The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  He handed the knight's sword to Blays. "Take that into the shadows, will you? Watch it close and tell me if you see anything like you do when somebody's reading the Cycle."

  "Like nether flowing between me and the sword?"

  "Yes. But don't limit yourself to only looking for that. That's a good way to miss what's right in front of you."

  Blays blinked from sight. Through the ripples in the shadows, Dante could feel him moving in slow, deliberate motions, like he was practicing a new sword form. Two minutes later, he reappeared in the canoe.

  "The traces are moving around like crazy." Blays rolled his wrist, twisting the sword back and forth. "But I'm not seeing anything coming out of me."

  "You're sure of that?"

  "Why do you need me to test this? Do you think the sword's drawing on another trace? One we haven't seen yet?"

  "I think that's a possibility."

  "Then we know how to test that, don't we? Give me the torchstone." Blays reached out. Dante handed it over. Blays walked into the shadows again. This time, he was back within a matter of seconds, the torchstone glowing in his hand. "Just lit myself up good. Now watch and tell me if you see anything."

  Blays propped a knee on a seating bench and tilted his sword through a chain of techniques. The ether shining from the torchstone threw each mote of nether into sharp relief. Shadows gushed up from the handle of the sword, jagging along the blade before returning to the grip. As far as Dante could tell, however, none of these shadows were coming from Blays himself.

  He watched for another couple of minutes, then cursed, pressing his fingers into his brow. "There's nothing I hate more than having a great idea refuted by stupid reality."

  Then again, just because it didn't appear to be the traces, that didn't rule out all forms of nether. What if they'd been powering the swords with the common nether inside their own bodies? Dante lifted the sword he'd been working on, reached inside himself, and summoned the shadows from his blood and bones. It looked and acted no different from the nether he could have called out of the water or the mud, but it was always possible that it contained properties he didn't know about. He sent it into the traces in the sword's handle.

  This accomplished nothing. Except, he supposed, that it ruled out one more possibility for how to craft the swords. This might have been useful, except that he suspected that the ways to not create the swords were infinite in number.

  He was getting frustrated again. Frustration was the enemy of discovery. Before it could poison his mind, he set down his sword and picked up the Odo Sein weapon. As the nether swept out of the handle and coursed along the blade, it sizzled and jerked, flowing and branching as unpredictably as turbulent water.

  Yet the longer he watched it, the more convinced he became that there were small patterns within the chaos. Or if not patterns (for they didn't repeat themselves exactly), then tendencies. It was like watching water pour down an uneven slope: while it looked like it was going whichever way it pleased, and often did just that, over time, it was prone to follow the same routes.

  He didn't think the nether's course along the blade had to do with the shape of the sword itself. At least not its physicality; nether could pass straight through the steel without knowing it was there. Why, then, did it follow these patterns? And if it wasn't following the physical planes of the sword, what was it following?

  As he turned these questions over in his mind, a dull ache formed in his head. His stomach started to toss and turn like a young soldier whose fear of the coming battle won't let him sleep. He found it more and more difficult to concentrate. Bad airs from the swamp, probably, but when he tried to cleanse his blood with nether, it didn't help in the slightest. Blays and Volo appeared unaffected. Even Naran, thinned and weakened by captivity, slept peacefully.

  If it was a bad air, it seemed unusually interested in him. And come to think of it, it only seemed to afflict him when he was handling the Odo Sein blade.

  "Do me a favor?" he asked Blays. "Will you hold the sword for a while? My wrist's getting tired."

  Blays shook his head in disgust. "Should I find a pillow for your delicate ass, too?"

  "Just trying to find a way to make you useful."

  Blays took up the sword. Dante resumed observing the shadows snapping along the blade, sketching out any tendency that repeated more than twice. He'd run out of ink many days ago, and the Tanarians didn't seem to use writing instruments at all, just their string-harp things. This had required him to fill his ink pot with a small quantity of his own blood. Running low, he paused to refill it.

