Daggerbound (Swordheart #2)

Chapter 1

“You must, at all costs, avoid women,” said the old man. “Pay attention! Their exhalations will turn your bowels to water and wither your genitals, change your seed to dust and the breath of your lungs to—”

“Brother Mornan,” said Learned Edmund wearily, “I have traveled beside women before, and my bowels remain in fine working order. I do not believe this is necessary.”

“It is because of your recklessness that I seek to remind you!” snapped Brother Mornan. He was eighty years old and resembled a pale, bug-eyed prune, particularly when he was indignant. “You seem to have forgotten the dangers, and by your foolish example, you will lead others astray!”

“Just give me the artifact, please.”

“I do not know what the senior Fathers are thinking,” grumbled Mornan, “trusting you with the artifact. You constantly tread the edge of heresy and yet they let you gallivant around the countryside, entrusting priceless objects to your care.” He folded his arms around the wrapped package that he held, as if refusing to give it up.

Learned Edmund pinched the bridge of his nose. “Brother Mornan…”

If I were truly as good a man as I wish to be, I would fight this battle, hopeless though it is. I would not let him say such things unchallenged. But I am tired of fighting and I wish to be away from here and the only thing that will change Mornan is a brick to the head. Perhaps not even that.

It had all been so simple once. Learned Edmund had believed that prejudice, like any other ignorance, could be alleviated with facts and proof. He himself had been ignorant, but he had learned, and he had come back to the white halls of the Many-Armed God’s temple to share what he had learned.

The magnitude of his younger self’s naivete made him cringe internally, even now.

The halls were still white. Tall windows let in beams of sunlight, and dust motes danced in them.

The statue of the Many-Armed God in His form as the Lord of the Book gazed down with benign marble eyes.

Deeper inside the temple, where the manuscripts were kept, there were no windows, lest sunlight and humidity damage the books.

The stacks were cool and quiet and smelled of old paper, old books, old knowledge.

The scholars moved between sun and shadow, library and scriptorium. It was a peaceful, beautiful place of learning, where intellects and ideas could be challenged, research conducted, a whole life spent in pursuit of knowledge to be given away once found.

And Learned Edmund could not bear to live there a moment longer.

“Brother Mornan,” he said, “either give me the artifact or inform the Fathers that you have refused to remand it to my care. They have ordered me to deliver it to a scholar of the Forge God in Archon’s Glory.

If you are questioning their authority to do so, your complaint must be directed to them, not to me. ”

Mornan’s eyes bugged out even further. He was one of the three keepers of the various artifacts that the Many-Armed God’s servants had acquired over the centuries and he was inclined to milk every drop of authority possible out of his post. Learned Edmund had truly hoped to get one of the other two keepers instead, but of course it would be Brother Mornan on duty.

I was supposed to agree that he knows best, and then listen to a lecture on proper care of the artifact, then agree again to guard it with my life, then agree a third time that I am not worthy of their trust and express my gratitude to the keepers for entrusting it to me and for having taken such good care of it.

And never mind that it’s an old sword in wrappings that haven’t been changed in a century and that “taking care of it” involved looking up the catalogue number from the description and finding the box it was in, nothing more.

Many-Armed One, I am so tired. This cannot be what You intended, surely.

“You can’t draw it,” said Brother Mornan angrily. “It’s not for using. Don’t go thinking it’s an ordinary sword and you can just hit people with it like a paladin.”

“God forbid!” said Learned Edmund, with more force than he intended. He had known a paladin once. The man had biceps thicker than Edmund’s neck and practiced the sword for three hours a day.

He had also been a good and honorable man who had been driven from his own temple and made his way as best he could without god or priests to guide him. Learned Edmund thought of him often.

If he can make his own way, surely I can as well. I am not being tormented by demons and there is no price on my head, so I have a great many advantages, even if I cannot swing a sword.

Of course, he also did not have to deal with Brother Mornan. Possibly demons would be an improvement.

That was unkind. He knew it was unkind. And he probably shouldn’t joke about demons.

Anyway, it’s not as if we can exorcise Mornan. Otherwise someone would have tried it by now.

“The description of the artifact we were given is that it is an ornamental sword of some antiquity and that the hilt is attached to the scabbard,” Learned Edmund said. “I would no more try to stab someone with it than I would strike them with one of the books I have been asked to convey as well.”

Mornan’s lip curled back. “For all I know, you’re likely to do that, too.”

“Brother Mornan…”

“Fine!” The old man shoved the wrapped package at him. “Far be it from me to question the Fathers. And you’ll do less damage out there than you will in here, with your foolishness. When your bowels are running and your root has withered, don’t think you’ll get any sympathy from me!”

“I assure you, Brother Mornan, I would never seek sympathy from you about the condition of my nether regions.” Edmund turned on his heel and walked away, wishing he dared to slam the door, but the doors were carefully weighted and closed gently behind him.

The mule was standing in the stableyard, already loaded up with gear.

He added a layer of oilcloth to the wrappings around the ornamental sword and settled it among the books, fussing over the straps and baffles until the mule grew restless.

Not that she would ever do anything so ill-behaved as buck or roll or bite, but she was beginning to get the thoughtful look that preceded mischief and Edmund knew that it was time to go.

“Safe travels,” said the stablehand. “Go well and come back to us soon.”

Edmund murmured something noncommittal. He would go as well as he could, but he knew that he was not coming back.

It was a short road from the temple to the valley road beyond. He could stand at the entrance to the valley and look behind him, up at the temple with its white stone walls.

This is the last time, thought Learned Edmund. The last. I am done. I tried and I tried and even Mistress Slate would tell me it was enough.

