[12]

 

 Except for old songs about hunting down criminals and stories about saving lost livestock, the High Priestess knew no more about the Wizard Lord than Breaker did—perhaps less, as she had not known he could make a rabbit speak. "I had heard that he could see through the eyes of birds and beasts, but to speak with their mouths—this is new to me," she said, when Breaker described the day of the duel.

   "I hadn't heard of it, either, but the Old Swordsman knew it could happen." It was odd, Breaker thought, how quickly he had grown accustomed to the lake priestess's nudity; he only noticed it now when she moved in certain ways.

   "Well, he is supposed to have greater magic than a dozen lesser wizards combined, far greater than any priest who ever lived. He can probably do a thousand things we never heard of."

   "I suppose so," Breaker agreed. He grimaced. "If he did go mad, I don't know how I could ever hope to kill him."

"You have your own magic, surely."

   "Yes," Breaker said, very aware of the talisman in his pocket and the sword on his hip—and the need to get his daily hour of practice before he slept that night; he had been too busy packing and worrying to do it that morning. "But nothing like his!"

   "And you wouldn't be alone; you would have your seven companions."

   "I've never met them," Breaker said. "I don't know how much help they would be."

The priestess stared at him for a moment. "You haven't met them?" she asked at last.

"No. Not yet, at any rate. I suppose I should try to find them."

   "I should say so, yes. Ask them what they know of the Wizard Lord, and what they think of them—surely, they will have given the matter some thought, and they have all held their roles for years, have they not?"

   "I suppose so. I don't really know."

   "You know very little, it seems."

Breaker started to protest, then stopped. He paused, considering. "That's true," he admitted at last. "The Old Swordsman taught me a great deal about the use of the sword, but not as much about the Wizard Lord or the Chosen. He told me a few things, but somehow now it seems as if he missed the most important ones."

   "Then you should find the other Chosen, and talk to them, and ask them about the Wizard Lord, as well as visiting the Wizard Lord himself. Ask anyone who knows the Wizard Lord—there must be men and women who work with him in his tower."

   "Just a few women, I'm told—and in all likelihood, they would not dare to speak ill of him, would they?"

   "Perhaps not. You could speak to his friends and family, though, to the people who knew him before he became the Wizard Lord, perhaps even people who knew h i m before he was any sort of wizard a t all. He's not so very ancient, after all, is he? Not yet ten years in the role? He might have brothers yet alive who would tell you all his secrets, from the name of his first girl to when he stopped wetting his bed."

   "Brothers?" That possibility had never occurred to Breaker, that the Wizard Lord might have family. Wizards were not tied to a single village like ordinary people, nor to a few known roads like a guide; they traveled freely, their magic protecting them from hostile ler. Breaker had never stopped to consider that they must nonetheless have come from somewhere, that they would have parents like anyone else, and homes, but of course they would. They could not, after all, spring full-grown from the forest, as if they were ler. Wizards might have strange powers, and might accomplish wonders, but they were still human. "Does he have brothers?"

   "I don't know." The priestess shrugged, and her breasts bobbed distractingly; it took Breaker a moment to compose his thoughts.

"Where is he from? One of the valleys?"
The priestess glanced at the guide, who shrugged. "I have no idea," he said. "His tower is in the southern hills,
so maybe that's his homeland, but I don't know."

"His tower is in the Galbek Hills," Breaker said. "Is that in the south?"

"Yes," the guide said. "I haven't been there, but I know that much."

"I think it would be very strange, to talk to the Wizard Lord's family," Breaker said.

"Perhaps," the priestess acknowledged. "I think I would like to do that."

"As you please; you are one of the Chosen, and all in Barokan are obliged to lend you aid, within reason."

   "I suppose that's true," Breaker said slowly. He thought for a moment, glanced at the guide, and then said, "I know the Old Swordsman came this way, months ago, and I had thought I might follow his route for a time, in hopes I would catch up to him, so that I could ask him more questions. I didn't know anyone else outside Mad Oak. But if he wanted to tell me more, he could have done so, couldn't he? No one compelled him to leave Mad Oak so hastily. If I found him, he might have no more to say than he did at home. But as you say, everyone is supposed to aid the Chosen in their duties, even complete strangers—I don't need to seek him out to find people who can help me learn what I want to know."

