After that, trying to see his way through tears, he
made his legs carry him away. He was not sure
where he was going, nor even of where he ought to
go. He got no farther than the next small hillock of
the field, coming again within sight of the flimsy
ruins of the carnival, when the great pain struck him
inside his chest. It felt like a spearthrust to the heart.
He collapsed on his back. A fighter’s instincts made
him draw the great Sword again before he fell. But he
faced no weapons now, and the Sword of Force was
lifeless.
As Sir Andrew lay in the grass the sky above him
looked so peaceful that it surprised him. He
considered his pain. It feels, he thought, as if my heart
were bursting. As perhaps it is.
He took a look back, quickly and critically, at what
he could see at this moment of his own long life. He
found the prospect of death, at this moment, not
unwelcome.
The pain came again, worse than before.
“Yoldi . . .”
But she did not answer. She was not going to
answer him ever again.
When it seemed that the pain was going to let him
live yet a little longer, Sir Andrew flung Shieldbreaker
away from him, using two hands and all of his
remaining strength. He had tried to throw the great
Sword away before, tried again and again when he
saw Yoldi running at him and realized what must have
happened to her, and what was going to happen. But
the Sword’s magic would not leave him then. This
time, now that it was too late, it left his hands as
obediently as any stick thrown for a dog. The blade
whined faintly, mournfully, turning through the air.
The Knight did not want to die alone. If only there
could be a friend nearby-someone.
He closed his eyes, and wondered if he would ever
open them on this world’s skies again. Would it be
Ardneh that he saw when he opened his eyes again,
as some folk thought? Or nothingness?
He opened them and saw that he was still in the
same world, under the same sky. Something
compelled him to make the effort to turn his head. A
single figure, that of a man in gray, was walking
toward him from the direction of the carnival, the
abandoned showplace that Sir Andrew had been
perfectly sure was quite deserted. A man, not armed
or armored, but . . . wearing a mask?
The gray-clad figure came close, and knelt down
beside him like a concerned comrade.
Sir Andrew asked: “Who’re you?”
The man raised a hand promptly and pulled off his
mask.
“Oh.” Sir Andrew’s voice was almost disappointed
in its reassurance. “You,” he said, relieved and calm.
“Yes . . . I know who you are.”
Denis, returning mounted and at full speed, leading
a small flying wedge of armed and armored folk who
were desperate to relieve their beloved lord, found the
battlefield deserted by the living. Sir Andrew lay dead,
at a little distance from the other dead. His body,
though covered with others’ gore, was unmarked by
any serious wound. The expression on the Kind
Knight’s face was peaceful.
Presently Denis and the others began to look for
Shieldbreaker. They looked everywhere among the
dead, and then in widening circles outward. But the
Sword of Force was gone..
CHAPTER 11
The field cot was wide enough for two-for two, at
least, who were on terms of intimate friendship-but
tonight, as for many nights past, only one person had
slept in it.
Or tried to sleep.
The Silver Queen’s field tent was not large, not for
a shelter that had to serve sometimes as royal
conference room as well as dwelling. According to
certain stories she had heard, it would not have made
a room in the great pavilion that usually accompanied
the Dark King when he traveled with his army.
She felt great scorn for many of the Dark King’s
ways. But there were other things about him that
enforced respect, and-to herself, alone at night, she
could admit it-tended to induce fear as well.
The Queen of Yambu was sitting in near-midnight
darkness on the edge of her lonely field cot, wearing
the light drawers and shirt she usually slept in when in
the field with her troops. She could
hear rain dripping desultorily upon the tent, and an
occasional word or movement of one of the sentries
not far outside.
Her gaze was fixed on a dim, inanimate shape,
resting only an arm’s length away beside the cot. In
midnight darkness it was all but impossible to see the
thing that she was looking at, but that did not really
matter, for she knew the object as well as her own
hand. It rested there on a trestle as it always did,
beside her when she slept-or tried to sleep. It was a
Swordcase of carven wood, its huge wooden hilt
formed by chiseled dragons with their long necks
recurved, as if they meant to sink their fangs into each
other. Just where the case had originated, or when,
the queen of Yambu was not sure, but she thought it
beautiful; and after the best specialist magicians in her
pay had pronounced it innocent of any harm for her,
she had used it to encase her treasure, which she kept
near her almost alwaysher visit to Sir Andrew in the
swamp had been one notable exception-as her last
dark hope for victory.
A thousand times she had opened the wooden case,
but she had never yet drawn Soulcutter from its
sheath inside. Never yet had she seen the bare steel
of that Blade in what she was sure must be its
splendor. She was afraid to do so. But without it in
her possession she would not have dared to take her
army into the field now, risking combat with the
Mindsword and its mighty owner the Dark King.
Some hours ago, near sunset, a winged
halfintelligent messenger had brought her word of
Vilkata’s latest triumph. He had apparently crushed
what might have been Sir Andrew’s entire, army.
Then, instead of coming to attack her as she
kept expecting he would do, Vilkata had turned his
own vast forces in a move in the direction of
Tashigang.
Maybe the Dark King’s scouts had lost track of
where her forces were. But for whatever reason, her
own certainty that she would be the first one attacked
by Vilkata was proven wrong, and that gave
cowardice a chance to whisper in her ear that it might
not be too late for her to patch up an alliance with the
King. Of course cowardice, as usual, was an idiot.
Her intelligence told her that her only real hope lay in
attacking the Dark King now, while she might still
hope for some real help. Sir Andrew was already
gone. When Tashigang too had fallen, then it would
certainly be too late.
When the news of Vilkata’s most recent triumph
had come in, Yambu had first conferred briefly with
her commanders, then dismissed them, telling them to
let the troops get some rest tonight. But she herself
had not been able to sleep since. Nor, though her own
necessary course of action was becoming plainer and
plainer, had she been able to muster the will to be
decisive, to give the orders to break camp and march.
Who, or what, could stand against the Mindsword?
Evidently only something that was just as terrible.
And Sir Andrew had been wearing Shieldbreaker,
ready at his side. With her own eyes, on her visit to
the swamp, she had seen the small white hammer on
the black hilt. Vilkata with his Mindsword had
evidently won, somehow, even against that weapon.
Did Vilkata now have possession of both those
Blades? But even if he did, each terrible aug
mentation of his power only made it all the more
essential to march against him without delay.
The Silver Queen stood up and moved forward one
short pace in midnight blackness, trusting that the tent
floor was there as usual, and no assassin’s knife. She
put out her hand and touched the wooden case, then
opened it.
She stroked .with one finger the black hilt of her
own Sword. This Sword alone among the Twelve
bore no white symbol on its hilt. No sense of power
came to her when she touched it. There was no sense
of anything, beyond the dull material hilt itself. Of all
the Twelve, this one alone had nothing to say to the
world about itself.
She glanced back at her solitary cot, barely visible
in the dulled sky-glow that fell in through the tent’s
screened window. She visualized Amintor’s scarred
shoulders as they sometimes appeared there, bulking
above the plain rumpled blanket. Amintor was wise,
sometimes. Or clever at least. She doubted now that