20

"A full-sized stone makes sharpening easier," King Carus said as he drew the small whetstone across the across the edge of the sword near the point. He was working on the reverse of the blade, the edge opposite the ring quillon: his spirit in Garric's body had backhanded the sword through an iron helmet. The metal had parted like wheat before the scythe, but it had left a nick in the blade as well. "This one will do, though."

He grinned at Garric. "Just don't cut your finger off—and that's not a joke, lad, I've seen it happen."

Dream Garric nodded. "When you're tired, you make mistakes," he agreed. "I do, at least."

"Everybody does," Carus said, turning the blade over to work from the other side. With a bigger whetstone you'd move the blade across the stone to sharpen it, but this one, from the pouch attached to the frogs holding the scabbard, was too small for that to be practical. "And you'll never be so tired again as after a battle, but it's then you must care for your sword."

He laughed with the joy of a man who finds humor in most of life, not least his own mistakes. "There's nothing worse than waking up to learn your enemy's counterattacking at night and your sword doesn't have the edge you'd like because you didn't bother to polish the dings out before you fell asleep."

Carus held the sword to the light and sighted along its edge. "Only the dings, mind. And only a working edge, lad. You don't take a sword into battle with an edge so sharp it turns or cracks when it meets something hard—as it surely will."

"I've sharpened knives," Garric said. "And axes too. Bone may be harder than the root of an old hickory, but not so very much harder."

Carus laughed again. "And was your tree wearing armor, lad?" he said. "But I take your meaning."

He sighed. "There's so much to know when you're king. Some of it I never learned, maybe never could learn. You'll do better."

They sat at opposite ends of a curved marble bench in a garden. Roses climbed a long trellis on the other side of a circular pavement. The sky above was blandly neutral; nondescript clouds showed against a faint blue background.

Carus used a rag to wipe the grit of sharpening from the blade, smiled at the weapon, and shot it home again in its sheath. "A good sword," he said. "It never let me down."

"Did a wizard make it for you?" Garric asked. He knew that if he got up and looked through the rose hedge, there'd be nothing to see—swirling grayness perhaps, the raw material from which his mind wove dreams. He didn't need to prove that to himself.

The king laughed. "One gave it to me, at any rate," he said. "I don't think he forged it, though. Wizards know things, but that doesn't make them any good with their hands. The smith who created this sword—"

He tucked the whetstone back into its pouch.

"—must have been like your friend Ilna. I never had much use for wizards, but I can respect a man who makes things."

Carus returned the sword to Garric, who stood and buckled it on again. The king remained seated, a pensive expression on his face.

"I hated wizards," Carus said. "Because I didn't understand what they did, I suppose. That's wrong."

He looked up, his features as sharp as a stamping die. "Don't make that mistake, lad; about wizards or anything else."

Carus' face broadened into its familiar grin. "But also don't make the mistake the Duke of Yole made and trust somebody simply because he knows things you don't."

King Carus got to his feet, his eyes exactly on a level with those of dream Garric. There was a sound in the background, a voice chanting words of power. The hues of the dreamworld brightened and faded with the pulse of every syllable.

"You need to go now," Carus said. He patted the hilt of the sword. "Take care of her, lad. It won't be long now before I need this blade again."

The garden dissolved into pearly light. Garric threw out his arms as he fell, but he was already lying on cool alabaster slabs in a room flooded by moonlight. Tenoctris smiled when she saw Garric's eyes open, but she continued chanting until he managed to sit up.

They were in the ruins of Ilna's drawing room. The bodies of liches lay where Garric's strokes had strewn them; some of the bones were already bare because the flesh had deliquesced in dark pools on the flooring.

A wild mace blow had smashed the walnut wardrobe chest. The destruction of that piece of fine cabinetry disturbed Garric at a deeper level than did the man slashed to death on the threshold, one of Ilna's yellow-eyed servants. He scowled, offended by his own priorities.

Ilna was gone.

"Ilna was here," Garric said. "Have you seen her?"

He remembered the thing clutching the girl; the stroke that cut through the serpentine trunk was Garric's, not that of King Carus in his body. But that might have been a dream, a nightmare like so much else.

Tenoctris shook her head. "You're the only person alive in the house, Garric," she said. "Can you stand up?"

She held out her hand. Garric braced his hands on the floor, avoiding the pools of spreading filth. He raised himself in a series of careful motions. He smiled at the notion that he needed the old woman's help—physical help, at least. He didn't doubt that the reason he could stand owed as much to the forces she'd called to his aid as to his own sturdy constitution.

"From the residue Ilna left behind," Tenoctris said, answering the question she'd avoided a moment before, "I'm afraid that she's in a place I'd rather she were not. A very bad place. But the same is true of Liane, and unless we rescue Liane before midnight—"

Her eyes gestured toward the moon, already high in the heavens.

"—it will probably be too late."

Garric glanced around the room instinctively, wondering what Tenoctris meant by "the residue Ilna had left." He saw nothing—recognized nothing at least—and it didn't matter anyWe can only do one thing at a time.

"Let's find Liane, then," he said. "She's in the old family mansion?"

"She's in the groundskeeper's shed that's part of the family tomb," Tenoctris said. "I didn't go there by myself. Not against Benlo."

"You're not by yourself now," Garric said. He stepped across, not onto, the dead servant as he led the way out.

A thought struck him. He paused and drew the long sword, then squinted at the edge in the light of candles still burning in the hallway.

Tenoctris might possibly have belted the sword around Garric's waist while he was unconscious, but she hadn't done this expert job of polishing the nick out of the tip of the blade.