Chapter 12 #3
He couldn’t go far. He wanted to run, or better yet, to get on a horse’s back and gallop until he left everything behind, but that wasn’t an option. He could go a quarter mile away from the wielder, no more, and then he’d fall apart into silver smoke and wake up when the sword was drawn again.
He made it as far as the second ring of trees around the campsite and collapsed against one, sliding down and feeling the bark scrape against his back.
Of course, it all made sense. Whoever cleaned up after his torturer died must have picked up the sword and brought it back to the temple or cathedral or whatever blighted hole in the ground the Lord of the Book lived in.
They’d have tried to draw it, but it didn’t work because the Dervish was newly dead.
It took at least a fortnight to come back from that, and in the meantime the blade might as well have been fused to the scabbard.
Presumably they’d given up and stuck it in a box somewhere.
Then the sword sat there for a hundred years or a thousand and then—what had Edmund said?
A scholar in some other city had requested it?
And Edmund, doing one last job for the temple so that he could keep his precious mule, of all things, had carried it off.
Ancestors have mercy. Edmund had saved him in a way, or possibly the mule had.
They’d taken the sword from that place of horrors, and because he’d gotten Edmund as a courier, instead of some wild-eyed true believer, he didn’t have to go back.
Might even get to someone who could break the curse and put him out of his misery.
He’d been lucky after all. Because of the goddamn mule.
The Dervish put his face in his hands and gave a single dry sob.
“Dervish?”
Edmund. Of course it was. There was no getting away. “What?” he growled.
“I … err … wanted to see if you needed anything.”
The Dervish was too raw to bother with a lie. “I want to walk away. I want to run until I can’t run anymore. That’s what I need.”
Edmund was backlit by the fire, and the Dervish couldn’t see his expression. “I know it’s, um, complicated, but if you need to go for a walk—”
“I can’t,” said the Dervish bitterly. “Because if I get more than about a quarter mile away from you, I dissolve. Remember?”
“Oh.” Edmund tilted his head. “A quarter mile from me or from the sword?”
“From…” The Dervish stopped, arrested. He’d never even considered it. The wielders had always kept the sword close. “I don’t know?”
Edmund immediately slung the sword off his back and held it out. “I’m not an expert on magic, but I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t the sword. There has to be a limit to how far away it works.”
No one, in all the years that he had been trapped inside the blade, had simply handed the sword to the Dervish before.
They treated him like an enslaved spirit, a djinn emerged from his prison and sent back as needed.
The few times a wielder lost hold of the sword in battle (and once through sheer stupid luck as his wielder choked on a fish bone) he’d immediately gone for the sword, throwing it into the nearest fire to keep it out of enemy hands.
And Edmund was offering it to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
He took it. He knew the cursed thing as well as he knew his own name.
Better, since he had changed names at least three times in his life.
He slung it awkwardly around his hips, feeling the weight settle.
It was much too heavy a weapon for him to want to use.
The Smith’s genius had all been in binding souls, not in delicate ironwork.
“If you stay on the road, even if it doesn’t work, we’ll be able to find the sword easily,” Edmund said. “I’ll draw it right away. I know you hate being in it.”
“Being in it’s not so bad. It’s the bit where I wake up and realize that I’ve been in it that I hate.”
Unspoken between them lay the knowledge that if the Dervish was bound by the location of the sword, not the wielder, he could simply leave and never return.
The sword’s magic might pull at him if Edmund was in danger, but if he was a hundred miles away, what good would that do?
Then the Dervish would be free and clear, without a wielder, able to do what he pleased, so long as he could keep anyone from drawing the sword again.
I could encase it in concrete … no, that’d be a pain in the ass to drag everywhere. Chains, maybe. That would be an irony for you, wouldn’t it?
Of course that assumed that Edmund would get killed eventually, but given the last few days, the Dervish was pretty sure it was only a matter of time. It’s amazing he lived this long. A god must have been looking out for him. Probably not that wretched Lord of the Book, but some god or other.
Either way, the scholar might have just handed the Dervish his freedom. Would have handed it to him at any time, if the Dervish had only thought to ask.
He did not know what to do with that knowledge. There were too many things spinning inside his head and he couldn’t catch hold of any of them. If he walked far enough, perhaps they’d quiet down.
He nodded curtly to Edmund, turned, and walked into the dark.