Chapter 5
This was dreadful. Really dreadful. He’d been entrusted with delivering the artifact to another scholar, and instead of delivering it, he’d dropped it in the mud, broken open the wrappings, drawn the blade, and was now, the Many-Armed God deliver him, a wielder bound to the living sword.
It was hard to imagine a more comprehensive way to fail at his assignment, short of having the sword melted down for scrap.
Granted that Edmund had left the temple, but it had never occurred to him not to fulfill the last task he’d been assigned.
You just didn’t do that sort of thing. Except now he was going to have to figure out what to do, because the artifact wasn’t an artifact, it was a whole person, and you couldn’t just hand those over to other people.
Well, maybe you could, if you were a guard or something. His paladin friend served the Dreaming God, and he’d handed people over to his temple, but they’d generally been demon-possessed at the time, which could be considered extenuating circumstances.
“I don’t know what to do,” he confessed aloud. “I was supposed to deliver your sword to a scholar of the Forge God, but nobody knew it did anything.”
The Dervish’s lip curled back. “You will not deliver me to a priest,” he said, in a tone that brooked no argument.
“No, of course not, if you don’t want that.”
“I do not. But why were you delivering it in the first place?”
“Right,” Edmund said. “I’m sort of a courier. Well, I am … I was … a dedicate. At the Temple of the Many-Armed God. I left. I’m not anymore.” He shook his head, not wanting to get into the details with someone who clearly was not fond of the priesthood. His head began to throb with the motion.
The Dervish held up a hand. “Say that word again?”
“Dedicate?”
The other man frowned. “The translation I’m getting is twisty.”
“Twisty? Wait, translation?” Edmund sat up straighter, the ache in his head temporarily forgotten. “What kind of translation?”
“From your language. I don’t really speak it, but the magic translates it for me.”
Edmund stared at him. “You’ve got a magical translation spell?”
“Yes?” The Dervish looked surprised and a trifle uncomfortable, as if Edmund had just accused him of something.
“That monstrous smith who made the swords constructed an extremely complicated bit of magic. Part of that was apparently translating the wielder’s language.
Otherwise people would get very confused if they drew a sword and someone popped out and started ranting at them in a tongue they didn’t understand. ”
Many-Armed One preserve us. Edmund didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or get up and dance.
“That’s incredible. Do you know how hard translation is?
It’s the single biggest problem we have with manuscripts!
But if you could read one and understand it, why, you could translate so many books that no one’s been able to read for years! ”
The Dervish held up both hands. “Whoa, whoa. It’s only your language. You’d have to find someone who spoke the language you wanted translated and have them wield the sword. And then I wouldn’t speak your language anymore.”
“Oh.” Edmund frowned. “That does limit the utility, I suppose. Unless you could memorize a page in one language, then switch wielders and write it down in another. Errr, can you switch wielders?”
“Sure,” said the Dervish dryly. “As soon as you die, I’ll switch to the next person who draws the sword.”
Edmund considered this. There were certainly books worth dying to translate, but single pages? That was asking a lot.
Maybe the Stone Fish Herbal? Brother Sennitus always said that if we could just translate one page, we could use that as a key to the rest of the text.
No, but we don’t know what language it’s in, so that one’s out, and anyway a translation might not work to break the code, so I might be dying for nothing.
“You don’t need to look so worried,” said the Dervish. “I can’t kill you. In fact, I’m bound to throw myself between you and danger. That’s what the swords do.”
Edmund blinked at him. “Oh, that wasn’t what I was thinking about.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No, I was thinking about what texts might be worth dying to translate.”
The Dervish stared at him as if he’d grown another head.
Edmund tried to explain. “If it’s only my language into another one, then obviously that limits the options.
We’d have to find something with a speaker who, for whatever reason, doesn’t speak any language that we can translate books into.
But communicating that to a scholar who speaks an unknown tongue would be difficult. ”
“You’d be willing to die to translate a book,” said the Dervish, looking at him as if he’d grown another head, which had then asked for a length of silk and a live goat.
“Not any book,” Edmund hastened to assure him. “I’d want it to be an important book. Maybe a medical text. It would be very awkward to die just to translate bad poetry.”
“Awkward. Yes. That’s one word you could use, I suppose.” The Dervish rubbed his face. “You don’t actually need to die. You can just give the sword away.”
