Free The Reluctant Swordsman by Dave Duncan

permanent, and therefore somehow worse.   The boy was continually dodging up alleys, avoiding the main streets, although those were barely wider and perhaps more crowded because they carried more wagons and carts. “Are you trying to confuse me, or are we avoiding someone?” Wallie demanded.
    “Yes,” the boy said.
    It was a shantytown with a glandular condition; some of the buildings were four stories high. Now he noticed that many of what he had thought were stray dogs were lanky pigs, rooting for their living in the gutters. Pigs would eat anything, even feces, and their presence explained some of the smell.   “I suppose a river goddess wouldn’t approve of flush toilets?” Wallie asked.   The boy stopped and looked at him furiously. “You will not make jokes like that!”
    Wallie clipped his ear—and missed. He could catch flies but this urchin could dodge him? “Not too real there,” Wallie said, and laughed.   They were standing in one of the alleys, pedestrians edging nervously around both sides of the dangerous swordsman.
    “Come here!” The boy stepped over to a display in a narrow doorway, a vertical board with strings of beads hung on it. A wrinkled old crone in brown crouched on a stool at the side, holding her toes in. The boy reached up and pulled off a string of beads. The woman scrambled up in surprise to fawn at the noble lord and be ignored.
    “Look, now!” The boy waved the string of beads on one finger—green clay beads on a thread without a clasp. “Every one is the same yet slightly different; it has no beginning and no end; it runs the same in both directions; and the string goes all the way through. Okay? Let’s go!”
    He started to walk. Wallie grabbed his shoulder and this time connected. “Those aren’t yours, Shorty!”
    “Does it matter?” the boy asked, showing his tooth gap.   “Yes, it does. Worlds may differ, or minds may get sick, but morals don’t change.” Wallie glared down at him, holding the puny shoulder firmly in his big hand. The old woman fretted and chewed her knuckles and was silent.   “That’s something else you will have to unlearn, then,” the boy said. “But understand the beads and you’ll be getting close, Wallie Smith. Here, grandmother.”
    He pulled the string through his other hand and then tossed it to her, but somehow the beads had subtly changed. They gleamed and they certainly were no longer clay. “Let’s go!” he snapped, and plunged off along the alley with Wallie striding behind him, trying to remember just what had been done to those beads and how the boy had escaped from his grip, and trying to understand what all the blarney had meant.
    They crossed another street and entered another alley, squeezed past a parked wagon, then huddled into a doorway as an oxcart went by, pulled by something that looked more believable than the camel-faced, long-bodied horses.   Finally they emerged at the edge of an open space, wide enough to admit the sunlight. The boy stopped.
    “Ah! Fresh air!” Wallie said. “Comparatively.”
    The boy was studying the far side of the court, a wall like a cliff. Two enormous gates made of timbers thicker than a man hung crookedly on massive iron hinges, flanking an arched entrance. But the gates were spread wide and looked as though they could not be closed without falling apart. On either side of them, buildings huddled right up to the wall. Beyond the arch, sunlight shone on bright green grass and tall trees. Small groups of people were walking across the square from the various alleys that emptied into it and passing through the gates.
    “The way into the temple?” Wallie asked.
    The boy nodded. “The guards will not notice you.” Wallie had not noticed the guards. There were two of them on each side, young swordsmen, three yellows and an orange. Two were leaning against the wall and the other two slouched with thumbs in their harnesses—a very unimpressive display of military style. They