The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  Blays returned with a self-satisfied smile, the torchstone shining in his hand. He sheathed the sword and held the stone up to the hole in the horn. "Take a look."

  Dante peered inside, but the core was no longer hollow. Instead, it was filled with six black stars a couple of inches across, stacked one on top of the other. "Traces?"

  "That's what they look like to me. Then again, I'm just the humble sell-sword who sometimes has to do your job for you."

  Dante laughed; nothing raised his spirits like making progress toward an answer. "What if the Odo Sein are able to clamp down on the shadows in our world, but their ability can't reach into the netherworld?"

  "So if you're drawing on something from the netherworld—such as the traces—their ability can't stop you. Hence they get to wave around these amazing glowing swords."

  Dante gazed in at the motionless black stars. "There are enough traces in here to form an Andrac. Why aren't they merging?"

  "Maybe swamp dragons don't like having soul-eating demons sprout from their horns."

  "I could draw on these to fight the Odo Sein. They wouldn't be able to stop me."

  "Yeah, unless they think about using their nethereal swords to bat down whatever you throw at them." Blays drew the stolen sword a few inches, letting the ambient sunlight fall into the abyss of the blade. "There isn't much nether in one of those horns. Rather than wasting it on a few black arrows that are spent as soon as you've used them, I say we make another sword."

  Dante held the weight of the horn in his hand. He'd meant to use it to learn how to battle the knights, but he supposed that forging it into a killing weapon would satisfy that goal rather well.

  But there was one large assumption looming over that plan: that he'd be able to learn how to craft such a weapon before they ran into the Drakebane and his army.

  Yet there was nothing else to do but get started. Using the nether as a scalpel and a crowbar, he sliced and pried the wooden handle and leather wraps away from the tang of his plain sword. Once the steel rod was revealed beneath the cross-guard, he carved a slot into the flat end of the horn and wiggled it over the tang, forming a new handle.

  The fit was already quite snug, but deviled by paranoid thoughts of the blade slinging itself free mid-swing, he stilled himself, allowed the ether to begin to mend the slot, then cut off the light's progress as soon as it had started to close off the hole he'd cut in the horn's end. Dante tested the handle and found it gripped so tightly that none of them could budge it.

  He had hoped this process would take long enough for his mind to gin up the solution to how to make his sword do what Blays' did, but his hope was sadly misplaced. He drew the looted Odo Sein sword, observing the now-visible traces flow up from the handle and into the blade, then turned to his weapon and instructed the traces in his dragon horn to follow suit.

  They moved, but there was nothing crackling or purple about them—they moved less like lightning and more like viscous oil, which they were about as sharp as. And rather than circling of their own accord, as soon as he stopped guiding them, they quit whatever they were doing and returned to the hilt.

  As he experimented with various configurations of the traces, he didn't seem to be making any progress whatsoever. But sometimes progress was just a matter of trying dumb things until you stumbled on a smart one. Early that afternoon, the pressure in Dante's forehead began to increase slowly but steadily: they were catching up.

  At the rate it was going, he feared they might reach the deposed ruler—and Gladdic—by the next morning, but as the sun tumbled toward the hazy horizon, the pressure stabilized. The enemy was on the move again.

  He took a break to clear his head. He'd tried to loon Sorrowen a few times over the last two days, but hadn't gotten any response. This time, the young man answered within moments.

  The boy told him that he and Raxa were on the verge of unraveling what seemed to be a major Mallish military investment. One that was being overseen by Mallon's Minister of the Eastern Reach. All signs pointed to the renewal of hostilities with Collen. Sorrowen didn't know the nature of the investment, but seemed to think they'd have the answer within a few days.

  "Let me know as soon as you've found it," Dante said. "We won't directly intervene in Collen again, but if Mallon's planning a final push to retake the basin, we can still warn them."

  "I think this is about more than Collen." Sorrowen hesitated. "I think they're starting a drumbeat against Narashtovik, too. The priests are saying strange things—beliefs that didn't exist when I left here a few years ago."

