“It is properly known as Xavva-Tish-Laqishtax,” said Sir Hereward reluctantly, in between bites, after he saw that Mister Fitz was not going to enlighten Fyltak. Presumably so the God-Taker continued to think him one of the harmless entertaining puppets. “However, it was better known in its heyday as Xavva the Soul-Gorger.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Fyltak.
“You know of it?” asked Sir Hereward curiously. The godlet had only been identified by the witches after some considerable research in their incomparable archives, and that only after Eudonia managed to get a fresh sample of the “spoil” left behind by the godlet’s predations, revealing the unique prismatic band of the godlet’s sorcerous signature. Unfortunately, after procuring the sample, Eudonia had not waited for the confirmation of identity before taking on the godlet by herself.
“Not as such,” replied Fyltak. “That was merely an expression of punctuation, as it were. And its weaknesses?”
“Not very apparent,” replied Sir Hereward. He hesitated, wondering how much he could tell Fyltak before he would have to kill him. The man seemed innocuous, an innocent, or near enough. Only his sword made him of some account, though he was either deluded on that score or did not wish others to know of it.
“It must have some weakness,” replied Fyltak. “As Hereshmur describes in Banishing and Imprisonment: Methods for Dealing with Unruly Gods, all extradimensional entities are flawed.”
“Ah, a scholar,” said Sir Hereward.
“What do you mean?” asked Fyltak, his eyebrows drawing together as he frowned, quick to detect offence or sarcasm.
“Merely punctuation,” replied Sir Hereward blandly. “Hereshmur may well be correct, but he is perhaps countered by that famous quotation of Lorquar, Executioner of Gods.”
“Oh yes,” said Fyltak, nodding.
Sir Hereward, who had made up “Lorquar, Executioner of Gods” on the spur of the moment, kindly did not tell Fyltak so, but ascribed a frequent saying of his own mother to this mythical personage.
“If an inimical godlet’s weakness cannot be discerned, does one exist? Act against its strengths for a greater chance of success.”
“And this Xavva…err…godlet…what are its strengths?”
“It devours souls,” said Sir Hereward bleakly. “It sucks the life out of anything that gets too close, and it grows stronger. Should it garner enough spiritual essence, it will become well-nigh impossible to banish.”
“But doubtless you have a plan, Sir Hereward?”
“I have an ally,” replied Hereward. “Who is extremely late arriving!”
“And who would that be, sir?” asked Fyltak, drawing himself up and inflating his chest. “For dare I say, an ally already stands before you!”
“Yes,” replied Hereward dubiously. “However, the specific ally I await is…”
Once again the knight hesitated, reluctant to give this imposter more knowledge than it would be safe to allow him to retain. Fyltak struck an expectant attitude, indicating that possibly not telling him might lead to death by curiosity in any case.
“You have heard of the Witches of Har?” asked Sir Hereward. “Agents for the ancient Council for the Treaty of the Safety of the World?”
“Have I not!” exclaimed Fyltak. “Am I not one of those agents myself?”
Momentarily puzzled by the double negative, Sir Hereward didn’t respond for a moment. Then he exploded.
“No, you’re not, so stop talking nonsense! And before you go fulminating about the place like a turkey-cock with singed tail feathers think about what I just told you. A Witch of Har—a real agent of the Council—should be here shortly, and they do not take lightly to impersonators. Furthermore, she will be bringing with her a weapon which we, and by that I mean the Witch and I and Mis—that is, the Witch and I—will use to banish Xavva-Tish-Laqishtax. And you, sir, should immediately face about in the opposite direction and go as fast as you can as far as you can and hope that we succeed!”
“You are offensive, sir!” exclaimed Fyltak. “And when this godlet has been dealt with you shall answer to me for a lesson in manners!”
“Did you not hear a word I said?” expostulated Sir Hereward. He stood up and thrust the demitasse back at Fyltak, who reflexively took it. “This is a serious business, not for moongazers and dilettantes!”
“Perhaps we should let the Witch of Har decide who is the dilettante!” Fyltak snapped back. As he spoke, he put both porcelain cups back in a well-padded box and slipped it into a pouch inside his cloak. “A notable such as myself, or a brutish wanderer who travels about with a capering puppet, aggrandizing himself as a godslayer!”
