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A low drone of pain pierced the skull of the Wizard Sworn a moment before consciousness did. As awareness descended, his eyes cracked open without his conscious permission, and at once his head throbbed and contracted with pain so disabling that there was nothing he could do but roll onto his side and vomit. He did so feebly, his body straining piteously to expel thin, sour strings of bile onto the hard floor beneath him. The sound of a chair scraping across the floorboards as his booted foot kicked weakly against the leg was psychically, spiritually, existentially offensive. As his nausea subsided for a moment, and he lay panting, he deduced from the unevenness of the floorboards pressing into his body and the strong scent of an illusorily clean floor crawling aggressively up through his nostrils and down the back of his throat that he had not managed to leave the tavern the night before—and neither, unfortunately, had he managed to successfully die.
Moving as little as possible, eyes squeezed shut, Sworn gingerly shifted himself away from the puddle of bile. There was absolutely no question of getting up; if he so much as twitched it was like a huge hot metallic hand of broad-spectrum misery squeezed his whole body extremely tightly. He could only bear to lay extremely still and shield his eyes and ears and, to the extent possible, nose and skin and tongue, from experiencing as much stimuli as possible. Luckily the bar was dark and shuttered. There did not seem to be any people around. It was actually pretty quiet, and the floor was cool. It was almost peaceful.
He did his best to crawl back into unconsciousness, away from the throbbing pain that kept time with his heartbeat against the back of his skull, when something truly awful happened:
The front door slammed open with a tremendous crash that in Sworn's state might as well have been a physical blow, and then a rapid, heavy-booted stride rattled the floorboards as someone large and noisy strode toward him. These boot-falls were like clubs against the tender lining of his skull. They stopped a short distance away, and then suddenly an invasive prickle of magic ruffled rudely over him—a profoundly unpleasant sensation comparable to having all the crannies of his face thoroughly scrubbed with a swatch of hot, coarse burlap—and then mercifully moved on to scour the floor beneath him. He rolled onto his back, squinting with a hand up to block the thin grey light driving in from the partly-shuttered windows like spears upon his eyes, and made out a familiar silhouette.
“Get up, you pathetic old drunk,” said the Wizard Slate. For some reason she appeared to be absolutely bristling with rage and tension. Her hands were clenched at her side and her tone was venomous.
“I beg your fucking pardon,” Sworn mumbled. He thought about trying to push himself upright, but it seemed fairly pointless; also, if he moved, he might vomit again, which would not only prolong his humiliation, but might cause him to be subjected to another of her unbelievably offensive prestidigitations.
She kicked him so hard in the leg that his boots knocked together. A thin, piteous noise of complaint issued from him.
She leaned over him with her hands braced on her knees, looked into his eyes—he noticed blearily that there were very dark circles under her eyes and her close-cropped hair was disheveled and for some reason she seemed to have turned it as gray as her skin—and said in a flinty voice, “I told you to get the fuck up.”
Sworn closed his eyes, pressed his hands hard over his face, and sucked in the deepest and most stabilizing breath he could muster. Somehow, even the air was nauseating. “If y’gotta kill me, just do it already. Do it right here. You got that prestidigitation”—this particular word mangled to mush in his mouth—“ready to go. Keep it tidy.”
“I’m not here to fucking kill you,” Slate said dangerously.
“No? Not gonna do for me like you did Silver, huh? Find that hard to believe…”
Slate slapped his hands away from his face and crouched over him, getting in close. As she leaned in he stared at her dumbly, not afraid. Her hair looked so strange, and so did her skin, he was realizing, and even her clothes. But he couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
“Silver was a traitor who tried to kill the Archmage,” Slate growled, so close to his face that a few fine drops of spittle landed on his cheek. Her eyes burned in her pallid face. She really looked unusually ghoulish. “You are a disgusting old wine rag, and if I had my way I’d leave you to rot in this corner forever. It seems like it’s doing you fine. But the Sword sent me to collect you, so you’re coming with me.”
