In mere physical appearance alone, the Great Truncheon was breathtaking. Its handle had been carved out of one great chunk of the ancient milky substance known as ivory and was padded not with leather but with some soft arcane substance that yet had the gloss of ruby. The shaft was a gleaming rod of some tarnishless metal fully four feet long and thick around as a man's forearm, etched all around with rich red traceries of lightning strokes, a motif which made the huge shaft appear as if it had but recently been quenched in blood. The oversize headball was a life-sized steel fist, and a hero's fist at that. Upon the third finger of this metal hand was a ring bearing the signet of a black swastika in a white spot surrounded by a circle of crimson fire, the colors as vivid as if they had been applied hours ago instead of centuries.
Feric stared at the mystic truncheon in unabashed wonder. "Do you realize what that weapon is?" he said softly.
Stopa grinned smugly at Feric, but he could not keep awe from softening somewhat the ferocity of his features.
"It's the Steel Commander," he said. "Once the old Kings of Heldon drew their power from it. Now it's the property of the Black Avengers!"
"It's the property of all Heldon!" Feric roared.
"We found it in a cave deep in the Wood when all you 70
worms thought it lost forever!" Stopa snarled, albeit clearly defensively. "It's ours now!" He laughed sardonically.
"If you want it, Jaggar, why don't you just pick it up and carry it away?"
The assembled Avengers laughed at this, but not without a good deal of uneasiness; their simple but true instincts told them that the Steel Commander and the ancient arts which had forged it were hardly a proper matter for jest.
For his part, Feric appreciated the irony of Stopa's words perhaps more keenly than did the Avenger himself.
Legend had it that Stal Held had ordered the weapon forged by a hidden community of captive wizards who had preserved the lore of the ancients through the Time of Fire and far beyond; once the weapon had been completed, Held had slain these evil creatures to a man. By some lost art, these baleful wizards had so constructed the truncheon that only Held himself and the true bearers of his genetic pattern down through the centuries could wield it. The mysterious alloy out of which the weapon had been forged gave it the weight of a huge boulder; no ordinary man could budge it, let alone wield it. But contact with flesh shaped by the royal genes triggered the release of some inexhaustable power within the Great Truncheon, so that in the hand of a hero of the true royal pedigree, the Steel Commander could be wielded as effortlessly as a willow wand, though to those who felt its wrath, it still had the mass of a small mountain. Thus, the Great Truncheon was both the sceptre of the King of Heldon and the ultimate verification of his pedigree. There were those who insisted that all troubles that had beset Heldon since its disappearance during the Civil War were the result of a rule by men incapable of wielding the Great Truncheon; in this view, Sigmark IV had been the last proper ruler of Heldon. Therefore, to pick up the Great Truncheon would be to seize in a very real sense the historic right to rule all Heldon. It was this that Stopa sarcastically suggested that Feric might do.
Yet somehow, there was a mad impulse within Feric to do just that; the truncheon seemed to call out to something deep within his blood, seemed to vibrate his being with a deep, almost cosmic, longing. No doubt many men had felt this; there were many tales of heroes who had sought to heft the Steel Commander and all were cautionary rubrics against the vice of excessive pride.
71
"Enough mooning over a weapon that no living man can wield!" Stopa finally said, breaking the palpably mystical reverie. "You have your truncheon, and I have mine, and that's enough for men like us! Defend yourself, Jaggarl"
With this, Stopa ran at Feric, his truncheon high over his head, and brought the weapon down in a stroke that would have smashed a skull like an eggshell.
But Feric had darted to his right, and as Stopa's truncheon went whistling through the empty air where his head had been, he struck the shaft a glancing blow near the handle which nearly caused the Avenger to lose his weapon. The first clangof steel on steel broke the solemn mood and set the Avengers to shouting boisterously and waving their torches in the air.
As Stopa, recovering with admirable speed, raised his truncheon above his head once more to aim another blow, Feric swung his own weapon in a low arc aimed at smashing Stopa's kneecap. Stopa fell back raggedly, avoiding the blow, but Ferio was able to get in a quick jab in the stomach with his headball, which caused the Avenger no Bttle discomfort.
