Oath of Swords

“I-I-I-” the pudgy man stuttered, and Bahzell frowned.

“Look you here, now,” he said in a sterner voice. “You were after pissing yourself even before Brandark fetched you upstairs this morning. You knew something was wrong-aye, and you’d more than a suspicion what , too, I’m thinking-before ever that door went down. Come to that, I can’t but wonder just where you were sending Lamach in such a hurry. It’s enough to make a man think you meant to warn someone I might be hunting him. Now, I’m naught but a hradani, but to my mind a man as knows what’s happened to my friends and won’t tell me, he’s not so good a friend to me. And if he’s not my friend , well-”

He shrugged, and the landlord sank to his knees on the greasy floor, round belly shaking like pudding, and clasped his hands before him.

“Please!” he whispered. “Oh, please! I-I don’t know anything-truly I don’t! A-And if I were . . . were to say anything that wasn’t true, or . . . or if I don’t tell him you’re . . . you’re asking questions-”

His voice broke piteously, but Bahzell only gazed down with flinty eyes, and something inside the landlord shriveled under their dreadful promise.

“There’s a lass half-dead upstairs,” Bahzell said softly. “A good lass-not perfect, maybe, but a good person. If it should happen you’d aught to do with that, I just might take it into my head to carve out your liver and fry it in front of you.” The Horse Stealer’s voice was infinitely more terrifying for its matter-of-fact sincerity, and the i

“That’s bad enough, I’m thinking,” the hradani went on, “but there’s worse, for Lady Zarantha isn’t upstairs. Now, it’s possible she’s dead, but there’s no way I can know until I find her, and find her I will, one way or another. Alive or dead, I will find her, and if it should happen when I do that I’m after learning you did know something and kept it from me, or warned those as have her I was coming, I’ll be back.” The landlord looked up in dull terror, and Bahzell bared his teeth and spoke very, very softly.

“You’d best be remembering every tale you ever heard about my folk, friend, because this I promise you. If Lady Zarantha dies and you’ve kept aught back from me, you’ll wish you’d died with her-however it was-before you do.”

“-so that’s the whole of it, so far as he knows,” Bahzell told his friends grimly. The healer was still upstairs with Rekah, and they sat before the cold taproom hearth while he spoke quietly. “Mind, it’s not so certain I am he’s told me all he knows, but I’m thinking what he has said is true enough.”

“Yes, and it makes sense, too,” Brandark muttered. The Bloody Sword’s dagger glittered as he carved patterns in the tabletop, and his ears were half-flattened. “Gods! No wonder the poor bastard’s scared to death. Black wizards less than a league away, and he can’t even tell the authorities because one of them is the authorities!”

Tothas nodded, wasted face shocked, for despite all that had happened since he first set out for Axe Hollow with Zarantha, the possibility that wizards had infiltrated the Empire had been only a suspicion before.

“Aye, well, I was listening hard to all he said,” Bahzell said, “and I’m thinking Baron Dunsahnta himself’s not so powerful a wizard as all that.”

“But the landlord claims he’s their leader!” Tothas objected.

“So he does, but think. The baron’s magistrate and landlord in one. That’s making him king frog in a tiny pond; if you were after being one of the tadpoles in his puddle, wouldn’t you think he had to be the one in charge?”

The Spearman nodded after a moment, and Bahzell shrugged.

“Well, then, think on this. It’s death to dabble in black sorcery and blood magic, so if you were after being a black wizard and you were wishful to move into an area, who would you look to recruit first of all?”

“The most powerful noble in it,” Tothas said flatly. “Aye, they’d almost have to bring him in on their side-or kill him and put one of their own in his place.”

“So they would. And I’m wondering about something else, as well. If magi can sense black wizards, can a wizard sense a mage?”

Tothas screwed his forehead up in thought, then shook his head.

“No. Oh, they can sense the mage talent , if it’s strong enough, but only if it’s used, and-”

“And she was probably using it,” Brandark said grimly. Tothas frowned at him, and the Bloody Sword’s ears twitched. “Think, man. You say she can ‘confuse the eye’ into not noticing her, and she was pretending to be Rekah’s maid. Don’t you think she’d have been reinforcing that any way she could?”

Tothas drew a deep breath and nodded unwillingly.

“That was in my own mind,” Bahzell murmured. He drummed on the table for a long, silent moment while Brandark carved a fresh design, then glanced sideways at Tothas. “You were saying something this morning-something about their taking her ‘home’ to kill.” Tothas nodded, and Bahzell frowned. “How sure would you be of that? And why would they do it?”

“I can’t be positive, but if they know who she is, not just what, it’s what they’ll do. Oh, they’ll kill her out of hand sooner than let her go, but if they can get her home and kill her on her own ground, they will.”

“Why?” Bahzell repeated.

“Because she’s heir to Jashân,” the armsman said, as if that explained everything.

“And?” Brandark asked, and sighed at Tothas’ look of disbelief. “Tothas, what our people remember about wizards is how to kill them, not how they do whatever they do, and we didn’t spend years in Axe Hallow learning about them.”

“Oh.” The Spearman digested that for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, it has to do with the nature of blood magic. Mind you, My Lady knows far more about it than I do, but from what I’ve been told, no wizard produces his own power. Mage talent draws on the power of the mage’s own mind, but a wizard uses the energy that-well, that holds everything together , if you see what I mean.”

Both hradani looked blank, and he sighed.

“The magi say there’s power in everything, even a rock, but especially in living things. The white wizards-when there were any-were sworn never to use the energy of living things, especially people, unless someone chose to let them, and even then they were bound never to kill or injure the . . . the donor. Are you with me so far?”

“Yessssss,” Brandark said slowly. “Or I think I am, anyway.”

“All right, then. The trouble is, very few wizards can use the energy of un living things without years of study. It’s harder to work with for some reason. But life energy, now, that’s easy to work with, especially at the moment of death. When a living thing dies, its energy-its life force-flows back out to merge with all the energy about it, and if a wizard seizes it when it does, he can use it however he wants. That’s why blood wizards seem so powerful. They may actually be weak-compared to other wizards, anyway-but they have a stronger energy source to work with, you see.”

Both hradani nodded this time, and Tothas leaned over the table.

“Remember I got all this in bits and pieces, so I may have some of it wrong, but from what I understand, the more intelligent a creature, the greater its energy. That’s why the most powerful blood rituals use people, not animals. And, by the same token, a younger person has more energy than someone who’s old and closer to death . . . and a mage has more than almost anyone else.”

Bahzell’s mouth tightened, and Tothas nodded.

“But that’s not all,” he said more harshly, no longer discussing theory but returning to the mistress he loved. “Some people, well, they ‘resonate’ with the life force around them.”