  The boy recounted the priests' stories of a resurgent Daris, Lord of the North. Dante listened with a furrowed brow.

  "You might be right," he said when the boy concluded. "But scriptures and parables are often designed to be impenetrable to people who aren't steeped in your beliefs. Keep your ears open. We need to learn more."

  He closed the loon's connection, relaying what Sorrowen had told him to Blays.

  "What if Mallon's preparing a third invasion?" Blays said. "Are we still going to leave Collen to face it on their own?"

  "We can't run off to Collen every time they're in trouble. Not without forsaking our own land. If things had been different between us, maybe I'd return a third time. But they decided they didn't need our help. Let's see if they're right."

  "That's a bit cold." Blays stared down at the murky water. "But I don't think I disagree with you."

  "Anyway, Gladdic's the architect of the Mallish plan. If we kill him, interest in fighting the Colleners might collapse."

  As soon as Dante spoke these words, he wondered if they were true, or merely the balm of wishful thinking that allowed you to turn your back without the sting of guilt. Either way, he couldn't spend time worrying about what might befall Collen. Not when he had his own troubles to tend to.

  He turned back to the matter of the swords. He thought to ask Naran whether Gladdic had ever said anything about the Odo Sein during his interrogations, but Naran was curled up on a tarp next to a bench. The captain had been sleeping—and eating—a lot since being plucked out of the tower.

  Other than that, Naran seemed healthy enough in both body and mind. According to him, his arrest had been sudden and unexpected: he'd been making inquiries among his merchant contacts at the docks and must have said something indiscreet in front of the wrong ears. Next thing Naran had known, he'd been snatched up by a gaggle of soldiers in green jabats and informed that he'd committed the crime of sedition for prying into imperial business.

  After a round of questioning, they'd whisked him off to Dara Bode, where they'd tossed him into the Blue Tower, questioned him again—these had focused on his interest in foreigners inside Tanar Atain—and then largely forgotten about him for multiple weeks.

  It hadn't been until Gladdic's arrival that the Tanarians had resumed their questions, more forcefully than before. This time, they'd seemed quite concerned to learn that Naran did most of his business from Bressel, asking repeatedly what he knew about the Tanarian enterprise in the city. At last, Naran confessed that he'd come looking for Gladdic, the Mallish priest. Which had only prompted them to cut him up a bit more and ask if that was really the only reason he'd come to Aris Osis?

  Other than the few days at the start and finish of his captivity, however, Naran had mostly been left to himself. If Dante had been trapped in a dingy cell with nothing to read and nothing to do, he would have spent each day practicing with the nether (assuming, for the sake of the scenario, he couldn't use it to open the walls or blast the entire tower apart). He couldn't imagine what it had been like to be so alone—and worse, to be separated from all of your interests, studies, and pursuits.

  With these dreary thoughts sliding around his mind, he alternated between studying the authentic Odo Sein blade and trying to make his copy imitate it. As the afternoon wore on, a sluggish, mild nausea crept over his body. He tried to push through it, but soon found himself on the verge of vomiting and passing out, not
necessarily in that order. He put away the swords and tried to soothe himself with nether, but it didn't seem to help.

  At sunset, the commanders ordered the canoes to a halt. Some of the soldiers bivouacked on small islands while others bedded down in their boats. There was almost no chance of an attack, but the troops seemed less rowdy and argumentative than any group of Tanarians Dante had witnessed up to that point. After a dinner of fish and root paste, Riza sent a messenger to summon Dante to his island.

  Riza greeted him with no pretense of dana kide. "How far?"

  "It's not precise enough for me to say for sure," Dante said. "But we're closer than we started the day. Maybe as much as five miles."

  The lord stared into the north, face pinched. "I fear we won't catch them for many days."

  "I thought they'd be recruiting help. Won't that slow them down?"

  "Mustering their loyalists is only a part of their plan. I believe they're making for the Go Kozo—the land's wound."

  "Sounds cheery."

  "They'll hope we won't follow," Riza said grimly. "It might be wiser if we didn't. But I don't think they're traveling to the Go Kozo to hide where we dare not follow. I think they're going there to summon something unholy to their cause."

