Swords: 06 - The Third Book of Lost Swords - Stonecutter's Story by Fred Saberhagen Read Free Book Online

kind of a bargain would such wizards want to make with a simple man like me?”
           “That was my question. Perhaps they sought the release of one of your prisoners?”
           Umar appeared to find that a preposterous idea. “One of these scum? I would’ve given them one for nothing if they’d asked.”
           “So, they showed you what their Sword could do, purely for your entertainment it would seem, and then they simply went away again?”
           “That’s it, Excellency. That’s just what happened.” Umar nodded, glad to have the matter settled and understood at last.
           Wen Chang, somewhat to Kasimir’s surprise, abstained from pressing the line of questioning further, and apparently lapsed into thought.
           Kasimir chose this moment to again identify himself as a physician and surgeon, and volunteered to tend whatever injured might be on hand. He had surmised correctly that here, as on the road job, there would always be at least a few men partially disabled.
           The foreman, still smiling as if he now considered the matter of the Sword closed, immediately accepted the physician’s offer. Kasimir was conducted into a shady angle of the quarry wall, and shown two patients lying there on pallets. These men had suffered, respectively, a head injury and a broken foot.
           Kasimir opened his medical kit and went to work. The man with the head wound complained of continual pain and double vision. His speech came disconnectedly, at random intervals. Usually it was addressed to no one in particular and made little sense. He also had difficulty with his balance whenever he tried to stand. There was nothing, Kasimir thought, that any healer could do for him here, and there would be little enough even in a hospital.
           The only attendant on duty in the rudimentary infirmary was a permanently lamed prisoner who handled other odd jobs as well for the foreman. This man stood by while Kasimir bandaged the second patient’s freshly damaged foot.
           This time Wen Chang had come along to watch the physician work. Leaning against the shadowed rock as if he had no other care in the world, the Magistrate observed to the lame man in a sympathetic voice: “There must be many accidents in a place like this.”
           The crippled attendant agreed in a low voice that there certainly were.
           “And no doubt many of them are fatal.”
           “Very true, Excellency.”
           Wen Chang squinted toward the quarry’s mouth. “And those who die in these sad accidents are of course buried in the sandy waste out there.”
           “Yes sir.”
           “And how long has it been now since the last fatal mishap?”
           “Only two days, sir.”
           “Oh. Then it occurred upon the same day that the two strangers paid their visit?”
           The attendant said no more. But under renewed questioning the little foreman Umar, who had also come along to the rude hospital, admitted that that was so.
           “A very busy day that must have been for you.” Then Wen Chang looked up at Lieutenant Komi, who was standing by alertly, and announced in a crisp voice: “I want to take a look at those bodies.”
           “Yes sir!” Komi turned away and started barking orders to several of his men.
           Umar began a protest and then gave it up. He had more overseers under his command than the foreman of the road-building gang, and these were somewhat better armed. Still, they did not appear to be a match for the Firozpur occupying force.
           Within a couple of minutes some of Komi’s soldiers were making the sand fly with borrowed tools, at a spot out in the sandy waste about a hundred meters from the quarry’s mouth.
           They had encountered no difficulty in locating the two-day-old burial site—the grave had been shallowly dug, and from a