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tions, his porcelain eyes alert. He had taken off his mask, I think that I should have known him the more swiftly.
It was the fragile Orek who had come up at my back to put his own knife against my ribs.
I had been wrong. Not a spear but a knife. In a moment I should feel the iron enter my lung. His slender hand trembled with anger or gladness.
The slave was by a tree, and noncommittal.
Hwenit’s face was narrowed hard. After that one cry, she had ensorceled herself to black adamantine.
“It is a delight for old friends to meet once more,” Zrenn said. “It has been our hope that we might see you again, my Vazkor, before you depart this life. Not that your going shall be hasty. Erran, the leopard-chief, is not isolated in his artistic plan for a death. Slow and painful, my Vazkor. A limb, lessan organ, a finger at a time. I see you are healed of the cruel cuts I gave you in Eshkorek. We shall have to mince you very small to be certain you remain beneath the earth, shall we not? And between whiles, we will play with this midnight doE you have thoughtfully provided us.”
It seemed to me I could turn easily and disarm the willowy youth behind me. Meantime, Zrenn would slash Hwenit’s throat. This fathomed, I kept still. My grave was near as Orek’s hand, and I had foretold my grave. Yet it appeared ludicrous. As Zrenn reminded me, I healed of wounds. Could I recover from a death stroke, as Erran had more than half believed?
“Did you find the love-tokens I left you?” I said to Zrenn, gently as he. “All about the hills? The silver-masks peacefully sleeping in their blood?”
“The jackal, slinking up on the baby’s cot. Oh, yes. Like your noble father, Vazkor’s son. You did it winningly.”
I sensed the blade at my back come a hah” breadth nearer.
“You have too many deaths to pay for,” Orek rasped in his broken boy’s voice.
“He shall pay with many deaths,” Zrenn said, smiling.
It is not simple to kill with Power, once you understand the trick of it. You bring extinction by summoning it from yourself, and it touches you also, like a burning, bloody wing. That is why sickness follows. And when the price is high, you do not spend indiscriminately. This held me, even now, in
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this second of stupid extremity, poised between a girl’s neck and a boy’s knife.
The savage, who knew only how to wield bludgeon and ax, must learn more subtle weapons.
I indicated the slave. I said, “Did he tell you how I killed the last man, the man in the camp?”
Zrenn prepared to dally a long while, followed my procrastination almost with approval.
“His face was congested. I presume you choked him with your strong warrior’s paws.”
“Not so. Ask him now, your slave, how Vazkor’s son slew the silver-mask.”
Zrenn, yet smiling, jerked his head to the slave. “Inform me, clod.”
The slave said in a flat, though thickly accented and unhandy voice, “Black lord stare, and white light come and fair lord fall and die.”
Zrenn’s mouth slackened. He frowned. “What do you mean, you dreg, white light!” “White light from eyes of black lord. White light strike fair lord. Fair lord fall. Fair lord die. Light go out. Black lord god.”
The slave’s tone was extraordinary. He might have been talking of the weather. I recalled how he prostrated himself in the mud before me, then walked away into the night. It seemed he and his stony people had grown accustomed to recognition and universality of demons in some remote and dismal past.
I was trying to assess what ability lay in me that I dared use. You will see this plight in the brilliant marksman who manages his marvels by instinct. Force him to study his art, to explain how he focuses magically on his target, and he will grow mannered and unsure and presently miss his mark altogether.
Abruptly Hwenit spoke. Striving to alter her predicament, I had forgotten her as a live being. Forgetting, too, that though I comprehended city speech, she did not, and the whole dialogue thus far had been gibberish to her.
“Mordrak,” she said, “don’t bargain for me. This is my fault. Let him kill me if he wishes, but get free.”
At this Zrenn shook her. He asked me, “What does the black wench say? Does she say she loves me, Vazkor?”
I said, to get more time (when would I have had sufficient?), “She wonders how you came here.”
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“Oh, the slave sniffed out the little cavern where her clan keep their disreputable boats. He speaks their tongue, but they lied to him in the village about you, Vazkor. They told us you had gone by them on the trek north. If it had not been for the slave’s sharp eyes and mine, seeing that pin-head of beacon fire last night, we should never have dreamed where you might be. When I am done with you, my brother and I shall revisit this bitch’s tribe, and roast them in their huts.”
Just then I saw a bright orange marker in the grass-the tail tip of Hwenit’s red cat. Next moment, yowling, the cat sprang up Zrenn’s booted leg and bit him in the thigh and sprang away. Zrenn yelled and half whirled about, slashing with his knife after the cat, which had already been too quick for him and was gone. Instantly Hwenit darted from his grasp, but, unlike the cat, not quick enough.
Zrenn moved fast as a lash and caught her by her hair as she was running from him, and reeled her about. His face was crazy with a white fury of pain, irritation, and maleficence, and full in this dangerous face Hwenit spit, and with a single movement of his arm, unpremeditated, directed by spite alone, Zrenn hammered his knife into her side.
Then came stasis, Zrenn letting slip between his fingers, like the motivating strings of a puppet, the black stands of Hwenit’s hair. As she gradually loosened and slid toward the ground, his expression altered to total disbelief. He had played the wrong game piece, and too soon.
I discovered myself already spinning around, crashing my fist hard into Orek’s arm so his blade went flying, smashing the other fist into his belly. He folded soundlessly away into the weeds, neat as a lady’s fan.
When I looked back, Zrenn had recovered himself.
He waited for me, part crouching, his red knife flickering, eyes bright. But I was done fighting. I did not glance at the shape of the woman; my guts were knotted up, but I kept her lessoning.
“Zrenn,” I said.
“Fight me, warrior.”
His eyes, white-hot, the blue sucked away by the heat, danced at me. Then the dance went out of them. Confronting mine, they fixed like enamel in the kiln. It took three breaths to mesmerize him, this lord of the silver, even for one new to
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the practice. He looked as small to me as a gnat. It was no difficulty for me to take control of him.
“Zrenn,” I said, “come closer.”
“No,” he muttered, but he came.
I took the knife from his fingers and he could not prevent it. His face worked and struggled all about his calcined eyes, to tell me I must not hurt him. To no avail.
I held his rat’s-skin hair, and cut his throat. He gargled in blood; it reminded me of his laughter. It is a vile death, but brief.
After that, I went off a way into the wood, and threw up, as if I had never killed a man before. I mused drearily, as I leaned shuddering on a tree, that I might as well have used the killing Power in me for all the good I had got from restraint.
When I returned, everything was very still. Some time ago the rain had stopped, and I saw the red cat was picking a path inch by inch, through the bladed grass toward Hwenit’s body, stiff itself as a moving corpse. I watched this sight a minute, but a stirring nearby put me in mind that there was unfinished business.
Orek stared up at me, lying on his back. His mask had fallen off, or he had pulled it off. His face, like that ghost of another face, and the eyes the green eyes of that face, made my gorge rise again. No, whatever else, I could not kill this distorted image of Demizdor.
“Zrenn is dead,” I said to him.
His eyelids fluttered, and his lips. He was not less proud, but less royal than she had been.
“Did you love her?” he croaked at me. He could mean one only. He said, “I will tell you before you butcher me, I will tell you why I came to hunt you down like the stinking diseased dog that you are. Shall you listen, dog? Or will you silence me before I can tell?”