Second Kiss (20 page)

By now, those who could had fled the castle, but the children in the highest loft, terrified by the sword, were frozen, screaming for their mothers. Sensing them there, the sword hovered and swayed a moment, as though suspended from a thread, its point aimed straight at the loft, its hilt aligned with Xemion's hand. It was as though it were challenging him, forcing him. In some way it was still part of him, and suddenly with that knowledge he knew what was going to happen next. The sword lowered itself and began to slash at one of the supports that held up the stairway to the loft where the children were. It took only three hacks to cut the new wood right through. Three more hacks and both supports were gone. With that the steps fell away, leaving the children stranded thirty feet in the air. The sword paused and then swooped down and turned its pommel once again very deliberately toward Xemion. “TAKE IT!” the increasingly deeper and more ghoulish voice shouted.

Xemion now knew that taking it was the only way to control it. But if he took it, would the sword also control him?

“Why won't you take it?” one of the mothers screamed.

Zero Remembers

S
triding
toward her room at the Panthemium, Zero recalled the flickering fin of a fish and the fin made her remember a wing. And the wing recalled a leaf and the leaf recalled a hand, and so one memory led to another. But there was no apparent order. The scent of a breeze brought back the sound of a stream and the stream was connected with her own reflection as she stared down at it, scared, the rapidly flowing water summoning a nightmare feeling of running away and never getting anywhere. That feeling echoed back to a place and that place like all places led back to the one place, the one face, the one melody that always seemed to be playing behind all these scenes, lovely and lilting. It called to something deep inside her, but it also inexplicably gripped her with terror. As she walked, the melody grew more refined and there was more of it and then it ran round again and she was shaking her head. “No.” But the melody came once more. And a sweet voice sang it now. And she started to hear words:
Open my heart, open the door…

Without warning the bright image of a wide blade came swinging at her. It was so clear and present she cried out and jerked her head back instinctively. And just as the new cut over her eyebrow stung and welled with blood, the old cut, diagonal to it, opened a deeper cut in her memory. She saw herself from outside herself. Her neck bent down over the butcher's block. A woman clenching her by the hair trying to keep it there long enough to let the ax in her other hand do its work. She was struggling and she pulled away from the veering of the blade. It just nicked her over the eyebrow as it went by but it felt like it cut her in two. She stood up screaming, the blade embedded in the block, the woman screaming, too, yanking her hair and hitting her in the face. Calling her a fool and a dog and a curse. And still the memories dragged one another out of the darkness and pulled themselves before her as she entered the Panthemium and proceeded down the long hallway to her room.

When she opened the door and saw her staff still leaning in the corner she got a brief respite. She remembered the sunflower stalk it once had been. She touched it and smiled for just a moment and envisioned the glade where that sunflower and so many other, lesser sunflowers had grown, and the sunflowers made her think of the sun — of a particular sun on a particular day — and suddenly she remembered a golden swan.

“Chiricoru!” she gasped, immediately clamping her hand over her mouth as though she could somehow push that name back in. For a second there arose the vision of a kindly old woman's face, but it was so quick it was but a glimmer. In the next instant it was replaced by that other woman's face again: the one who looked a little like her. And she knew now that it was her mother. In this memory she was still bleeding from that cut the axe had made, but the blood was shimmering up and away from her and getting thinner and thinner. She gasped and realized she had been holding her breath. She gasped again when she saw, rippling above her as though through the surface of a rapidly running river, her mother's face. And there was such love in her eyes, but her hands … Zero choked and gasped again. She heard herself try to say no, but she was underwater and her mother's firm hands were clenched about her neck. She felt herself blacking out and hardly knew if it was memory or the present. She felt herself going down to the weedy bottom, drowning, but rising again. And then she remembered being swept along down the river.

For a long time Zero sat on the edge of her bed, still dressed in her armour. She rocked back and forth, wincing and shaking her head. And just as Xemion was saying “No! No!” to the sword in the great banquet hall at the castle, she kept saying “No! No!” to the words and images that burst into her consciousness. No to the insanity. No to the violence and the justification of violence. No to the whole long list of abuses, betrayals, and shocks.

The truly shocking thing, though, was something she didn't want to say no to. Whenever she dared to look directly into her mother's eyes the only thing she ever saw in them was love.

Love.

