Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Misenchanted Sword

He would, however, want to be very, very careful to avoid maiming or blinding or any other sort of permanent injury. He had once asked himself what sort of a life one should lead when one could live forever; he answered himself, “A cautious one.”

For now he intended to put Wirikidor somewhere out of sight, where it would tempt no one. He might bury it, or throw it in the river; he knew that the Spell of True Ownership would prevent it from being carried downstream away from him. He was sure that he would be able to recover it should he ever want to.

Perhaps, he thought, I should hire a wizard to break the spell, and live out my life normally. The war is long over; why do I need a magic sword?

He remembered then that Darrend had thought the spell was unbreakable. Well, Darrend could have been wrong. It would undoubtedly take a very powerful wizard to break the spell, of course, and wizardry was expensive—not just because of the greed of its practitioners, but because so many of the ingredients needed for charms were so difficult to obtain. He recalled when a call had gone out, years earlier, for the hair of an unborn child, needed for some special spell Azrad had wanted performed; he wondered if any had ever been found. Other ingredients were said to be even more difficult to acquire. By ordinary standards he was well off, as the inn was successful, but if he tried hiring high-order wizardry his savings could easily vanish overnight.

He resolved to ask whatever wizard Tandellin might bring back about the possibilities of hiring powerful countercharms, but for the present he had no intention of actually having the spell broken. Wirikidor could be useful. Dangerous, but useful. He could safely draw it at least fifteen more times, perhaps as many as twenty-three, by his best count. That was still a safe margin. When it dropped to single digits he might reconsider—or when his health started to go.

He would mention it to the wizard—assuming Tandellin did not bring a witch or theurgist instead—but for now he would simply bury the sword out back.

Two days later, his wounds magically healed, he did just that, working alone, late at night, by the light of a lantern, using a patch of ground that he had thawed with a bonfire that day.

The earthquake that followed a sixnight later was small and localized. It broke a few windows, emptied a shelf or two, sent a wine-barrel rolling across the cellar floor, and, of course, split open the ground and flung Wirikidor up, to lie against the inn’s kitchen door.

Valder considered throwing it in the river only until he had estimated how much damage would be caused by a flood big enough to carry the sword half a mile up the slope to the inn. The flood might not come, but he was not willing to risk it.

He wondered idly what a concealment spell would cost, but finally just tossed the sword under his bed and forgot about it.

The news of the death of Gor of the Rocks in 5034 sent Valder into a brief depression. He had admired Gor once, but that admiration had largely worn away, starting with the overlord’s request that Valder serve as his personal assassin in peacetime. The loss of the territory where Valder had served, when it became the Kingdom of Tintallion, had been another blow. The Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, which had once seemed so pure and all-embracing, had been corrupted and whittled down.

Gor’s part in putting Edaran of Ethshar on his father’s throne had not raised Valder’s opinion any; it had left the entire central region that Anaran had once controlled at the mercy of Gor and Azrad, who had taxed it heavily. Gor had gotten an edge over Azrad by marrying off his son and heir, Goran of the Rocks, to Edaran’s sister Ishta of the Sands in 5029, despite Ishta being eleven years older than the boy.

Over the years Gor had gone from being virtually an object of worship in Valder’s eyes to just another conniving tyrant, but still, his death was not welcome news. It removed any possibility of further difficulty over Valder’s long-ago refusal to serve as an assassin, but it also removed the last vestige of his boyhood hero.

Gor had been only a dozen years older than himself, at that, and yet he was dead of old age. Valder still felt strong and healthy, but Gor’s death was another reminder that he, too, was growing old, and that Wirikidor was doing nothing to prevent it.

Goran was now overlord of Ethshar of the Rocks, a young man in the prime of life—and he had not even been born until thirteen years after Valder built his inn. The thought of that oppressed him as he sat in a corner staring at the half-dozen patrons in the dining room, every one of them too young to remember the Great War.

Perhaps, Valder mused, part of the depression was because he had never taken a wife, and to the best of his knowledge had sired no children. He had had women, certainly, but none had stayed. When he had been a soldier none of his pairings had been expected to last by either party, because most did not in a soldier’s life, and since becoming an innkeeper the only women he saw were those with the urge to travel. Some had stayed for a time, but all had eventually tired of the calm routine of the inn and had moved on.

It seemed a bit odd that Tandellin, who had always seemed rowdy and irrepressible as a youth, had been happily married for thirty-seven years, while Valder, who had always thought of himself as dull, ordinary, and predictable, had never married at all. It went against the traditional stereotypes.

He knew that he could have found a wife in Ethshar of the Spices, had he ever wanted to, but since the completion of the inn he had never once returned to the city. He disliked the crowds and dust, and knew that swords were no longer worn openly there save by guardsmen and troublemakers, so that the necessity of carrying Wirikidor would mark him as a stranger.

He had always done well enough for himself without visiting the city. His lack of a family had never really bothered him; Tandellin and Sarai and their children had been his family in many ways.

He mulled all this over sitting in the main room with a mug of ale that Sarai the Younger kept filled for him. As he glanced up to signal her for another pint his eye fell on Wirikidor, hanging over the hearth.

The sword had lain neglected beneath his bed for scarcely a month before he restored it to its place. He had gotten tired of questions about its absence from familiar customers; too many had gone away convinced that the thieves had indeed gotten away with it, even if they had lost one of their number in doing so. Although that might have deterred thieves on the grounds that there was nothing left worth taking, it grated on Valder’s pride. Besides, Valder had gotten tired of seeing the empty pegs, and could not think of any way to remove them short of sawing them off as close to the stone as possible.

So he had returned Wirikidor to its place of honor, but devised another approach to the problem of removing temptation. He held contests whenever the inn was crowded, offering ten gold pieces to any man or woman who could draw the blade. This served as good entertainment on many a night, and demonstrated to all present just how useless the sword was to anybody else. Rather than suppressing details of the sword’s enchantment, as he had before, Valder made a point of explaining that it was permanently linked to him, and that every time he drew it a man died.

That had discouraged any further attempts at theft. After all, who cares to risk one’s life for a sword that nobody can use, knowing that if it does leave its scabbard someone will die—and that that someone will not be the sword’s owner?

He had not mentioned that the spell was limited to another score or so of uses, however, nor that it would then turn on him. He did not mention his theoretical immortality, lest someone be tempted to test it.