The Heir

Chapter 2

2

Abject poverty, misery, and squalor. We know little more about Seeking Sword's childhood than that. So little do we know that we could almost say his life began at fifteen. Perhaps it did, in a figurative way. The person he became bears little resemblance to the depravity of his origins. We have no way to account for the compassion, strength and benevolence that so characterized his rule.—The Gathering of Power, by the Wizard Spying Eagle.

Seeking Sword found himself a place to sit on the shiny log, exhausted. His eyes were the gray-blue of hazy skies, his hair the bronze of cooling embers, and his skin the brown of tanned leather. Fifteen years old and six feet tall, he weighed one hundred seventy-five pounds. He still had the narrow shoulders and hips of adolescence, which many mistook for clumsiness. Left-handed and able to fight equally well with either hand, he was anything but clumsy.

Slithering Snake retrieved his sword from the bushes where the boy had flung it with his own. His body so lacked oxygen that his peripheral vision clouded with sparkle.

Their practice clearing was a circle of smooth, packed dirt, which they leveled every year after the winter rains. For ten years the two of them had practiced in this clearing, ever since the boy had shown up one day at the Elk Raider caves and asked Slithering Snake to teach him. The child holding a sword as big as he was had touched the sectathon.

Seeking Sword had turned out to be an apt pupil. Now the boy was so skilled that he disarmed his every contestant. At every other form of hand-to-hand combat, he was indomitable as well, and showed incredible promise, despite his maleficent parentage and the squalor in which he lived.

“You're getting better,” Slithering Snake said. “I like the weight shift you put into that last parry—surprised me. You'll have to refine it, though.”

Seeking Sword smiled, nodding. “It won't work as well on a smaller man. With your bulk, Lord Snake, it worked perfectly.”

The large man grinned.

“Listen, my friend, I need to decide something.”

The large man frowned.

Seeking Sword plunged his weapon into the ground between his feet. The ruby set in the pommel sparkled. “It's my father, Lord Snake.”

How could a woman, any woman, deign to let Icy Wind into her sacred cave? Slithering Snake wondered. The man stank like a skunk two weeks dead and had halitosis bad enough to frighten a bear. Uglier than excrement, Icy Wind was as abrasive as sand rubbed into wound, and looked as if any act of c****s would be his last. Only through the Infinite's direct intervention could Icy Wind have sired a child as handsome as Seeking Sword.

“What about him, Lord Sword?”

Seeking Sword sighed. “I hate him,” he said, as though describing the weather. “I love him, but I hate him.”

“He's … not a pleasant man.”

Nodding, Seeking Sword put his face in his hands. “Remember when Fawning Elk stopped him from beating me?”

Slithering Snake grunted. “Five, six years ago, wasn't it?”

On one of the few occasions Icy Wind had come to the Elk Raider cave, Seeking Sword had misbehaved in some way. Icy Wind began to beat him with his staff.

“What the Infinite are you doing?” Fawning Elk demanded, stepping between them.

“Get out of my way, wench!” Icy Wind said, swinging the staff at the boy again.

Somehow, Fawning Elk avoided the blow and slapped Icy Wind.

“Meddling harpy!” His face red, the old man swung at her. Lunging at his father, Seeking Sword tackled him at the waist, throwing them both off balance. In a tangle they fell to the cavern floor.

Fawning Elk put her knife to Icy Wind's neck. “If you harm the boy again, I'll peel your skin off in strips and feed them to you!”

Leaping into the fray, Leaping Elk and Slithering Snake pulled her off Icy Wind and dragged her away.

Sullenly, pulling the boy behind him, Icy Wind had left the Elk Raider cave and had never returned.

“I remember, Lord Sword,” Slithering Snake said. “She would have killed him if the Lord Elk and I hadn't stopped her from going after you.”

“Infinite bless her for caring,” Seeking Sword said. “It didn't stop him, though. That was the first time I realized something wasn't right about the way he treats me.” The boy sighed, biting his lip. His left hand picked absently at scabs of bark still clinging to the log. “How old was I? Six, seven? I don't remember. He dragged me back to our cave and beat me worse than ever before.”

