The Seventh Book of Lost Swords : Wayfinder's Story Fred Saberhagen (phonics books txt) 📖

      Tigris was taking great care not to remind her Master directly of this latter fact.

      He grunted something, for the moment sounding completely human—a mode of existence he did not always appear to favor.

      “Where to now, Master?”

      “To a place where I trust we will not be interrupted, Tigris. We have work to do.”

Chapter Three

      Morning had arrived, and Ben of Purkinje was enduring an enormous headache.

      He sat up slowly, further tormented by a fierce itching. Particles of the hay in which he had been sleeping had worked their way into his clothing. According to the feeling in his head, the hour ought not to be much past midnight, but the exterior world ruthlessly assured him that a new day had indeed begun. The cavernous interior of the barn in which he had sought shelter was now becoming faintly visible, venerable roughhewn beams and gray wall planks bathed in an illumination that could only be that of dawn. Intermittent crowing noises now issuing from the adjacent barnyard offered confirming evidence.

      The noises were there, but Ben was reasonably sure that they had not awakened him; they were completely routine, and he had been too deeply asleep to be roused by anything so ordinary.

      Too deeply asleep indeed. Unconscious, he thought, would be a better word for it. Recalling some of last night’s adventures in the local tavern, he wondered if the second or third girl to sit on his lap might have put something unfriendly in his ale. The first, as Ben recalled, had been almost unconscious herself at the time, and he thought he could exclude her from the list of suspects.

      He doubted that any of last night’s girls would have played a dirty trick like that on her own accord. Someone would have put her up to it.

      Ben clenched his eyelids shut again. His memories of last night were somewhat hazed. He went prowling through that fog, in search of his newly-met drinking companions. They had been three or four youngish men, who had had the look of bandits—or, if not bandits, of people who had no higher moral standard than they found absolutely necessary for survival. A couple of them, perhaps not realizing what a formidable opponent they had encountered, had challenged Ben to a drinking contest. Before that had been carried to a conclusion, the tavern girls had taken a notion to sit on his lap, first in sequence, then together … or had that been his own suggestion?

      …but of course nothing could be done about any of that now. If in fact someone had tried to drug his drink, he had survived the effort. This was morning, and at least it wasn’t raining—he would have heard that on the barn roof. Trouble was, the first subtle indications of this fine spring morning were that things were not going to go well today for Ben of Purkinje, known in recent years as Ben of Sarykam. Right now he feared that his headache might be the least of today’s problems, because certain sounds outside this borrowed barn were like those of no ordinary farmyard in the early morning. These were the noises, he now felt sure, which had awakened him.

      These ominous mutterings and footfalls evoked for Ben the presence of a number of men, maybe half a dozen or even more, clumsily exchanging low-voiced words with undertones of urgency. Muttering, and then separating, spreading out, moving quickly but quietly as if they meant to get the barn surrounded.

      That was not at all a reassuring image.

      Getting off to a bad start as he seemed to be this morning, Ben hoped that no one today was going to call him by any name that mentioned either Purkinje or Sarykam. As soon as anyone did that, he would know that the false identity under which he was currently traveling had been penetrated. Not that he had much hope for the false identity anyway. It had been a resort of desperation, conceived on the spur of the moment several days ago, when other plans had at last gone desperately and completely wrong. A man who weighed close to a hundred and forty kilos, and looked capable—and was—of twisting a riding-beast’s iron shoe into scrap with his bare hands, tended to attract attention. For such a man, ordinary disguises were seldom of much avail.

      Ben’s worst suspicions were presently nourished by new evidence. If he had been in the least danger of drifting back to sleep—and with a start he realized that he just might have been—that peril was destroyed by a loud call in a hoarse male voice, coming from somewhere not far outside the barn. The words were meant for him. The man outside was threatening to fire the wooden structure if he didn’t immediately come out and surrender.

      The bass roar was almost instantly repeated: “Ben of Purkinje! We know yer in there!”

      Despite the besieged man’s huge size, he came up to his feet softly and promptly amid the hay, the wooden floor of the hayloft creaking under the shift of weight. At the same time he took a quick inventory of assets. Through recent misfortunes his personal weaponry, apart from his own mind and body, had been reduced to one middle-sized dagger. Leaving the dagger at his belt, he caught sight of a pitchfork not far away, and swiftly and softly took possession of it.

      A certain urgency within his bladder next demanded his attention, all the more so with impending combat probable. Relieving himself quietly into the hay, regretting the lack of heroic capacity that might have served to put out a fire, Ben listened for more shouts but for the moment could hear only the throbbing of his aching head.

      Doing his best to give the situation careful thought, he decided that allowing or encouraging the barn to burn down around him would be a waste of time for all concerned, and a waste of some perhaps innocent farmer’s property as well. Ben had no real idea how many of last