On this third night the air of the high country grew chill enough to keep Mark from sleeping soundly. He wrapped himself in the sword's covering, but built no fire, for fear of guiding his still hypothetical pursuers to him. The next morning, wet from a light drizzle, he climbed wearily on. The country round him grew ever wilder, more alien to what he knew. He continued to follow the river as it carved its way across a high plain, then up among a series of broken foothills.

Mark's head felt light now, and his stomach painfully empty. On top of each shoulder he had a sore red spot, worn by the cord from which the sword was slung.

Near midday, with timberline visible at what ap- peared to be only a small distance above him, Mark came upon a small shrine to some G.o.d he did not recognize. He robbed it of its simple offerings, dried berries and stale bread. As he ate he tried to compose a prayer to the anonymous G.o.d of the shrine, explaining what he'd done, pleading his necessity. He might not have bothered with the prayer were he not getting so close to the G.o.ds' high abode. Even here, so close, he was not entirely sure that the G.o.ds had either the time or the inclination to notice what happened at small shrines, or to hear small prayers.

Maybe tomorrow he'd be high enough on the moun- tain to get some direct divine attention. At any previ- ous time in Mark's life, such a prospect would have frightened him. But, as it was, the shock that had driven him from his home still insulated him against the theoretical terrors that might appear tomorrow.

Not far above the shrine, the Aldan had its origin in the confluence of two brooks, both of which flowed more or less out of the north. At their junction Mark tried his luck at fishing, and found his luck was bad.

He grubbed around for edible roots, and came up with nothing that he could eat. He searched for some fresher berries than the shrine had provided, and found a few that birds had spared. If any human dwelling had been in sight he would have tried his skill at burglary or begging to get food. But there was no such habita-tion to be seen on any of the vast hills under the enormous sky, and Mark was not going to turn aside now to look for one.

He spent the fourth night of his journey, sleeping little, amid a tumble of huge rocks at timberline.

Tonight the lights of Vulcan's forge-fires appeared to Mark to be almost overhead, startlingly near and at the same time dishearteningly far above him. Near midnight some large animal came prowling near, staying not far beyond the glow of a small fire that Mark had built in a sheltering crevice. When he heard the hungry snuffling of the beast he unwrapped Townsaver and gripped the hilt of the weapon in both hands. No sound came from the blade, and the air around it remained clear and quiet. Mark could feel no hint of magical protection in its steel, yet in the circ.u.mstances the simple weight and razorsharpness of it were a considerable comfort.

In the morning there were no animals of any kind in sight, nor could Mark even find a significant track.

The air at dawn was bitter cold but almost windless.

During the night Mark had wrapped himself again in the sword's cloth, but now he swathed the weapon again and tied it for carrying. Then he climbed, head- ing up between foothills, following a dry ravine, mov- ing now on knees that quivered from his need for food.

Once he was moving, he was no longer quite sure just how he'd spent the night just past, whether he'd slept at all or not. It seemed to him quite possible that he'd been walking without a pause since yesterday.

Shortly he came upon a small spring, that gave him good water to drink. He took this discovery as a good omen, drank deeply, and pressed on.

All streams were behind him now, as far as he could tell. He kept following what looked like an ill-defined trail up through the ravine. Often he wasn't sure that he was really following a trail at all. By now he was unarguably on the slopes of the mountain itself, but so far the climbing was not nearly as difficult as he had feared that it might be. There were no sheer cliffs or treacherous rockslides that could not be avoided. Even so, the going soon became murderously hard because of sheer physical exhaustion.

Mark considered ways to lighten the load that he was carrying. But it consisted of only a few things, none of which he felt willing yet to leave behind. The idea that he might be able to discard the sword, somehow, along the way had itself already been discarded. The sword was connected with his goal, and it would go with him to the end. At one point, with his head spinning, he did decide to divest himself of bow and quiver. But he changed his mind and went back for them before he'd gone ten steps.

The climb became a blur of weariness and hunger.

At some timeless bright hour near the middle of the day Mark was jarred back to full awareness of hissurroundings by the realization that he'd run into a new feature of the mountain. Just ahead was the bottom of a cliff face, very nearly vertical, a surface that he was never going to be able to climb . . . gradually he understood that there was no need for him to try.