"I suppose not," the priestess agreed.

   "I'll want to find the Wizard Lord's home village, if I can; surely, the people there can tell me whether he is a good and trustworthy man, or not."

   "I'm sure he is," the priestess said. "Otherwise, why would the wizards and their ler have accepted him as the Wizard Lord?"

   "They could have made a mistake; it has happened before," the guide pointed out.

   "Not for a century," the priestess replied.

   "Then perhaps we're due."

   Breaker grimaced, his eyes meeting the priestess's, and the two of them shared a moment of silent derision at the guide's suggestion that Dark Lords happened on a schedule.

"How will you find his home?" the priestess asked.

"I'll ask, until I find someone who knows where it is. I'll start in the southern hills."

"That's a long walk, out of the valleys and across the Midlands."

"Then I should get started as soon as possible."

   And with that, the conversation came to its close. Breaker excused himself and set about his required hour of practice, leaving the guide and the priestess to chat.

   As he went through a familiar routine of thrust and counterthrust against an imaginary opponent, he mentally reviewed the day's events, and found himself pleased. He had left his home for the wider world, and so far the adventure was going well. The incident with the oak was unfortunate, but educational, and his stay in Greenwater was proving entertaining, as well. He was interested to' notice that while he felt just as disconnected from this town as he had from his own, it bothered him less here, because he was not expected to feel at home in Greenwater. Mad Oak was still nominally his home, the place where he should fit in, but he no longer felt at home there, or in his proper place; here in Greenwater he was a stranger made welcome, and he felt like a stranger made welcome. It was oddly comforting to no longer have that disjunction between expectation and reality.

   Late that night, as he lay drowsing but not yet asleep upon the bed they had given him, the door opened silently and a figure slipped in. He held his breath and tried to see who it was, but me darkness was too complete; his hand slid toward the hilt of his sword, lying close by the bed.

   "The spirits command me to attend upon worthy visitors," a familiar alto voice said. "As their High Priestess I am forbidden a husband, but must instead be wife to the lake itself—but the lake cannot easily get a child on me, and my line must continue if Greenwater is to thrive."

   Breaker withdrew his hand and began to breathe. As with her nudity, Breaker had heard tales of such things, but had never entirely believed them.

   "Besides," she said, "the rumors say that the spirits give you superhuman skill with both your swords, not just the steel one, and your predecessor lived up to that legend, despite his age. Shall we see whether you do as well?"

   Certain remarks he had heard among the women back home suddenly made sense; Breaker had never heard such rumors himself, but obviously they had reached female ears in Mad Oak, just as the tales of naked priestesses seducing strangers had come to his own. Magical speed, strength, coordination, endurance, the ability to anticipate another person's actions and respond appropriately—perhaps his newfound talents did have another use.

   "I make no promises," he said, sitting up, "but I'll do my best."

   And his best was apparently good enough; Breaker had never heard a woman squeal so, certainly not any of the few girls he had bedded back home. He worried that some listener might think her cries needed investigation, but no one interrupted them.

   And as he fell into an exhausted slumber at last he found himself thinking that, quite contrary to what he had been told since infancy and his own initial expectations, he liked traveling.

   In the morning, at first light, he awoke as Shilil left his bed, and he looked out his window just in time to see the priestess leap into the lake again. A few moments later Kopol appeared at the door of his room, eager to hustle Breaker through his preparations for departure—"It's farther to Hartridge than to Mad Oak," he explained. "We need to get an early start if we want to be sure of arriving before sundown."

   And scarcely an hour after dawn the two passed a wooden fence carved with prayers, and were out of Greenwater and in the wild again, making their way south along the slopes above the Greenvale River.

   The Longvale River flowed south to north, and Breaker found it mildly disorienting that the Greenvale did the opposite, but he adjusted to it readily enough.

The sun was indeed skimming the western ridgetop when they reached Hartridge, where the priests were all men who had seen eighty summers and the ler respected only age. Although the guide showed him to a guesthouse, no one there seemed interested in speaking with him, nor admitted to any knowledge of the present Wizard Lord or his origins.

