Today’s short story was guest written by Walter, author of The Fifth Defiance!

Curse of the Magi

 

I emerged from the Bargaining Place, turned to face the ongoing siege.

A hush never really breaks out on a battlefield. It would be totally unreasonable. Anyone who moved while everyone else was gawking at whatever the big deal was supposed to be would gain a huge advantage over their immediate adversary. No matter what flags were flown, what big shots cut down, the infantry always kept on swinging.

Nevertheless, a hush broke out on the battlefield.

Men backed away from one another, those in the golden cloaks of Rich Katra perhaps a shade more readily than those in the unadorned armor of First Muwenda. I couldn’t blame them. Katra’s was the fortress besieged, and only one of their gilded emissaries was scuttling forth from the tent. The Bargaining Place itself had belonged to First Muwenda. Everyone, seeing that he did not emerge alongside me, must have wondered if the Blade had been hired.

The Blade cast my eyes over the besiegers, registered their desperation, their fear, their barely concealed avarice. They would have heard the legends of the Blade, have taken the tenor of their master, maybe even believed he might have stooped to employing such a tool. Hoped it, perhaps.

All dead men.

It prompted me, and I drew the blade with my customary flourish, held it high.

A great shout heralded its appearance. ‘The Bidden Blade unsheathed in war, bought with blood and bringing more’, as the poet had said. Everyone knew what that meant.

Muwenda HAD hated. He’d hated enough to assemble great hosts, to empty the treasuries of his Tributaries and their servitors. Hated enough to smash his disparate armies against the citadel of his rival, to cast his sons and daughters into the wager. Hated enough to weep as they fell, and then send forth their siblings. Hated enough to lead the final attack himself.

Hatred, alas, was no guarantor of tactical proficiency.

Katra had always been his better. She had been to the War Houses. She’d maximized her every advantage. She’d hunkered down and worn his men away. She took no chances, made no errors. Engagement by engagement she’d worn away at his resources.

This siege would have been his last chance.

And here, at least, Rich Katra had slipped up. Perhaps the legend of the Blade hadn’t made it into the circles that she moved in. Perhaps she simply hadn’t given them any credence, explaining away the slaughters that grew like flowers in its wake as the result of some other factor. For whatever reason, she’d made no effort to keep the First away from me, and my deadly cargo. Her final play had been one of desperation, I felt, and had been unable to keep my deadly cargo from being bidden to battle.

I pointed the blade at the castle, and a great cheer broke out among the besiegers.

Earlier in my career, I might have denied them this. But I had grown beyond such pettiness. The Bidden Blade had a numbing effect on its bearer. I had no idea whether to blame the properties that the Ancients had engineered into it, or simple human nature, but the truth of the matter was that the slaughter had come to mean little to me.

I would always serve the Blade, until it passed me over for a greater wielder. Men would always hire it, giving their lives to secure their victories. Other men would always strive against it, pitting their frail prowess against the work of the Ancients. The particular details of any given instance of this pattern no longer engaged my interest.

Muwenda’s Archons strode to my side.

“He is…gone then?” asked the larger of the two. His lover, perhaps. His brothers had all gone before him, parceled out into the armies that had fallen to Katra’s tactical acumen.

I gave a simple nod, at the Blade’s instruction.

“We shall remember him with honor!” said the shorter of the two. A woman. I’d heard rumors that Muwenda had a bastard daughter, not yet fallen in this senseless conflict.

“Remember him with victory,” I suggested, mildly.

They gave the cheer of the First, slamming fists to their chests.

“Victory will be hard purchased today,” said the Lover. “The gate is narrow, and the foe has already sighted their Klaives upon it.”

An apt phrasing.

“Muwenda has already paid the price for your triumph,” I told them. “Have your men follow behind the blade.”

I walked towards the great gate, its surface riddled and shattered by the Klaives of Muwenda’s subordinates who came before.

Katra had let them breach it. She had a subtlety of mind. A sophistication that utterly escaped the men of the First. Time and again they had come against the gate. Time and again they had surged forth in their numbers, fighting bravely and utterly without guile. They had cracked the gate, surged inside, and entered the Dying Place.

Even as I was about to.

