I had to strain to keep pace with him. By the time we reached Fetch I was exhausted. Hanneker had expired in our absence.
"We rest here," Lord Hammer told me. "We will carry these two, and there may be ambushes." He sat down with his back against one wall. He massaged his lifeless arm.
The image had slipped even more. He seemed quite human at that moment.
"Who are you?" I asked after a while.
The iron mask turned my way. I couldn't meet his gaze. The power was still there.
"Better that you don't know, soldier. For both our sakes."
"I have taken the gold," I replied.
I expect he understood. Maybe he didn't. He said nothing more till he decided to go.
"It's time. Carry Fetch. Be wary."
I hoisted the little woman. She seemed awfully heavy. My strength had suffered. The mountains. The forest The fighting. The tension, always. They had ground me down.
We met no resistance. Only once did we hear what might have been men. They avoided us.
We rested often. Lord Hammer seemed to be weakening faster than I, though hjs resources were more vast. Maybe the Harish kill-dagger had bitten more deeply than he let on.
"Stop," he gasped. We were close to the end of the tunnel. I dropped Fetch.
Men's voices, muted, echoed along the shaft. "Chenyth." I started on.
"Stay." The command in Hammer's voice was weak, but compelling.
He moved slowly, had trouble keeping his feet. But he negated the spells that made us glow. "We must rest here."
"My brother..."
"We will rest, Willem Potter."
We rested.
XII
Outside ambushed us.
The sun had set. No moon had risen. The stars didn't cast much light. Bell weather had lighted no fires. We were suddenly there, beside Lord Hammer's stallion.
The last dozen yards we had to step over and around the dead and wounded. There were a lot of them. I kept whispering Chenyth's name. The only man I could find was Brandy. The griper had been dead for hours.
"They've killed or captured most of the animals," Bellweather reported. Lord Hammer grunted noncommittally. "We've killed hundreds of them, but they keep coming. They'll finish us in the morning. This's serious business to them."
"Chenyth!" I called.
"Will? Will! Over here."
I hurried over. He was doing sentry duty. His post was an open-topped bunker built of the corpses of savages.
"You all right?" I demanded.
"So far. Brandy and Russ and Aral are dead, Will. I'm sorry I came. I'm tired. So tired, Will."
"Yeah. I know."
"What happened down there?"
"It was bad." I told him the story.
"The other Harish. Will they?..."
"I'm sure their daggers are consecrated to the same name."
"Then they'll try again?"
"They made it? Then we'd better warn..."
A shriek ripped the air.
I hurled myself back toward Lord Hammer. I arrived at the same time as the Harish. Blades flashed. Men screamed. Lord Hammer slew one. I took the other. Bellweather and the others watched in dull-eyed disbelief.
Before Jamal died he cursed me. "You have given the Hammer his life," he croaked. "May that sin haunt you all the ages of earth. May his return be quickened, and fall upon you heavily. I speak it in the Name of the Disciple."
"What did he mean, Will?" Chenyth asked.
"I don't know." I was too tired to think. "They knew him. They knew his mission. They came to abort it. And to capture the dragon's blood for El Murid." I glanced at Lord Hammer. He had begun a sorcery. His voice sounded terribly weak. He seemed the least superhuman of us all. My awe of him had evaporated completely.
He was but a man.
"Maybe they were right," Chenyth suggested. "Maybe the world would be better without him. Without his kind."
"I don't know. His kind are like the dragon. And we have taken the gold, Chenyth. It doesn't matter who or what he is."
Sleep soon ambushed me. The last thing I saw was a ball of blue light drifting into the rocks where the savages lurked. I think there were screams, but they might have come in my dreams.
They took me back to the wars. To the screams of entire kingdoms crushed beneath the boots of legions led by men of Lord Hammer's profession. Those had been brutal, bitter days, and the saddest part of it was that we hadn't won, we had merely stopped it for a while.
My subconscious mind added the clues my conscious mind had overlooked.
I awakened understanding the Harish.
"His name is a joke," Fetch had said.
It wasn't a funny one. It was pure arrogance.
One of the arch-villians of the Great Eastern Wars had been a sorcerer named Ko Feng. He had commanded the legions of the Dread Empire briefly. But his fellow wizards on the Council of Tervola had ousted him because of his unsubtle, straightforward, expensive, pounding military tactics. For reasons no one understood he had been ordered into exile.
His nickname, on both sides of the battle line, had been The Hammer.
Aboud had told me he was my enemy...
The savages bothered us no more. Lord Hammer's sorcery had sufficed.
Only a dozen men were fit to travel. Chenyth and I were the only surviving Kaveliners...
Kavelin had borne the brunt of the Great Eastern Wars. The legions of the Dread Empire knew no mercy. The nation might never recover...
I was sitting on a rock, fighting my conscience. Chenyth came to me. "Want something to eat?"
"I don't think so."
"What's that?"
"Kill-dagger. Aboud's." I had been staring at it, and had hidden it at his approach. I showed him.
What's the matter, Will?"
"I think I know who he is. What he's doing. Why."
"Who?"
"Lord Hammer."
"I meant, who is he?"
"Lord Ko Feng. The Tervola. The one we called The Hammer during the wars. They banished him from Shinsan after it was over. They took his immortality and drove him into exile. He came for the dragon's blood to win the immortality back. To get the time he needed to make his return."
"Oh, Gods. Will, we've got to do something."
"What? What's the right thing? I don't know that he's really Ko Feng. I do know that we've taken his gold. He's treated us honorably. He even saved my life when there was no demand that he do so. I know that Fetch thinks the world of him, and I think well enough of Fetch for that to matter. So. You see what's eating me."
My life wasn't usually that complicated. A soldier takes his orders, does what he must, and doesn't much worry about tomorrow or vast issues. He takes from life what he can when he can, for there may be no future opportunity. He seldom moralizes, or becomes caught in a crisis of conscience.
"Will, we can't turn an evil like Ko Feng loose on the world again. Not if it's in our power to stop it."