The Death of a Swordsman 13

13

His daze lasted for somewhat over a week. Cognizance returned in the form of noticing that his shin bones no longer wiggled when he adjusted the splint. They had always been cragged and rough under the skin as long as he could remember. Now they were just like usual.

Several times a day he was brought bowls of meat and roots, and either water or fresh milk. That was usually hotter then the beef, so fresh from the cow. He was sitting on his low bed, back to the hard dirt wall, and resting his legs straight out before him. They throbbed if he rested their own weight on them vertically.

Suddenly he realized he wasn't sure how long it had been since he practiced. Dispassionately he ignored waking sword work. Footwork drills were obviously out as well. That left him with stretching, if he was careful, and meditation. So he did that.

With the meditation came the full import of his condition. He had burns across much of his back and legs as well as his face. His eyebrows and hair had been burned off. Even his eyelashes were gone. His palms were erratically burned as well, but he knew those scars. They matched the spots on the Song of Winter's handle where metal had been able to touch his skin through the silk. Varad stared at them for a while, then noticed the burns on his wrists as well.

On one was a perfect hand print in bright red skin. On the other was the mark of a foot. He didn't remember getting those, but after time and careful thought he put them together with when Fradick had disarmed him. The horned lord's skin had been burning hot to the touch, not that Varad had noticed at the time. Lrok had stood near the heart of the furnace, and the reflected heat off the two great stones would have beat him like fire. Their horned bodies were inflamed with heat, and vastly stronger and heavier than a man's. The broken swordsman tried to figure out what that meant.

It did trip his memory of the dragon. Morryin's wyrm had breathed fire, but its presence had extinguished it as well. Not all the time, he corrected himself. It had set the broken ship aflame and that had burned well enough. Varad sent his mind into his recent memories and searched them. Did the beast have a general command of fire and heat, or were there specific things it could do? And Lrok, was he similarly capable?

Varad thought not. Fradick had not taken a wooden bow after his own had been broken. It was possible that was because his hands would have set a regular bow burning at a touch. Both Lrok and Fradick had worn heavy leather, especially on places their bodies might have brushed their horses, and rode in thick saddles. The unnatural body heat was probably something out of their control.

Then he remembered the other key point. Lrok was, or had if he was finished, smelted Fradick's corpse, and his bones closely resembled metal of their bows. The calcification on death had been like the corpse congealed into iron and rust. Their bones resisted the bite of swords. In his dirt prison the man lay still and went further back through his memories, searching for mention of the horned lords.

The stories were relatively simple. They came from the deep south and had pushed as far as Ashirak itself, several hundred years ago. Dylath Leen had once been conquered, and Asali Al, Tyr, and Van had all been traded back and forth. When trade relations had opened, they had initially sought slaves. The historians knew more. How do you kill something like that?

'With a lance and warhorse' was the obvious answer. Put a ton of armored man and charger behind a sixteen foot lance, and all that impact gets condensed to a point. The Red Guard fought on foot, frequently behind fortifications, but the White Guard did the exact opposite. They were the heavy cavalry of Dylath Leen, and Varad suddenly regretted ignoring them for being inferior swordsman. They were certainly excellent horsemen.

Suddenly Varad twitched and was hard pressed to regain control of his breathing enough to return to the deep, placid calm. Morryin was certainly a sublime horseman, and that wasn't something he had learned on the Palm. Of course, with a dragon, Morryin wouldn't have needed to a lance. How had Morryin even gotten a dragon? There were too many details still unknown.

Varad roused himself out of the trance, and noticed more food had been provided. He rolled out of bed and inched his way to the door by shrugging his shoulders. Then he ate well, and crawled outside to do his business.

There was a steep cleft in a tall stone nearby, the summit of which was on level with Varad's hovel. From the smell it was clear this served as the settlement's facility. As of yet no one had objected to the injured man crawling there to conduct his business, but Varad hadn't pushed his luck. He returned to the hovel directly and reentered his trance.

This time all he did was encourage his body to heal. For hours he lay very still, focusing on his breathing, and urging himself to heal faster. When the tension of carefully directing his thoughts overwhelmed him, he dropped out of the meditation covered in sweat. Then he stretched for a while and went back to sleep.

No one bothered him. Lrok had other things to do and for a while carried on without further torment of his prisoner, while the people who served him just didn't care. He saw them sometimes when they brought his food. They always looked exhausted and beaten down. They weren't starving and had well fleshed forms, but they were careworn always. None ever looked rested. They looked in on Varad with hollow, uncaring eyes.

Varad vowed so long as Lrok kept to the exchange, he would not do him harm. Bound as he was by the creed of imprisonment for release, anything the northman did might be vented in punishment on prisoners of the future. Thus he played his role and refused to dwell on thoughts of revenge. His back and burns healed, and within another couple weeks, he could sit on the bed with lower legs resting on the floor. His healing bones could hold their own weight, though the rest of his was still beyond reason. Meditating all day when he was not stretching or sleeping, Varad ran katas in his head, forwards and backwards, sometimes focusing on just the feet or position of the hips throughout. He waited for word that an exchange had been agreed upon and didn't notice that his pride was quiet about being rescued.

One night he woke up suddenly, overwhelmed by a sense of immanent danger. Unconsciously he went for his sword, groping aimlessly across his body, before stopping as understanding returned. Before he opened his eyes he felt a sudden pounding heat mixed with the stench of gore.

Lrok was in his hovel, standing over him. In the darkness he was just a dark blur, but the stars shimmered over his shoulders. They waltzed in the shimmering air. The horned lord was an immense dark shadow, almost as wide as he was tall with an outline broken by errant bits of fabric and bone spikes. He stank of blood and viscera. Some fluid was running down his skin, and the splatter of droplets across his body sounded like distant rain. Beyond anything else in the night, beyond the power and horror of his dim shape, was an overwhelming sense of evil. Lrok stood in consummate spite, staring down.

Varad dragged himself back against the wall, away from the almost tangible sense of malice coming off his captor. He couldn't lean forward to sit without touching the black form, so he pulled himself up against the wall. He didn't know what to say or do, and in the darkness he couldn't identify a target, were he to have a weapon.

Yet Lrok was not there to speak. He watched the injured man in silence, radiating vileness without words. Then he turned and left.

For a long time Varad stared after him, wondering what that visitation could have possibly meant. He expected the horned one's return at any point. It didn't happen. All Varad had was a long, sleepless night. He couldn't figure out why. Some time later a man entered and crouched by the door, but he was as silent as the horned lord and likewise made neither movement or conversation.

Elsewhere, in the defile between the two huge standing stones where Lrok had located his forge, the horned one began to coax heat out of the furnace. Below the mouth was a long, tubular chimney of hard clay with a number of hatches. Each of these lead to a stone basket, cunningly worked to allow maximum airflow. One by one he loaded them with charcoal baked from cow dung, until the lowest level he filled with dry grasses and crumbled crap. Once he coaxed a fire out of that, he sealed all the hatches and worked a vast leather bellows.

The flames worked their way up, slowly, level by level. Soon the wind was roaring into the opening at the very bottom and moaning out the top. The whole forge was carefully built to allow no escaping light. Beyond the standing stones were other parts of the hill, and they blocked the ruddy glow. Only the heat boiled up, free, and cast mirages that made the stars dance madly. At night, the only time the forge ran, it was almost impossible to see from a distance.

Lrok was smelting the dead Fradick. He had broken the body to pieces, and was now pounding one arm into a glaive. It would be a spear-mounted blade five feet long, ideal for hacking through the light cavalry of the Consequences. That required time. The bones and steely flesh of his dead enemy resisted running straight, and it took time to subjugate the metal into the shape Lrok desired. He thought about northern steel, a full man's weight, as he put the mangled limb to his anvil and began smashing it straight. His hammer weighed three dozen pounds, and no one but him could swing it one handed.

"Get me Koquo," he suddenly demanded. A human had been sitting outside the baking heat of the furnace, back around one wall, but he heard his masters command. He took off running and shortly returned with the other. It was one of the guards who had dragged Varad before Lrok that first evening.

"I am here," Koquo announced. He was also around the corner, not facing directly into the heat, and wasn't sure if Lrok had heard him coming over the sounds of his smithing.

"Who set the prisoner's legs?" Lrok demanded.

"No one, Lrok. You did not order it done."

"But his legs are set."

"Then he must of done it himself."

The horned lord said nothing while he bludgeoned the metal into shape. "He set his own legs? Do you know this?"

"I did not see it done, Lrok," Koquo replied uncertainly.

The pounding stopped. Koquo couldn't hear footsteps over the noise of the furnace, and his uncertainty grew as he realized he didn't know where Lrok was. His master could move very quietly on hard ground.