Sworn frowned. That didn’t make any sense; he struggled to organize his mind into a shape capable of understanding the situation, but it was beyond him. “Why does the Sword…?”
“Above my pay grade,” Slate sneered, obviously as unable to imagine a reason for this as Sworn was. She stood up straight and kicked him in the leg again. “Let’s go. Now.”
That was enough. Sworn sat up like a puppet pulled on a string. Waves of cold, prickling anxiety—a physical sensation somewhat equal and opposite to Slate’s prestidigitation, actually—coursed through him. His head swam, and he buried his face in his hands again, breathing deeply. Cold sweat broke out on his brow and under his arms. He stifled a heave.
Slate gave a low coughing bark of disgust and seized him under the collar. “Don’t you fucking dare vomit on me,” she said, and hauled him upright.
Sworn staggered forward out of her grip, clutching desperately at a tabletop as he barely managed to get his feet under himself. He took a few steps in the direction of the door, his body trying to list out from under him, and then a powerful vertigo rose up and obscured his vision and he fell to his hands and knees and vomited again. The bile burned in his nose and the back of his throat. Distantly, Slate could be heard cursing viciously under her breath.
Finally, mercifully, the heaving subsided. Sworn hung his head, shutting his eyes for a moment, and then laboriously pushed himself upright, leaning heavily against the back of a chair. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and glanced over at Slate.
The look in her eyes was one of flat contempt and disgust. “Can you walk?”
Sworn cleared his throat. The noise of it rattled his skull. “Can I have some water?”
“Do you think I’m gonna get you some water?”
Sworn sighed and pressed the heel of his hand into his temple as if by doing so he might either squeeze the hangover out or hold in what few scraps of intelligence he had left, worked up a thick gob of astringent mucus from the back of his throat and spat it into the puddle of bile at his feet. Said to the floor, though carefully not looking at the bile, “I don’t think I can really walk unless I get some water.”
Slate let out a noise like a bleeding air line, whirled, and stomped behind the bar. She rattled loudly for a glass, filled it, and marched back over to him and shoved it at him so violently that most of it slopped down his chest.
Sworn fumbled it from her before she could drop it at his feet, and cupped his hand over it. Concentrating hard, he dropped his own tiny prestidigitation into it. The magic fizzed, raising a crackling head in the glass, and he quickly tipped it into his mouth. The spell sparkled in his mouth and throat, clearing the harsh sensation of bile from his sinuses. Then he drank the rest of the water, and possibly felt a little better.
Slate watched him do this with dull, mean eyes, arms folded across her chest. The moment he leaned over to set the glass on a nearby table, she snapped, “Let’s go, old man. You’ve kept her waiting long enough.”
Sworn resisted the urge to sigh again and merely turned and gestured for her to lead the way. She rolled her eyes and shoved his shoulder around, marching him ahead of her with a hand between his shoulder blades.
When he opened the door the first thing he noticed, so to speak, was the light, which blinded him immediately and drove into his skull like a pickax. He groaned, hesitating in the doorway and shielding his eyes. Slate grunted in annoyance and shoved him stumbling into the street, wrapped an iron hand around his elbow, and dragged him onward.
The second thing he noticed, once his eyes adjusted enough to make out his surroundings, was that the broad, orderly street of Gavreel was completely empty. And there was a pale haze that hung in the air like smoke, and a sharp, unpleasant smell.
A chill of unease crawled up his spine. He turned back to look at Slate, and finally realized what had caused her to look so strange. She was covered head to toe in a thin, grey film of dust.
“What… what happened?”
He almost expected her not to answer, or to give him more of that disdainful hostility. But she only said bluntly, eyes fixed ahead, “There was a jailbreak in Xiao.”
Sworn sucked in a harsh, shocked breath.
“The Kasov was completely razed. All of the spirits escaped,” Slate said, answering his unspoken question. “While you were busy pickling yourself, I was digging the bodies of archivists out of the rubble. The Citadel is under lockdown.”
He would have stumbled to a stop but for her hand clamped around his arm. As she dragged him forward he thought numbly, stupidly, of Sky.
