He had no thought of alerting the rest of the camp. He wanted vengeance for this pitiful, furtive death in a filthy place. It was a personal thing with him.
Away from Cobaltmere, the phosphorescence grew progressively dimmer, but his night vision was good, and he followed the tracks swiftly. They left the path at a place where the trees were underlit by lumps of pale blue luminous crystal. Bathed in the unsteady glow, he stopped and strained his ears. Nothing but the sound of water. It occurred to him that he was alone. The ground sucked at his feet; the trees were weird, their boughs a frozen writhing motion. To his left, a branch snapped.
He whirled and threw himself into the undergrowth, hacking out with his sword. Foliage clutched at his limbs; at each step he sank into the muck; small animals scuttled away from him, invisible. He halted, breathing heavily, in a tiny clearing with a stinking pool. He could hear nothing. After a minute, he became convinced that he had been lured from the path, and in revealing himself to whatever moved so silently in the darkness he had lost his advantage. His skin crawled.
Only his peculiar defensive skills saved him. There was a baleful hissing behind him: he allowed his knees to buckle, and a cold green blade cut the air above his head; poised on his bent left leg, he spun himself round like a top, his sword slashing a half-circle at the knees of his assailant. Knowing that the stroke could not connect, he leapt back.
Before him loomed a great black shadow, some seven or eight feet high. Its limbs were thick and heavy, its head a blunted ovoid, featureless but for three glowing yellow points set in an isosceles triangle. It continued to hiss, its movements silky and powerful and controlled, leaving those strange, shapeless imprints in the mud beneath it. There was an alien coldness about it, a calm, calculating intelligence.
The great baan, that he did not dare meet with mere steel, cut a second arc toward him. He danced back, and it sliced through his mail shirt like a fingernail through cold grease; blood from a shallow wound warmed his chest. Despite its size, the thing was cruelly swift. He went behind its stroke, cutting overhand at the place where its neck met its shoulder, but it writhed away, and they faced one another again. Cromis had measured its speed, and feared he was outclassed.
There was no further sparring. In the dark place by the stinking pool, they went at it, and baan and steel performed a deadly, flickering choreography. And always Cromis must evade, hoping for a moment’s carelessness: yet the shadow was as fast as he, and fought tirelessly. It forced him slowly to the lip of the pool, and a mist was in front of his eyes. He was cut in a number of places. His mail shirt hung in ribbons.
His heel touched water, and for an instant he allowed the baan to catch his blade. In a shower of sparks, the tip of the nameless sword was severed: now he could not thrust, but must use only its edge. Fear crept and coiled in him. The giant, its cluster of eyes pale and empty, loomed above him, chopping and leaping like an automaton. Abruptly, he saw a dangerous remedy.
Beneath his clothing, his right hand found the hilt of the little baan that had killed his sister. Clutching it, he feigned an injury, delaying a counterstroke and fumbling his recovery. He felt little hope for the stratagem. But the giant saw the opening, and as its weapon moved back, then down, Cromis whipped out the energy knife and met with it the killing blow.
There was a terrifying flash as the two baans engaged and shorted out. Cromis was hurled bodily into the pool by the concussion of ancient energies, his arm paralysed. Its blade dead and useless, the giant reeled drunkenly about the clearing, hissing balefully.
Cromis dragged himself from the water, arm numb with agony. Gagging and retching on the liquid that had entered his mouth, he renewed his attack and found that in the final flurry of blades, the nameless sword had been cut clearly in two halfway down its length. Cursing bitterly, he lashed out with the stump. But the giant turned and ran awkwardly into the trees, lumbering through the pool in a fountain of spray.
Its murderous confidence had been dispelled, its grace had left it, and it was defeated: but Cromis cast himself on the poached earth and wept with pain and frustration.
Shouting broke out near him. On grey wings, Cellur’s lammergeyer crashed through the foliage, flapping evilly across the clearing, and, screaming, sped after the fleeing shadow. Cromis felt himself lifted.
“Grif,” he muttered. “My blade is broken. It was not a man. I injured it with a trick of Tomb’s. There is ancients’ work here “The Moidart has woken something we cannot handle. It almost took me.”
A new fear settled like ice in his bone marrow. He clutched desperately at the fingers of his left hand. “Grif, I could not kill it!
“And I have lost the Tenth Ring of Neap.”
Despair carried him down into darkness.
Dawn broke yellow and black like an omen over the Cobaltmere, where isolated wreaths of night mist still hung over the dark, smooth water. From the eyots and reedbeds, fowl cackled: dimly sensing the coming winter, they were gathering in great multicoloured drifts on the surface of the lake, slow migratory urges building to a climax in ten thousand small, dreary skulls.
“And there will be killing weather this year,” murmured tegeus-Cromis, as he huddled over the fire gazing at the noisy flocks, his sword in three pieces beside him, the shreds and tatters of his mail coat rattling together as he moved. They had treated his numerous cuts and bruises, but could do nothing for the state of his thoughts. He shuddered, equating the iron earths of winter with lands in the North and the bale in the eyes of hunting wolves.
He had woken from a brief sleep, his mouth tasting of failure, to find Grif’s men straggling back in despondent twos and threes from a search of the glade where he had met the dark giant; and they reported that the Tenth Ring of Neap was gone without trace, trodden deep into the churned mud, or sunk, perhaps, in the foetid pool. The metal bird, too, had returned to him, having lost its quarry among the water thickets. Now he sat with Theomeris Glyn, who had snored like a drunk through all the chaos.
“You take single setbacks too hard,” said the old man, sucking bits of food from his whiskers. He was holding a strip of meat to the flames with the tip of his knife. “You’ll learn-” He sniggered, nodding his head over the defeats of the aged. “Still, it is strange.
“It was always said south of the Pastel City that if tegeus-Cromis and the nameless sword could not kill it, then it must already be dead. Strange. Have some cooked pig?”
Cromis laughed dully. “You are small comfort. An old man mumbling over meat and homilies. What shall we do without the Queen’s authorisation? What can we do?”
Birkin Grif came up to warm his hands over the fire. He sniffed at the cooking meat like a fat bloodhound, squeezed his great bulk carefully into the space between Cromis and the old man.
“Only what we would have done had we kept the thing,” he said. “Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontrovertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.”
“But to command an army-” began Cromis helplessly.
Grif scraped halfheartedly at the filth on his boots. “I have seen you command before, poet. It appeared to me then that you did so from the strengths of your own self, not from those of some bauble.”
“That’s true,” old Glyn said judiciously, spitting out some gristle. “That’s how we did it in the old days. Damned expensive boots, those, Grif. You ought to saddle-soap them to keep the damp out. Not that I ever commandeered anything but the arse of a wench.”
Grif clasped Cromis’s shoulder, shook it gently. “Brooder, it was not your fault.”
Cromis shrugged. It made him feel no better. “You buried the guard?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.