Slithering Snake winced, nodding. Once, he had visited Seeking Sword at home. Seeking Sword and his father Icy Wind lived under an overhang on the opposite slope of the mountain in which the Elk Raiders made their home. The cave stank of unwashed body. The ceiling and walls were rancid with the smoke of a thousand cooking fires. Discarded bone and other detritus choked the floor. Seeking Sword had tried to clean their cave for Slithering Snake's visit. Icy Wind had beaten him nearly senseless, and Slithering Snake hadn't visited again.

“Anyway, it's time for me to leave,” Seeking Sword said, weeping softly and closing his eyes.

Slithering Snake put his hand on the boy's shoulder, not knowing what else to do. He doubted that Icy Wind had fathered Seeking Sword, but had no proof. Icy Wind had appeared with the infant one day at the Elk Raider caves, claiming the boy was his own. The mother had died shortly after giving birth, Icy Wind claimed, in the earthquake that had destroyed Burrow Garrison and stopped the Imperial siege of the Tiger Fortress. The old man also claimed she died before bestowing half her psychic reserve on Seeking Sword, hence his lack of talent.

His lack notwithstanding, the Infinite had blessed Seeking Sword with incredible luck. In ten years of weapons practice, he had received only one injury. Slithering Snake couldn't count the number of cuts and scratches he'd gotten while teaching the boy.

Furthermore, where the destitute, half-crazy, obnoxious old man had obtained the boy's sword was a mystery. The blade looked like tarnished brass. The haft was plain, contoured for the hand, and unremarkable except for the single ruby set in the pommel. Slithering Snake had seen many swords more elaborately decorated, but none that color of metal. Modest in appearance, the sword was valuable, its craftsmanship superior.

The mystery of Seeking Sword and Icy Wind had attracted the attention of Scowling Tiger, the most powerful bandit in the Windy Mountains. Months ago, the bandit general had questioned the sectathon at length, then the two Wizards Melding Mind and Easing Comfort had plied him with further questions. The three men had then interviewed Leaping Elk. Initially, Slithering Snake had thought that the questioning was the bandit general's first move toward inducting Seeking Sword into the Tiger Raiders. Months had passed since then, and Scowling Tiger hadn't offered the boy a position. Why was Scowling Tiger so interested in Seeking Sword? Slithering Snake wondered.

Sighing, the sectathon scanned the area for human presence, his talent enabling him to detect others from as far as twenty miles away.

The eye-sore of Icy Wind's psychic signature was the only one within two miles. In all his forty-three years, Slithering Snake had seen few signatures as ugly. The figure tottered toward them, leaning heavily on a staff. Why does Icy Wind need the staff when a medacor can easily correct any infirmity? Slithering Snake wondered. Is it a talisman, as Leaping Elk suspects?

“Here comes your father,” he said.

A look of resigned disgust passed across Seeking Sword's face. “Just in time,” the boy said, wiping the tears off his cheeks. Sighing, he stood and stepped to his discarded weapons. Quiver, weapons belt, a knife for each moccasin, pack and bow. He slid the sword into a sheath that disparaged the blade it housed. None of Seeking Sword's clothing was of quality workmanship, the boy having made it himself. All of it was better than Icy Wind's rags.

“The Lord Elk's offer of better clothing still stands, my friend.”

“As does my refusal, Lord Snake.” Seeking Sword already owed Leaping Elk more than he could repay. For years, Leaping Elk and other members of the Elk Raiders had taught Seeking Sword various disciplines. The boy had often wondered how to repay that debt. I wish Father didn't hate them so much, Seeking Sword thought. If he didn't, I'd join them tomorrow.

The old man limped into the clearing. Clutching a polished staff were trembling, gnarled hands of shriveled skin, prominent vein, knobby knuckle.

“Father, you didn't need to come all this way,” Seeking Sword said as usual, the clearing several miles north of their cave.

“Oh, I know, my son, my only son, but I wanted to see you disarm this bandit. Yes, I did,” Icy Wind said, directing a contemptuous look toward Slithering Snake. Glistening, bloodshot, jaundiced eyes dregged sunken sockets and peered from beneath a precipitous, lupine brow.

“It's becoming easier, Father,” Seeking Sword said. “I'm getting very good with a sword, good enough I think to join the Elk Raiders.”