“There was also an explosion in Haverward,” she added, almost casually. “A terrorist attack—probably related to the attempted hit on the Archmage Silence. Fifteen people were injured and two were killed. Unfortunately, the Sage of the Penumbra was one of them.”
The ground dropped out from Sworn’s feet. He staggered. Slate hauled him up and dragged him on.
They came shortly to her Galithopter, parked casually across the empty boulevard. She swung a leg over, told him to get on.
For a moment he stood completely numb, staring around as if expecting at any moment an illusion would be peeled back from the deserted street and all of it would be revealed as a dream, a lie. “Sky is dead?”
“The Sword is in an extremely bad mood,” Slate said flatly. “As you might imagine. We shouldn’t keep her waiting.”
He stepped up to the Galithopter. He felt a dizzying sensation of distance between his mind and his body, as if he was scrying on himself. His knees almost buckled.
“You’re alright, aren’t you, Sworn?” Slate suddenly asked.
“I’m okay,” he said, hesitating.
“You aren’t going to throw up on me, are you?”
“No,” he said, trying to sound offended that she would ask.
“Good,” she said. “Then get on.”
As he moved to straddle the seat behind her she caught his arm, bringing him up short.
“You should hold on tight,” she told him softly. A vicious, hectic light shone in her eyes. “If you don’t, you might fall. And then I’ll have to tell the Sword you were just too drunk to hold on—you didn’t have your wits about you. What could I have done?
“I don’t think the Citadel needs any more tragedies today, does it?”
“No,” Sworn said stupidly. He hauled his leg over the seat and wrapped his arms around her.
“Be careful back there,” she said silkily, and kicked the Galithopter vertiginously up into the sky.
It was not a pleasant flight. Slate rode hard, making sharp banks and ascending rapidly only to level off with stomach-swooping jolts. Sworn fought down bile miserably, watching the distant horizon as much as he could in an effort to control his nausea, and tried not to wonder how far he would fall if he did vomit and she threw him off. Below, he could see Xiao court descending. The wreckage of the Kasov Collection was visible from the air, and Slate had spoken true—it had been utterly destroyed. All that remained was a crater of still-smoking rubble.
From this distance, Haverward was not visible through the hazy air. Still, Sworn strained to make out any sign of the blast, but all he could see was the faint shadows of houses and buildings on the very outskirts. Then they rose too far to see even that much. The gritty smoke curled through the whole column of the Erien, making the cold wind that beat at his face less than refreshing; but at last they climbed above it, leveled off, and began a steep descent into Malecanth.
They landed hard at the base of the Tower of the Sword. Sworn let go of Slate at once and staggered off the Galithopter. Much like Gavreel had been, the boulevard was utterly deserted. But he could not do more than glance around before Slate seized his arm and brought him into the Tower.
Inside, it seemed that every Wizard in Malecanth had convened. Sworn caught glimpses of a few familiar faces, but Slate hustled him past; they took the spiraling stairs in double time, shoving past knots of rattled-looking tacticians and conjurers and War Mages traversing between floors. Every face was drawn, weary, and rigid with tension. Many of them were bruised, scraped, and blotchy with dust.
For some reason, Sworn had been expecting to be taken directly to the Sword’s sanctum, but Slate pulled him off the main staircase onto one of the middle levels. Immediately, his hackles were raised as he was steered down a long, completely empty hallway, curving along the outer wall of the tower. It was bare white stone, with only narrow slits of frosted windows letting in thin bars of daylight but no view of the outside. They passed door after door, each of them a single slab of that same white solid stone banded in iron, lacking a latch or knob of any kind. There was arcane calligraphy carved into the doors and chiseled into the ironwork, but Slate hustled him past too quickly for him to make out the inscriptions.
“I thought you were taking me to the Sword,” Sworn said.
Slate’s only answer came by way of bringing him up short in front of another identical door. He stumbled against her grip, looked to her face set with remote concentration, looked apprehensively at the door. He still could not make out the meaning of the calligraphy, even as she passed her hand across it in a complex spell-gesture. The symbols glowed blue; the door vanished, revealing a blank white room; she shoved him inside.
