Swordheart

by T. Kingfisher

  Another bandit came through the trees. “Sir,” he said. “We can’t find hide nor hair of the other one.”

  “Because he’s invisible!” yelled Mina.

  “Because you shot him, so he ran away!” Halla yelled back.

  It occurred to Halla that this was not a good thing in what was supposed to be a hired guard, so she added, “And anyway, he’s fired! What kind of guard runs away because he’s been shot? What was I even paying him for?”

  The bandit leader rubbed his forehead wearily.

  “Didn’t see him running away,” muttered the one who had been scouting. “Didn’t see any trail.” He scuffed the ground with his foot.

  “Thought I saw some shiny light over by them, before,” volunteered another one. Halla’s heart sank. “But I don’t know for sure.”

  The leader came and sat down in front of Halla and Zale.

  “I am very sorry for all of this unpleasantness,” he said to Zale. “But ma’am, if you can, in fact, make people invisible, surely you can see why that is a skill that I would be interested in making use of.”

  Halla wrinkled her nose. “No,” she said after a moment. “I can’t.”

  He tilted his head. “I’m a bandit.”

  “Yes,” said Halla, “but you’re a highwayman. You want people to believe you have superior numbers so that they give you their money without a fight. Making someone invisible would just mean that they were more likely to fight you, wouldn’t it? And you can’t very well have an invisible person stop travelers in the middle of the road. They’d just get run down. And then if there’s arrows flying around and someone is invisible, doesn’t it mean that that person is more likely to be shot on accident?”

  The bandit leader blinked slowly at her.

  “Really,” said Halla, “it just seems like a poor idea all around. Even if I could make people invisible, which I can’t.” She shook her head. “It’s all moot anyway. I think you’ve listened to a really unpleasant person and gotten entirely the wrong impression.”

  Mina started forward with an oath. The bandit leader twisted around and said, “If you don’t want to end up in a shallow grave alongside Brett, I suggest you sit down.”

  She sat down.

  So Brett’s dead, then. I wonder if this man killed him, or if he got himself killed doing something stupid.

  Halla didn’t feel guilty over the man’s death, but she found that even as angry as she was at Mina, she could feel a pang. The poor woman was obviously distraught over her friend’s death and looking for someone to blame. Maybe she’d latched onto Halla and this wild tale of invisibility.

  Which, ah, is not that wild, when you think about it. She’s got things wrong, but she did see Sarkis appearing out of nowhere. It’s not a completely farfetched theory.

  The bandit leader squeezed his eyes shut. He looked as if he had a headache. “Do you know,” he said, “this is not the way that I pictured this going?”

  “Oh, I get that a lot.”

  He actually winced.

  “Um,” said Halla. “I’m sorry?”

  Zale nudged her. “You don’t have to apologize to someone who’s kidnapped you,” they muttered.

  “Oh.” That did make sense, but apologizing was ingrained in Halla’s nature. She chewed on the inside of her cheek and wondered what to do next.

  “So,” said the leader, still not opening his eyes, “if I am hearing all this correctly, my men have shot at a priest of the Rat, in order to take a prisoner who is not actually a wonderworker, and who as near as I can tell, thinks that the entire idea would be stupid even if she was.”

  “Not stupid,” said Halla hurriedly. “I mean, if you were a different sort of person, I can see invisibility being useful! If you were a burglar, say.”

  She peered up through the leaves of the tree. It was starting to get dark. Had Sarkis had long enough to heal?

  I suppose any amount of time I can buy him is useful…

  “Invisibility might be very useful for a burglar,” she added, nodding to the man. “Or an assassin. Or even a pickpocket. I just think that highway robbery is perhaps not a field where invisibility is called for.”

  The bandit leader looked over at Zale. “Under the protection of the Rat?” he said.

  “I fear so.”

  “They’d be upset if I kill you both.”