Sir Hereward’s hand went to his pistol as Fyltak’s went to his sword.
“Enough!” said Mister Fitz, very loudly. “The godlet has turned back toward us!”
Fyltak looked to the puppet, but Sir Hereward gazed up to the sky. The snow was beginning to fall thicker and faster, and he felt the air suddenly grow colder, ice forming on his nose and cheeks.
“How far away is it?” he asked, urgently.
“Four hundred yards and closing swiftly,” replied Mister Fitz. He jumped to the basket even as Sir Hereward leapt from the milestone and began to force his way back the way they had come. Already the path they had made was beginning to disappear under the fresh snow.
“Why do you flee?” called out Fyltak, adding, “Coward!”
“If it gets closer than a hundred yards, Xavva-Tish-Laqishtax will draw the spirit from your body as easily as a man quaffing a pint of ale!” shouted Sir Hereward over his shoulder, not pausing to do so. “Stay and have your soul consumed! Your small life will not be a great weight in the scales! That’s if you don’t freeze first!”
A few minutes later, he heard Fyltak puffing up behind him.
“So do we simply flee?”
“Going back on its own trail, the godlet will diminish, finding no new life to consume,” explained Sir Hereward shortly. “If it follows us for a sufficient time, it may become weak enough to dispatch even without the weapon I await from the Witches.”
“It grows cold,” said the self-professed God-Taker. His breath came out as dense fog, icicles forming around his mouth as he spoke. “Very cold.”
“The cursed godlet is applying its strength to bring an even greater freeze, staking all on this pursuit,” huffed Sir Hereward. It hurt to breathe in, the air was so intensely cold. “Fitz! We cannot long go on like this.”
“A little farther!” urged Mister Fitz from within the basket. “I am calculating. We must make the godlet use as much of its stored energy as possible, because with only one needle, I cannot hold it off for more than twenty or perhaps thirty minutes.”
“Ww-what is this…” asked Fyltak, his teeth chattering. He was staggering now, wading through icy, brittle snow that was building higher than his thighs, the air so thick with flakes neither man could see much farther than their own outstretched arms. “W-w-hat talk of n-n-needles?”
“The mathematics are simple,” continued Mister Fitz, ignoring Fyltak’s question. “If the godlet depletes its reserves sufficiently in pursuing us or trying to break down the defences I will raise, it will not be able to retain control over Eudonia’s body. She will reassert dominance and walk away, back along the path they took, where the godlet will only grow weaker. We can follow, await Kishtyr and proceed as required.”
“W-h-at if…if it doesn’t weaken enough?” asked Sir Hereward. He couldn’t stop shivering, and he could barely see now, his eyes thin slits surrounded by ice. “Or we freeze first? We have to stop and shield ourselves!”
“Ten more steps!” commanded Mister Fitz.
Sir Hereward pushed on, but every step took him a smaller distance forward. The snow was waist high and more tightly packed, indicating he had wandered off their previous path. Or so much snow had fallen so quickly it didn’t matter where he went. He couldn’t hear Fyltak, but then he couldn’t hear much of anything, save the echo of his own straini
ng heartbeat. His ears were frozen under his woolen cap, he felt as if the only sound he picked up now was coming from within him.
Dimly he heard Fitz shouting something, and he felt a vibration on his back. The puppet leaping clear of the basket, he supposed. He tried to walk on, but instead he fell face-first in the snow, which was weirdly warmer than the air above it. For a moment he welcomed this, before realizing it was a trap. If he didn’t get up again straightaway, he would lie here and freeze to death. Groaning, the knight rose up on one knee and with frantic but feeble swimming motions, managed to clear the snow away from his chest and stand.
Fitz spoke again, a phrase Hereward couldn’t properly make out, save it included the word “eyes.” He knew what that meant—Mister Fitz was about to use a sorcerous needle—so he forced his ice-ridden eyes completely closed and buried his face in his buff coat sleeve.
