“Knife,” said Vivian, peering as best she could across the mirrors. They reflected the light overhead in dazzling flashes that left green and pink flecks swimming in front of her, while the darkness in between bursts of radiance was almost absolute. It made vision difficult.
Nonetheless, it hadn’t taken much walking before she got a better sense of the shape in the center: about hand-length, with a curved guard and a square hilt. She thought that it was metal and that some of the blade might have showed beneath it, but it was hard to say. There was too much other light, too much of the landscape itself that shone.
“A hilt, at any rate,” Olvir said after Vivian alerted him to the object. “And it does look too small to be from a sword.”
Both of them spoke softly, with reverence bordering on horror or the other way around. Only one knife went with the Battlefield, the one that had shed the first blood in treachery.
And Veryon’s grave,said Ulamir,for the stories say he left no body behind.
“Would the mirrors have come from him? Glass is a sort of stone, isn’t it?”
Here, it’s hard to determine what came from which source or even what was real when it happened.
“I don’t think he turned into them.” Olvir’s eyes were shadowed, his voice half-dreaming. Hearing him made Vivian’s muscles tighten, getting her ready for action she hoped would never come. “He vanished. The dagger went into the ground. The Threadcutter came just in time to see, and then she threw herself across the mirrors, but they weren’t Veryon. He was beyond her reach.”
“Gizath, then,” she half whispered, feeling the old peasant’s fear of saying the Traitor’s name.
“Not meaning it. Not minding it. The mirrors appeared because of his actions, because of his mind, but not from his intent. He… No. I’m sorry,” Olvir said, sounding alert once again. “There’s nothing else. I don’t know if I should apologize forthator for speaking in the first place.”
Vivian put a hand lightly on the nape of his neck. “I wouldn’t say you need to apologize at all right now,” she said, and she meant it, even while her nerves sang with tension. “You’re doing what you can. Besides, I asked.”
Nor can we predict what knowledge may prove useful in the end,said Ulamir, and then, as close to wry as he could manage,and in truth, should this quest not undo us, the world, or his mind, the knight could likely be a scholar’s dream.
That was undoubtedly true, but Vivian wouldn’t praise the day until nightfall, as the saying went.
Darkness took its turn, leaving her with only the sound of creaking glass as she walked. Her eyes, with the stupid persistence of instinct, kept trying to make out shapes, though she understood that it was futile.
It was unnecessary too. Even her blessing wasn’t exactly crucial any longer. They knew where they were going—unless—
She didn’t let the idea become hope, but she did speak. “Since you’re remembering more and you’re sensing more, do you think you could make the storms stop just with that and not bother going the rest of the way? The spider didn’t mention grabbing the knife specifically.”
“I don’t know,” Olvir said after a moment of silence. “I can’t even tell one way or another. They’re building up on the other side of the mountains, you understand, and there’s so much…noise here, so to speak. When I try, I can tell a bit of what the storms are doing and how, but only a bit, and I could be remembering some of that from what I did earlier. We’d have to go a good distance back before I could try.”
Should we do that and fail, we’d have very little chance of making it this far again. No, Vivian,said Ulamir.It was a clever idea, but our fate lies where Veryon met his.
“It was a long shot anyhow,” she said.
“I’d give my right eye if it hadn’t been.”
Every feature of Olvir’s face was sharper in the flashing landscape. Vivian could see what he’d look like in ten or twenty years or after a long illness: handsome, still, but gaunt, a man whose bones were wrapped as much in willpower as in flesh and skin. “Olvir—” she started and came up with nothing to say.
He turned toward her, just a little. “I know. I’ll see it through, don’t worry. And I still consider it our best chance—but no part of me wants to go near that knife, let alone touch it.”
That was, in its own way, reassuring.
* * *
Olvir spoke only a tenth of what he felt aloud, not out of shame or concern about Vivian’s opinion but because he was afraid even to put his terror into words.
He couldn’t be sure of its source. He wasn’t even sure how separate he and the fragment were any longer. The moments of recognition had felt like his own, and so had the memories he’d told Vivian about. Those images—the dagger’s swift entrance and the woman’s anguished countenance—had carried with them grief, not triumph. That had been some relief, but it gave Olvir no clarity.
Each step he took was a trial of his will. That much was clear. Every inch forward was one closer to…what? The unknown fate that he, the mortal man, might have good reason to fear? The spot where the divine portion of him remembered a hideous crime? He couldn’t tell.
What waited at the center was irrevocable, whether it had been so in the past or would be in the future or both. All of Olvir understood that, and all of him feared it, even as he walked.
There should have been a drum, he thought, like the ones that beat out the journey to the headsman’s block.
Instead, he heard steady breath and breaking glass. He watched the horizon, where the shape of the knife became ever clearer. After closing some distance, he noticed the gem in its hilt: large, square-cut, and red-orange. Below the guard, the blade tapered dramatically for the inch or so until it entered the mirrors, and the light glinted on two razor edges.
