Have Sword, Will Travel

by Garth Nix

  Eleanor sagged back onto the ground, breathless with relief. She had expected to be eaten at any moment, and Odo with her. Somehow they had survived.

  “We can’t stay here,” said Odo. “We have to move before it leads the other one here. What if it’s even bigger?”

  “We shall fight and defeat it,” said Biter.

  “Be quiet, Biter,” ordered Odo. “Quick. Get our stuff.”

  His voice was shaky, but Eleanor found she couldn’t talk at all. Her legs were quivering as well. She was grateful that for once Odo was taking charge. Fighting people didn’t frighten her, but monsters, it turned out, were very scary indeed. Though, Eleanor told herself, this was probably just because she hadn’t fought any. With practice, she was sure she’d get used to it. Wouldn’t she?

  Together they rushed around the camp, gathering their scattered belongings, proceeding by feel as well as the occasional lingering ember.

  It was so dark they could barely see the road.

  “Which way?” asked Eleanor doubtfully. “I’ve gotten turned around.”

  “Ah, I think … no …” muttered Odo. He looked up, trying to find the moon or some familiar stars. “Let’s just pick a direction and find a clearing —”

  “Shhh!” warned Eleanor. “Something’s coming!”

  There was a sly crunching sound coming through the forest toward them, the sound of careful footfalls among the debris of the forest floor. They crouched down next to a tree, weapons ready.

  “I know you’re there,” called a voice out of the darkness. “But I can’t see you. Come out. You’re safe now.”

  Odo wished he could see Eleanor’s face. The voice sounded like a woman’s, but dragons could talk (or so the stories said). Who was to say that this wasn’t the other creature they had heard? A fully grown, wily dragon.

  “The bannoch is gone,” the voice continued. “My name is Wenneth, and I assure you that I mean you no harm. There are two of you, I believe. I can smell you … Ah, yes.”

  The source of the crunching noise, which had been coming closer, now stopped.

  “Perhaps this will shed light on our situation.”

  Cool, toadstool light flared from the mouth of a curled brass horn held by a woman who appeared out of the darkness, standing just three yards away. She had long, gray hair and wore a black robe cinched around her waist by a red cord. Her face was pinched, her skin oddly glassy-looking, and although she was facing Eleanor and Odo, she wasn’t looking at them. Her eyelids were sunken hollows fused shut by scar tissue.

  The woman called Wenneth was blind.

  “Can you see me now?”

  “Yes,” said Odo. Lying didn’t seem an option.

  “Are you hurt? I can smell blood, but it doesn’t seem to be human.”

  “We killed a rabbit, and that thing … whatever it was … I cut it, but it didn’t bleed.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. Come with me to the chapel and I will tell you about it.”

  “The chapel?” Eleanor asked.

  “Yes. In Fangholt. That’s where I live. I don’t think the bannoch will return, but if it does we will be safe there.”

  “What was it? The … the bannoch?”

  “I will explain, I promise.” Wenneth beckoned to them. “Come, come. You haven’t cooked that rabbit, which means you have not eaten and will be hungry. I have food. And I promise I won’t eat you, if that is why you hesitate. I am not a wicked witch from some silly story.”

  With that she smiled, but the expression was stiff. Eleanor realized then that more than her eyes were burned. Her entire face was a mask of scar tissue.

  A monster in the heart of an Old Forest … a blind, burned woman who lived in a chapel … This didn’t seem like the kind of story that had a happy ending.

  But they didn’t really have a choice.

  Eleanor looked at Odo. If she had to fight another monster, she was ready. That was what knights-in-training did! As Odo was the one with the magic sword, though, he made the decision to advance or retreat.

  He nodded.

  They stood up and came forward one step.

  “What are your names?” asked Wenneth.

  “Sir Odo of Lenburh.”

  “Squire Eleanor.”

  “A knight-errant, eh? Who was your sponsor?”

  “My sponsor?” asked Odo.

  “Who knighted you? I know many knights, but the only knight of Lenburh I know of is Sir Halfdan.”

