Crossed Blades by Kelly McCullough

Author:Kelly McCullough
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2012-11-27T06:00:00+00:00

13

Fear touches everyone. The soldier who panics at the sight of snakes, the torturer afraid of the dark, the murderer who abhors the deep blue sea. No matter how hard you think life has made you, no matter how many lives you’ve ended, no matter how many darkened alleys you’ve walked down, you have a breaking point. Apparently, a severed but still living finger was one of mine.

Aral! Triss wrapped himself around my shoulders, a cool but firm presence. Are you all right?

I nodded. I will be. I just wasn’t expecting it to still be warm. I pushed at the finger with my boot tip.

I’m sorry, I should have warned you. I felt it when I first touched it.

It’s all right, Triss. How is it . . . no, that’s silly. It’s magic, of course. But why?

Breathing deeply as I had been taught—by Kelos, ironically—I forced myself to relax. Calm the body and the mind will follow. He must have told me that a thousand times.

Once I felt like myself again, I reached down and picked up the finger. It felt disturbingly alive, and it took every shred of discipline I had to turn it so that I could look at the bone disk instead of flinging the damn thing across the room. I was so going to need a drink after this.

A silver nail head centered the disk, presumably driven through and into the bone of the finger on the other side. It was surrounded by a tracery of tiny glyphs and a single word carved in the runic alphabet of Aven—Kelos’s name. I had to suppress another shudder at that. Though I hadn’t yet parsed the spell’s specifics, I instantly knew the only possible reason for Kelos to include his name like that. He had tied the functioning of the spell to the magical force of his own life, his nima.

The vast majority of magic happens in the moment, for the moment. What we call “low magic”—things like magefire, or summoning an item across a room—is the simple manipulation of forces. But even most high magic is temporary. Wards, for example, require regular renewal—weekly or even daily. Things like my thieveslamp or a window’s shatternot are longer lasting. They might survive a year or more depending on who casts them, but those, too, will fade without regular renewal.

Permanent enchantments take a lot of power. Far more than any one spellcaster can muster in a single session. They need to be built one step at a time over days or weeks, layering in spell after spell to achieve the desired results. That’s for the simplest of things. Greatspells take months or even years to build, though the most powerful sorcerers can collapse the process somewhat and a god can do even more.

Namara had created my temple swords in a seeming instant and those embodied multiple greatspells—though again, there were limits even to what a goddess could do. It was a rare year that saw more than a half dozen Blades become masters.

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