Swords: 09 - The Sixth Book Of Lost Swords - Mindsword's Story Read Free Page B

certainly find your Sword.
           Eventually the honored one had seemed to forget about the mysterious Sword, or at least he spoke of it less and less frequently. Instead he spent what strength he had in other lamentations, chiefly for his lost youth and fame and power.
           But today the older of the pair of visiting elders was growing worried that those early days of fiery obsession might have come back. Because:
           “Someone,” Old Grandfather was croaking now, “has found the Sword, and is carrying it away. Taking it away, farther and farther, while we sit here and do nothing.”
           Once more the two men who stood before him exchanged glances. “What Sword would that be, Grandfather?” the younger visitor asked, quite innocently. In the early years of the god’s visit this man had been only a simple villager and not an elder, too young to pay any attention to talk about some unessential Sword. So his question now was no attempt at mockery. But still it was too much for the albino, who lapsed into incoherent abuse.
           Where once high intelligence had ruled, inside the skull of Vilkata the survivor, now stretched a ravaged mental wasteland illuminated only intermittently by flashes of his former intellect. The mind of the quondam Dark King ached in its concentration on a bitter craving for revenge upon the world in general. Revenge, for the impertinence of the world, in having dared to escape his domination! A sharper and more localized craving for vengeance was centered upon Prince Mark and Princess Kristin of Tasavalta—and to a slightly lesser degree upon the Tasavaltan people—for what Vilkata considered good and sufficient reason.
           Inextricably mixed with these cravings for revenge there persisted a monumental regret for the Mindsword’s loss. Somehow, on that last day of Vilkata’s power, that very nearly peerless weapon had slipped out of his possession.
           On that day, in staggering retreat with a band of fugitive gods, crossing the mountains at no very great distance from this hut, Vilkata had been either carrying the Mindsword or wearing it at his belt—he could not now remember which. That black day had seen the Dark King in full flight from his last battlefield, where Soulcutter in the hands of the Silver Queen had finally snuffed out his bid to rule the world. And then within hours he’d somehow lost his own Sword—condemning himself to spend the next fourteen years trying to remember exactly where and how.
           He seemed to remember that, at one point during the disastrous retreat, the god Vulcan had been carrying him on his back … but that might have been only a dream, or nightmare.
           By the time the Dark King had lost his Sword, he’d already been half mad, suffering the psychic pain of terminal defeat, and on top of that, the acid despair engendered by that other Sword, Soulcutter. That output of the Sword of Despair had begun on the battlefield to eat into Vilkata’s innermost being.
           On that day, on that particular field of combat, the dull dead force of Soulcutter had proven even stronger than the Mindsword’s blazing, dazzling call to glory. Vilkata’s host, thousands of warriors fanatically loyal to him and ferociously triumphant, had in a frighteningly short span of time degenerated into something less than a mob. His large and powerful army had become little more than an assembly of lethargic bodies. The warriors were slumping to the ground, all their blood still in their veins and their bones unbroken, but their strength melting in a lunatic inertia. The great mass of helpless men had been slain or taken captive before they could recover. Only those few who remained physically close to Vilkata, deep inside the zone of the Mindsword’s power, had been able to survive. And even those survivors were badly shaken.
           But since he’d fled the battlefield he’d seldom