  “Uh, my sword knighted me,” said Odo, sensing that in the strangeness of the night there was no point in keeping secrets. “His name is Hildebrand Shining Foebiter. We call him Biter.”

  “That sounds irregular, if not entirely without precedent,” the burned woman said. “But why does your sword not show me the proper respect?”

  “I’m sorry, good mother,” Biter replied in a surprisingly meek tone. “I ought to have greeted you sooner.”

  Odo shot Eleanor a mystified glance.

  “Do you know each other?” he asked as Wenneth turned and led them through the forest, the light from the brass horn guiding their feet. Wenneth herself needed no guidance. Eleanor wondered if she could smell the way.

  “I do not know your particular sword,” the woman said. “But I know his kind and can tell when I’m in such company.”

  She sniffed the night air.

  “An old sword, and damaged. And yet … washed clean …”

  Surprise upon surprise.

  “You can tell that just by smelling him?” asked Eleanor in amazement.

  “It’s a skill anyone can learn.” Wenneth’s voice took a solemn edge. “If you’re willing to pay the price.”

  “What do you mean by ‘washed clean’?” asked Odo.

  “Scoured, laved, baptized. When a newly forged sword is still hot, it is quenched in water. This hardens the metal. Some swords are reforged and made anew, but not, I think, in this case. This sword has a story. Do you know it?”

  “No,” said Eleanor. “But we’d like to.”

  “What does the sword have to say for himself?”

  “I do not remember, good mother.”

  “Well, there’s something odd about you, something oddly familiar … We shall discuss this later. Let’s be quiet for a moment in case the bannoch is nearby. We are passing the decoy fire, which I lit to draw it away from you.”

  The light from the horn dimmed slightly as they crossed an ashen clearing where a fire had recently raged. The air above it was still warm. If Wenneth had lit the fire deliberately to distract the creature that had attacked them, Odo speculated, then maybe she had also made the other shrieking sound — perhaps by blowing through the horn, assuming it was more than just a magical light-bringer. He was beginning to understand that this was, if not a usual occurrence, then at least an anticipated one.

  A dozen paces beyond the ashy clearing they came to a series of ragged stone walls belonging to a ruined settlement, charred black by ancient fire. Wenneth led them unerringly among the ruins to the sole surviving building, a steep-roofed chapel with an empty bell tower and boarded-up windows, granting them access through a heavy iron door. When it boomed shut behind them, she hung the horn on a hook by the door and clapped her hands once.

  A dozen glowing stones scattered through the chapel sprang into life, casting irregular patches of cool, white light across an incredible jumble of oddments, too plentiful to catalogue in a single glance. At the same time, Eleanor felt the flagstones beneath her feet grow warm.

  Wenneth crooked a finger. The children followed her through paths and tunnels formed by the leaning piles, deeper into the chapel’s heart. Seeing her lightly touch things as she went by, Eleanor understood that the arrangement was designed for someone who could not see. Open spaces were lost on someone whose preference was to navigate at arm’s reach.

  “Here. Welcome.” Wenneth ushered them into the inner room in which she clearly spent most of her time. There was no chimney, but there was something that looked very
much like a stove, and there was food to cook on it. “Sit while I make you something hot.”

  Wenneth clapped her gnarled hands again, and a scattering of stones in the stove began to glow a deep red.

  Odo lowered himself into a chair, while Eleanor perched on a spindly stool.

  “You really live here?” she asked, staring around her at a space filled with shelves and boxes out of which spilled everything from gold chains to rotting celery stalks. The low light gleamed off surfaces that might have been spun glass, but might equally have been something alive, once. The cavelike space reminded Eleanor of her father’s apothecary, which was equally full of surprising things, although much better organized.

  “Yes, I live here.” Wenneth put a kettle on the stove and cut some onions, moving swiftly and surely despite her lack of sight. “I am a monk of the Order of Adloma. We live in the great old forests, and to us falls the care of the bannoch. One day a year, at Addlemas, we meet to perform a census and to elect new members, if needed. Otherwise, we are alone with our charges, the bannoch.”