He was standing on a high, irregular shelf of black rock, with the wind howling around him. But the day was still clear, and the afternoon sun on his back was comfortingly warm. The sun had warmed the black rocks here considerably, even if the deeper shadows still held patches of snow, and there was a chill in the wind that played endlessly in the fantastic chimneys of the cliff. Mark stood still for a time, still holding the sword and bearing his other burdens, slowly getting his breath back after the long climb. In some of the chimneys he could hear a roaring that was deeper than the wind, a noise that he thought was coming up from somewhere far below.

Mark was wondering which of the chimneys might hold fire, when his attention was caught by a place he saw at the rear of the rocky shelf, just at the angle where the clifface went leaping up again. There were signs of old occupancy back there. Mark's eye was caught by scattered, head-sized lumps of some black and gnarled substance. The lumps were of an un- familiar, off-round shape. He went to one and prodded it with the soft toe of his hunter's boot. The object was hard, and very ma.s.sive for its size. Mark slowly under- stood that the lumps were metal or ore that had been melted and then reformed into rough blobs.

He stood now in the very rear of a shallow half-cave in the face of the rising cliff, in a place where the sun struck now and the wind was baffled. Here there were old, cold ashes, from what must have been a very large wood fire. The ashes looked too old, Mark thought, to have any connection with the fires he'd seen up here during the last few evenings. Anyway, he d a.s.sumed, from the stories he'd heard, that what people called the lights of Vulcan's forge were something to do with earthfire, volcanic, whether or not it was the G.o.d in person who raised and tended them. Yet plainly some- one had once built a large blaze, deliberately, here in this broad depression in the rock floor against the cliff.

The stain of its smoke still marked the natural chumney above. The tone of the old soot was a different dark- ness from that of the rock itself.

In front of the abandoned fireplace Mark slumped to his knees, then let himself sink back into a sitting position. The air up here was thin, and stank of sulphur.

It frosted the lungs and gave them little nourishment.

At least his stomach had now ceased its clamoring for food; he had reached an internal balance with his hunger, a state almost of comfort . . . with a mental snap he came back to full alertness, finding himself sitting quietly on stone. Had he just started to fall asleep or what?He diddt see what difference it would make if he did doze off for a rest. But no, there was something to do, something to be decided, now that he was here. He ought to see to that first, think about it a little at least.

He d come up here for some vital reason . . . ah yes, the sword. When he had warmed himself a little more, he d think about it.

Still sitting in the faint sun-warmth of the high, sheltered place, Mark slowly began to notice how much unburned wood was lying about nearby. There were large chips and roughly broken sc.r.a.ps, and the half-burnt ends of logs that must once have been too big for a man to lift. He realized that he needed heat.

He wanted a fire, and so he painfully began to gather and arrange wood in the old fireplace.

It should have been an easy matter to build a fire using this available material, but weakness made it hard. Drawing his hunter's knife, Mark tried to shave i inder and fine kindling but his hands were shaky, and th-, blade slipped from the half-frozen wood. He tried the sword and found the task much easier despite its weight and size. With the sword held motionless, its point resting on the ground and the hilt on his bent knee, Mark could draw any chunk of wood against the edge and take off shavings as thin and fine as he wanted. Then when he had his tinder and his kindling ready, his flint struck a fat spark from the rough f.l.a.n.g.e of the sword's steel hilt.

The fire caught from that first spark. It burned well-alrhost magically well, Mark thought. Larger fragments soon fed it into respectable size and crack- ling strength. Then, after he'd rested and warmed himself a little more, he took his hunter's cup and gathered some snow from a shaded crevice, to melt and heat himself some water for a drink. Now, if only he had a little food . . . Mark cut that thought off, afraid the hunger pangs would start again.

He sat on the rocky ground with the unwrapped sword beside him, sipping heated water. And found himself staring at large symbols, markings so faint that he hadn't noticed them at first, painted or some- how outlined on the rock of the shallow caves rear wall. Several of the symbols had been partially obscured by the old stains of smoke. There were in all about a dozen of the signs, all of them drawn with inhumanly straight, geometrical sides; and the lines of one of them, Mark realized, formed the same design that appeared on the hilt of the sword. He took up the sword again and looked at it carefully to make sure.