“No! A thousand times, no! How many times do I have to tell you?!” Spittle slathered a prognathous jaw, the mouth nearly toothless, two rotted stubs remaining.

Looking toward Slithering Snake, Seeking Sword motioned with his head.

The sectathon gathered his accoutrements and left without a word.

Sometimes Seeking Sword argued with his father, sometimes not. Always his responses were mild. The boy smiled apprehensively. “If you won't allow me to discharge my debt to them, then you had better do so yourself, Father.” He had tried many tactics, but never this one.

Flush crept up the neck, a corded, wrinkled pillar buttressing sagging jowls that hung in scaly folds below cheekbones collapsed into the face. “You impudent little runt, I ought to beat you black and blue for that!” Narrow nostril dripped nasal mucus, sleeved on crusted cloth.

“You ought to be grateful they taught me how to survive as a bandit!” Seeking Sword replied. “The time has come for me to decide for myself what to do, Father,” he said sadly, sighing. “I'll come visit you when I've found another place to live.”

“What!” Icy Wind screamed, his voice acid to eardrums. “You'll listen to me, oh yes, by the Infinite, or I'll thrash you so soundly you won't walk for a week…”

Seeking Sword turned to go. His senses tuned, he spun at the whistle of staff, blocking it with the edge of his blade.

The explosion blew him backward, stunning him.

Blinking the flash from his eyes, his ears ringing, Seeking Sword extricated himself from bushes, wiped the blacking and singed hair off his arm, and looked toward his father.

Laying at the opposite edge of the clearing, Icy Wind rolled his head from side to side with a groan, a hand tenaciously clinging to staff.

Good, he doesn't look harmed, Seeking Sword thought. Caring only to get away from his father, he sheathed the weapon and started north. Jogging slowly at first, he soon settled into a distance-eating pace.

Three or four times, Seeking Sword slowed to a walk because he couldn't see the path very clearly. His grief filled his eyes and spilled down his face. When his eyes burned so badly he had to close them, he doggedly put one foot in front of the other. More than once he fell. Every time he got back up and continued northward.

While his relationship with his father had never been ideal, he did love him and was full of sorrow that he needed to leave. I've lost more than my father, he thought. I've lost my youth; I'm not a boy anymore. He knew that to shed his youth he needed to shed his tears. Even then, the past remained, and the tears only mitigated its effects on his present.

Dark fell. Still he continued, feeling that he neared a destination. In his distress, he recognized nothing familiar. As the moon cleared the trees, he stopped. Shedding his weapons, he sat at the base of a huge oak tree, where dense wood encroached upon meadow.

The quiet was eerie. No bird sang, no wind blew, no cricket chirped. The feeling of the place was annihilation. That was how Seeking Sword recognized it. Hundreds of acres of broken granite boulder marked the plain where the castle of the Emperor Lofty Lion had once stood. Once, ten years before, Seeking Sword had come here.

The memory was vivid. At the time, he thought that his father had lost the little sanity left to him. Icy Wind awoke one morning. Without the help of staff, he started northward, ordering the five-year old to accompany him. After two days of hard traveling they had reached this place of death.

Approaching this oak, Icy Wind smote it with the staff between its two largest branches, splitting the massive trunk. Out of the tree had fallen a sword. The trunk had then closed without a wound. As the boy took the sword from him, Icy Wind collapsed and slept for a full day.

Waking, Icy Wind asked the boy what happened, as if he hadn't been there. Explaining as well as any five-year old could, Seeking Sword felt he had been a character in one of the stories told late at night around the fire. His father didn't want to believe him but had to.

The sword.

Icy Wind's eyes lit up like lamps when he saw the weapon. Seeking Sword didn't remember his father's exact words, merely that Icy Wind was ecstatic, as if they had found something very valuable.

To this day, Seeking Sword wondered why the sword was valuable, and also wondered, if it were so valuable, why Icy Wind had left it in a five-year old's possession.

Sighing, Seeking Sword stood to examine the place where the trunk had split ten years ago. He found no seam, no scar, nothing to show where the tree had opened.

His stomach growled, and he shook his head. I need to eat, he thought, not feeling hungry. Shouldering his bow and quiver, he stepped toward denser forest, leaving his other accoutrements behind.

