“That’s all I’m going to tell you, you blasted fool! Now take your sword and get out of here!”
Valder looked around at the darkness surrounding them; the fire’s glow faded within a yard or two, and the clouds were thick enough to hide the moons and stars. He saw no trace of the sun’s light to either east or west.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“How should I know? I finished the spell at midnight exactly, or at least I intended to, but you’ve kept me here arguing long enough that I have no idea what time it might be. It’s after midnight, and it’s not yet dawn.”
Valder said, “I don’t know what time it is either, old man, but I do know that I’m not going anywhere until dawn. An enchanted sword isn’t going to do me much good if I trip and drown in this stinking marsh.”
The wizard glared at him for a long moment, then growled. “Please yourself,” he said as he turned and stalked off.
Valder watched his back fade into the gloom, thinking how absurd so small a man looked when angry, then sat down and looked at the familiar scabbard on his belt. He saw nothing different about it, yet the wizard had undeniably worked over it for a day and half a night, with indisputably real magic. The urge to draw it and see if the blade was visibly altered was strong, but Valder had a healthy respect for magic of all sorts; if the old man said it was dangerous, it probably was dangerous. Perhaps enough magic lingered in the air from the spell-making to react with the sword’s enchantment.
Or perhaps, the thought crept in, the wizard had decided to retaliate for the destruction of his home, and the sword would work some terrible vengeance when drawn, a vengeance the old man did not wish to see.
Valder drove that idea back down; he had little choice but to trust the hermit. He settled back against the hump of ground and was quickly asleep.
CHAPTER 4
His legs were stiff and cramped when he awoke; he unfolded them slowly, then flexed them again, working out the stiffness as best he could. When he felt up to it, he pushed himself up onto his battered feet and looked around.
The sun, he was appalled to discover, was halfway up the eastern sky; he had not intended to sleep so long as that. He saw no sign of the old hermit.
He told himself that the wizard had probably gone off to fetch water or food. He decided to wait for the old man’s return so that he might say his farewells before heading southward. With that resolved, his next concern was breakfast. He glanced about casually.
The handful of crabs that had not been eaten the day before were gone; Valder supposed they had served as the old man’s breakfast. The broken jar was also gone, which supported his theory that the hermit had gone after water. As he continued to look, however, it gradually sank in that everything that might be of use was gone. Nothing remained on the site of the destroyed hut but ash and broken glass. The piles of salvaged magical paraphernalia had vanished with their owner.
An automatic check told him that his sword was still securely in its sheath on his belt; he was relieved by that.
He could not imagine how the old man could have cleared everything away so completely, or where he might have gone with it all. Puzzled, he clambered up the rim of the crater, wincing at the scratching of shards of glass against his bare feet.
Runes were gouged into the ash in the center of the crater, showing black against white. They were nothing magical, but merely a message in common Ethsharitic runes.
“Found new place,” they said. “Not returning. Good luck.”
No signature was included, but one was hardly necessary under the circumstances. Valder stared at the words for a moment, then shrugged. It might be that the wizard was actually somewhere nearby and would return as soon as Valder was gone, he thought, but if so it was none of his concern. The hermit obviously wanted him to leave without further contact, and he saw no reason to argue about it. He took a final look about, then marched southward into the marsh.
He reached dry land without incident. By noon he could no longer see or smell the salt marsh, though a faint whiff of the sea could still be detected on the breeze from the west. Although he was eager to return to his comrades in the south and get out of the wilderness, he stopped when the sun was at its zenith and sat down abruptly on a moss-covered log.
His feet were blistered and would carry him no further without a rest; the day’s walk of a mere two or three hours was not so much responsible as was the prior day’s abuse and the lack of footwear. He had not taken the time to rig any sort of substitute for the boots that had been burned to ash in the wizard’s hut, and his weight was distributed differently without them, putting pressure on parts of his feet that were not accustomed to it.
He was not sure what sort of a substitute he could improvise; he had never before lost a pair of boots while out in the country. It was not a subject that he remembered hearing discussed, either in his training or in barracks chatter; when a pair of boots gave out, they were replaced with another pair of boots. That was one item that had never been subject to shortage, so far as he knew.
His socks, which he had left on for lack of replacements, had worn down to absolute uselessness, their soles consisting of a few stray threads; he peeled them off and hurled them away.
As if aching feet were not sufficient annoyance, he was ravenously hungry. Enough streams had crossed his path to make thirst no problem, but he could not eat pine cones, and the only wildlife he had seen had been a chipmunk he had not thought to pursue.
He stared around at the empty forest, the sun dappling the thick bed of pine needles that covered the ground. He had no food — he had been out on a two-day reconnaissance, and with the sustenance spell, at that — who would have thought he might need food? He had survived for two months without any, thanks to the bloodstone’s magic, but that enchantment was broken and gone now.
He did not have any ready means of acquiring food, either. He had his belt, his sling, his knife, and his magicked sword, but that was almost the full extent of his supplies. He had a silver bit tucked away, not so much as a lucky piece as because one never knew what might happen, and even a single coin might bribe a peasant — not that any peasants lived in the northern forests. He had managed to hang onto his flint and steel and he still wore kilt, tunic, and breastplate, though his helmet was long gone. The bloodstone was still safe in its pouch, but useless until he found another wizard to renew the spell.
He wondered if the hermit might be able to cast a Spell of Sustenance and upbraided himself for not asking when he had the chance. If he went back, he would probably be unable to find the old man.
Of course, it was unlikely that he would have been able to help in any case. Valder knew that casting the spell required a mysterious powder or two, and the little hermit’s supply of whatever it was had probably burned and would not be readily replaced.
He ran through a quick mental inventory of what he had and decided that the sling was his best bet for obtaining food. He would need to find some pebbles, or at least wood chips, for ammunition, and he would need to find some sort of game to use it on.
A sword was too big to be of much use against a chipmunk, but he looked down thoughtfully at the hilt on his belt. Something larger than a chipmunk might happen along eventually, after all.
The hilt looked just as it always had — simple, functional, and rather ugly, gray metal bare of any ornamentation or finesse, the sweat-softened leather of the grip bound in place with dulled brass wires. There was no gleam, no glamor about it, and he suddenly wondered whether the wizard had actually done anything to it. Spells existed, he knew, that did nothing at all save to look impressively magical, and the old man had had no supplies to speak of. Perhaps, in his fully understandable annoyance at the loss of his home, he had deceived his unwelcome visitor with play-pretties and phantasms. That would explain why he hadn’t wanted the blade drawn until he had had time to disappear; use would surely show that there was no real enchantment.