Gor’s part in putting Edaran of Ethshar on his father’s throne had not raised Valder’s opinion any; it had left the entire central region that Anaran had once controlled at the mercy of Gor and Azrad, who had taxed it heavily. Gor had gotten an edge over Azrad by marrying off his son and heir, Goran of the Rocks, to Edaran’s sister Ishta of the Sands in 5029, despite Ishta being eleven years older than the boy.
Over the years Gor had gone from being virtually an object of worship in Valder’s eyes to just another conniving tyrant, but still, his death was not welcome news.
It removed any possibility of further difficulty over Valder’s long-ago refusal to serve as an assassin, but it also removed the last vestige of his boyhood hero.
Gor had been only a dozen years older than Valder, at that, and yet he was dead of old age. Valder still felt strong and healthy, but Gor’s death was another reminder that he, too, was growing old and that Wirikidor was doing nothing to prevent it.
Goran was now overlord of Ethshar of the Rocks, a young man in the prime of life — and he had not even been born until thirteen years after Valder built his inn. The thought of that oppressed him as he sat in a corner staring at the half-dozen patrons in the dining room, every one of them too young to remember the Great War.
Perhaps, Valder mused, part of the depression was because he had never taken a wife and, to the best of his knowledge, had sired no children. He had had women, certainly, but none had stayed. When he had been a soldier, none of his pairings had been expected to last by either party, because most did not in a soldier’s life, and since becoming an innkeeper the only women he saw were those with the urge to travel. Some had stayed for a time, but all had eventually tired of the calm routine of the inn and had moved on.
It seemed a bit odd that Tandellin, who had always seemed rowdy and irrepressible as a youth, had been happily married for thirty-seven years, while Valder, who had always thought of himself as dull, ordinary, and predictable, had never married at all. It went against the traditional stereotypes.
He knew that he could have found a wife in Ethshar of the Spices, had he ever wanted to; but since the completion of the inn, he had never once returned to the city. He disliked the crowds and dust and knew that swords were no longer worn openly there, save by guardsmen and troublemakers, so that the necessity of carrying Wirikidor would mark him as a stranger.
He had always done well enough for himself without visiting the city. His lack of a family had never really bothered him; Tandellin and Sarai and their children had been his family in many ways.
He mulled all this over, sitting in the main room with a mug of ale that Sarai the Younger kept filled for him. As he glanced up to signal her for another pint, his eye fell on Wirikidor, hanging over the hearth.
The sword had lain neglected beneath his bed for scarcely a month before he restored it to its place. He had gotten tired of questions about its absence from familiar customers; too many had gone away convinced that the thieves had indeed gotten away with it, even if they had lost one of their number in doing so. Although that might have deterred thieves on the grounds that there was nothing left worth taking, it grated on Valder’s pride. Besides, Valder had gotten tired of seeing the empty pegs and could not think of any way to remove them short of sawing them off as close to the stone as possible.
So he had returned Wirikidor to its place of honor, but devised another approach to the problem of removing temptation. He held contests whenever the inn was crowded, offering ten gold pieces to any man or woman who could draw the blade. This served as good entertainment on many a night and demonstrated to all present just how useless the sword was to anybody else. Rather than suppressing details of the sword’s enchantment, as he had before, Valder made a point of explaining that it was permanently linked to him and that every time he drew it a man died. That had discouraged any further attempts at theft. After all, who cares to risk one’s life for a sword that nobody can use, knowing that, if it does leave its scabbard, someone will die — and that that someone will not be the sword’s owner?
He had not mentioned that the spell was limited to another score or so of uses, however, nor that it would then turn on him. He did not mention his theoretical immortality, lest someone be tempted to test it.
He stared up at the dull gray of the scabbard and the tarnished black hilt. Wirikidor was such a very ordinary-looking sword; how could it have such power over him?
That is, if in fact it actually did. At times Valder was uncertain whether he should so trustingly accept the assessment made so long ago by General Karannin’s magicians. Karannin was long dead; Valder had heard that he had been knifed ignominiously in a brawl in 4999 or 5000. He had no idea what had become of the wizards. Sometimes it seemed as if most of the world’s wizards had vanished after the war; once the army’s control was gone, the Wizards’ Guild’s compulsion for secrecy, which had done so much to restrict wizardry’s effectiveness in the war, had taken over unrestrained. Now even simple spells could be difficult to obtain or prohibitively expensive. Certainly there were still wizards around, but most seemed to be severely limited in what they would undertake.
That virtually eliminated the possibility of having Wirikidor’s enchantment removed, even if he decided he so wanted. When last he had sent an enquiry to the city, he had been told that no wizard in Ethshar would attempt to remove an eighth-order spell for less than a thousand pieces of gold. Valder was not sure whether Wirikidor’s enchantment was in fact eighth-order, but he remembered a mention of that number. A thousand pieces of gold was considerably more money than he had ever had in his life and far more than he had at present, as business had trailed off slightly. Furthermore, as he grew older, he turned more and more of the work over to his helpers, which meant he needed more helpers — all three of Tandellin and Sarai’s children now worked for him — and that meant more money. He had more than enough to live comfortably on, but he was not rich.
Karannin was dead. Gor was dead. Anaran was dead. Terrek was dead. It seemed as if all the men who had fought the war were dead or dying. Valder had not seen a man in a wartime uniform in decades; the soldiers of the Hegemony, such as were posted in the guardhouse at the bridge, had long ago switched to a new one, with a yellow tunic and a red kilt replacing the old familiar brown and green and with no breastplate at all.
Azrad was still alive, of course, and still ruled over the seas and the southwestern portion of the Hegemony, from the Small Kingdoms halfway to Sardiron — but he was a doddering old man now, three-quarters of a century old and showing it. He had not aged well.
And Valder of Kardoret still lived, no longer the young scout, or the desperate assassin, but the aging proprietor of the Thief’s Skull Inn — the skull had fallen and been buried years ago, but the name still lingered. Valder wondered if his younger customers even knew the name’s origin; he rather expected that the name would soon change again, perhaps back to the Inn at the Bridge.
He finished his ale and put down the mug, signaling that this time young Sarai was not to refill it. A pleasant young woman, that, more like her father than the mother she was named for.
Life was still good, Valder told himself, and as long as it remained so, he need do nothing about Wirikidor. Gor’s death did not change anything.