At once the door reappeared between them. Operating on instinct more than logic, he threw himself against it, hammering his fist against the unforgiving slab. He tried to cast Knock, but could not. He tried to cast Shatter, he tried to cast Message to Slate. Nothing, nothing. Trying to reach for magic was like expecting another step when there was none and putting his foot down into empty air. Pure, unadulterated animal panic rose in his throat. So he tried feeling desperately for any sort of latch or hidden mechanism, then clawing at the edges with his fingernails in raw desperation. But there was no air between the door and the posts and lintel, nor behind the iron bindings. He could not have passed a blade the width of a hair between them.
“Slate!” He shouted. “Slate!”
The only answer was his own ragged voice echoing back at him from the floor, the walls, the ceiling. He screamed wildly, “Let me out of here, you fucking bitch!”
Of course this yielded nothing. He turned and sagged back against the door and sank to his knees. His heart was hammering wildly in his chest, his breath came rapid and unsteady. He tried to master it, but he felt all the wild, fearful rage of a trapped animal, and in that moment he wished more than anything that he had managed to kill himself in that bar. He cursed himself for having gone with Slate with all the docility of a dumb animal; he should have fought. He should have died rather than let her take him. He should have gone with Sky, and died with her, and having failed her so completely in not doing so, he should have died anyway.
Sworn was a soldier. He was strong, he was brave, he was undaunted in the face of danger, he did not fear death. But in that moment he was trapped, and helpless, and had failed so profoundly that the weight of it was like a mountain bearing down on him. He folded over with his face in his hands and sobbed.
For the space of three breaths these heaving convulsions came out of him unchecked, as instinctive and irrepressible as the vomiting had been. But then something else engaged inside his mind. Something more pragmatic, more keen and cold. He sucked in a last shuddering breath, stopped his own tears with a violent force of will, and sat up. A cool clarity had descended upon him; his helplessness had turned from a wellspring of terror into the catalyst of a deep, nihilistic calm.
Looking around the room, it was not as perfectly barren as he had thought, though nearly so. There was a rectangular table and two low benches flanking it, all cut from that same white featureless stone, and a panel in the high ceiling that seemed to let in daylight, although surely that could not have been the case. That was all.
However, Sworn found himself somewhat reassured by the fact that there was a table and seating, rather than a bunk. So they must not have meant to imprison him here indefinitely. But still, they might leave him here for a very long time. The paranoid thought came that perhaps they simply meant to let him die of thirst. But then, why the furniture? If they had meant only to throw him in a hole and let nature take its course, they need not have bothered to put him in a lit room with seating. Someone would come to interrogate him, eventually; it might be hours or days, the lights on all the time, and they would only come after he had gone half mad from sleeplessness and dehydration. But someone would come. If only to discover how little he knew of two dead traitors, and then kill him.
For lack of anything else to do, Sworn pushed himself to his feet and examined every inch of the room, passing his hands over the walls and the furniture trying to feel for even a crack he could fit his fingernail into, trying to cast any spell he could think of as he did. But nothing worked, and nothing moved. It was as if the room had been hewn from a single solid block of perfect marble: the walls and benches and table were seamless with themselves and with the floor.
Eventually Sworn accepted that there was nothing he could do. His imprisonment was perfect and absolute. He sat at the table, put his head on his arms, and in defense of continuing to think of anything at all, went to sleep.
In his dreams, he saw Sky again, sitting next to him in the bar. She wrapped a hand like iron around the back of his neck and said, looking into his eyes, you’re coming with me. An elated conviction filled his body. He stood and went with her, to a place he had never been before, a home in Haverward with the drawings of a child thumbtacked to the walls. He turned to her and meant to ask something, but before he could get the words out, a great shadow appeared in the doorway, and then the world erupted into sickening green light. It shredded the house and the shadow and her. Finally it also swallowed him.
He woke with a start. The Sword of the Citadel was seated across from him.
