Nobody's Son Read Online Free PDF Page B

been a neat piece of work: his first really story-worthy deed.
    He decided again that he needed a name for his sword. Violent? Blood-drinker ? Too… brutal. Thief ?
    Thief. That was a fit name for a sword of his. Nothing pretentious, nothing overblown: but a steel thief who robbed wrong-doers of their weapons, or their lives.
    The climber had reached the topmost window. For a long moment he hung there, as if angling to reach inside. Then he stopped, jerked and hung suspended, feet scrabbling against the stone for a dreadful moment before tumbling back and out, screaming as he dropped through the night. He landed with a sickening crash only yards away.
    Mark’s heart hammered in his chest. He stared, horrified, at the crumpled figure on the grass before him. He thought of the spikes now lying in his pack, and cold sweat crawled along his limbs.
    A low, mournful melody whispered from the shadows by the dead man’s body, a song like the wind passing over a bed of reeds, lonely as November.
    It called to Mark, that song: called to places left empty when his father went away, hollows never filled. It sang to Mark of a thousand days alone before the dawn, driving to make himself faster, stronger, better, so that one day he could show them all, he could say Look! And they would know they had been wrong, everyone who had mocked him, scorned him.
    Left him.
    Dream-slow he stepped toward the fallen body. At its side, a flash of fallen moonlight and a whisper-song, thin steel sliding from a leather sheath.
    “Sweetness!” Mark breathed. The most storied of the great weapons, its steelsong lost forever when Stargad the Shrewd challenged the Ghostwood and did not return.
    But tonight Mark was back in grandfather days, and Sweetness sang for him.
    Desire kindled in Mark. Here was a treasure to wrest from the perilous wood! He stooped to unbuckle the half-sheathed sword from its dead master’s side, averting his eyes from Stargad’s face.
    A pale hand crawled from beneath Stargad’s cloak and settled on the pommel of his sword.
    Mark leapt back with a yell of fright. Slowly the shadow before him gathered itself to all fours, then knelt, then finally stood.
    “You! You’re alive!” Mark breathed.
    Stiffly Stargad threw back his hood, showing a face horribly crushed by his fall. “No,” he sighed. “I am the dead.”
    “Shite, shite, shite!” Fear jumped and crackled through Mark. He whipped out his sword: it trembled like a dowsing rod in his shaking hand.
    “I am the dead,” Stargad repeated. He was a tall man and spare; his face, before his fall, had been long and gaunt. One eye jutted from its socket; the other gazed at Mark with cool sorrow. “And though it gives my heart no joy to say it, you too must die.”
    “I mean to die well,” Mark said. “I was thinking of taking another two score years to get ready.” Fine words, fine words. Tell your shaking swordhand to be so brave . “What happened up there? What was waiting for you?”
    A spasm of pain passed over Stargad’s shattered face. “The brooding Tower have I climbed too many times. Inside one waits who has a soul as cold and hard as iron. Each time he slays me with his touch, and I see my Death within his eyes. Now like all the others I have returned to guard the Keep.”
    Sweetness whispered its terrible song. “As I climb, I always on my fifteenth step glance down upon the Great Hall’s shingled roof. Thrice now have I seen Four-fingered Fhilip creep across the slates, and once the larcenous Silverhand, paused before a lamplit window. To his cheek he raised his hand; I knew him by the silver bracer proud round his wrist. I think he wept.”
    Stargad gazed at Mark with his one good eye. “Can you guess why we return, Warm One?”
    Mark shook his head.
    “Because it is our duty. Stay the dagger must, or else the heart will bleed! The heart will bleed… We were wrong, thrice-curst fools to try to break the spell that chains the black wind within these