After that he continued to stare at the wall-signs, with the feeling that he was on the verge of extracting some important meaning from them, until he was distracted by a sound. It was not the wind, or his own fire, but the deep chimney-roaring, louder than before, rising below the never-quite-ceasing whine of wind. It was too breathlessly prolonged to be the voice of anyanimal or human. The furnaces of Vulcan, Mark thought. The forge-fires. Whatever they really were, they were burning still, somewhere near to where he was sitting. And this old wood-fire place in front of him was. . . that thought would not complete itself.

Mark's sun-shadow on the face of the cliff before him was reaching higher, and he knew that behind him the sun was going down. He thought: I won't live through this night up here; the cold if nothing else will kill me. But in spite of approaching death-or per- haps because of it-he felt a strong and growing conviction that he was going to see Vulcan soon. And somehow neither death nor the G.o.ds were terrible; the shock of watching his father and his brother die still numbed Mark's capacity for terror. Now he under- stood that ever since he'd picked up the sword from the village street he'd been meaning to confront Vulcan with it. To confront him, and . . . and maybe that would be the end.

Trying to gain strength, Mark built up his fire again, with larger chunks of wood. Then he curled up in front of it, as if he could absorb its radiant energy like food.

Again he had the sword's cloth wrapped round his own body as a blanket.

The next time he awoke, he was cold and stiff, and the world was totally dark around him except for a million stars and the brightly winking embers of his fire. Slowly and painfully Mark turned over on his bed of rock, twisting his aching body to get the nearly- frozen half of it toward the fire. His face and the backs of his hands felt tender, as if they'd been almost scorched when the flames were high. But they began to freeze as soon as they were turned away from the remaining warmth. Mark knew he ought to make him- self stand up, move his arms and walk, and then build up the fire again. He knew it, but he couldn't seem to get himself in motion. Deep in the middle of his body he could feel a new kind of shivering, and now he was almost completely sure that he was going to die tonight.

Still the fact had very little importance.

Get up and tend the fire, and it will save you.

Startled, Mark raised his head, croaked out a half- formed question. The words had come to him as if in someone else's voice, and with the force of a command. He could not recognize the voice, but it made a powerful impression. Now, once he'd moved his head, the rest was possible. He sat up, rubbing his arms together, preparing himself for further effort.

Now his arms were able to move freely. And now he forced himself to rise, swaying on stiffened knees, but driving his legs, torso, everything into activity. Half- paralyzed with cold and stiffness still, he gathered more wood and fed the flames when he had blown them back to life.

Then, Mark lay down near the new flames, wrap- ping hiself in the blanket again. He rubbed his face.

When he took his hands down from his eyes, a circleof tall, silent figures was standing around him and the fire. They were too tall to be human. Mark, too numb to feel any great shock, looked at what he could see of the faces of the G.o.ds. He wondered why he could not recognize Ardneh, to whom his mother prayed so much, among them.

One of the G.o.ddesses-Mark couldn't be sure which one she was-demanded of him: "Why have you brought that sword back up here, mortal? We don't want it here."

"I brought it for my father's sake." Mark answered without fear, without worrying over what he ought to say. "This sword maimed him, years ago. It's killed him now. It's killed my brother, too. It's driven me away from home. It's done enough, I'm getting rid of it."

This caused a stir and a muttering around the circle.

The faces of the G.o.ds, shadowed and hard for Mark to see, turned to one another in consultation. And now the voice of a different deity chided Mark: "It was time enough, in any case, for you to be leaving home. Do you want to be a mill-hand and a rabbit-hunter all your life?"

"Yes," said Mark immediately. But even as he gave the answer, he wondered if it were really true.

Another G.o.d-voice argued at him: "The sword you have there has done hardly anything as yet, as meas- ured by its capabilities. And anyway, who are you to judge such things?"

Another voice chimed in: "Precisely. That sword was given to Jord the smith, later Jord the miller, until you, mortal, or your brother had it from him. It's yours now. But you cant just bring it back here and be rid of it that way. Oh, no. Even leaving aside the question of good manners, we-"

And another: -cant just take it back, now that it's been used. You can't bring a used gift back."

"Gift?" That word brought Mark almost to midday wakefulness. It came near making him jump to his feet. "'You say a gift? When you took my father's arm in payment for it?"