  Blays made a gagging sound. "That's easily among the five grossest things you've ever done. And I've seen you stick your hands inside corpses like you're looking for prizes."

  "You're afraid of blood now? What do you think is the red stuff that comes out of all the people you stab?"

  "I just set it free. I don't…play with it."

  Dante rolled his eyes and continued sketching, filling one page and moving on to the next. The effort helped distract him from the illness he felt, which was slow in fading. After ten minutes, Blays was making swallowing noises. After fifteen, Dante glanced up and saw that his tan skin was ashy, with sweat beading across his forehead.

  He set down his quill. "Something the matter?"

  "It feels like I've been stricken with a hangover. If so, I'd really like to know where I found all those spirits, so I can do it again."

  "How long have you been feeling this way?"

  Blays shrugged. "The last few minutes. It came on fast."

  "How would you describe it?"

  "I'm not a physician, but I'd say it's a general shittiness of the head, followed by a shittiness of the gut. Feels like something's sucking the strength right out of me."

  "Have you experienced something like this before?"

  "Like I said, hangovers." Blays frowned. "Hold on, you're deducing something! Were you expecting this?"

  "I think," Dante said, "that the sword is consuming our traces."

  "What do you mean, our traces?"

  "The one each of us carries inside. The one that's left behind in the shadows when we die."

  Blays swallowed again, then glanced in horror at the sword and flung it to the bottom of the canoe. As soon as he let go, the purple nether vanished from the now-inert blade.

  "You mean it's been sucking my soul?" Blays wiped his hand on the side of his jabat. "When were you planning to tell me?"

  "Once it happened."

  "What if that part of my soul's gone for good? I'll turn into you!"

  "Lyle's balls, will you calm down? The same thing happened to me yesterday and I'm fine today. It happened again about an hour ago and I'm already feeling better. Slightly."

  "Slightly."

  "When you spend nether, it tries to return to wherever you called it from. It just takes a little time. I'm betting the traces are no different."

  Blays ran his palms down his face. "It's immensely comforting to know that my soul will probably come back to me eventually. You couldn't have waited until tomorrow to confirm this on yourself?"

  "Always better to confirm a phenomenon's existence by using a second subject." Dante picked up the blade. As the nether began to whirl about its edges, he sheathed it, then pointed to the hilt. "The stored traces aren't getting used up. They're circling back and forth around the blade, providing its cutting power. But what powers them? In the legends Volo told us, when the Odo Sein needed to, they were able to draw nether from within themselves and channel it into their swords."

  "But we looked for this exact thing earlier and couldn't see it."

  "We thought that proved it couldn't be the traces, but we fell victim to our own egos. We couldn't see the traces in action, but that isn't hard proof they aren't part of the process. All that proves is we might be morons. Here's what we know for sure: the sword isn't consuming its own nether. Meanwhile, it's draining something from us. And there's a historical record of it doing the same
to others."

  Blays burped in discomfort, then winced. "Then you can only use it for so long each day before it starts to kill you?"

  "Seems like. Although it's possible it doesn't have to be powered by the wielder's trace. Maybe when you kill someone with it, it can use their trace instead."

  "Er. You suppose that's where the traces in the lizard's horn came from? The people it's killed?"

  "That's possible."

  "So what happens if you run through your own trace? Does the sword break?"

  "Could be," Dante said. "Either that, or you do."

  ~

  Logically, the next step was to locate his own trace within himself. However, given that his trace had already been depleted to the point of illness, Dante thought it best to carry on with that line of exploration after he'd recovered. Instead, he studied his sketches, searching for anything that could help him understand how to guide or align the traces trapped in the swamp dragon's horn.

  Throughout the day, the pressure in his head inched steadily upward. By the afternoon, it was increasing rapidly. Some time later, the enemy began to move northeast again, but the Monsoon was still gaining ground. Or water, as it were.

  Dante made sure that Riza knew this. Which made it all the more surprising when Commander Barain called for the flotilla to stop and make camp shortly after four that afternoon.