The besiegers subsided about me as I strode forward. Heads bowed with wary respect, or simple weariness. Even the dying seemed to scream less loudly. The world itself seemed muted, greyed. My senses dimmed, the Bidden Blade had no need of them.

Instead, it made use of its own peculiar sense.

Lines sketched themselves around me. Momentum of objects, fluctuations in temperature and pressure, the predicted paths of every combatant. Omniscience, so far as I’d ever been able to determine. It never let on just how far it reached, but I wouldn’t be totally shocked to find out that there was no limit. The Ancients had wrought too well with this particular device.

I wondered, from time to time, at the purpose of the Blade. Why craft such a weapon? A blade that made a slave of its master, and corpses of those who sought victory with it. Was it a lesson of some kind? Perhaps the result of some foolish dare? None could know. We, the folk of this faded era, knew only its deadly supremacy.

Klaives fired, ricocheting wildly down the path. They hadn’t been set for saturation density. There was no point to driving the First back entirely. They were sporadic, widely spaced. Almost an invitation to walk through.

The Blade did so, taking my nerves and marching me forward, sliding me aside before each Klaive flashed by.

It was no great feat of superhuman agility to do so. No single move beyond what an unpaired human could pull off. The Bidden Blade’s perfection was found not in its quality as an augment, but in its ability as an augur.

The Blade did not dodge. It did not need to. Its perceptions let it see the paths that the Klaives would take, allowing it to walk my form idly by each knifelike missile as though their course had been a part of its plan from the start.

I had spent a nontrivial amount of time pondering that very point, in fact. Did the Blade’s omniscience extend temporally as it did spatially? It certainly seemed to, reacting to every planned surprise and gambit of a foe or employer as though they’d been woven into its scheme from the get-go. But I’d come to suspect that it might simply be perceiving preparatory motions and using those to anticipate the future.

The Blade halted me at the end of the corridor, poking my head around to get the lay of the courtyard and then ducking smoothly back into the archway before a Klaive could make a sheath of my face.

Earlier in my servitude, I might have rejoiced at a moment like this. Where the corridor was passable, the better to entice invading forces, the courtyard beyond was decidedly not. It was where armies came to die, where every ounce of the fortress’s armory, those not required for defending the walls from more straightforward siege anyway, was focused.

It was utterly impassible. Not merely difficult to pass, but entirely impossible. Klaives flashed and vibrated through the air, their flight organized and coordinated by their mind cloud. They wouldn’t leave any openings for a human to make it up the stairs and onto the battlements. There might be paths that would take you most of the way there, but they’d all dead end at some point.

I was a bit disappointed in the path the Blade chose. It reached my other hand into a pocket, slid out Katra’s bypass, snagged from her corpse as she fell in the Meeting Place, and attached it to my shirt.

This was characteristic of its operation. Presented with an insoluble situation it responded with nonchalance and what I’d always felt was an unstated contempt for the best efforts of man. It evaded all countermeasures as though their design specs had been presented for its perusal at the time of their creation.

An instant later it put me in motion again, striding out into the klaive storm, ducking and weaving around them just as though it had left me unprotected. It didn’t need to do so, of course, but it seemed like it didn’t wish the bystanders to know it had Katra’s bypass just yet.

More of Muwenda’s men followed in our wake, hacking at the buzzing, hissing missiles. They hewed their own shortlived trails, smashing against the swarms’ components to the best of their ability. Each Klaive hacked out of alignment stressed the mind cloud’s net, might theoretically open up holes through which warriors could rush.

I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame them. The Blade had arranged this, just as it had arranged everything else. The flourish of the draw, the unwillingness to reveal the second contract, just its customary tidiness at work. All calculated to feed into mankind’s built-in sense of narrative, to convince the First’s men that they were part of the winning team. Might as well let the trash take itself out.

We moved quickly across the yard, only beginning to draw shouts of alarm from the watchers when we reached the foot of the stairs.

Katra’s men were busy, for the most part, contending with the ladders and other contemporary means that the Muwenda’s men were using to attempt other breaches. There weren’t, as the blade had known, all that many of them backing up the Dying Place.