His lips twitched. Mistress Slate would probably have told him that it was outside of enough, that he’d stayed well past the point of good sense.

Slate had very little patience with idealism.

He’d tried to bring change from inside, but the order of the Many-Armed God wasn’t going to change for one lone dedicate, particularly not one who was only twenty-seven, even if he currently felt about a thousand years old.

He could see the future stretched in front of him if he stayed, as clearly as if it had been illuminated in pen and paint.

A life spent fighting with his brethren, growing older and more bitter, bringing up his cause every time there was an open discussion, the way that Brother Kerevan brought up his demands to change the taxonomic classification system.

And I will be as little regarded, he thought wearily.

I will say it so often that people stop hearing it and I will die here in these halls and be buried and the Many-Armed God’s servants will be no closer to thinking that perhaps women are not an inferior creation and I will have spent my life accomplishing nothing.

So he would take the other way. Already, he was sent on many trips outside the walls of the Many-Armed God’s temple.

He was good with mules and he traveled well and he was reliable.

So the temple sent him on more and more such journeys, whenever a dedicate was required to hand over important texts or to observe and record.

And it helps that my handwriting is legible, he thought rather dryly.

Good handwriting and good with mules, that is what will save me.

The mule flicked her ears at him, and he reached over and rubbed her nose. “All will be well, Sweetness,” he told her.

The mule gave him a skeptical look, but that probably didn’t mean anything.

All mules were skeptics, in Learned Edmund’s experience.

Sweetness the mule, so far as he could tell, did not believe in the existence of anything except food, and only the food that was directly in front of her at that.

There might be food in other places, and she was, perhaps, willing to make the experiment, but she was not going to get her hopes up.

She reminded Learned Edmund of the great philosopher Garlane, who claimed to disbelieve in the back of his own head because he had never seen it.

At the entrance to the valley, he turned to look behind him.

We could have done so much good, he thought, staring down at the temple. We could have changed so much. But we huddle in our temple and only give our knowledge to people who know the right words to ask for it, and any good we do is because of them, not us.

Learned Edmund sighed and turned away and left the Temple of the Many-Armed God for the last time.

The road was cold and dusty, a combination that Edmund found particularly obnoxious.

The only snow lay in the shadows under the trees.

Snow was often unpleasant to travel through, but there was something cheerful about the crunch underfoot and the way the sun sparkled off it.

And at least it laid the dust. Chilly air and dry ground meant that your lungs dried out and the inside of your nose dried out and sooner or later you’d start sneezing blood into a handkerchief like a consumptive.

“But it’s good for books,” he told Sweetness. “Not the dust, but cold and dry is better than rainy or humid. At least to a point. I should be grateful.”

Sweetness flicked her ear at him. Gratitude was foreign to mules.

Mules, in Sweetness’s opinion, were royalty who deserved all the food and warmth and treats that they could get.

The failure of the rest of the world to provide this was simply one of the indignities that an equine monarch was forced to endure.

There was a hostel a few leagues from the temple. Learned Edmund stopped there while the sun was still above the horizon. The food was not terribly good, but the hostel had a bathhouse and sauna and that made everything wonderful.

He sweated in the sauna until his reddish-brown hair had plastered itself to his face.

Since there was no one else in the sauna tonight, he sang a tuneless song about humidity while dumping water over the rocks.

“Hu-mid-it-ty, how I love thee…” He would not have done that in front of another human, and certainly not in front of the mule.

Sweetness would have judged him very harshly indeed.

It occurred to him that technically he was stealing Sweetness, which gave him a nasty turn. He stopped in midsong, staring into the steam. From a scholar and dedicate to a horse thief. Have I really come to this?

No, no. Technically the temple had given Sweetness into his care until he delivered the books and the useless sword to Archon’s Glory.

He wouldn’t be a horse thief until he’d made the delivery and then didn’t bring her back.

It’s not as if anyone is going to come looking for me.

Maybe in a year or two someone will wonder what happened to me.

They’ll just assume I found something interesting to research, and then after a while they’ll assume I’m dead.

It would probably not occur to anyone that he had simply left the temple’s service.

Scholars just didn’t do that. Acolytes, perhaps, who had come in young and discovered they didn’t have a vocation, but Learned Edmund was a full-fledged dedicate of the Many-Armed God and not even Brother Mornan would have questioned his vocation.

As long as I deliver the books, no one will care about the mule, Learned Edmund told himself, and poured more water on the stones to try to steam away the last traces of his guilt.

When he had drenched himself in cold water and dried off, it was time for the next stage. Learned Edmund took out his tiny shaving mirror of polished steel and his spring scissors and began to cut his hair.

His tonsure had been growing out for weeks and he had been dodging increasingly judgmental looks from the older brothers, but the constant itchy stubble of a shaved scalp was unbearable when the weather was dry.

Now he was glad that he had put off cutting it.

He chopped the sides to match the rest. It was not pretty, but he looked less like a monk and more like a traveler with exceedingly poor fashion sense.

He dumped water over his head again to get rid of the bits of stray hair.

The gray robes of the temple were generic enough, once the stole and medal were removed, that he felt no need to change them.

He folded the signs of his faith together and placed them at the bottom of his pack.

He no longer had a right to them, but he might need to present one at his final destination in order to deliver the books.

(It certainly would not do to discard them somewhere where another person might pick them up.

It was considered profoundly unlucky to impersonate a priest or a paladin, but you never knew when someone might try anyway.)

He looked into the polished square of metal again.

The face that looked back looked absurdly young, but no longer obviously like a dedicate of the Many-Armed God.

“All right, then,” said No-Longer-Learned Edmund. “All right. I suppose now I find out what happens next.”