Even with this protection, a violet radiance burst through, seeming to illuminate the insides of his eye sockets and skull. Sir Hereward cried out at that, and at the blast of welcome but painful heat. His ears suddenly cleared. He heard Fyltak groaning and Mister Fitz reciting instructions as if they were back in the schoolroom at the High Pale.
“Hereward, Fyltak. Do not move. I have inscribed a sorcerous barrier about us, which will resist the godlet’s ravening and also make the air much more clement. But it is of a small radius and should you cross the boundary, flesh and bone would be bisected and death instant.”
Slowly, very slowly, Sir Hereward opened his eyes, blinking away the melted ice. He was now standing in a pool of melted snow that was trickling about his ankles, finding its way to the lowest point of the ground nearby. Mister Fitz, sodden to his neck, was crouched next to him, his wooden fingers cupped around a needle that even so shrouded, shone with a light too bright to address save out of the corner of one’s eye. A radiant trail, not so brilliant, marked where the puppet sorcerer had drawn a circle around the three would-be godslayers.
Xavva-Tish-Laqishtax stalked around the circle, ice instantly forming in thick sheets under its feet. Hereward looked at the godlet’s current physical form with rather mixed feelings. Eudonia had always hated him, always called him an aberration, even to his face: a boy-child born to a Witch, when the Witches only gave birth to girls. She had wanted him exposed at birth on the cliff tops of the High Pale, a fate only averted because Hereward’s mother was one of the Three, the ruling council. Eudonia had also opposed his being taught by Mistress Fitz (as she was then), and later had tried to prevent Hereward and the puppet being sent out as companions on the eternal mission to rid the world of inimical godlets.
Hereward feared her and returned her hatred.
But now he also felt pity.
Xavva-Tish-Laqishtax had retained Eudonia’s shape, at least in torso and head. But somewhere along its ravening trail it had obviously felt the need for faster locomotion, because there were two extra sets of human legs fused to Eudonia’s middle, with repellent growths of flesh and skinless bundles of muscles and nerves bulging out where the godlet had stuck everything together willy-nilly.
Eudonia’s harsh, unforgiving face with its ritual scars was unchanged, save that the stubs of sorcerous needles were embedded in her forehead and through both cheeks, all three still sparking faintly with susurrations of violet energy. Clearly she had resorted to draconian measures in an effort to resist the godlet. Looking at her white, rolled-back eyes, Sir Hereward wondered if deep inside she still fought against the extradimensional being who had invaded her mind and flesh.
Xavva-Tish-Laqishtax approached the circle, reaching out with Eudonia’s hands, only to draw them back as sorcerous energy flared, its fingers smoking and blackened. It paid these hurts no heed, not even dipping its hands in the snow, so the fingers continued to slowly burn, skin crackling back to bone. The awful stench wafted across to Hereward, Fitz’s sorcerous defence on this occasion not designed to forestall odors.
“Will the circle hold?” croaked Sir Hereward.
“For a time,” confirmed Mister Fitz. The puppet was watching the godlet intently. After a few moments, he made a clicking sound with his tongue, which was pierced with a silver stud, perhaps just for this purpose. “I fear I have miscalculated.”
“What?” asked Fyltak, his voice quavering.
“It is more cunning than I expected,” remarked Mister Fitz, facing the horrific, malformed thing that hosted the godlet’s presence in the world.
Xavva-Tish-Laqishtax smiled at the puppet too widely, the skin around Eudonia’s mouth splitting like rotten cloth at each end, revealing bone. No blood came from this new wound. Then the godlet turned and moved away, using all three sets of legs clumsily in a lopsided waddle through the drifts. Snow swirled and followed it, a localized flurry. Though the godlet moved slowly, within half a minute it was lost to sight in the gloom of the perpetual winter that followed it everywhere.
“The godlet’s turn and pursuit was a bluff,” continued Mister Fitz. He closed his fist completely, concentrating for a moment. When he opened his hand, the needle he held was nothing more than a sliver of cold iron, all radiance gone, and the circle around them faded into nothing more than a line of melted snow. “To make me use my remaining needle in defence. It clearly never intended to press its attack home. Worse, it has more stored energy to sustain it than I estimated, enough to reach the manors on the far shore of the Smallest Sea. There it will gorge itself beyond chance of retribution.”
