Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Annals of the Chosen 01 (17 page)

The next day they
headed for Valleymouth, the walled city at the edge of the Midlands, where the
numerous priestesses attending to the
ler
in the
gigantic stone temple and the dozens of scattered shrines were all young
girls—the
ler
there would treat only with female virgins—whom he
was forbidden to approach or address, or even to look at for more than a
heartbeat or two. Other townsfolk were friendly enough, but greeted almost
every question with "I'd need to ask a priestess," and co
nsidered it bad luck
to mention the Wizard Lord at all, lest he think them rude and punish them with
bad weather.

The guide greeted
people in each town as old friends, and always knew where they could find food
and shelter—the lake pavilion in Greenwater,
the guesthouse in Hartridge, the bachelor
barracks in Bent Peak, an upstairs room at the trading post in Valleymouth—but
did not provide a great deal of assistance beyond that. With each new town
Breaker had to adjust to the local accent; by the time he reached Valleymouth
he sometimes had to ask for words to be repeated, but with a little coaching
from his guide he picked up the differences readily. He also had to learn new
customs, and cope with new
ler
—while he
never felt as unwelcome in any town as he
did in the wild, each community had its own
feel, its own rules, its own prayers and attitudes.

The guide—despite the
habits of the people in the towns of Greenvale, Breaker could not bring himself
to call the man Kopol—helped him out a little, but as the
priestess Shilil had
warned him back in Greenwater, Kopol liked to keep his secrets and took mild
pleasure in watching his charge's discomfiture as he learned the differences
for himself.

He discovered that
visible
ler
of the sort that sometimes manifeste
d in Mad Oak as
lights or shadows were unusual, as was the constant coddling and coaxing Mad
Oak's priestesses used to make the
ler
cooperate
with humans. Styles of prayer, styles of clothing, and styles of speech all
varied more than he had imagined, alm
ost more than he had thought possible—and
this was all just in Greenvale.

No one in any of
these towns seemed to know much about the Wizard Lord beyond the same stories
he had grown up with and the absurd fancies of the Bent Peak farmers, but in
Valleymout
h
he began to hear new stories about one of the Chosen.

The Leader—"Boss," he called
himself, as the Old

Swordsman had said—had come through there
once or twice; he was reported to be tall and handsome, as might be expected,
with a thick black beard and dark eyes. Several of the priestesses seemed
smitten with him, though of course none had succumbed to his charms, since
anyone who
had
would no longer be a priestess. There
were rumors that two young women had indeed given up the
ler
for the sake of the Boss
at some point in the past, but no one was
willing to give Breaker any details; he suspected they thought he might use
them as his model in seducing a priestess or two himself. Most of the girls
were too young to be much of a temptation, but there were a few he glimpsed
fleetingly who might have been worth the effort.

Breaker was hesitant
to leave Valleymouth, even though he could see other towns from atop the town's
ramparts; the flat open plain of the Midlands made him nervous. He had lived
his entire lif
e between two forested ridges, with the Eastern Cliffs guarding one side
of his world, but here the cliffs were so far distant they appeared little more
than a gray line on the horizon, and there were no ridges at all, nor forests,
just fiat land for as far as the eye could see, land covered with fields and
farms, villages and towns, boundary shrines or fences or walls scattered
everywhere. Actual roads—like streets, but between towns instead of inside
them—crossed the landscape in the distance; the towns here were not all on
rivers or lakes, and the land was fiat enough to make wheeled vehicles
practical, so a great deal of trade was conducted overland, hauling goods not
on barges, but in giant carts called "wagons" that were pulled by
oxen.

Breaker had ne
ver seen oxen before
reaching Valleymouth, and did not much like them—placid as the beasts were,
their mere size and obvious strength was frightening.

And the towns in the
Midlands were so close together that there were no guides; to reach the next he
wo
uld
have to venture through wild country unescorted. Even with the roads, that was
a daunting prospect.

"I've done it," Kopol told him.
"It's not hard."

"But you're a guide!" Breaker
protested.

"Not here; I learned the routes up
through Greenvale and part of Longvale from my mother, but in the Midlands I
just set out at random, and I did fine."

"But still. . ."

Kopol shrugged. "Please yourself,"
he said. "But I'm heading north again tomorrow, and you're on your own
from here. The Galbek Hills are somewhere to the south, across the
Midlands—you'll have to find your own way."

Breaker still hesitated.

Good as his word, the Greenwater Guide left
the next day, leaving Breaker alone in the upstairs room of the trading post.

Eventually, after four days in Valleymouth,
he gathered his courage and set out to the south. He arrived in Barrel unscathed,
after a completely unremarkable walk.

It was in Barrel that
he first learned to use money. The people of Longvale bartered goods and
services, and sometimes used a meas
ure of barley as a standard, but they had no
coinage other than the copper tokens they traded with the bargemen, and a great
many things were held in common by the entire village, to be used as needed.
The people of the Midlands, as Kopol had warned, considered this foolish and
old-fashioned, and used stamped silver disks as their medium of exchange. It
took Breaker three or four days to get the hang of using the silly things, and
to earn a modest supply by displaying his prowess with a blade and then passing
a mug around.

