Ben of Purkinje, common soldier, is trudging through the storm in the middle of the night, to make a top secret delivery. He is one of six men working as drivers on a pack train. What is their cargo? They haven't been told.
Ben, who has more of a brain than casual acquaintances normally give him credit for, can't help noticing a few oddities in the proceedings. Such as the fact that he and the other five men working as drivers on this trip were all transferred to this area quite recently, then suddenly assigned to this pack train duty before they had time to make friends with the local garrison. And the fact that they are led to a spot where someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to conceal the entrance to an underground network of caverns. And the fact that the bundles they are moving from their packbeasts to the caverns feel awfully heavy for their size, as if they were stone, lead, or gold. (Which of these is most likely to be transported in absolute secrecy?) And the fact that the six drivers were ordered to leave their personal weapons behind on the grounds that the pesky things would just get in the way of all the manual labor they'd be doing. And the fact that the Blue Temple (the very powerful religious hierarchy which they work for) is notoriously secretive about where it keeps its central treasury, "Benambra's Gold," suggesting that very few living men know the location at any given time. Put it all together and he has the nasty suspicion that being a common soldier on this treasure-transporting expedition is meant to be a one-way trip. Dead men tell no tales . . .
He decides to desert. (Talk about your classic case of paranoia!) One problem with this plan is that the Blue Temple keeps a dragon roaming this area, and only the most trusted wizards of the Blue Temple know the spell to make it leave them alone. Ben isn't any sort of wizard, but dragons are not very bright, and he manages to outmaneuver it and disappear into the storm before the Blue Temple can find him.
So now we have established the basic situation: one of the good guys knows exactly where the entrance to the legendary horde of Benambra's Gold is to be found. Of course, just approaching the entrance again will require having a way to kill a dragon, and there will be considerable risk in going inside, where the Blue Temple presumably has mundane and magical forces ready to discourage intruders. But it's a start on the road to fame and fortune, or at least fortune!
Ben of Purkinje first appeared in the previous book of the trilogy, The First Book of Swords, but I didn't bother to mention him in my review of that book because he didn't accomplish much in it. The central character seemed to be his buddy Mark, whom we now meet in Chapter 2, wherein we establish that it's been five years since he left home. This means he's now 17, and the twelve Swords were forged by Vulcan about eighteen years ago and counting. We also learn that although knowledge of the existence of the Swords was very scarce in the first decade or so after they appeared, they are now the subject of widespread rumors, of which the most interesting part (not mentioned in the first volume) is that the man who gets his hands on all twelve of the powerful things will rule the world. Near as we can tell, thus far no one has even come close to being able to test that theory, or prophecy, or whatever it may be.
Meanwhile, an impoverished nobleman called Baron Doon has been using a Sword he somehow acquired, called Wayfinder, to help him find the people and things he will need to rob the Blue Temple's horde and cart off as much of Benambra's Gold as he can manage. First we see it lead him to a powerful wizard who has similar desires in life, then (inevitably) we see Wayfinder lead the Baron's party to where Ben (and his friends Barbara and Mark) have just been retrieving Dragonslicer, the dragon-killing Sword they were fiddling around with in the first volume. Wayfinder, we gather, works like a compass: the Baron holds it in his hand, thinks of what he wants to find, and the Sword twists to point in the proper direction to bring him closer to his ultimate goal. Obviously one of the things he needed to find was someone who knew the exact location of the secret entrance to Benambra's Gold, as well as having some idea of its defences (the dragon, for instance), and a Sword to overcome that problem. Logical, yes? The two groups join forces, and from there it becomes something of a "dungeon crawl," as RPGers might put it. Nasty monsters, traps, double-crosses, fighting over the loot . . . all the usual fun and games!
But there is one shocking thing that we learn near the end, and I'm going to give it to you for free: at least one of the Swords is capable of killing one of the mythological deities who arranged for their creation and are using them as gamepieces. Obviously, there's only one possible way we could learn this for certain. It's the first real sign that the gods may have created more trouble for themselves than they ever intended - up until this time, we had only seen the Swords making humans miserable in one way or another. Obviously this new thought will be explored more extensively in the concluding volume of the trilogy.
I'll mention in passing that the Blue Temple had already collected four Swords before our heroes broke in and got their hands on them. These four were all ones that had not previously appeared onstage at all, which, with the presence of Wayfinder all throughout the story, meant that by the time we finished reading two-thirds of the trilogy, there were only three Swords we had never seen anyone encounter. Pretty easy to guess which ones would get lots of coverage in the third book!
Even when I first read this book (must be at least fifteen or sixteen years ago?) I noticed that the major action of it could easily be converted into a Dungeons & Dragons-type module. It also occurred to me that it was very rare in my experience for a big-name fantasy author to write a novel for which that statement was true, i.e. much of the action occurring in one big dungeon raid. Looking back on it, that's still true - not that I've read every single fantasy novel by every single well-established author in the genre, of course. Although Saberhagen is not one of my top favorites in the field, if you are interested in such things as AD&D and the related novels TSR has published that are set in one AD&D campaign world or another, it might amuse you to take a look at this story and speculate on how much better the TSR books could be if they could persuade more "big name" authors to work on the things instead of the quality of talent they actually seem to end up with. (Of course, you may already be thrilled with the efforts of R.A. Salvatore and others, in which case I can tell we don't have much in common.)
This has been Part 2 of 3 in my contribution to WretchedPyro's Double-Edged Blade Write-Off. Other participants are:
adjensen * David.C * egab01 * fez_monkey * foghorn * InfoScott * kurt_messick * lunadisarm * machkick * monssfisch * mtbat * naphtalia * night_vision * Solid_Snake * systemdwn * WretchedPyro * Xeno3998
Recommended:
