Second Kiss

by Robert Priest

  “No!” he shouted again, his voice twisted with rage and fear. In response the sword shoved itself at his hand so hard it hurt his knuckles. But still he refused it. Everyone by now was screaming and many were running for the exits.

  “Pick it up,” a disembodied voice yelled. This caused the biggest uproar yet from the assembly. There was a clear sense of terror in the room. Some of the little children in the lofts began to whimper and hide their eyes.

  “Don’t!” Veneetha Azucena shouted at Xemion over the racket. “Don’t touch it!”

  “Stop!” Xemion shouted at the sword in the loudest voice he had yet mustered. But the sword had a mind of its own. It followed his hand and kept trying to force itself into his palm, and even when he cupped his two hands together it tried to force itself between them.

  “No!” Xemion shouted again, tucking his hands into his armpits. But the sword was determined. It suddenly withdrew from him and, revolving about its axis, stopped with its point aimed out at the crowd. There was a quick flash of light, and then it sped toward the front row and swung at the leg of the nearest stone table there, cutting it through. The young men and Thralls who were sitting at it gasped at the weight, which now pressed down upon their knees.

  “No,” Xemion shrieked. He knew the sword was doing this to force him to take it into his palm and there was rising fear in his voice. But the sword swung anyway, cutting through the opposing table leg, so that the entire end of the table slanted downward, sending a long line of golden goblets tumbling off, clanking upon the floor. The sword flew back to him once more, hitting his hand hard, trying to open it.

  “TAKE IT!” the voice commanded. It was so loud it caused the windows to rattle. This was when Veneetha Azucena brought her own sharp sword down upon the spelled blade’s back. She struck it to the floor with a slanted swipe that sent it hurtling off, spinning into the empty area behind the stage. It hit the flagstones hard and kept skidding and turning until it came to a halt, its hilt facing directly at her.

  “Get out of here!” she screamed to the crowd in a voice that could not be ignored. “Somebody find Tiri Lighthammer and get him here immediately.” She had barely gotten this command out of her mouth before the sword launched itself at her so fast it was but a blur. She held up her own broadsword reflexively and managed to deflect it, but she saw that it had left a deep nick in her weapon. Still she held the damaged sword defensively in front of her while the spellcrafted sword hung in the air, swinging to and fro malevolently. It took two more quick hacks at her, both of which she parried excellently, but when the third came the weakened sword gave way and the blade fell to the stone floor, leaving her with nothing in her hand but the shorn hilt. As she swayed it backed away a little before lunging toward her chest with great force. Her breastplate held strong but Veneetha Azucena staggered back three steps, all the air knocked out of her. Before she could even gasp, the magical sword swung sideways and drove its cutting edge into the side of her helmet. It hit so hard that it breached the metal and remained wedged in her helmet as she struck the ground. There was a shriek of metal on metal as it tore itself free and rose once again into the air. Veneetha Azucena remained prone where she had fallen, a rim of deeply red blood already welling up and over the split in her helmet.

  By now every able Phaerlander who had a sword had drawn it and as one they tried to subdue the magical sword. But no matter how they struck, no matter how they fell upon it and drove it to the ground it would always cut free, often leaving a screaming mess of torn metal and streaming blood in its wake. Many a sword was left deeply dented and many were sheared off at the hilt. Xemion, more alert now that the sword was no longer at his side, kept trying to get them to stand away from it. He knew that the more they attacked it the more it would attack them. If they left it alone it would return to him. He almost felt he knew its mind and ways as it wreaked havoc upon the great hall. He knew something else, too. It was not yet fully empowered. It needed him. It needed his commitment in full to the spell he had cast. And that was something he was not going to give it. But what other option was there?

  Sensing his continued refusal, the sword shot up out of the melee. Soaring to the great vaulted ceiling, it began to hack away the heads of the stone gargoyles, sending them crashing to the flagstones far below. Then it began to cut down the high chandeliers that lit the hall. They fell, shattering and sputtering and flickering onto the flagstones. It was darker in the hall, for night had long since fallen, but the sword had a light of its own. It radiated with an awesome green emanation, shooting from chandelier to chandelier until the whole place was a mass of scattered, shouting people, screaming, terrified children, and sputtering candles rolling along, still lit, over the flagstones.

  By now, those who could had fled the castle, but the children in the highest loft, terrified by the sword, were frozen, screaming for their mothers. Sensing them there, the sword hovered and swayed a moment, as though suspended from a thread, its point aimed straight at the loft, its hilt aligned with Xemion’s hand. It was as though it were challenging him, forcing him. In some way it was still part of him, and suddenly with that knowledge he knew what was going to happen next. The sword lowered itself and began to slash at one of the supports that held up the stairway to the loft where the children were. It took only three hacks to cut the new wood right through. Three more hacks and both supports were gone. With that the steps fell away, leaving the children stranded thirty feet in the air. The sword paused and then swooped down and turned its pommel once again very deliberately toward Xemion. “TAKE IT!” the increasingly deeper and more ghoulish voice shouted.

  Xemion now knew that taking it was the only way to control it. But if he took it, would the sword also control him?

  “Why won’t you take it?” one of the mothers screamed.

  30

  Zero Remembers

  Striding toward her room at the Panthemium, Zero recalled the flickering fin of a fish and the fin made her remember a wing. And the wing recalled a leaf and the leaf recalled a hand, and so one memory led to another. But there was no apparent order. The scent of a breeze brought back the sound of a stream and the stream was connected with her own reflection as she stared down at it, scared, the rapidly flowing water summoning a nightmare feeling of running away and never getting anywhere. That feeling echoed back to a place and that place like all places led back to the one place, the one face, the one melody that always seemed to be playing behind all these scenes, lovely and lilting. It called to something deep inside her, but it also inexplicably gripped her with terror. As she walked, the melody grew more refined and there was more of it and then it ran round again and she was shaking her head. “No.” But the melody came once more. And a sweet voice sang it now. And she started to hear words: Open my heart, open the door…

  Without warning the bright image of a wide blade came swinging at her. It was so clear and present she cried out and jerked her head back instinctively. And just as the new cut over her eyebrow stung and welled with blood, the old cut, diagonal to it, opened a deeper cut in her memory. She saw herself from outside herself. Her neck bent down over the butcher’s block. A woman clenching her by the hair trying to keep it there long enough to let the ax in her other hand do its work. She was struggling and she pulled away from the veering of the blade. It just nicked her over the eyebrow as it went by but it felt like it cut her in two. She stood up screaming, the blade embedded in the block, the woman screaming, too, yanking her hair and hitting her in the face. Calling her a fool and a dog and a curse. And still the memories dragged one another out of the darkness and pulled themselves before her as she entered the Panthemium and proceeded down the long hallway to her room.

  When she opened the door and saw her staff still leaning in the corner she got a brief respite. She remembered the sunflower stalk it once had been. She touched it and smiled for just a moment and envisioned the glade where that sunflower and so many other, lesser sunflowers had grown, and the sunflowe
rs made her think of the sun — of a particular sun on a particular day — and suddenly she remembered a golden swan.

  “Chiricoru!” she gasped, immediately clamping her hand over her mouth as though she could somehow push that name back in. For a second there arose the vision of a kindly old woman’s face, but it was so quick it was but a glimmer. In the next instant it was replaced by that other woman’s face again: the one who looked a little like her. And she knew now that it was her mother. In this memory she was still bleeding from that cut the axe had made, but the blood was shimmering up and away from her and getting thinner and thinner. She gasped and realized she had been holding her breath. She gasped again when she saw, rippling above her as though through the surface of a rapidly running river, her mother’s face. And there was such love in her eyes, but her hands … Zero choked and gasped again. She heard herself try to say no, but she was underwater and her mother’s firm hands were clenched about her neck. She felt herself blacking out and hardly knew if it was memory or the present. She felt herself going down to the weedy bottom, drowning, but rising again. And then she remembered being swept along down the river.

  For a long time Zero sat on the edge of her bed, still dressed in her armour. She rocked back and forth, wincing and shaking her head. And just as Xemion was saying “No! No!” to the sword in the great banquet hall at the castle, she kept saying “No! No!” to the words and images that burst into her consciousness. No to the insanity. No to the violence and the justification of violence. No to the whole long list of abuses, betrayals, and shocks.

  The truly shocking thing, though, was something she didn’t want to say no to. Whenever she dared to look directly into her mother’s eyes the only thing she ever saw in them was love.

  Love.

  So strong was this impression it made her stop remembering for a moment. How could this possibly be? Before the answer could come to her, another vision spun it out of her mind. A crooked-backed, wrinkled old man with long, wild hair like lichen bent over a handwritten spell kone as high as his waist. He’s going to turn it. He shushes her and winks. He smiles at her. She is just a little girl and he is very kind looking, but a little confused. As if to remind himself, he speaks the old rhyme:

  As the eye goes down

  The words go around.

  All in one turn

  The spell is bound.

  Then he starts cranking the handle clockwise and the beautiful kone spins and the words go round and round and the glass eye descends and somewhere she can hear her mother singing that song. And now she begins to hear the rest of the words:

  Open my heart, open the door

  Every day to love her more.

  Break O wave upon the shore

  Every day I’ll love her m—

  At that moment Asnina burst into the room. “It was a spell-wrought sword!” she screamed. She was very distraught. Her hair had come all unbound and there were streaks through the orange chevrons on her cheeks where tears must have run.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you didn’t lose. He’s up there right now confessing. He made a sword that couldn’t lose. He says he made it with a spell. It’s there right now going mad on him.”

  Zero didn’t quite know who or what she was talking about, but she saw the urgency in her eyes and grabbed the sunflower staff from the corner of the room. Together they ran out of the Panthemium and off toward the castle.

  31

  Staff and Blade

  The sword slowly levitated until it was level with the loft where the children cowered. There it hung like a compass needle, swinging back and forth, back and forth, in a narrower and narrower arc. Screaming, the children kept rushing from one side to the other, trying to get out of its path, but there was not much room and the weakened structure had begun to tilt to and fro with their movements. Children on the sides of the loft were being squeezed up against the railings and some of them looked like they might soon either fall or be squashed. Their mothers had gathered below, screaming their children’s names and preparing to catch them if they should fall. But they were quite high up and many of them would likely be injured, or worse, from the fall.

  “Take the bloody sword!” a huge, red-faced Thralleen yelled furiously in Xemion’s face.

  “I can’t!” he yelled back. But he had to do something. Instead of reaching for the sword, he took off down the aisle between the stone tables, heading toward the exit. A new series of outraged screams rose from the mothers and the stranded children, but Xemion had a plan. When he was halfway down the aisle to the doorway, he turned back, opened his palm, and shouted “Here!”

  The sword stopped swiveling back and forth in front of the children and turned toward him.

  “Come! I command you!” he yelled again, offering his open palm. The sword shot at him hilt first. But just before it reached him, he turned, still holding his hand over his head as if to take it, and ran toward the exit. Once outside, even if he did have to grab it, he would only do so long enough to shove it up to the hilt into the ground and hope it stayed there until the children could be rescued.

  Unfortunately, before he got to the doorway Asnina arrived with Zero just behind. Indeed, he almost collided with them. He felt the sword graze by his knuckles as he stopped in front of the mighty Thralleen, but then it was gone again in an arc, upward to the ceiling. “Don’t come in here!” he yelled, but Asnina’s only response was to tug out her iron blade and come at him with a snarl. Just then the spelled sword, having completed a wide loop in the air, was heading once more for Xemion’s palm. Hearing it before she saw it, Asnina struck a mighty blow, but the spell-made sword, full of momentum from its long flight, met her blade full force in the middle and cut it in half. Enraged, she struck at it with the hilt, but it was too quick. It pulled back and with a quick push forward pierced her through the shoulder. For a second she was pinned right up against the stone wall. With a grunt of pain she dropped to the ground as the sword yanked itself out.

  Zero had tried to prepare herself for the reality of the spellcrafted sword, but now that it hovered before her, a whole lifetime of fearing spellcraft gathered in the one scream she emitted as she turned and fled in the opposite direction. Halfway across the hall the sword caught up, surpassed, and then turned and confronted her, eager to fight its old opponent.

  “Someone get me a sword!” she screamed, holding the sunflower staff out in front of her in trembling hands, awaiting the inevitable attack. She didn’t have to wait long. It struck so fast Xemion didn’t even have time to shout. The sunflower staff was old by now and though its exterior was hard as wood, its centre was hollow. It should have been cut in two by the impact of the sword, but somehow it took and deflected the blow.

  Zero was startled by the force exerted from the sword. She looked around in a panic. She saw Xemion, but didn’t remember him yet. “Somebody get me a real sword!” she yelled again, as she readied herself for the next assault. Xemion was exhausted, but he pushed himself now beyond his limits, struggling open-palmed toward her. “Come to me!” he yelled again. But the sword ignored him, and before he could get to her there was an explosion of green light as the sword struck at her again. Once again Zero succeeded in deflecting it with her staff.

  Xemion realized what was happening. “It can’t cut through your staff,” he yelled, “because it’s made from a sunflower not a tree. It can only cut through the things in the spell that made it: wood and metal and—” The rest of his words were lost in the shouts of the crowd as the sword rushed at Zero with enormous speed. But Zero had heard enough of what Xemion said. She held the staff at an angle to absorb the force just as Lighthammer had trained her to do. She let it spin her a little and came round, staff up at the ready. The next thrust came faster, then the next and the next. Soon a flurry of strikes and feints broke out. This was a fight of maximum motion that should have overcome even the most skilled swordsman, but Zero had fought this sword before and she was beginning to know its wa
ys. Nothing it did could get past her guard. Seeing the sword begin to lag and fade, several of the terrified children stranded atop the loft made the mistake of cheering Zero on. Unfortunately this attracted the sword’s attention. If it couldn’t get around her guard, it could certainly get around theirs. Abandoning Zero, it soared back to the beams that supported the loft. The children now began to shriek in earnest as it slashed mightily through the first beam, causing one whole side of the loft to lurch downward.

  “Come to me!” Xemion screamed again, but the sword would never be fooled by this ruse again. If he wanted it to stop he would have to say it and mean it. It carefully positioned itself for another swing at the loft, but by this time Zero had seen its purpose and was standing in front of the beam, guarding it, her staff held before her in both hands.

  “Make it stop!” she screamed angrily at Xemion as the sword came at her.

  It struck quicker than it ever had, hurtling down with full force on the staff, but still the sunflower stalk held. This enraged the sword. As Xemion staggered and swayed in the centre of the hall, he called out in his most spellbinding voice, trying to stop the sword. But this only seemed to make the weapon more frantic. It hacked and hacked, but Zero followed, warding it away from the groaning beam.

  Meanwhile, Belphegor the Nain, his brother Tomtenisse Doombeard, and several others were struggling to stand one of the long stone tables on end so they could lean it up against the wall and rescue the children.