Sliding along a clearing edge, Seeking Sword saw motion among the opposite trees. Dropping to a crouch, his back hunched, an arrow in his bow, he crept through the grass. Slowly, he approached, tracking the animal more by sound than sight, the wind favoring him. At fifteen paces from his prey, he rose, found a bead and loosed the arrow.

“You vomitus of a cancerous hyena, what do you think you're doing?!”

Laughing, Seeking Sword rose to his full height. “How are you, Thinking Quick?” he asked, unable to see the girl to whom the voice belonged.

She appeared in the moon-dapple, his arrow in her fist. “Alive, thank the Infinite. You almost put that arrow in my heart, Seeking Sword. Have you begun hunting humans?” she asked affably, stepping into his arms.

“I love you and would never harm you, child,” he replied, embracing her. “I may go hungry if I don't kill something.”

“I'll be back.” She disappeared without sight or sound, teleporting herself away, her usual method of coming and going.

He smiled, grateful she was here. Eight years old, Thinking Quick was the daughter of Melding Mind, the bandit Wizard. Independent, mischievous and talented, she was a full-fledged Wizard of many psychic disciplines, and of all three time sights—temporal, extant, and prescient. She often complained that her prescience was more a curse than a blessing.

Waiting in the clearing, Seeking Sword wondered what it was like to know the entire past and all possible futures. She claimed it was t*****e. He sympathized, knowing he was incapable of truly understanding. At one time she had told Seeking Sword he was invisible to all three time sights. “I can never see where you've been, where you are, or where you'll be. Sometimes I can see the effects of your presence on others.” Despite her multiple talents, Thinking Quick couldn't determine why he was without one. “Only the Infinite knows,” she had said.

She appeared before him, carrying a large hare by the ears. Taking it from her, he gestured toward the oak where he had left his other weapons.

“I saw the burst of energy earlier,” she said. “What did he do, try to hit you with his staff?”

He nodded, stepping through moon-dapple.

“It's not easy to leave one's father,” Thinking Quick said, “or lose a son.”

Seeking Sword was in tears again, feeling his grief anew. She always knew what to say to bring his pain pouring from him, always knew when he needed her. The girl calmly took his hand and led him while he was blind.

Her practice seemed to be to help him through his rough times. A psychological Wizard, she was expert at treating emotional imbalances. With him, of course, she used words instead of psychic adjustments.

“Icy Wind has his own terrible purpose—as you do,” she said, guiding him across a dry stream-bed. “Your time had come to take a different path. Remember, my friend, he's a very sick man. The staff compounds the problem. I think he'd die without it.”

“It's just a staff.”

“It's a talisman,” she replied.

“Oh?” Seeking Sword wiped his face, puzzled. “Why's he so angry?”

“The staff makes his every adjustment useless.” She turned to look at him. “Do you know he's not angry with you?”

The pain came up again, blinding him. “Then why does he take it out on me?”

“He's sick, as you'll be sick if you don't express all that anger inside you.” She poked a finger at him and led him around the base of the oak.

Sitting, he gave the hare to her, knowing she would have it prepared far more quickly. How can I express my anger without alienating those around me? Seeking Sword wondered.

“Your life will soon change, my friend,” she said, preparing the hare.

Seeking Sword preferred not to watch, his own methods clumsy. I wish I had a talent, he thought. The thought had gone through his head so many times that it registered as nothing more than small sigh, a small frown.

“A storm of change is coming toward the bandits,” Thinking Quick said. “I can't join you in the new life you'll lead.”

“Why not?” he asked, suffering another jolt.

“Some things I can't say,” she replied, not pausing in preparing the carcass. “I can tell you how encompassing the changes will be. They'll affect all bandits in some way. Everyone in the three Empires will know of them. Promise me, Seeking Sword, that you'll tell no one what I'm about to say.” She floated hot, sweet rabbit meat in front of him.

He drew a knife and stabbed it, self-pity spilling from the holes in his soul. “I promise.”

“More than one quarter of all bandits in the northern lands will die.”

Suddenly, Seeking Sword felt more sick than hungry. She's telling me I'll live through it, he thought. Perhaps I should be grateful.