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Updated: May 21, 2025
He looked very young and thin and pale, but suddenly his father's smile was lighted in his face. He said a few words in Samavian clearly and gravely, saluted, and passed out. "What did you say to them?" gasped The Rat, stumbling after him as the door closed behind them and shut in the murmur of impassioned sound. "There was only one thing to say," was the answer. "They are men I am only a boy.
"'The Forgers of the Sword. Remember every word they say," The Rat whispered, "so that you can tell it to me afterwards. Don't forget anything! I wish I knew Samavian." At the foot of the steps stood the man who was evidently the sentinel who worked the lever that turned the rock.
Marco paused a moment. "Perhaps I am not the boy you think I am," he said. "My father has never been to Samavia." "He has not? But you are Marco Loristan?" "Yes. That is my name." Suddenly she leaned forward and her long lovely eyes filled with fire. "Then you are a Samavian, and you know of the disasters overwhelming us. You know all the hideousness and barbarity of what is being done.
"Perhaps you do not understand? I asked your name because you are very like a Samavian I know," he said. "I am Marco Loristan," the boy answered him. The man looked straight into his eyes and smiled. "That is not the name," he said. "I beg your pardon, my boy." He was about to go on, and had indeed taken a couple of steps away, when he paused and turned to him again.
It must be something connected with the war, if a man who was a great diplomat and the companion of kings came in secret to talk alone with a patriot who was a Samavian. Whatever his father was doing was for the good of Samavia, and perhaps the Secret Party knew he was doing it. His heart almost beat aloud under his shirt as he lay on the lumpy mattress thinking it over.
Among all those who had known that a man who was an impassioned patriot was laboring for Samavia, and using all the power of a great mind and the delicate ingenuity of a great genius to gain friends and favor for his unhappy country, there had been but one who had known that Stefan Loristan had a claim to the Samavian throne.
It was an army drawn chiefly from a peasantry which did not love its leaders, or wish to fight, and suffering and brutal treatment had at last roused it to furious revolt. "What next?" said Marco. "If I were a Samavian " began The Rat and then he stopped. Lazarus stood biting his lips, but staring stonily at the carpet. Not The Rat alone but Marco also noted a grim change in him.
He stood up when he said the last words and added the "sir" as if he suddenly realized that there was a distance between them which was something akin to the distance between youth and maturity but yet was not the same. "You are a good Samavian but you forget," was Marco's answer. Lazarus' intense grimness increased with each day that passed.
They will chant prayers and burn altar-fires on their mountain sides," Loristan said. "But the end is not yet the end is not yet. Sometimes it seems that perhaps it is near but God knows!" Then there leaped back upon Marco the story he had to tell, but which he had held back for the last the story of the man who spoke Samavian and drove in the carriage with the King.
"Some one will notice in time. At night, when the streets are quiet, I might make a policeman hear. But my father does not know where I am. He will be trying to find me so will Lazarus so will The Rat. One of them might pass through this very street, as I did. What can I do!" A new idea flashed light upon him. "I will begin to sing a Samavian song, and I will sing it very loud.
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