The first klaive that *should* have killed us wicked by, twisting away at the last second as the stolen bypass overrode its heuristics. The shouts grew louder still as the onlookers recognized what must have happened.

Even as the Blade dragged me up the steps they didn’t move forward. Their bypasses would disrupt the pattern, much as ours had. They were also probably recognizing me, and more importantly my master. Maybe Katra had been ignorant of our legend, but these were soldiers. They would have heard of the Last Foe.

Still, when we cleared the last measure of the Klaive storm they came for us as everyone always does. They held their blades in shaking hands and rushed forth to fight with us.

What ensued was merest butchery. The Blade was at its finest in such engagements, taking the perfect measure of every participant, sliding my form smoothly around thrusts and bringing itself into intersection time and again with the vital portions of our target’s forms.

Onlookers had compared it, from time to time, to a dance, but it had always seemed to me more like a child’s bullying of a younger sibling. The fight was fixed from the start, every effort a defender made to escape the pattern turning out to have been nothing but the terrible design’s next step, as the Blade flawlessly incorporated their desperate strivings into its slaughter.

We might flatter ourselves, we descendants of the Ancients, that our will is free, our souls unbidden, but every time I saw the Blade pitted against such vain concepts I recognized the terrible truth. Man is Machine, and not an exceptionally sophisticated one. In the face of a machine of greater complexity he is a riddle easily solved, a child’s cipher.

We reached the first Klaive generator, and the Blade flicked out, plunging through a power cable in a great shower of sparks. The defenders redoubled their efforts, closing around us in desperate unison, thrusting blades as though they might find their mark.

The Blade drew me back from these thrusts, too many to parry or avoid within the confines of the top of the wall, and plunged me over the edge, back into the Dying Place.

The triumphant shouts of those above as we plummeted were entirely premature. The Blade slashed sideways, scoring the wall and slowing my descent at minor cost to my shoulder.

The Blade saw no need to expend its energies in battle with Katra’s minions, not when it had disabled a Klaive generator. It would leave them to Muwenda’s followers, great throngs of which were now starting to press through the diminished buzz of the previously impenetrable defenses.

The Klaive’s mind cloud could compensate for many factors, but a missing generator was not among them. The previously impenetrable defense matrix had great gaps and holes in it, and the enraged men of the First were all too eager to surge through these vulnerabilities and engage at last their hated foes.

The Blade pulled me through the press of them, exhorting and directing their efforts. It called upon them to remember their fallen, to remember their lord, and to avenge him.

As we reached the top once again, however, it bade me fall silent, and we struck out away from main vector of the thrust.

Muwenda’s men had gained the landings and were striving ever towards the gates which led deeper into the facility. Katra’s men, accordingly, were deployed to face them. The focus of both forces was ranged upon this point, as Katra’s crew mounted a last stand in this choke point.

As ever, the Sword disdained such drama. It directed me to a point along the wall, well away from the narrow gate. As soon as we reached the Blade swept out, carving a hole wide enough to step through. After several battering kicks, testing the limits of my bodies available power, the thin plug of stone fell away, permitting us to duck through into the interior reaches.

Katra’s Archon turned to face us, an old man in ill-fitting armor.

“Faithless artifact!” he shouted. “Katra went to you under flag of truce, paid your price with her heart’s blood! You should be slaying the besiegers, not fighting alongside them!”

The Blade had little interest in conversation, but it didn’t, at this moment, prevent me from indulging in it.

“Katra’s contract will be honored,” I told the old man, sourly. “Every one of your besiegers will die. But Muwenda’s contract will also be honored.”

His mouth opened, shock clear upon it.

“I don’t know why your boss thought that another contract with the Blade would cancel those which already exist. All she managed to do was turn Muwenda’s victory into a bloodbath. No one is going to walk away from this, no one at all.”

His mouth moved, but nothing came out.

At that moment the Blade saw whatever it had been waiting for. It rushed me forward, drove itself savagely into his shoulder, carving down into the core of him.

Why had the Blade bothered with this? Katra’s forces had been entirely reactive since their leader had fallen in the Bargaining Place. Killing their Archon would have very little impact on the overall flow of the battle.