An arm, long as a tree-limb, pointed. "This one here is responsible for taking the arm. We didn't tell him to do that." And the towering figure standing beside Vulcan (Mark hadnt recognized Vulcan till the instant he was pointed out) clapped the Smith on the back. It was a great rude slap that made Vulcan stagger on his game leg and snarl. Then the speaker, his own ident.i.ty still obscure, went on: "Do you suppose, young mortal, that we went to all the trouble of having Clubfoot here make the swords, make all twelve of them for our game, never to see them properly used? They were a lot of trouble to have made."

For a game . . . a game? In outrage Mark cried out: "I think I'm dreaming all of youl"

None of the G.o.ds or G.o.ddesses in the circle thought that was worth an answer.Mark cried again: "What are you going to do about the sword? If I refuse to keep it?"

"None of your business," said one curt voice.

"I suppose wed give it to someone else."

"And anyway, don't speak in that tone of voice to G.o.ds...

"Why shouldn't I speak any way I want to, I'm dreaming you anyway! And it is my business what-"

"Do you never dream of real persons, real things?"

Smoke from the fire blew into Mark's face. He choked, and had to close his eyes. When he opened them again the circle of tall beings was still there, surrounding him.

"And, anyway, if we G.o.ds wish to play a game, who are you, mortal, to object?" That got a general murmur of approval.

Mark was still outraged, but his energy was failing.

His muscles seemed to be relaxing of themselves. He lay weakly back on rock half-warmed by fire. Despite all he could do, his eyelids were sagging shut in utter weariness. He whispered: ' A game . . . ?"

A female voice, that of a G.o.ddess who had not spoken until now, argued softly: "I say that this Mark, this stubborn son of a stubborn miller, deserves to die tonight for what he s done, for the disrespect he's shown, the irresponsible interference."

"A miller's son? A miller's son, you say?" That, for some reason, provoked laughter. ' Ah, hahaaa! . . . any- way, he's protected here by the fire that he's kindled, using magical materials and tools. Not that he had the least idea of what he was doing when he did it."

"What is so amusing? I still say that he must die tonight. He must. Otherwise I foresee trouble, in the game and out of it, trouble for us all."

"Trouble for yourself, you mean."

And another new voice: "Hah, if you say he must die, then I say he must live. Whatever your position is in this, I must maintain the opposite."

They're just like people, Mark thought. His next thought was: I'm almost gone, I'm dying. Now the idea was not only acceptable, but brought with it a certain feeling of relief.

During the rest of the night-his gentle dying went on for a long, long time-Mark kept revising-his opin- ion of the wrangling gang of G.o.ds who surrounded him on his deathbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that they were conducting their debate on a high level, using words of great wisdom. At these times he wanted to make every effort to remember what they said, but somehow he never could. At other times what they were, saying struck him as the most foolish babble that he had ever heard. But he could not manage to retain an example of their foolishness either.

Anyway, he completely missed the end of the argu- ment, because instead of dying he finally awoke to behold the whole vast reach of the sky turning lightabove the great bowl of rock that made the world. The near rim of the bowl was very near in the east, almost overhead, while the northwest portion of the rim was far, far away, no more than a little pinkish sawtooth line on the horizon. And to the southwest the rim was so distant that it could not be seen at all.

Mark was shivering again, or shivering still, when he woke up. Now he was cold on both sides. The fire was nearly out, and he immediately started to rebuild it. Somewhat to his surprise, his body moved easily.

For whatever reason, he had awakened with a feeling of achievement, a sense that something important had been accomplished while he lay before the fire. Well, for one thing, his life had been preserved, whether by accident or through the benevolence of certain G.o.ds.

He was not at all sure of the reality of the presences he'd seen. There was no sign of G.o.ds around him now; nothing but the mountain and the sky, and the high, keening wind.

Except for the obscure symbols on the wall of stone, and the remnants of that large and ancient fire.

The need for food had now settled deep in Mark's bones, and he thought, with the beginning of fear, that soon he might be too weak to make his way back down the mountain. He had to implement his final decision about the sword before that happened; so as soon as.

he had warmed himself enough to stop his shivering, he turned his back on his renewed fire and the old forge-place of the G.o.ds. Keeping the blanket wrapped around himself, he slung bow and quiver on his back again, and took up Townsaver. He carried the blade as if he meant to fight with it.