“Oh! Well, that makes it much easier, then!” Edmund clapped his hands together. “We’d just need two scholars and then you could switch between them.”
His rescuer pinched the bridge of his nose as if he was getting Edmund’s headache. “You have just learned that you have an immortal bodyguard bound to your service, and you’re thinking about translations.”
“Um.” Sudden embarrassment heated his skin. “I’m sorry, I’m being very rude. Is there something else that you wanted to do? I realize that not everyone is interested in that sort of thing.”
“It doesn’t matter what I want,” said the Dervish, his silver eyes suddenly flat and hard as mirrors. “I’m bound to you. I can’t get away.”
Embarrassment deepened into shame. “I’m sorry,” Edmund said.
He had let his enthusiasm carry him away, without stopping to think about how the Dervish must feel, saddled with a failed ex-dedicate.
“Is there something I can do? Is there somewhere that you want to go?” He definitely had to deliver the books to the library in Archon’s Glory, but after that, it wasn’t as if he had anywhere else to be.
“What I want is not to be trapped in this miserable hunk of steel.” The Dervish’s eyes lifted to the sword, which was propped against a tree, and an expression of loathing crossed his face.
The idea of that loathing directed at him made Edmund feel ill. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think how it must be. Can I release you from the spell somehow?”
The Dervish sighed, the hard lines of his face softening. “No,” he said, poking the fire with his stick again. “I don’t know how to break the spell. I don’t even know how long I’ve been in there.”
“Oh, that we can figure out, I’m sure,” said Edmund, grateful to have a problem he could solve. “What year did you … um…”
“Become sentenced to a hideous metallic undeath?”
“… That, yes.”
“It was the Year of the Ghost Sturgeon.”
Oh, damnation. One of the calendars with names instead of proper numbers. Edmund bit his lower lip. “I’m afraid I don’t know that one.” It was possible to work out dates by the precession of stars, though he was hazy on the details. “Ah … how many degrees above the horizon was the north star?”
The Dervish looked at him as if he’d grown two more heads and they had begun singing in harmony with the goat. “How the hell would I know— No. No, don’t tell me. You know, don’t you?”
“Err, yes?” Edmund felt a sudden intense urge to apologize for his rudimentary astronomical knowledge.
“Of course you do.” The Dervish sat back. “Let’s worry about stargazing later. Before we got distracted, you were telling me that you were something. Dedicated?”
“No. Well, yes. A dedicate. Someone given to the service of a temple.” The Dervish stiffened and Edmund hurried on. “My parents brought me there when I was five. But I’m not one anymore. I mean, I’m still a scholar, I suppose, but not a temple scholar. I left. Am leaving.”
“You left?” asked the Dervish. His voice sounded odd, or perhaps that was only the ringing in Edmund’s ears.
“Yes.” The throbbing in his head was beginning to make itself felt again.
He rubbed his temples, squeezing his eyes shut.
“Everyone there was just so … awful. They could have done so much good and they weren’t.
And I argued and fought and it just never made any difference.
I had to leave.” Did that sound like whining?
It probably was. He didn’t want to whine in front of the Dervish.
“So I agreed to transport the books and just left. I guess I stole Sweetness, but really it would have cost them a lot more to hire a courier anyway. But then the bandits jumped me, and an angel saved me.”
That earned him a snort. “You were running away from the priests, then,” said the Dervish, his voice softening. “That I understand.”
Edmund wasn’t sure if he’d have phrased it quite like that, but he heard rustling and then a warm, damp cloth pressed against his forehead. “Thank you,” he mumbled.
“Does the cloth help?” asked the Dervish after a minute.
“I’m not sure,” admitted Edmund. “It’s a thing healers do, though, so I suppose it does something.
” His headache did seem to be receding a bit, but perhaps it was the light being blocked out.
He wondered if there were any papers written on the effect of warm cloths on people’s foreheads, and if they had drawn any conclusions one way or the other.
The Dervish laughed softly. “I’m not a healer, I’m afraid.”
“I’m not dead, though,” said Edmund. “So you must have been doing fairly well. Do you think I’ll be able to travel soon?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. If I was a healer, I suppose I’d say, ‘No, don’t get up yet, you’ll hurt yourself,’ but being me, I suppose you can travel once you can sit on the mule without falling off.”
Edmund grimaced. “Sweetness isn’t really a riding mule.”