  "Gladdic's demons?"

  "Maybe. Or maybe something worse."

  Dante tried to press him for more, but Riza had fallen into a dark mood. Dante returned to his island camp. Was Riza trying to sway him into supporting the rebels against the Drakebane's heinous tactics? It was hard to say for sure; perhaps he was only venting. Yet a subtler approach was always more effective at convincing a neutral party to your side than it was to preach at or berate them.

  Whatever the case, he didn't care. Caring was Riza's job, along with the other leaders of the movement of the Righteous Monsoon. Dante didn't even have to care if the Righteous Monsoon won or lost. With that thought, he fell asleep with a smile.

  Morning came. The pressure in Dante's brow told him the enemy's northern path was drifting eastward. Hearing this news, Riza looked unhappy but unsurprised. As they set out, an unsteady rain beat at the waters.

  Whatever illness had afflicted Dante the day before was long gone, so he resumed trying to duplicate the captured sword. After an hour of getting nowhere, he sat back and got out the other artifact he'd successfully reproduced: the loon. The loons worked for two reasons: they used their own internal source of nether, requiring no input from him—in fact, they could easily be used by someone who had no talent with the shadows whatsoever—and their function was based on qualities found in the objects they were made from. In order to hear from and be heard by someone else, you built the loon from the skull bones of a creature that had once been able to hear.

  Being such a poor user of ether, he'd never tried to make a torchstone, but he understood the concept was similar. By using a base of azamite, a particular kind of cloudy gemstone that could focus ambient light into a brighter, condensed illumination, and imbuing it with ether, you could cause the stone to magnify and even create light.

  By comparison, it seemed as though the nether in the Odo Sein blade could magnify the cutting strength of the sword. But how to access the sword's inner virtue of sharpness? The ability to cleave? To take a whole and sunder it into two?

  In the afternoon, the flotilla came to a stop. Their force had been skirting the settlements they'd passed, but the scouts reported that a nearby village appeared empty. Fearing the Drakebane had orchestrated another massacre, the Monsoon diverted to investigate.

  The adda paddies had been ripped up, the roots plundered. The docks were intact, but most of the houserafts were gone. There were no bodies. It was as if everyone there had picked up and left—or been taken.

  They gathered food from what little remained and moved on. Dante had hoped the interruption would jar an idea loose from his mind, but he felt thoroughly stalled.

  "Volo," he said. "Do you know any stories about the Odo Sein?"

  The girl laughed. "I got more stories about those bastards than a frog has pollywogs."

  "Are there any involving their swords?"

  "You mean like the Red Tide of Falo Loc? Before I was born, the Drakebane's father Evo Yoto decreed his soldiers needed more adda so they could fight back the interlopers from the Deep Swamps. He said that when harvest time came, he needed ten percent more from each village. Well, the people of Falo Loc worked hard to meet their quota, but halfway through the growing season, a blight killed five out of every six plants.

  "Harvest came, and Drakebane Evo sent the Odo Sein to collect the empire's share, but Falo Loc couldn't meet their obligation. So the Odo Sein killed everyone. Chopped them into bits!"

  Dante waited for more, but Volo's laughter indicated that was the end of the story. "What the hell does that have to do with the Odo Sein's swords?"

  "What do you think they used to kill the villagers?"

  Blays shrugged. "The shame of not meeting their quota?"

  "I'm looking for something that gives me insight into anything unique about their swords. I'm already well-versed in the notion that swords as a class are capable of cutting people up."

  Volo stuck out her lower lip, swerving around a bare branch reaching out of the water. "Well, that's about the only thing the Odo Sein do."

  "Know what? Tell me any story that comes to mind. You never know when something vital's going to spring up."

  Volo launched into a string of tales, starting with the story of how the Odo Sein had created swamp dragons as mounts and ridden them to battle to expand the Tanarian Empire across the marshland. After several successful campaigns, however, the dragons had escaped their masters. They'd been living in the swamps—and killing innocent travelers—ever since.

