by elaborate invocations, and even then usually offering little more than advice and the occasional petty miracle. Had this somehow changed? The whole universe seemed to be turning topsy-turvy around him.
Valder found himself wondering whether perhaps he wasn’t lying delirious in a coastal marsh in the summer of 4996, imagining it all. He had led an ordinary life for twenty-two years, boring and predictable — born to a soldier and his woman of the moment, raised in an assortment of camps and villages, signed up at sixteen and trained as a scout, and assigned to the western coast where nothing of importance ever happened. Then, suddenly, everything had shifted. The enemy had attacked, seemingly out of nowhere, destroying his home unit and driving him into the wilderness, where he found an old hermit who had enchanted his sword and thereby granted him the possibility of eternal life — or of a rather nasty doom. That enchantment had made him an assassin, prowling the streets of northern cities and camps that most of his former comrades never knew existed. Former comrades, because his work as an assassin set him apart.
All that, however, seemed logical and coherent compared with the news that demons were attacking eastern Ethshar and the gods themselves counterattacking. The world had always been fraught with magic, controlled by unseen forces, but those forces had been predictable unless manipulated by men and women. The gods had never been prone to whims.
What would this superhuman conflict mean to the world, to the war — to Ethshar and to Valder?
The cheering in the inner room had spread, become universal, and then died down again. Now Valder heard the unmistakable tones of orders being given, and a stream of men and women began pouring out past him. Among them was Kelder, who spotted Valder and paused, stepping out of the onrushing human current for a moment.