I discovered the answer to that question a moment later. We moved deeper into the facility, cutting down the occasional panicking civilian.

The blade drove me onwards, passed us into the harnesser core of the fortress.

“Please!” shouted a technician. “No violence here. The harnesser is very delicate! I know not for which of the Great you fight, but whatever cause you bear arms for would be ill-served if its partisans were blasted apart by a runaway reaction.”

I felt a surge of despair at those words. I had been wondering, ever since the Blade took up Katra’s contract, how it would make certain that no one in Muwenda’s force fled the battle, and thus survived. I’d convinced myself that it was inspiring them, compelling each and every one of them to fight to avenge their beloved leader, but that had been nonsense.

This was its contingency. A spire of cloud-scraping the heavens, a blast like that which had ended the Ancient World. My service would end, at last, in fire.

The Blade did not disappoint. It cut down the maintenance personnel, then used my hands to make a series of careful adjustments to the controls.

I had no particular knowledge of the workings of a harnesser, but the cascade of red lights boded ill for us.

I’d always known that my service to the Blade would end some day. It had had bearers before me, and would have bearers after. I’d always presumed, however, that it would be years later, after I’d grown too old and decrepit to be of use.

The door opened behind me, and Muwenda’s Archon, the one that I’d called the Lover, came into the room.

“You are too late,” I told him, sadness filling my voice. “It has already triggered the cascade. No one will survive. Not your troops, nor your enemies. You have exactly what Muwenda bargained for.”

I waited for his blade. Killing me would be pointless, but in his position, I’d have done precisely that.

He lowered his blade instead, gave a hollow laugh.

“We were doomed from the moment your Blade took Katra’s life, were we not? Even if I were to stop this cascade it would only prompt your master to slay us in some other way.”

I didn’t bother to correct him, to point out that the Blade would never permit him to stop the eruption. It wasn’t worth it.

“I’m sorry, for what it is worth. Katra was very clever in seeking revenge. I’ve never seen, or even read of a victim of the Blade gaining audience with it before it began to strike and negotiating her own contract, alongside the one which doomed her.”

The Lover gave a sad smile.

“She did not do so alone. Muwenda, before he paid your price, exchanged emissaries with her. The pair of them came to this agreement.”

That made no sense. They’d agreed to die, to take with them all they loved?

“I don’t understand.”

He shook his head.

“They could not entirely set aside their hate. Couldn’t trust one another not to seek out your dread weapon. One or the other would have sought you out covertly. Instead they arranged this situation.”

I spat with distaste.

“Don’t you understand,” he asked, eyes shining with unshed tears. “We’ve killed it. Ours are the last lives that the Blade will ever take.”

It was my turn to shake my head, disgusted.

“The Blade has been buried before,” I said. “But fools of my ilk are plentiful. Another bearer will be along soon enough.”

“Buried,” he said. “But never like this.”

“I’m telling you it can’t be stopped,” I said. “The blade thrives on that which is worse in our kind. No matter what is heaped upon this place, someone will come for it. We cannot but do so. It is in our nature. No compact can stand against it.”

“I know,” he said. “But Muwenda and Katra did more than bury your master. They have discredited it. The tale of this outcome will twine forever about its name. Who will seek to make their fate that of Muwenda, of Katra? The Blade’s promise is irretrievably damaged.”

“You farcast the meetings?” I asked. “You let the world know what came to pass here?”

He gave a solemn nod.

“From the very beginning.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Magnificent,” I told him. “You didn’t waste any energy on our better natures. You’ve built a cage for this thing, one that relies upon human self-interest, and our ability to spit upon an unproductive bargain, a force scarcely less infinite that the cunning of the Blade’s manufacture.”

“No one will seek you out,” he said, scowling down at the blade itself. “Do you understand? Your role in our people’s history has ended.”

The harnesser cascade was reaching criticality now.

The blade gave answer. It rose and fell, one final time, slashing through the Lover’s neck with one precise arc.

But on his face, as the blast consumed us, was a triumphant smile.

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This story was guest written by Walter of The Fifth Defiance. If you liked this short story vote for it on The top Web Fiction and leave a comment! Check in next week for Everybody Dies #7!