Page 94 of Swordheart
“And if you eat until you are uncomfortably full, that, too, goes away.”
Sarkis nodded. He hadn’t enjoyed that one. The only food they had on hand in quantity was porridge, and he had eaten a truly heroic amount. He wasn’t going to be able to look at porridge again for a month.
“We have not tested what occurs if you are drunk—”
“I become sober when the sword is sheathed,” said Sarkis. “I know that one.”
Zale nodded, making a note, then paused with their hand over the ledger. “Have you ever starved to death?”
“No. I’ve gotten very thirsty a time or two during a siege, but that’s all.”
Zale tapped the pen against their teeth. They had excellent teeth. Sarkis had observed the priest scrubbing their teeth with salt and sage nightly, which was undoubtedly a factor. “I do wonderif you’d be hungry if you were starved until it became a form of injury, then went back in the sword for an insufficient time to heal… but I have a philosophical objection to testing that.”
“As do I,” put in Halla.
“Thank the great god for that.”
He stifled a sigh, remembering sieges. He had dealt with more than a few in his time. His company of mercenaries had been good at sieges—making them, breaking them, occasionally even enduring them. Their services had been in high demand.
And now I am riding on an oxcart with two people who are making me eat porridge until I am ill, and who get excited when my urine dematerializes. The great god laughs at man’s expectations.
Still, he had to admit that he had learned rather more about the actual workings of the sword in a few days than he had learned in all the years since the sorcerer-smith had trapped him.
I should have listened more closely when she was explaining the process, but it was so clearly impossible, what she was saying…
The beating he’d taken beforehand hadn’t helped his concentration. In truth, he’d probably been lucky to have absorbed as much as he had from the woman before she’d driven a length of white-hot steel into his chest.
Even so, he couldn’t remember her explaining how itworked.
“The smith was a genius,” said Zale, as if echoing his thoughts. “If she had been a simple wonderworker, we would expect that the magic would have released you when she died. Whatever she did, she built this magic that gives you a body that seems real… and to use the processes of that body, the food you eat and the air you breathe, to fuel the magic. And because your body is not truly reliant on the same weak, complicated meat that the rest of us are—” they slapped their arm by way of demonstration “—it converts those processes with remarkable efficiency. It’s incredible.”
“Could you do it?” said Halla, genuinely interested.
“Rat’s tail, no! I can just barely understandhowit works. Thekind of mind that could set that up…” They shook their head so vigorously that their braid whipped from side to side. “That’s why I say genius. Most wonderworkers are creatures of instinct. They learn the boundaries of their power by running into them. This smith built her magic like the artificers in Anuket build clockwork automatons, and then used whatever natural talent she had to power it. It is extraordinary.” They gazed at Sarkis with something uncomfortably like awe. “Even killing your body only pauses the magic temporarily. In theory, at least, you are nearly immortal.”
Sarkis sighed. “I am very tired of being immortal,” he confessed.
Zale looked briefly surprised. “Are you?”
“I would like to be allowed to die,” said Sarkis.
Halla made a sound of protest and Sarkis reached out without thinking, taking her hand in his. “Notnow.Not today. Someday, though, before I am nothing but silver scars, before I’ve forgotten what it was like to be human.”
“Is it so awful?” asked Halla.
He glanced over and caught the look in her eyes. It pained him more than he wanted to admit. He squeezed her fingers. “Sometimes. Though these last few weeks have been a respite. I have had to murder very few people and no one has chopped any part of my anatomy off inages.”
She snorted, obviously happy to lighten the mood as well. “Let us know if you start to miss that part.”
She glanced away, smiling. He gazed at her full lower lip and imagined running his tongue across it. Increasingly, the only thing he regretted about their earlier kiss was that he had stopped at just one.
Settle yourself, man. It is still a long way to Rutger’s Howe.
“Well,” said Zale, in a suddenly grim voice, “it seems that you might have someone try to chop parts off you very shortly.”
“Problem?” said Sarkis.
Zale nodded ahead. A familiar pair of indigo-cloaked men stood in the middle of the road. One was mounted, while one had dismounted and stood waiting.