They stayed the night before continuing on to Bent Peak, where the half-dozen priests and priestesses were as ordinary as those in Mad Oak but the brightly clad farmers had a custom of gathering in their odd, dirt-floored pavilion and telling tales in the evening. He heard a score of fine stories about the Wizard Lord, none of which h e believed; somehow he doubted even a Wizard Lord could fly to the moon and challenge the sun to a game of riddles, or build a tower of nothing but ara feathers to hide his sea-sprite mistress from other wizards. Alas, as Breaker had no good tales to tell i n exchange, his welcome wore thin quickly.

The next day they headed for Valleymouth, the walled city at the edge of the Midlands, where the numerous priestesses attending to the ler in the gigantic stone temple and the dozens of scattered shrines were all young girls—the ler there would treat only with female virgins—whom he was forbidden to approach or address, or even to look at for more than a heartbeat or two. Other townsfolk were friendly enough, but greeted almost every question with "I'd need to ask a priestess," and considered it bad luck to mention the Wizard Lord at all, lest he think them rude and punish them with bad weather.

The guide greeted people in each town as old friends, and always knew where they could find food and shelter—the lake pavilion in Greenwater, the guesthouse in Hartridge, the bachelor barracks in Bent Peak, an upstairs room at the trading post in Valleymouth—but did not provide a great deal of assistance beyond that. With each new town Breaker had to adjust to the local accent; by the time he reached Valleymouth he sometimes had to ask for words to be repeated, but with a little coaching from his guide he picked up the differences readily. He also had to learn new customs, and cope with new ler—while he never felt as unwelcome in any town as he did in the wild, each community had its own feel, its own rules, its own prayers and attitudes.

   The guide—despite the habits of the people in the towns of Greenvale, Breaker could not bring himself to call the man Kopol—helped him out a little, but as the priestess Shilil had warned him back in Greenwater, Kopol liked to keep his secrets and took mild pleasure in watching his charge's discomfiture as he learned the differences for himself.

He discovered that visible ler of the sort that sometimes manifested in Mad Oak as lights or shadows were unusual, as was the constant coddling and coaxing Mad Oak's priestesses used to make the ler cooperate with humans. Styles of prayer, styles of clothing, and styles of speech all varied more than he had imagined, almost more than he had thought possible—and this was all just in Greenvale.

No one in any of these towns seemed to know much about the Wizard Lord beyond the same stories he had grown up with and the absurd fancies of the Bent Peak farmers, but in Valleymouth he began to hear new stories about one of the Chosen.

 

 The Leader—"Boss," he called himself, as the Old Swordsman had said—had come through there once or twice; he was reported to be tall and handsome, as might be expected, with a thick black beard and dark eyes. Several of the priestesses seemed smitten with him, though of course none had succumbed to his charms, since anyone who had would no longer be a priestess. There were rumors that two young women had indeed given up the ler for the sake of the Boss at some point in the past, but no one was willing to give Breaker any details; he suspected they thought he might use them as his model in seducing a priestess or two himself. Most of the girls were too young to be much of a temptation, but there were a few he glimpsed fleetingly who might have been worth the effort.

   Breaker was hesitant to leave Valleymouth, even though he could see other towns from atop the town's ramparts; the flat open plain of the Midlands made him nervous. He had lived his entire life between two forested ridges, with the Eastern Cliffs guarding one side of his world, but here the cliffs were so far distant they appeared little more than a gray line on the horizon, and there were no ridges at all, nor forests, just fiat land for as far as the eye could see, land covered with fields and farms, villages and towns, boundary shrines or fences or walls scattered everywhere. Actual roads—like streets, but between towns instead of inside them—crossed the landscape in the distance; the towns here were not all on rivers or lakes, and the land was fiat enough to make wheeled vehicles practical, so a great deal of trade was conducted overland, hauling goods not on barges, but in giant carts called "wagons" that were pulled by oxen.

Breaker had never seen oxen before reaching Valleymouth, and did not much like them—placid as the beasts were, their mere size and obvious strength was frightening.