“Yet it is weakened now?” asked Sir Hereward. He was vigorously rubbing his extremely cold nose, so his words were only just intelligible. “There was less snow and ice about it then, as it departed, and it was definitely slower.”
“It is diminished,” confirmed Mister Fitz. “Our brassards would give us sufficient protection to close with it now and not be frozen. But we still do not have any armament that might force it from Eudonia’s body, let alone send it out of this world.”
Hereward looked to the sky, shook his fist, and exclaimed, “Kishtyr!”
“Unless, of course there is more to your sword than has been supposed,” mused Mister Fitz, his round head slowly turning on his thin neck to fix his gaze upon Fyltak, who stood shivering and wild-eyed at Hereward’s side.
“What kind of puppet are you really?” he asked, his voice as unsteady as his shivering body.
“A singular one, made for a most particular purpose: dealing with proscribed extradimensional entities,” said Mister Fitz. Though he spoke in his usual matter-of-fact tone, there was an air of menace in his next words. “Doing whatever must be done for the safety of the world.”
“Mister Fitz is a sorcerer, as much as any of the Witches of Har,” added Sir Hereward. “More so, in many ways. Come, tell us about your sword. It might be the only chance for the people whose souls will otherwise be fodder for Xavva by tomorrow’s dawn.”
“I told you before…” Fyltak started to say, but his voice withered under the combined stare of Mister Fitz and Sir Hereward. There was something about the puppet’s piercing gaze, in particular, the man was not eager to meet.
“The sword has been in my family a long time,” he finally said. “I don’t know exactly how long. We have always known it was made to kill…banish, I suppose in actuality…godlets.”
“Show me the blade,” commanded Mister Fitz. He drew closer, while Sir Hereward stepped behind Fyltak. The knight’s fingers closed slowly into a fist, ready to smash the other man on the side of the head if he chose that moment to try to use his sword rather than merely show it.
But the God-Taker drew the weapon slowly and held it low across his body, angling the sword so the light fell upon the blade. The sky was already clearing, only a few scant snowflakes falling now, and there was even a hint of the sun’s presence in the west, a kind of golden backlight to the dissipating clouds. To the east, where Xavva-Tish-Laqishtax was inexorably staggering toward the Smallest Sea, the sky might as well have been painted with coal dust, being entirely black.
Mister Fitz inspected the sword, peering closely at the rippled surface of the blade. There were no obvious marks or inscriptions, at least none visible to Sir Hereward’s mortal eyes. But the puppet saw something there.
“Interesting,” he said. “This might actually be one of the fabled God-Taker swords of sunken Herenclos.”
“Herenclos?” asked Sir Hereward. “But that is an abyss, a molten cleft…”
“It was a city once,” said Mister Fitz. “Before the earth swallowed it. The city sat above a deep vent that tapped the fires of the underworld, which they used in their smithing. That vent was kept from yawning open by their patron godlet Heren-Par-Quaklin. When that godlet disappeared, the city quite literally fell.”
The puppet leaned closer still to the sword and touched the blade with the very tip of his blue tongue.
“Yes,” he said. “It is of Herenclos. The last captive of the sword still lingers within. Greatly reduced, but still with some remnant power. Perhaps enough.”
“Captive?” asked Fyltak and Sir Hereward, speaking together.
“Yes,” said Mister Fitz. “The God-Taker swords were not made to banish the extradimensional, but rather to entrap and use their powers. The smiths of Herenclos were not particular about which godlets served this purpose, often enslaving benign entities as well as those proscribed. I do not know which particular godlet lingers in this blade, nor is there time to capture a slide of its essence…what powers does the weapon exhibit, Fyltak?”
“When I wield it, I can see in the dark,” said Fyltak slowly. “The world around me moves more slowly, I become impossibly swift and consequently deadly. But this slowing continues…if I hold too long to the sword, then everything about me drags to a standstill, people and animals. Everyone and everything, they become as statues and it seems so too does the movement of the air, for however I gasp and struggle, I can draw no new inhalation into my lungs.”
“So you can only use the sword as long as you can hold your breath?” asked Sir Hereward.
The Book of Swords Page 29