  Next was the legend of Ro Woto, widely regarded as the greatest swordsman of all the knights of his time. For years, his loyalty was as unparalleled as his skill. One day, he and several other knights were sent to travel into Yataga, a lesser kingdom that had been at war with the fledgling Tanar Atain. The knights were ordered to pick up a large group of Yatagan children orphaned after a recent battle. Once they had their young charges in their war canoes, the knights started back toward their homeland, where the orphans would be resettled.

  Ro Woto was supposed to return by himself to Dara Bode to inform the Drakebane of their success, but he'd only gone a short ways before spotting a group of Yatagan warriors ahead. He turned back to warn the others, and witnessed his fellow knights tossing the Yatagan children into the open swamp, then canoeing away as the ziki oko feasted.

  Seeing this, he was overcome with black wrath. He flung himself at his former brothers, striking down one after another until their bodies lay so thick on the water you could walk across them without getting your feet wet. It wasn't until seven Odo Sein surrounded him on the central platform of a war canoe that they were able to wound him. Even then, he fought on, his sword crackling against theirs as he slew first one, then two, then four.

  But in the effort, the surviving three wounded him a second time. Ro Woto collapsed to the deck. As they closed on him, he was too weak to lift his sword arm. Yet he reached inside himself and his soul streamed forth to his sword, and it lifted of its own accord, dancing between his foes like a skipperfish. When it finished, all three enemies fell dead. Then Ro Woto smiled and died—but his soul stayed always with his sword, and whenever it was carried by another Knight of Odo Sein, the bearer was inspired to help the helpless.

  After that, Volo told three quick stories about the Pacification of the West, where the Odo Sein were deployed to put down an insurrection in the western territories that had been spearheaded by a division of Mallish priests sent to gain a foothold in Tanar Atain. The knights were described as whirling through the enemy's soldiers like tree-nodders—a type of local windstorm that made the trees seem to bob their heads.

  When the priests came forth to stop the slaughter with their magic, the Odo Sein called upon the Stillness of Rocks in the Str
eam. When both light and dark were fastened in place, the Odo Sein lifted their blades, which blazed with shadows forged of the knights' own spines. The priests looked on in terrified wonder, spending their final thoughts to ask their gods why their magic had failed them while the enemy's swords whistled down upon their necks, uniting them with the awful darkness.

  "That's as morbid as something out of Dante's diary." Blays eyed Volo. "You said your people tell that story to children?"

  "It's the truth." Volo cocked her head. "Do you foreigners lie to your children?"

  "We practically make a sport of it! How else are you going to get them to do what you want?"

  "Have you tried the truth?"

  "Truth doesn't work on them."

  "Not when you've trained them to be unable to tell truth from lies, and why it matters."

  Blays gave her a dirty look, sputtering for words. "Dante, help me out here. You justify lying to people all the time."

  "We lie to them to control them," Dante said. "And because we're so frail we can't imagine that they're not. When we lie to them, it isn't really to protect them. It's to protect ourselves. To allow us to pretend that they're the weak ones."

  Volo had stopped paddling, her head twisted around to watch him. Her face had the stunned, almost alarmed look of a worshipper hypnotized by a sermon. "Do you really believe that? Or is that just dana kide?"

  "I don't know. I wasn't even thinking about it until I said it."

  "That's the sign the gods are speaking through you." She narrowed her eyes. "At least, that's what the Drakebane wants us to believe. But we all know we already have the truth inside us. So what do we need the gods to tell us anything for?"

  Before Dante had the chance to respond, she turned and drove her oar into the water, stroking hard to regain her place in the loose formation of boats. Dante was momentarily annoyed by her withdrawal from a debate she'd started, then remembered that he didn't give a damn.

  Instead, he silently recapped the stories she'd just told them. Usually, he thought he had a good ear for what was historical fact and what was myth, but in Tanar Atain, the borders of truth felt as foggy as the Mists. Even so, he thought he might have a lead. In both the last stand of Ro Woto and the massacre of the Mallish priests, the stories had said the Odo Sein had drawn on something inside themselves to lend strength to their swords.