Page 36 of Swordheart #1
“Right!” said Halla a day later. “We’ve established that even if you’re hungry or thirsty when you go into the sword, you come out feeling neither, at least if you’re in the sword for more than about twenty minutes.”
Zale was writing everything down in their quick, precise hand, and nodded to her.
“And if you go into the sword with a full bladder, you come out without one.”
Sarkis rubbed his forehead in resignation.
“And presumably that applies to other—uh—bodily wastes—”
“We are not testing that,” said Sarkis grimly. “A man has limits.”
“And if you eat until you are uncomfortably full, that, too, goes away.”
Sarkis nodded. He hadn’t enjoyed that one. The only food they had on hand in quantity was porridge, and he had eaten a truly heroic amount. He wasn’t going to be able to look at porridge again for a month.
“We have not tested what occurs if you are drunk—”
“I become sober when the sword is sheathed,” said Sarkis. “I know that one.”
Zale nodded, making a note, then paused with their hand over the ledger. “Have you ever starved to death?”
“No. I’ve gotten very thirsty a time or two during a siege, but that’s all.”
Zale tapped the pen against their teeth.
They had excellent teeth. Sarkis had observed the priest scrubbing their teeth with salt and sage nightly, which was undoubtedly a factor.
“I do wonder if you’d be hungry if you were starved until it became a form of injury, then went back in the sword for an insufficient time to heal…
but I have a philosophical objection to testing that. ”
“As do I,” put in Halla.
“Thank the great god for that.”
He stifled a sigh, remembering sieges. He had dealt with more than a few in his time. His company of mercenaries had been good at sieges—making them, breaking them, occasionally even enduring them. Their services had been in high demand.
And now I am riding on an oxcart with two people who are making me eat porridge until I am ill, and who get excited when my urine dematerializes. The great god laughs at man’s expectations.
Still, he had to admit that he had learned rather more about the actual workings of the sword in a few days than he had learned in all the years since the sorcerer-smith had trapped him.
I should have listened more closely when she was explaining the process, but it was so clearly impossible, what she was saying …
The beating he’d taken beforehand hadn’t helped his concentration. In truth, he’d probably been lucky to have absorbed as much as he had from the woman before she’d driven a length of white-hot steel into his chest.
Even so, he couldn’t remember her explaining how it worked.
“The smith was a genius,” said Zale, as if echoing his thoughts.
“If she had been a simple wonderworker, we would expect that the magic would have released you when she died. Whatever she did, she built this magic that gives you a body that seems real… and to use the processes of that body, the food you eat and the air you breathe, to fuel the magic. And because your body is not truly reliant on the same weak, complicated meat that the rest of us are—” they slapped their arm by way of demonstration “—it converts those processes with remarkable efficiency. It’s incredible. ”
“Could you do it?” said Halla, genuinely interested.
“Rat’s tail, no! I can just barely understand how it works.
The kind of mind that could set that up…
” They shook their head so vigorously that their braid whipped from side to side.
“That’s why I say genius. Most wonderworkers are creatures of instinct.
They learn the boundaries of their power by running into them.
This smith built her magic like the artificers in Anuket build clockwork automatons, and then used whatever natural talent she had to power it.
It is extraordinary.” They gazed at Sarkis with something uncomfortably like awe.
“Even killing your body only pauses the magic temporarily. In theory, at least, you are nearly immortal.”
Sarkis sighed. “I am very tired of being immortal,” he confessed.
Zale looked briefly surprised. “Are you?”
“I would like to be allowed to die,” said Sarkis.
Halla made a sound of protest and Sarkis reached out without thinking, taking her hand in his. “Not now. Not today. Someday, though, before I am nothing but silver scars, before I’ve forgotten what it was like to be human.”
“Is it so awful?” asked Halla.
He glanced over and caught the look in her eyes. It pained him more than he wanted to admit. He squeezed her fingers. “Sometimes. Though these last few weeks have been a respite. I have had to murder very few people and no one has chopped any part of my anatomy off in ages. ”
She snorted, obviously happy to lighten the mood as well. “Let us know if you start to miss that part.”
She glanced away, smiling. He gazed at her full lower lip and imagined running his tongue across it. Increasingly, the only thing he regretted about their earlier kiss was that he had stopped at just one.
Settle yourself, man. It is still a long way to Rutger’s Howe.
“Well,” said Zale, in a suddenly grim voice, “it seems that you might have someone try to chop parts off you very shortly.”
“Problem?” said Sarkis.
Zale nodded ahead. A familiar pair of indigo-cloaked men stood in the middle of the road. One was mounted, while one had dismounted and stood waiting.
“Again?” said Halla. “They already searched the wagon. What more can they want?”
“I suspect that it was never about searching anything,” said Zale.
“The Rat has been a thorn in the Mother’s side, and they are acting it out by harassing us.
They never expected to find anything. No one really thinks the Rat is smuggling…
I don’t know, contraband or witchcraft or children or whatever.
They simply want to prove that we cannot stop them. ”
Scar gestured for them to stop. Halla curled her lip back. There was a look in her eye that worried Sarkis.
As it turned out, he was right to be worried.
Halla was sick of the Motherhood, sick of being bullied, sick of men like Scar and Alver and all the rest. She slid down off the wagon before Sarkis could grab her and stomped determinedly toward Scar.
“Halla!” She heard Sarkis’s feet hit the road behind her.
“I have had enough !” shouted Halla in Scar’s face. “You’ve bothered us and tormented us and yelled at us and we didn’t do anything and you searched the wagon for no reason and you know it’s for no reason and this isn’t how the Mother is supposed to behave! It isn’t right !”
And then she burst into tears.
It was at least ninety percent intentional, as she already knew that Scar panicked in the face of crying women. Ten percent of it was that she was angry, and she always cried when she was really angry. She hooked both hands in Scar’s indigo tabard and wailed. Loudly.
“Uh,” said Scar. “Uh. Ma’am. No. Uh.” He looked around in panic. Red backed his horse away, possibly afraid that Halla would leap into the saddle and begin crying on him instead.
What happened next was mostly bad luck.
Scar shoved Halla away. He shoved her rather hard, to be sure, but if there had not been a rock under her foot right there, she wouldn’t have fallen.
But there was a rock and she did fall, with a yelp of surprise, and Sarkis, presumably, saw his wielder being knocked down and possibly injured. He charged.
Halla herself saw only the underside of the ox, realized that she had rolled beneath the animal, and kept rolling out the other side. Her ankle twinged painfully from the rock. Then she heard the clash of steel.
She climbed to her feet, eyes wide, to find that Sarkis and Scar were sword to sword. The priest looked shocked and Sarkis looked furious. Zale was yelling, “Stand down, stand down !” No one appeared to be listening.
Red, who was still mounted, drew his sword. He shuffled his horse from side to side, trying to find a way to strike at Sarkis without hitting his own ally. The ox was in the way.
“Stand down!” cried Zale helplessly.
Sarkis was winning easily, probably because immortal swordsmen can take openings that mortal swordsmen would find dangerously close to suicide.
The horse’s rump smacked into the ox. The ox made an irritated noise and sidestepped, making the wagon shudder, then turned its horns toward the horse, dragging the wagon sideways with it.
Something went THWACK .
An arrow sprouted from the mounted warrior’s throat and he toppled off the horse, just as Sarkis pulled his sword out of his opponent’s chest.
Brindle lowered Zale’s crossbow.
The sound of the second body hitting the road was very loud in the sudden silence.
“Well,” said Zale, their voice sounding high and strained, “this is going to be a problem.”