  “What is a bannoch?” Odo asked.

  “A bannoch is what is left of a dragon when it has stopped being a dragon.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Eleanor.

  “Few do. Much has been forgotten. Some dragons don’t die, you see. They may lose their firestarters and their iron hides, and their minds with them, but what remains is still very dangerous. The Order of Adloma exists to keep them contained. You saw the barrow at Hertech, yes? And the stone circle at Carcastel?”

  Eleanor and Odo nodded, then answered aloud when they remembered that she couldn’t see them nodding.

  “Yes, yes, we saw them.”

  “They are attempts by my predecessors to put bannoch to rest. A grave and a jail … neither worked. I let my current charge roam freely these days. There are wards around the forest, so it cannot escape completely. I am ready to intervene if anyone is so foolish as to light a fire in the Old Forest.”

  She turned to face them, her scarred face very stern.

  “Bannoch are drawn to fire like salmon to rivers. What you did was a very dangerous thing.”

  “We, uh, didn’t know.” Odo shifted uncomfortably in the falling-down chair. If the bannoch was a decrepit dragon, he hated to imagine a fighting fit one, like Quenwulf. “No one ever told us.”

  “And there was no warning sign,” said Eleanor.

  “Perhaps I should erect one.” Wenneth shrugged. “In days past the villagers outside the forest would warn travelers. But Time marches on forgetful feet, as they say.”

  Odo wondered who said that. He had never heard the expression before. Thanks to her scars, it was hard to tell how old Wenneth was.

  “And all your … things?” asked Eleanor, looking around at the piles of candlesticks, shoes, books, crockery, tools, and much, much more. “Did you find it all in the ruins?”

  “Some. Fangholt was once a thriving town, before the bannoch in its dragon life burned it. Some are gifts from people we have helped. The collection is passed down from monk to monk, each adding something in their turn.”

  “Can I have a look around?”

  “You may look as you wish, but please be careful. There are items in here that are very old, and some are dangerous.”

  Eleanor took her up on the offer. Gingerly touching one of the smaller glowing stones, she found it cool to the touch, so picked it up and used it to properly illuminate what she found. There was no obvious order to the collection. One stack contained many sheets of vellum, mostly scraped clean of whatever had been written on them; the next held lots of small wooden boxes lined with velvet — all the ones Eleanor opened were empty. Then she opened a large bag and found it full of finely made but individually different silver spoons, all jumbled together.

  While Eleanor indulged her curiosity, Odo asked the questions foremost in his mind.

  “You said Biter seemed familiar to you. Do you know something about him?”

  “Perhaps. Tell me how you found him, and we will see what we will see.”

  Odo recounted the tale of Dragonfoot Hole and his unexpected knighting in the mud. He described the unusual nick in Biter’s edge, and how Biter himself had no memory of how he had received it, or how he had ended up in the river. Wenneth questioned the sword on this matter too, and instead of being defensive, Biter answered all her questions respectfully, balancing on his tip on a stack of old books, emerald swiveling to follow her every movement.

  “A sword at the bottom of a river,” she mused when they had finished. “That explains why you smell so clean, Biter. But were you put there deliberately or by accident? That is the question.”

  The three of them mused about this while Eleanor wandered deeper into the monk’s collection. There were tin helmets in stacks, glass jars full of ivory buttons, walking sticks with knobs of crystal, maps of countries she had never heard of. She had a sense of mining deep into the past, but a past that made no sense. How long had the chapel been here? How many monks had tended it and its strange collection?

  A delicious scent filled the chapel as Wenneth stirred a mixture of onions, mushrooms, and potatoes in a heavy iron skillet over stones as red as coals. The smell made Odo’s stomach ache, in a good way.

  “There used to be a smithy here, long ago,” she said as she cooked. “Only the wood from the oldest trees of an ancient forest such as this one can forge an enchanted sword, you see, when it is made into charcoal and ignited by a … lit in a certain way. When the smithy burned, this chapel was built on the ruins. If Biter was forged here, that might explain why he seems familiar to me.”