"Who was watching him?" asked Lrok, very close in the darkness. Koquo blinked and realized that his master had come around the rim of the standing stone to stare at him. It was as he had feared. There was blood on the Lrok's jerkin and bits of brain still stuck in his teeth. The rest had all burned away in the furnace heat.

"I watched to be sure he did not escape, master. I did not watch his actions."

Koquo suddenly wondered if he was about to die. The night was dark and cold, except for the violent heat of the forge. There was a wind in the stones, and it carried the smells of cattle, clustered in for the evening.

"From now on, you should watch his actions," Lrok said very quietly. "And bring me Farus. Go now."

Without bothering to say anything indicating his agreement, Koquo went. While he was gone, Lrok went back to work. The furnace swallowed charcoal hungrily, and half of the smith's efforts were bent on feeding its hunger. Yet the consequence had an effectively limitless supply of cow shit, and throughout the day the idle were put to work. Dried dung was packed into iron pots and baked in the fires of more cow dung. now Lrok had all he could require to feed his furnace. He worked tirelessly.

"Master, I am here," Farus said from the outskirts of the firelight circle. Sooty red shadows danced on the stones behind him, and just being within sight of the forge had drenched him in sweat.

"The prisoner, Varad. Did you know he had set his own broken legs?" Lrok asked, putting the mangled arm back into the furnace. He stepped towards the man so he could hear his reply clearly.

"Yes, master. I watched it."

"Yet you did not tell me?"

"I do not bother you with trivialities. His legs are still broken. He cannot walk and crawls on his belly to the crevice to relieve himself."

Lrok considered this, but failed to find a flaw. "Tell me of it now."

"The mortal was weak. He cried like a child, weeping as a warrior shouldn't," Farus replied. His words had a habitual scorn in them, but that lacked real weight.

Lrok didn't seem to notice, taking them at face value. "How well did he do? Setting his legs," he clarified.

Farus shrugged in the shadows. "He examines them regularly. Sometimes he moves the ties, or re- wraps something, but otherwise leaves them alone."

For a while the horned one piled more charcoal into the furnace and labored in silence. Farus retreated slightly, so the curl of the stone forge walls sheltered him from the blasting heat. When he was finished, Lrok asked, "Was he crying when he began setting his bones?"

"I didn't pay attention. He was weak enough to cry. Does it matter when and how?"

"Yes," the other flatly answered. Farus makes no reply, as there's nothing for him to say. Lrok resumes his toil, and the confined echoes of the great hammer on metal rings through the boulders. Finally the smith continues. "You broke his legs. He set them himself, in agony, while the pain was still fresh. Now you tell me he set them well enough."

Lrok turned and stared at Farus. The blazing white light of the furnace perverted his features into total contrast, and the lines and planes of his face were utterly alien. Only the bone spurs that jabbed out of his skin seemed organic. They cast red shadows on his fire induced pallor.

"He set his own legs, Farus. He says with confidence that his people will pay his weight in steel for him returned. His one concern is that his sword is sent back first. Yet you ask if it matters?"

"Yes, master, I do," Farus replied. His words were calm and determined. "Why does it matter? We are returning him to his people alive. If we break him any further, he will probably die. We can either kill him or not, and you've made that decision already. So what does it matter if he sets his own bones? Shall I break his arms or his hands, that he can never bear a weapon again? Would you like me to pluck out his eyes? If so, if you think he is such a threat, bid me kill him and be done with it."

Lrok digested this slowly, thinking hard about everything Farus said. "You are sure we can break him no further?"

"Not and let him live. Were we sure exactly when his people would come for him, we might risk it, and let him die in their care. His wounds already flirt with corruption and pestilence. If I do harm to him until he can never hold a sword again, I tell you that I cannot be sure he will live."

Lrok let his hammer rest on the boulder he was using as an anvil. Save the roaring furnace, the forge was quiet.

"In short, do you fear his potential more then you want his weight in steel?" Farus asked.

"Fear? No, not fear. But I don't seek more enemies, especially unnecessary ones. Not at that cost."

"Then what do you want me to do?" Farus asked again. "He won't be an enemy if he's dead. But he won't be worth anything either."

Lrok picked up the hammer again and resumed swinging it. "I can kill him later, if necessary. Go to Koquo, who should be watching him. Speak to the prisoner. Find out who he is, where he comes from, and as much as you can of his abilities."

Taking that as a dismissal, Farus at once rose and left. Lrok spent no more thought on the problem and concerned himself with smithing his dead brother.