He jerked himself upright with a gasp, wiping drool from his cheek and straightening to attention in his seat as well as he could.
For her part, the Sword sat with her gauntleted hands folded together in front of her. Her expression was totally remote; she barely seemed to see him. Haggard exhaustion dragged at the lines of her face; her posture exhibited the rigidity of someone who required some part of their conscious mind to be devoted to remaining upright. Her eyes were sunken and completely bloodshot, the lids as red and swollen as if she had been crying, but the sclera was as matte as paper, with that dull dryness that only set in after days of sleeplessness. When she blinked, Sworn almost expected to hear the rasping.
Against the wall over her left shoulder, Slate stood at attention, gaze fixed into the middle distance. She was holding concentration on something; Sworn could not say what, but her hands were clasped behind her back, and she had that posture they had all been trained in, relaxed but upright, vacant, expression turned inward. He guessed that it was a mind-reading spell, but he couldn’t know for sure.
“Sword,” he said dumbly, when the armored figure before him made no move to speak. “High Commander.”
“Sworn,” she replied, a low, menacing rasp.
He resisted the urge to wipe his mouth again and asked out of rote, “Madam, how may I be of service?”
He had never had a direct conversation with the Sword. The closest he had ever come was during the briefing for the mission to the North Pole. The force of her reddened gaze as she turned it on him was paralyzing.
“We know that you were among the last to speak to the Wizard Sky before her death,” she said softly.
Sworn could have guessed that this would be her line of questioning. Still, he gulped apprehensively. “Only briefly, Madam,” he replied, trying to sound appropriately confused by this line of questioning, trying to direct his mind towards the shameful haze that clouded his memories of her next to him in the bar, and not touch the contents of the memories themselves. He added, uncertainly, and, to his horror, unable to prevent his voice from trembling briefly with emotion, “I was very sorry to hear of her passing.”
The Sword said in a mechanical tone, “The Citadel lost a great wizard last night.”
“Indeed, Madam,” Sworn replied thickly.
“Why did she go to find you last night?”
Sworn hesitated, then answered, “She wanted me to come with her.”
“Come with her? Where?”
“I don’t know,” Sworn replied honestly. In honest shame, he added, “… I was very inebriated, Madam. I couldn’t say why she came looking for me, of all people.”
“You worked with her closely,” the Sword said. She leaned forward a little, and as she did so Sworn felt a faint scrabbling at the edges of his mind. He flicked his gaze briefly at Slate, but her eyes remained blank and remote. His attention drew back to the Sword as she went on, “You followed her into the Shroud Mountains, although it went against the directives of your mission. You endangered the lives of your soldiers for her. You led some of them to their deaths, as a matter of fact.”
Sworn drew back, feeling as if he had been slapped. “Madam, she was my commanding officer. I would not have disobeyed her.”
The scrabbling grew to claws. He flinched involuntarily, and barely withheld a grunt of pain.
“She trusted you,” said the Sword. Her eyes were bright now and focused on him with intensity. He could not look away. She leaned in. “She trusted you then, and she trusted you last night. Why is that, Sworn?”
“She didn’t trust me when I arrested her on your orders, Madam,” Sworn said bluntly.
But the Sword only smirked. “By now you should know as well as I do the legitimacy of that arrest.” Her tone had become silky, almost inviting. She went on, “Sky was playing a part. You’re smart enough, I think, to understand why that was.”
“She’s your daughter,” Sworn replied stupidly.
“You speak of her as if she still lives,” the Sword snapped.
Sworn flinched and ducked his head. “Apologies, Madam,” he mumbled. “I only…”
No one spoke into the silence as he trailed off. At last he was forced to continue, looking at his hands, “It’s only that it doesn’t quite feel real.”
“Doesn’t it?” The Sword asked. She shot a look of disgust over her shoulder at Slate, who grimaced and bowed her head in a gesture of defeat. Then she turned back to Sworn and cast Detect Thoughts openly in front of him. Her emerald ring flashed as she reached into the Aerith to do it. The spell came down on his mind like a hammer swung into his skull; Sworn was flattened against the table.
