Legacy of the Darksword Read Free Page B

me.
    “He is your secretary,” Mosiah
said.
    “That is what he has me call him,”
Saryon said, glancing in my direction with a fond smile. “Though it has always
seemed to me that ‘son’ would be the more appropriate term.”
    I felt my skin burn with
pleasure, but I only shook my head. He was dear as a father to me, the Almin
knows, but I would never take such a liberty.
    “He is mute,” Saryon continued,
explaining my affliction without embarrassment.
    Nor did I feel any embarrassment
myself. The handicap which one has had a lifetime seems more normal than not.
As I had foreseen, Mosiah had advance knowledge of this, as his next words
proved.
    “Reuven was only a small child
when the Shattering”—the term the people of Thimhallan now use for the
destruction of their way of life—”occurred. He was left an orphan. Whatever
happened to him was so traumatizing that it bereft him of speech. You found
him, critically ill and alone in the abandoned Font. He was brought up in the
household of Prince Garald, educated in the relocation camp, and sent to you by
the Prince to record the story of the Darksword. I read it,” Mosiah added, with
a polite smile for me. “It was accurate, as far as it went.”
    I am used to receiving mixed
compliments for my work, and therefore I made no reply. It is never dignified
to defend one’s creative endeavors. And I made allowances for the fact that
Mosiah had been one of the central participants.
    “As for my leaving the relocation
camp,” Saryon said, continuing the earlier conversation, “I did what I thought
was best for everyone.”
    His hand holding the teacup began
to shake. I rose, went to him, and removed the cup, placing it on the
nightstand.
    “This house is quite nice,” said
Mosiah, glancing around, somewhat coldly. “Your work in the field of mathematics
and Reuven’s work in literature have made you a comfortable living. Our people
in the relocation camps don’t live as well as this—”
    “They could if they wanted to,”
Saryon said, with a flash of the old spirit.
    Knowing him as I do, and knowing
his history, I guessed that this must be the same driving spirit which led him
to seek out the forbidden books in the Font library. The same spirit that
helped Joram forge the Darksword. The same spirit that
faced the Turning with such courage and kept his soul alive, though his flesh
had been changed to rock.
    “No barbed wire surrounds those
camps,” Saryon said, speaking with increasing passion. “The guards at the gates
were placed there when we first came to keep out the curious, not to prevent
our people from leaving. Those guards should have been gone long ago, but our
people begged for them to stay. Every person in the camp could have entered
into this new world and found his or her place.
    “But do they? No! They cling to
some hopeless dream of returning to Thimhallan, of going back there to
find—what? A land that is dead and blasted. Thimhallan has not changed since we
left. It will not change, no matter how much we wish for it. The magic is gone!”
Saryon’s voice was soft and aching and thrilling. “It is gone and we should
accept that and go on.”
    “The people of Earth do not like
us,” said Mosiah.
    “They like me!” Saryon said
crisply. “Of course, they don’t like you. You refuse to mingle with the ‘mundane,’
as you call them, although many of them have as much magic in their bodies as
you do in yours. Still, you shun them and isolate yourselves from them and it
is no wonder they look upon you with distrust and suspicion. It was this same
pride and arrogance which brought about the collapse of our world and put us
into those relocation camps, and it is our pride and arrogance which keep us
there!”
    Mosiah would have spoken, I
think, but he could not do so without raising his voice to interrupt my master,
who, now conversing on his pet topic, was on his soapbox—a quaint term used by
the natives of this world.
    Indeed,