  Zale somehow managed to look tranquil despite having their hands tied and a man hinting at their death. “I fear there would be dying curses, yes. And then the Temple would be forced to withdraw their services from the underworld until you had been dealt with. Every man’s hand turned against you and so forth.” They paused. “Nothing personal, you understand.”

  “No,” said the leader, “of course not.” He stood up and walked away.

  “Do you think he’s going to kill us?” asked Halla.

  “I’m not sure he knows yet.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Could go either way.” Zale’s pewter hair had come loose from the braid and fallen into their eyes. They tossed their head irritably, which fixed the problem for perhaps thirty seconds, and then it fell back down again.

  “Oh dear.”

  Shadows crept under the trees. Halla studied the ropes in front of her. “Are we supposed to try to get out of these?”

  “People usually try, I think,” said Zale.

  “A gnole could chew through them,” volunteered Brindle, who had been keeping very quiet.

  “It’s just that we’re in the middle of their camp and I think they’ll notice. And that awful Mina person keeps glaring at me.”

  “Seems like we might not want to do that, then.”

  “Probably not.”

  “A gnole would at least wait until dark.”

  “What do we do?”

  Zale gave her an ironic look. “I have no idea. I’ve never actually been kidnapped and tied up before. This is a new experience for me.”

  “Oh. Really? Because you seemed to be handling it really well, so I thought you must have done it before.”

  “Thank you. The Temple of the Rat does run us through a fair amount of training, you understand. I know what to do, in theory. It’s just the first time I’ve had to put it into practice.”

  Mina glared daggers at them from across the clearing.

  “What gets me,” said Halla, after the better part of an hour dragged by, “is that people are tying each other up and robbing each other when there’s those godawful slimy things lurking out there in the Vagrant Hills. I mean, don’t they realize we have much bigger problems?”

  “I don’t think they do, no.”

  “We could tell them.”

  Zale leaned their head back against the trunk of the tree. “Somehow I don’t think that will help much.”

  “Probably not. It just seems so short-sighted.” Another, more immediate thought struck her. “Oh no! You don’t think they’ll bother Bartholomew and his friend, do you?”

  “Hard to say,” said Zale. “I suppose they might.”

  “This is terrible.”

  “What, only now?”

  “A gnole isn’t getting paid enough for this.”

  The bandit leader came back over and looked at them like a man with a problem.

  “You’re absolutely certain you’re not a wonderworker?” he said.

  “Very,” said Halla.

  “And this light that Mina says she saw?”

  Halla lifted her bound hands and let them drop back into her lap, hoping he couldn’t read the lie. “I have no idea. You’d have to ask her.”

  “You have no explanation for it?”

  She wrinkled her forehead. “Why do you want me to explain somebody else’s hallucination? I really would have to be a wonderworker for that.”

  Did that sound convincing? I hope that sounded convincing.

  “What would you say if I tortured you?” asked the bandit leader conversationally.

  Halla blinked at him. “Err…’ow,’
probably? ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ something like that?” What a bizarre question. What does he expect me to say?

  The bandit leader’s face took on an expression that Sarkis would have found immediately familiar. “I meant about being a wonderworker.”

  “Oh. I mean, it’s torture,” said Halla uncertainly. “I’ll probably say anything you want to make it stop. But I’m still not going to be able to make anyone invisible afterward, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “If you release us now,” Zale put in, “I am happy to let bygones be bygones. But my superiors would undoubtedly consider torture to be excessive.”

  The bandit leader walked away again, muttering to himself.

  They continued to sit under the tree. One of the bandits came back with a rabbit, skinned it, and began cooking chunks over one of the campfires. Halla’s stomach growled.

  “Do you think they’re going to feed us?”

  “I am not entirely hopeful.”

  Halla started to reply to that, then noticed that two more bandits had sat down alongside the pile of their possessions confiscated from the wagon.

  She bit her lip. She couldn’t even say anything to Zale for fear of being overheard.

  They examined Zale’s crossbow first, with appreciative noises, then set it down. The gear taken from the dead Motherhood priests was next.