  Blays frowned. "We're stopping already? There's still nearly two hours of daylight."

  Volo made a murmuring noise. "We're about to enter the Deep Swamp. Bet they want to spend as few nights there as possible."

  "What's in the Deep Swamp?"

  "Things that make you want to stay out of it."

  Dante helped make camp, then got back to his sketches. He'd made around fifty. Flipping through his parchment, the images seemed to be suggesting something—but if so, the message was too subtle, or he was too dim to understand it. That night, little green lights bobbed over the waters. He thought they might be fireflies, but sometimes the lights faded, darkening away to nothing. Other times they held perfectly still, as if watching the soldiers sleep.

  He awoke to rain falling on his face. He hadn't had time to stop being angry about that before Riza called him over to the nobleman's island. Servants scurried about packing up tents and rolling up down-stuffed mattresses made from a Tanarian fabric woven so tightly that the feathers' quills couldn't stick through.

  "Sorcerer." The Do's eyes skipped from tree to tree, occasionally dipping to the water, which was swirled with rainbow-colored oil. "Be on watch today."

  "For what?" Dante said. "The enemy's at least twenty miles ahead of us."

  "The Deep Swamps lie ahead. The creatures there are rarely disturbed."

  "Duly noted."

  Riza shifted, glancing at Dante and then back to the trees. "Yet even these reaches aren't uninhabited. If you see anyone traveling without a boat, warn me at once."

  "How would they get around without a boat? Are there no ziki oko?"

  "They're much rarer here."

  "Is the water that shallow? Or do the people swim around?"

  Riza cranked his head around to meet Dante's eyes. "Do you doubt my words?"

  "The better I understand what we're getting into, the better I can protect us."

  "Protecting us is my duty. Your duty is to abide my orders. Am I understood?"

  Dante nodded and returned to his island.

  The flotilla advanced into the bog. The color of the waters shifted from a rich brown to an ocher laced with metallic ribbons that gleamed dully beneath the overcast light. With this change in water, the trees changed too, the singular boles replaced by irregularly braided orange trunks, as if several plants had congregated together for safety. Rather than willowy, draping branches, their boughs were angular and jagged, sporting slender black leaves. Some wore clumps of a dark matter that looked like sticky fur.

  Nearly a third of the craft were deployed as scouts, keeping close to the fleet and within sight of each other. Dante slew a few dragonflies and beetles and dispatched them a mile or two ahead. As he paged through the sketches, warming up his mind, one of the dragonflies blanked out. A minute later, motion attracted him to the eyes of a beetle. A bat with the jaws of a tiny wolf swooped toward it. Its mouth opened wide. An instant of darkness was followed by a glimpse from between rows of needly teeth. The connection was roughly severed.

  Dante considered making some fish or bats to do his bidding, but he couldn't spare the nether. Not until the sword was forged. If they had to fight their way through the Odo Sein with a single blade and no shadows to call on, they'd never get to Gladdic.

  Suddenly glum, he turned back to his sketches. And stopped in the middle of flipping over one of the sheets. Hurriedly, as if the idea might escape him if he didn't jot it down, he unstoppered his ink pot of blood and, guided by the patterns in the sketches, distilled them into an arrangement of seven red dots, roughly t-shaped.

  He blew on the markings, drying them, then shoved the parchment in front of Blays. "What does this look like to you?"

  "A sword." Blays traced his finger from point to point. "Blade, cross-guard, hilt."

  "It looks like a sword. But it isn't, is it?"

  "No," Blays said slowly, "it's your own blood dabbed on a square of cow skin. Are you being pedantic on purpose? Don't tell me you've bought into norren philosophy."

  "I think it's more like a constellation."

  "All right, it looks like a constellation. What does this have to do with anything?"

  "The Odo Sein blade has seven traces in its horn. When you watch the nether move around the blade, it appears to flow chaotically, but it always flows through the same seven points. I think this is the underlying structure of the sword. Like its skeleton. Or its soul."