  “I have never been here, good mother,” said Biter. “My forge was in the forest of Eathrylden. I remember that clearly.”

  “Well, there must be another explanation. Clearly we haven’t met, if you were underwater for so long. I am old, but not that old.” She smiled forgivingly. “There is another enchanted sword here, in the chapel. There might be a connection between them. I will find it for you later, Odo, after you have eaten. You must be famished.”

  Eleanor’s ears pricked up, not at the mention of food, but at the notion of another sword. So far she hadn’t seen any swords during her exploration of the chapel, but that only encouraged her to look harder. She squeezed past a bookcase full of carved chalkstone animals and found herself in a section of the collection that had not been disturbed for decades, full of cobwebs and dead flies. Her glow-stone cast light into darkened corners, sending things with black legs scuttling for cover and illuminating pieces of mismatched armor in a pile, a mound of rusty axe heads next to a stand of splintered axe handles, what looked like an ancient musical instrument with numerous pipes in complicated knots and finger holes too far apart for a human hand … and, at the very end of the cramped space, a large, half-melted anvil.

  Stuck into the anvil, so deep it had to go into the oak-heart block of wood beneath it, there was a sword.

  Eleanor slipped through a gap between the musical instrument and the wall to get a better look. The sword’s hilt and sharkskin grip were very similar to Biter’s, but where he had a large emerald in his pommel, this sword sported an equally large ruby. There was no gleam to the gem, as it was buried under a thick layer of dust, and the blade looked dull.

  It had to be the one Wenneth was talking about.

  Without thinking, Eleanor reached out to take the sword by the hilt and tried to pull it from the partially melted anvil. It shifted an inch, but then stuck, so she pulled harder, and then harder still. The anvil rocked on its oaken base, making the junk around it rattle. Eleanor held her breath, praying the piles wouldn’t collapse on her. Then she put a foot against the anvil for leverage and pulled one last time.

  With the low, awful shriek of metal upon metal, the sword slid free of its iron prison.

  Eleanor expected it to cry out, just as Biter had.

  She expected her life to change immediately, to feel glory.

  Instead, the s
word hung heavy and silent in Eleanor’s hands.

  It was an ordinary sort of sword after all.

  She set the point on the hole in the anvil and prepared to put it back, and at that moment the sword kicked like a rebellious cat and leaped away. Eleanor held on tightly, even as a shower of dust rained down around her.

  “Why am I disturbed?” moaned the sword, sounding very much like an agonized, ancient woman. “Who has woken me from my rest?”

  “Eleanor?” called Odo. “Is that you?”

  “What are you doing back there, dear?” asked Wenneth.

  “My name is Eleanor,” she told the sword. “I want to be a knight. A true knight.”

  “Then you have made a terrible mistake,” groaned the sword. “You will never be a true knight, for I am cursed. I am death to all who hold me!”

  Eleanor gasped. She knew about curses. One famous knight had been cursed to break all the promises he ever made, which didn’t sound so bad until his queen executed him for refusing to swear allegiance to her. Another knight thought she had escaped a curse to die on the Battlefield of Merscas, only to be murdered during an argument one year later in exactly that spot. No one even dared mention the Knight with the Cursed Name for fear they would suffer the same fate. Curses were not to be taken lightly, and cursed swords doubly so.

  But when she tried to put the sword back in the anvil, the wound had healed itself. The melted iron was now smooth and unblemished. So she dropped the sword, but now instead of trying to get away from her, it sprang back into her hand.

  “You have claimed me now,” said the sword menacingly. “And I shall be your doom.”

  With a rattle and a crash, Odo forced his way into the space behind her, Biter in his hand.

  “What’s wrong?” Odo asked. “Who’s saying such terrible things?”

  “It is I, Reynfrida Sharp-point Flamecutter,” said the sword. “And if the truth is terrible to you, so be it.”