   And the towns in the Midlands were so close together that there were no guides; to reach the next he would have to venture through wild country unescorted. Even with the roads, that was a daunting prospect.

   "I've done it," Kopol told him. "It's not hard."

"But you're a guide!" Breaker protested.

   "Not here; I learned the routes up through Greenvale and part of Longvale from my mother, but in the Midlands I just set out at random, and I did fine."

"But still. . ."

   Kopol shrugged. "Please yourself," he said. "But I'm heading north again tomorrow, and you're on your own from here. The Galbek Hills are somewhere to the south, across the Midlands—you'll have to find your own way."

Breaker still hesitated.

   Good as his word, the Greenwater Guide left the next day, leaving Breaker alone in the upstairs room of the trading post.

   Eventually, after four days in Valleymouth, he gathered his courage and set out to the south. He arrived in Barrel unscathed, after a completely unremarkable walk.

   It was in Barrel that he first learned to use money. The people of Longvale bartered goods and services, and sometimes used a measure of barley as a standard, but they had no coinage other than the copper tokens they traded with the bargemen, and a great many things were held in common by the entire village, to be used as needed. The people of the Midlands, as Kopol had warned, considered this foolish and old-fashioned, and used stamped silver disks as their medium of exchange. It took Breaker three or four days to get the hang of using the silly things, and to earn a modest supply by displaying his prowess with a blade and then passing a mug around.

   He had developed his act little by little as he traveled; in every village since Hartridge, as soon as his identity was known, he had been asked to demonstrate his supernatural skills in exchange for his meals.

The stunts the Old Swordsman had taught him served him well; people were entertained by even the simplest tricks— slicing a tossed pear into three pieces before it hit the ground, deflecting a ball flung at his head without warning, disarming a stick-wielding attacker, snuffing a candle with the tip of his blade. He had gradually developed a standard performance, and could use it as his daily hour of practice. In the towns of Greenvale the end of the hour had usually meant a flurry of admiring questions and perhaps a little flirting from the local women; in Barrel it became his cue to hold out a mug and gather coins.

   He was not the only one providing entertainment in the taverns and public houses—Barrel had no village pavilion, but instead several separate businesses arranged around a central square served the same purpose, and several people seemed to make their living by amusing the patrons of these establishments. Singers and storytellers would pass a mug or hat before and after each performance, and anyone who made a point of dropping in a larger coin than the usual could request a particular tale or tune.

   Breaker bought himself a few stories and songs about the Wizard Lord, but alas, none of them were about the

present Wizard Lord; instead he got to hear several familiar pieces about how this lord or that had turned aside a flood, or driven murderers to their doom, or fetched runaway children and cattle safely home again.

   And of course, he heard the old ballads about how the Chosen slew the Dark Lords of Goln Vleys and Spider Marsh, though in versions not quite the ones he had learned back in Mad Oak.

In truth, Breaker thought he learned more talking to the townsfolk than he did listening to the professional storytellers. Here in Barrel, as in Valleymouth, Boss was a known and familiar figure, and several of the locals claimed to have met the Scholar, as well. Three men even mentioned encountering the Speaker once, when traveling.

   "What are they like?" Breaker asked as he stood in a public house, a mug of ale in his hand. The locals glanced at one another.

   "What do you mean, what are they like?" a fellow not much older than Breaker himself asked.

   "I mean, are they short, tall, thin, fat, jolly, sad, quiet, loud—what are they like?"

"Scholar's pleasant enough," one man said. "He's about my height but thinner, with gray in his beard. He's

good company, will trade tale for tale, and takes his turn buying the beer."

The man in question was of average height and stoutly built, which would make the Scholar a man of ordinary dimensions.

   "He collects gossip like an old woman," another man said. "Always wants to know the news since he last came through."

"That's true enough—he'll remember everything you told him last time, about your sister's boyfriend and your mother-in-law's bad knee, and he'll ask you what's become of them, whether your sister's married her man and how that knee's been doing." This third speaker shook his head. "Filling his head with gossip instead of studying the lore he should be!"

   "Well, it's not as if the Chosen will ever be called upon," said the stout man. "He has the gift of learning, so why not use it to make himself pleasant?"