Testing the wind, he tried to follow the smell of sulphur to where it was the strongest. It took him only a few moments to stumble right against what he was looking for, in the form of a chest-high broken column of black rock. The middle of the broad black stump was holed out, as if it were a real treestump rotting, and up out of the central cavity there drifted acrid fumes, along with some faintly visible smoke. At cer- tain moments the smoke was lighted from beneath with a reddish glow, visible here at close range even in broad daylight. A breath of warmth came from the fumarole, along with something that smelled even worse than sulphur, as foul as the breath of some imagined monster.

Somewhere far below, the mountain sighed, and the wave of rising heat momentarily grew great.

Mark lifted the sword. He used both hands on the hilt, just as his brother Kenn had held it with two hands during the fight. But no power flowed from the weapon now, and Mark could do with it as he liked.

Without delaying, without giving the G.o.ds another moment in which to act, he thrust the sword down into the rising smoke and let it fall.

Father, Kenn, I'ye done it.The sword fell at once into invisibility. Mark heard the sharp impact that it made on nearby rock, followed by another clash a little farther down. Holding his breath, he listened a long time for some final impact, perhaps a splash into the molten rock that an Elder had once told Mark lay at tire bottom of these holes of fire. But though he listened until he could hold his breath no more, he heard no more of the falling sword.

Mark looked up into the morning sky, clear but for a few small clouds. They were just clouds, with nothing remarkable about them. He realized that he was wait- ing for a reaction, for lightning, for something to embody what must be the anger of the G.o.ds at what he had just done. He was waiting to be struck dead. But no blow came.

What did come instead was, in a sense, even worse.

It was just the beginning of a sickening suspicion that his throwing the sword down into the volcano had been a horrible mistake. Now he had made his gesture, of striking back at the G.o.ds for what they had done to him. And what harm had his gesture done them? And what good had it done himself?

In thirteen years, Jord had never made this awful trek, had never thrown the G.o.ds' payment for his right arm back into their teeth. For whatever reason, Mark's father had kept his arm-price hanging on the wall at home instead. Never trying to use it, never trying to sell it, not bragging about it-but still keeping it.

Mark had never really, until this moment, tried to fathom why.

One thing was sure, Mark's fatherhad never tried to rid himself of the sword.

The spell of shock that had been put on Mark in the village street by the evil magic of violence began at last to lift. He realized that he was alone upon a barren mountainside, almost too weak to move, many kilome- ters from the home to which he dared not return. And that he'd just done something awesome and incompre- hensible, completed a mad gesture that would make him the enemy of G.o.ds as well as men.

He hung weakly on the edge of the smoking, stink- ing stone stump, growing sicker and more frightened by the moment, until he began to imagine that the voices of the G.o.ds were coming up out of the central hole along with the mind-clouding smoke. Yes, the G.o.ds were angry. In Mark the feeling grew of just having made an enormous blunder. The feeling esca- lated gradually into black terror.

Only his lack of energy saved him from real panic.

Doing what he could to flee the wrath of the G.o.ds, leaning shakily on the black rocky stump, Mark started round it to reach its far side, from which the mountain- side went rather steeply down. As Mark moved onto the descending slope, the stump he leaned on turned into a high crooked column, the way around it into a definite descending path.

Mark had not followed this path for twenty stepsbefore he came upon the sword. It was lying directly in his way, right under a jagged hole in the side of the crooked chimney-column, through which it had obvi- ously dropped out. One bounce on rock, the first impact that he'd heard, then this. Altogether the sword had fallen no farther than if he'd dropped it from the millhouse roof.

Even in that short time it had encountered heat enough to leave it scorching. Mark burned his fingers when he tried to pick it up, and had to let it drop again. He had to wait, shivering in the mountain's morning shadow, and blowing on his fingers, until the unharmed metal had cooled enough for him to handle it.

CHAPTER 3.

"I am still amazed at the extent of your recent failure, Wearer-of-Blue," Duke Fraktin said. "In- deed, the more I think about it, the more amazed I grow."

The blue-robed wizard's real name was not the one by which he had just been addressed. But his real name-or, indeed, even his next-to-real name-were not to be casually uttered; not even by the lips of a duke; and the wizard was used to answering to a variety of aliases.

The wizard now bowed, though he remained seated, in controlled acknowledgement of the rebuke; he had a way, carefully cultivated, of not showing fear, a way that made even a very confident master tread a little warily with him.