  “Now where do you suppose they got this?” one of the bandits asked his companion, who shrugged.

  Halla watched, holding her breath, as he picked up Sarkis’s sword.

  He idly drew the sword, examining the blade. “Not bad. Good edge on it, don’t you think?”

  His companion’s opinion was lost to the ages, as a foot of steel slid into his throat.

  The first bandit gaped, and then Sarkis jerked the sword free and smashed the hilt into the man’s face in the same motion. He fell backward, clutching his face, and Sarkis reversed the sword and chopped down into his neck like a man splitting a log.

  The attack was so quick and so brutal and above all so silent that for a long moment, Halla thought that she was the only person in camp who even realized what was going on. Even the crunch of steel into bone sounded like a snapping branch.

  Sarkis looked around the campsite.

  Halla held her breath for what seemed like an eternity and then someone finally realized what was going on and began to raise the alarm. Suddenly it seemed like everyone else in the bandit camp was rising to their feet.

  “Oh dear,” said Halla, to no one in particular. “I hope his arrow wound is healed up.”

  She was aware that this was probably not the right response, given that there were now a great many dead people in front of her. She should be horrified. She should scream her head off. But mostly she was just enormously relieved to see Sarkis again.

  He’d take care of things. The man was a hero. These were just decadent southern bandits and anyway he was nearly immortal, so as long as she didn’t have the poor taste to die in the interim, he would come for her and Zale. She had faith.

  Chapter 39

  Sarkis had a good deal less faith, but then again, he was the one doing most of the work.

  He materialized, saw the two in front of him, neither of which was Halla, and therefore they both needed to die. Possibly they were innocent bystanders, in which case he could put another few deaths on the great god’s ledger, but he wasn’t worried about it.

  They expired before either of them had time to worry about it either.

  He looked swiftly around and saw that it was far darker than it had been. Hours had passed while he was inside the sword.

  If hours had passed, then Halla could have been hurt. Not killed—he’d know that immediately—but tortured or terrified or god forbid, one of the bandits had taken liberties, and if they had, Sarkis would carve out that man’s heart and place it at her feet.

  A bandit stood up from beside the campfire, blinking stupidly at him. The man was still carrying a skewer with a chunk of meat on it. This proved very ineffective at parrying a sword.

  Finally somebody had the good sense to shout “We’re under attack!”

  Being bandits rather than soldiers, this did not result in a coordinated defense. A few of them decided to absent themselves from the fight altogether. Sarkis watched a tall woman across the camp hold up both hands and step back into the trees.

  A much shorter woman, looking vaguely familiar, leapt to her feet and began shrieking “I knew it! I told you! Invisibility!”

  Invisibility? What?

  “I told you! Wonderworkers!”

  She was clearly raving with fever or shock or drink, so Sarkis simply smacked the pommel of his sword against the side of her head and let her drop. Such a blow might prove fatal, of course, but it was certainly preferable to decapitation.

  Anyway, it was bad luck to kill drunks.

  He looked around wildly for Halla, Zale, and opponents, in that order.

  He found an opponent. The opponent had an axe. Parrying an axe with a sword was possible, but hard on the sword, and Sarkis had developed a certain aversion to seeing swords break.

  He spat on the ground and shouted an insult. The man looked baffled.

  Wrong language. Right. The magic was good, but he did tend to revert for obscenities, particularly ones that didn’t translate well.

  “Your sister screws wolves because the men of your clan have dicks the size of grass blades!”

  This did not endear him to the bandit, but the sudden burst of laughter from off to his right told him that Halla was alive.

  Alive. Not dead. I didn’t fail her.

  Sheer relief made him slow to dodge the axeman’s charge. He had to dive out of the way and felt his ankle twinge a warning. He ignored it, put his sword in the axeman’s kidneys and yanked it back out again, which pretty much ended the matter.

  He looked around the campsite again, listening for crossbow strings. “Anyone else?” he asked.