  Blays was looking at him like Dante was trying to sell him a block of wood painted like beef. Rather than fighting to explain something he wasn't sure he understood himself, Dante set his sword-in-progress on a rowing bench and sent his mind into its hilt. His horn only held six traces, not seven, and as he lured them out with a few dabs of blood, he dearly hoped that the precise number wasn't vital to the operation of the sword.

  Working partly on the example of the Odo Sein sword, and partly on intuition, he dabbed his blood along his sword, spacing it out in six points. The six traces stopped their slow circulation, each one settling on a different blot of blood. But by channeling them between dots manually, they flowed in a manner almost identical to the Odo Sein weapon.

  As he paused to think, he glanced out the side of the canoe and locked eyes with a pair of yellow cat-eyes floating on the surface. These were attached to a scaly lizard as big as a fully-grown man. Unlike the swamp dragons, its snout was as long and narrow as a sight hound's. It watched him pass by, then sank below the surface.

  He returned to the sword. He thought he'd found its underlying structure, its bones or its soul. Yet it was still missing its blood, so to speak. He instructed Blays to wield the Odo Sein sword again, watching every speck of nether as closely as he could. Just like before, he couldn't discern which of the shadows powering it were coming from Blays: it was too stirred up, as cloudy as the orange waters they were paddling through.

  Volo's story of the swordsman had specifically mentioned him delving into his spine. Dante closed his eyes and turned his focus inward, finding his spine and the nether within it. If there was a trace there, he couldn't see it. Even so, he mixed it together, withdrew a fraction—if he was fooling with his trace, the last thing he wanted to do was pull the whole thing out of his body—and sent it into his sword.

  His sword sat there, pointedly doing absolutely nothing.

  Blays scratched his temple. "Shouldn't that have worked?"

  "Unless I'm not getting any of my trace," Dante said. "Or if the common nether it's mixed with is nullifying it somehow."

  He tapped his front teeth. Traces left by dead people tended to stay put unless you used blood to goad them into action.
What if he removed all of the normal nether from his body? Would the trace be exposed? He did this excessively slowly, wary for any sign of the sickness overtaking his body and indicating he'd accidentally stripped himself of his trace, too. After a few minutes, with his body entirely void of nether, he couldn't feel any aches or nausea, but he couldn't see the trace, either.

  He was getting nowhere. He squeezed his eyes shut and leaned against the gunwale, trailing his fingers in the water. Almost instantly, he thought better of it, jerking them out and wiping them dry.

  "This is ridiculous," he said. "Narashtovik has fielded dozens of generations of priests and nethermancers across hundreds of years of travel and study. Not a single one of them could have figured this out for me?"

  Blays settled his elbows on his knees. "If they'd done that, you'd be complaining about how there was nothing left to discover."

  "Couldn't they have at least left me a hint?"

  "They didn't need to." A note of impishness had entered Blays' voice. "You already know how to access the trace."

  "Interesting," Dante said. "Because no, I don't."

  "No? Then what's happening when you wield the Odo Sein blade?"

  "But I don't know how it's drawing on our traces."

  "Who cares? Cheat!"

  Dante lowered his chin, gazing at the stolen sword. "It will draw out the trace for me. If I divert that into my sword, it might be enough to power it."

  He set the blades beside each other on the rowing bench, keeping one hand on each hilt, the Odo Sein blade black and wreathed in what might have been purple lightning, his sword shabby plain steel in comparison. Streams of nether rippled around the black blade. He activated the traces within the pommel of the steel one, sending them coursing along the stars of their bloody constellation.

  The river of traces didn't want to leave the Odo Sein weapon. But water's strength—its adaptability, its willingness to carve new channels, its relentless need to move forward—was also the key to controlling it. Working carefully, Dante guided a finger of nether away from the purple-black flow and channeled it into the traces calmly circulating the steel sword.