   "Pleasant?" the young man said. "How is it pleasant?"

"Everyone likes a good listener."

   "And it's not as if he spreads it about—he listens to all the news, but when it's his turn he'll tell a story about some wizard dead a hundred years."

   Breaker nodded. "And the Speaker?" The men suddenly fell silent, the eyes of the others turning toward the three who had traveled; after an awkward pause, the man who had spoken of a mother-in-law's knee said, "I think she's mad, if the truth be told."

   "Aye. She'll sit in the corner with her head tilted to one side, staring at nothing, and then she'll startle at nothing, and when she speaks she interrupts herself with nonsense."

   "She's a crazy old woman, and the magic should have been handed on long ago," the stout man agreed.

   "Is she old?" Breaker asked. The Old Swordsman had implied otherwise.

   The men exchanged glances.

   "She still has her teeth."

   "And her hair hadn't gone gray as yet, when we saw her." "Not so very old, then."

"I'd be hard put to guess her years," the stout man acknowledged.

"I think the madness makes her seem older," said the man who had called her mad.

   "I know that the Chosen guard us all against the Wizard Lord going bad and we owe them respect for that, but it's hard to think well of such as her."

   "Scholar and Boss, though—they're both fine men, and I'd not like to be a Wizard Lord who'd done evil."

   "And show us that sword of yours again! I saw some of the tricks you did, and I wouldn't care to have you after me, either!"

   "Buy me something to eat, and I'll show you how fast steel can move," Breaker agreed. "I can't do my best on an empty stomach!"

"Fair enough." The stout man beckoned to the landlord.

"Do you know who / would like to meet?" one of the others began.

"The Beauty. We know. We all would."

   Breaker smiled. "The most beautiful woman in the world—who wouldn't want to meet her, if just to see the standard by which all others might be judged?"

   "And is that why you agreed to be the Swordsman, then— so you'd have a chance to get to know her?"

   Breaker shook his head. "No—fool that I am, I didn't even think about that aspect of it until after I'd started my training. It certainly wouldn't have discouraged me, though!" His smile faded. "Would you have any idea where she might be found?"

   "None at all."

   "Nor I."

That was hardly a surprise. The Old Swordsman had said she lived in Winterhome, at the base of the Eastern Cliffs where the trail came down from the Uplands into Barokan, but Breaker was not sure how reliable the old man had been. He had been vaguely hoping these people might know more—if the Beauty were nearby, then visiting her, getting to know another of the Chosen, might have been a good idea.

But she apparently wasn't, and before he could say anything more the landlord was there, and the men fished out a few coins to cover the cost of a platter of ham and vegetables.

   As they did, Breaker was thinking over what he had learned. The Leader, or Boss, or whatever he called himself, sounded like a good strong man and a useful ally, worthy of being one of the Chosen, but there was nothing to indicate that he would know much of anything about the Wizard Lord. And the Speaker, if she was truly mad, would be useless.

The Scholar, though—if he had been collecting gossip for years, he might well know more about the Wizard Lord than anyone else. So far, Breaker had not heard a single negative word about the current Wizard Lord from anyone but the Old Swordsman—but he was beginning to notice he hadn't heard anything positive, either. There were hundreds of stories about Wizard Lords righting wrongs and saving lives and so on, but they were all about

former Wizard Lords, not the current holder of the title.

Someone must know something about the man, and the Scholar was more likely than anyone else to be that one. "When was the Scholar last in Barrel?" Breaker asked. The men looked at one another. 

"Last summer, was it?" 

"Spring. I'd just been planting the north field." 

"That's right—remember, he left just before the priests started looking for the solstice sacrifice."

"Right. Last spring, then." 

A year's head start was more than enough to be discouraging, but Breaker had little else to guide his travels; he knew he wanted to head generally southward, toward the Galbek Hills, but other than that his plans were vague. He refused to be distracted by the mention of a solstice sacrifice, and asked, "When he left, which way did he go?"

"Toward Blackwell."

The others nodded.

   And the following morning Breaker passed by an exceptionally ugly boundary shrine and headed southeast toward Blackwell.