  No one stepped forward. This did not really surprise him. Bandits were in it for a profit, and there was pretty obviously no profit in fighting a very dangerous man who had appeared out of nowhere with a sword. He’d be surprised if half the group hadn’t followed their colleague’s example and melted away into the trees.

  He walked to the tree where Halla was sitting.

  She had her hands tied in front of her. Zale and Brindle were sitting next to her. They appeared unharmed. Brindle was busily gnawing away at his ropes, bits of hemp falling out of the sides of his muzzle.

  Sarkis grabbed Halla’s hands, sliced through the ropes, pulled her upright, and said the first thing which came into his head, which was, “We are never going down this stretch of road again! Never! I do not care if we must go a month out of our way and bribe three kingdoms for passage!”

  Halla blinked at him. “Um, we could just take the north road up past the sheep downs next time…?”

  “Yes!” roared Sarkis “We will do that!”

  She nodded. He nodded.

  Great god.

  He wrapped his arms tightly around her. He wanted very much to kiss her, but he stopped himself. This far was safe. A friend might embrace her like this, particularly after a frightening experience.

  A friend would not have had his lips pressed so tightly against her hair, but she could not see that and did not have to know. His heart hammered in his ears so loudly that it seemed like she had to be able to hear it, but perhaps a friend would feel that, too.

  “It’s all right,” said Halla, patting his shoulder as if comforting him.

  He held her at arms-length. She smiled up at him. “I knew you wouldn’t let anything happen to us.”

  Sarkis stared into her face and saw that she was telling the absolute truth.

  She trusts you.

  She trusts you to keep her safe.

  Pride warred with sudden dread. He would fail. He had already failed. Everyone who trusted him to keep them safe had already died, most in the space of one single blo
ody day.

  Halla didn’t know about any of that. Sarkis felt as if his unworthiness was branded across his face, and yet she was looking up at him without a trace of fear, trusting his competence and his care.

  Great god, I must tell her what the sword says. I must tell her soon, before she finds out on her own.

  “I wasn’t worried.”

  “You should have been worried!”

  Halla relented. “All right. I was a little worried. I mean, the one in charge didn’t seem angry, just really confused and sort of frustrated, but he did talk about torture—”

  Sarkis saw red. “I’ll kill him. Where is he?”

  “He ran away,” said Zale, from the ground. “After you killed the fellow with the axe. Which was quite sensible of him, I suspect.”

  Sarkis lifted his head and scanned the trees, eyes narrowed.

  “Before you charge after him, could you untie me? I mean, when you’re done with the hugging.”

  “Oh dear…” Halla stepped back. Sarkis released her immediately. “Sorry, Zale.”

  “It’s fine. These ropes and I are good friends by now.” The rogue lock of hair fell back into the priest’s face, and they tried to flip it away.

  “A gnole wouldn’t mind being untied, either.”

  Sarkis sheathed his sword and helped first the priest, then the gnole to their feet by way of apology.

  He turned to Halla and she wasn’t there. His nerves screamed, but she was stepping over dead bodies, nose wrinkled, to their gear.

  As he watched, she picked up his sword and slung it over her shoulder, then carefully lifted Zale’s crossbow and held it at arm’s length, like it was a snake that might bite. “This thing isn’t loaded, is it?”

  “No,” said Zale. “You can tell by the lack of bolts and the fact that the string isn’t pulled back. Sarkis, forget my ropes, go take my crossbow away from her before she hurts it.”

  “I’m not going to hurt it!”

  “Just don’t…you know, drop it or…breathe on it too hard…” Zale rested their forehead against Sarkis’s shoulder in apparent despair.

  Sarkis patted the priest on the arm. “Let me get those ropes.”

  They left the bandit camp without any particular incident. Sarkis’s arrow wound was still tender. His ankle twinged, but that didn’t mean anything. He’d had a bad ankle since before he went into the sword, and not even magic could fix that up.