The Sword spent what felt like hours rummaging through his mind. Sworn had been subjected to mind-reading before, of course, even deep probing on one or two occasions. But that had been nothing—a breath against the back of his neck as someone leaned in to look over his shoulder, a rustle as someone reached under his cloak to steal from him. Nothing in his life could have prepared him for this sensation, like she was tearing the clothes from his body and the skin from his flesh and the flesh from his bones, a violent unmaking, a breakdown into total disorder. She shredded him apart trying to find what she was looking for. He was a room she was turning over, he was the drawers she flung from the dressers and the pillows she split open, paintings that she knocked from the walls and ripped from their frames, the stuffing of the mattress bulging obscenely through long rents, the clothes and books and papers she tore to pieces as she hunted for something she had not yet found. He felt his own thoughts, and even the more intangible things, his feelings and memories, his opinions and instincts, as they were pulled from his body—a physical sensation existing only in the mind, that was as if she was pulling his tendons and veins from beneath his skin to get a closer look. His shame, the grief at his mentor’s death, his feelings of inadequacy, his fear of self-determination, she looked at briefly and then discarded. He had not even realized it was fear until he witnessed her examining it inside of him. He had thought that it was a truth that was evident in the world, not the cold disgusting mass of congealed emotion that Steel turned over, glanced at briefly in disdain, and moved on from as Sworn was still reeling. His memories of his mentor she shuffled through without interest, but he felt her repulsion and again he realized for the first time the stringy mass of shame and guilt that he had allowed to corrupt the few precious memories of a person who had never stopped caring for him. Everything inside of him was sticky with self-loathing, tender with self-inflicted pain. And Steel did not care; her armored boots crushed the tenderest parts of him as she strode through his mind, kicking away those cancerous bloody masses until she reached the thing she had been looking for, buried deep: a pure, shining nacreous shell enclosing honor, duty, love. It was as blue as the sky above the Erien at the height of summer. She rent it with her blade. Everything spilled out.
Sword could only observe, a helpless passenger in his own mind, as Steel pulled apart everything he held in himself of value. Every moment of his life, every aspect of himself, that he had ever found to be of some worth, lay scattered before her. She was looking only for Sky, and here she found her. The North Pole, the Shroud Mountains, Haliker Forest, Gavreel. They had not had so much time together. But she was everywhere, all around them, embroidered forever into the thin fabric of the only part of him that was true.
Steel saw everything. The conversation with Silver, the discussion with Ame about love and loyalty, every moment in which Sky had asked him for his obedience and he had given it over readily along with his devotion. The furious, ashamed heartbreak he had felt when he learned that she had left him behind to save the Grenaux children, the selfish leap of joy inside him at seeing her again as he detained her. The letter she had sent him, the hopeless longing he had felt as he read her words. The words she had written and the effect they had on him, her long elegant script, the way he had passed his hands over the marks her hands had made in despair and grief and shame, knowing already what his answer would be. Then at last the Sword came to the conversation in the bar in Gavreel.
Steel went silent in his mind, absorbing the memory. Sworn could not recover; he lay prostrate within his own skull, a gasping wreckage, unable to think, unable to make sense of his body. The disorganization of his mind was as disabling as physical pain. The only comprehensible thing was the memory Steel was forcing him to relive. She watched through his inner eye, made him play it out again and again, examining different angles; the intrusion of her focus in his mind was like a brick in his skull, but he clung to it like a life raft, the only sensible thing in the shattered world of his selfhood.
Then the spell ended, and even that was gone.
He collapsed into a senseless, wordless dark. For an interminable period of time the mind of the Wizard Sworn lacked even the most base organization by which it might know itself. Broken shards of thoughts and feelings and memories, the constituent parts of his self, drifted freely. Whatever was left to observe them did so without a tether to bind them in understanding. Everywhere inside this dark skull-space there was a howling of mortal terror. But it did not belong to anyone. It just was.