He had developed his act little by little as
he traveled; in every village since Hartridge, as soon as his identity was
known, he had been asked to demonstrate his supernatural skills in exchange for
his meals.

The stunts the Old Swordsman had taught him
served him well; people were entertained by even the simplest tricks— slicing a
tossed pear into three pieces before it hit the ground, deflecting a ball flung
at his head without warning, disarming a stick-wielding attacker, snuffing a candle
with the tip of his blade. He had gradually developed a standard
performance, and
could use it as his daily hour of practice. In the towns of Greenvale the end
of the hour had usually meant a flurry of admiring questions and perhaps a
little flirting from the local women; in Barrel it became his cue to hold out a
mug and gather coins.

He was not the only one providing
entertainment in the taverns and public houses—Barrel had no village pavilion,
but instead several separate businesses arranged around a central square served
the same purpose, and several people seemed to make their living by amusing the
patrons of these establishments. Singers and storytellers would pass a mug or
hat before and after each performance, and anyone who made a point of dropping
in a larger coin than the usual could request a particular tale or tune.

Breaker bought himself a few stories and
songs about the Wizard Lord, but alas, none of them were about the
present
Wizard Lord; instead
he got to hear several familiar pieces about how this lord or that had turned
aside a flood, or driven murderers to their doom, or fetched runaway children
and cattle safely home again.

And of course, he heard the old ballads about
how the Chosen slew the Dark Lords of Goln Vleys and Spider Marsh, though in
versions not quite the ones he had learned back in Mad Oak.

In truth, Breaker thought he learned more
talking to the townsfolk than he did listening to the professional storytellers.
Here in Barrel, as in Valleymouth, Boss was a known and familiar figure, and
several of the locals claimed to have met the Scholar, as well. Three men even
mentioned encountering the Speaker once, when traveling.

"What are they like?" Breaker asked
as he stood in a public house, a mug of ale in his hand.

The locals glanced at one another.

"What do you mean, what are they
like?" a fellow not much older than Breaker himself asked.

"I mean, are they short, tall, thin,
fat, jolly, sad, quiet, loud—what are they like?"

"Scholar's pleasant enough," one
man said. "He's about
my height but thinner, with gray in his
beard. He's good company, will trade tale for tale, and takes his turn buying
the beer."

The man in question was of average height and
stoutly built, which would make the Scholar a man of ordinary dimensions.

"He collects gossip like an old
woman," another man said. "Always wants to know the news since he
last came through."

"That's true
enough—he'll remember everything you told him last time, about your sister's
boyfriend and your mother-in-law's bad knee, and h
e'll ask you what's
become of them, whether your sister's married her man and how that knee's been
doing." This third speaker shook his head. "Filling his head with
gossip instead of studying the lore he should be!"

"Well, it's not
as if the Chosen will ev
er be called upon," said the stout man. "He has the gift of
learning, so why not use it to make himself pleasant?"

"Pleasant?" the young man said.
"How is it pleasant?"

"Everyone likes a good listener."

"And it's not as if he spreads it
about—he
listens
to
all the news, but when it's his turn he'll
tell a story about some wizard dead a hundred years."

Breaker nodded. "And the Speaker?"

The men suddenly fell silent, the eyes of the
others turning toward the three who had traveled; after an awkward pause, the
man who had spoken of a mother-in-law's knee said, "I think she's mad, if
the truth be told."

"Aye. She'll sit
in the corner with her head tilted to one side, staring at nothing, and then
she'll startle at nothing, and when she speaks she interrupts her
self with
nonsense."

"She's a crazy old woman, and the magic
should have been handed on long ago," the stout man agreed.

"Is she old?" Breaker asked. The
Old Swordsman had implied otherwise.

The men exchanged glances.

"She still has her teeth."

"And her hair hadn't gone gray as yet,
when we saw her." "Not so very old, then."

"I'd be hard put to guess her
years," the stout man acknowledged.

"I think the madness makes her seem
older," said the man who had called her mad.

"I know that the Chosen guard us all
against the Wizard Lord going bad and we owe them respect for that, but it's
hard to think well of such as her."

"Scholar and Boss, though—they're both
fine men, and I'd not like to be a Wizard Lord who'd done evil."

"And show us that sword of yours again!
I saw some of the tricks you did, and I wouldn't care to have
you
after me,
either!"

"Buy me something to eat, and I'll show
you how fast steel can move," Breaker agreed. "I can't do my best on
an empty stomach!"

"Fair enough." The stout man
beckoned to the landlord.

"Do you know who / would like to
meet?" one of the others began.

"The Beauty. We know. We all
would."

Breaker smiled. "The most beautiful
woman in the world—who
wouldn't
want to meet her, if
just to see the standard by which all others might be judged?"

"And is that why you agreed to be the
Swordsman, then— so you'd have a chance to get to know her?"

Breaker shook his head. "No—fool that I
am, I didn't even think about that aspect of it until after I'd started my
training. It certainly wouldn't have discouraged me, though!" His smile
faded. "Would you have any idea where she might be found?"