This period of deranged dissolution could have lasted hours or weeks. There was no part of him that could mark the passing of time. But eventually, the spinning chaos began to coalesce again, like clouds of dust becoming planets: memory, feeling, cognition. The first thing he became aware of was the fear. As he cohered within himself, the confusion dissipated slowly, but the fear remained. Then came an awareness of pain; then awareness of his body, the limits of himself and his selfhood within those.
He was crumpled on a cold, hard surface, twitching uncontrollably, every muscle tight and spasming with cramps. He could feel that he had soiled himself. His cheeks were hot and wet with tears. Eventually, he was able to open his eyes.
He was still in the white stone room. The Sword still sat at the table, Slate standing rigidly at her back. Perhaps two minutes had passed since Steel had cast the spell.
“You aren’t very useful, are you,” Steel said, presumably to him, although he had no hope of replying. His teeth were chattering too violently, his breath was coming too fast, he could not make his limbs obey him. He noticed that his throat ached as if he had been screaming.
Steel went on as he shook on the floor, in a low rasping monotone that seemed to fill the room unnaturally, “She trusted you a little. But not enough to tell you anything. She didn’t even tell you her plans about the Grenaux kids. She told Silver, for fuck’s sake. So fucking stupid. That boy was a good soldier, she should have known better.
“I guess you had her fooled, though. I think she mistook your pathetic puppy love for her for a sense of duty, old man. Well done. You hid it pretty well. But you can’t hide anything for long. Not from me. You understand that now, don’t you?”
Sworn forced a thin, croaking noise of assent between his teeth. It was all he could manage. Loathing crashed over him in waves. He found himself anticipating, hopeful, that soon the Sword would get sick of tormenting him and just crush him like a bug.
“That’s good,” said the Sword. She added, “Get him up, please.”
Slate strode around the table and hooked him under the armpits, hauling him to his feet. With her face turned away from the Sword, she wrinkled her nose in disgust at him. Then her expression smoothed into professional blankness as she brought him around and deposited him on the bench, and she returned to her post at Steel’s back.
Steel watched him impassively as Sworn struggled to keep his elbows under himself and his head upright. She said, “Here’s one thing you did right, soldier. You didn’t go with her last night. You were smart enough for that. Do you know why that was a smart move?”
Sworn shook his head slowly, grimacing as it throbbed.
Steel leaned in. “If you had been stupid enough to go with her, you’d be dead now. But because you didn’t, you get to be useful to me. Does that sound good to you, soldier? Being useful to me?”
“Yes, Madam,” Sworn croaked. His throat was raw. It was agony to speak.
“That’s a smart answer,” Steel said, and smiled at him. It was a thin, curving smile that did not reach anything but her lips. It was as mechanical and menacing as her voice. “I like it when people give me smart answers, Sworn. You’re off to a strong start.”
She turned to Slate and said, “Get him rooms in the Scabbard. And for fuck’s sake, clean him up.”
She stood up, looking down at Sworn with flat, apathetic disdain on her face. “You’ll report to me at 0700 hours tomorrow,” she said. “Keep being smart, Sworn. We’ll see if we can make you into something useful, in time.”
“Yes, Madam,” he croaked, as she strode from the room. The door blinked out of existence as she passed through it, then reappeared.
Slowly, Sworn turned his face to Slate. She was looking at him as if he was a pile of dog shit she had been instructed to scrape off the sidewalk.
“You’re one lucky old cunt,” she said, sneering at him. “She hasn’t slept in days, you know. And her daughter just died—I think it’s made her soft.”
Then she cast another prestidigitation on him. It was perhaps even more awful than the first had been. But at least when it was over his pants were dry.
Sworn mustered all the strength he had, knowing it might be his only chance. As she rounded the table to haul him up again, he met her eyes and barely managed to croak, “You’re a sour, hateful bitch, Slate.”
She braced her hand on the table and leaned in close. “One day,” she said, “you’re going to wear out your usefulness to the Sword. And when that day comes, I hope I get to be the one to turn you into a red smear on her floor.”
“Just as long as I won’t have to feel it when you clean me up,” Sworn rasped.