So strong was this impression it made her stop remembering for a moment. How could this possibly be? Before the answer could come to her, another vision spun it out of her mind. A crooked-backed, wrinkled old man with long, wild hair like lichen bent over a handwritten spell kone as high as his waist.
He's going to turn it.
He shushes her and winks. He smiles at her. She is just a little girl and he is very kind looking, but a little confused. As if to remind himself, he speaks the old rhyme:

As the eye goes down

The words go around.

All in one turn

The spell is bound.

Then he starts cranking the handle clockwise and the beautiful kone spins and the words go round and round and the glass eye descends and somewhere she can hear her mother singing that song. And now she begins to hear the rest of the words:

Open my heart, open the door

Every day to love her more.

Break O wave upon the shore

Every day I'll love her m—

At that moment Asnina burst into the room. “It was a spell-wrought sword!” she screamed. She was very distraught. Her hair had come all unbound and there were streaks through the orange chevrons on her cheeks where tears must have run.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you didn't lose. He's up there right now confessing. He made a sword that couldn't lose. He says he made it with a spell. It's there right now going mad on him.”

Zero didn't quite know who or what she was talking about, but she saw the urgency in her eyes and grabbed the sunflower staff from the corner of the room. Together they ran out of the Panthemium and off toward the castle.

Staff and Blade

T
he
sword slowly levitated until it was level with the loft where the children cowered. There it hung like a compass needle, swinging back and forth, back and forth, in a narrower and narrower arc. Screaming, the children kept rushing from one side to the other, trying to get out of its path, but there was not much room and the weakened structure had begun to tilt to and fro with their movements. Children on the sides of the loft were being squeezed up against the railings and some of them looked like they might soon either fall or be squashed. Their mothers had gathered below, screaming their children's names and preparing to catch them if they should fall. But they were quite high up and many of them would likely be injured, or worse, from the fall.

“Take the bloody sword!” a huge, red-faced Thralleen yelled furiously in Xemion's face.

“I can't!” he yelled back. But he had to do something. Instead of reaching for the sword, he took off down the aisle between the stone tables, heading toward the exit. A new series of outraged screams rose from the mothers and the stranded children, but Xemion had a plan. When he was halfway down the aisle to the doorway, he turned back, opened his palm, and shouted “Here!”

The sword stopped swiveling back and forth in front of the children and turned toward him.

“Come! I command you!” he yelled again, offering his open palm. The sword shot at him hilt first. But just before it reached him, he turned, still holding his hand over his head as if to take it, and ran toward the exit. Once outside, even if he did have to grab it, he would only do so long enough to shove it up to the hilt into the ground and hope it stayed there until the children could be rescued.

Unfortunately, before he got to the doorway Asnina arrived with Zero just behind. Indeed, he almost collided with them. He felt the sword graze by his knuckles as he stopped in front of the mighty Thralleen, but then it was gone again in an arc, upward to the ceiling. “Don't come in here!” he yelled, but Asnina's only response was to tug out her iron blade and come at him with a snarl. Just then the spelled sword, having completed a wide loop in the air, was heading once more for Xemion's palm. Hearing it before she saw it, Asnina struck a mighty blow, but the spell-made sword, full of momentum from its long flight, met her blade full force in the middle and cut it in half. Enraged, she struck at it with the hilt, but it was too quick. It pulled back and with a quick push forward pierced her through the shoulder. For a second she was pinned right up against the stone wall. With a grunt of pain she dropped to the ground as the sword yanked itself out.

Zero had tried to prepare herself for the reality of the spellcrafted sword, but now that it hovered before her, a whole lifetime of fearing spellcraft gathered in the one scream she emitted as she turned and fled in the opposite direction. Halfway across the hall the sword caught up, surpassed, and then turned and confronted her, eager to fight its old opponent.

“Someone get me a sword!” she screamed, holding the sunflower staff out in front of her in trembling hands, awaiting the inevitable attack. She didn't have to wait long. It struck so fast Xemion didn't even have time to shout. The sunflower staff was old by now and though its exterior was hard as wood, its centre was hollow. It should have been cut in two by the impact of the sword, but somehow it took and deflected the blow.

Zero was startled by the force exerted from the sword. She looked around in a panic. She saw Xemion, but didn't remember him yet. “Somebody get me a real sword!” she yelled again, as she readied herself for the next assault. Xemion was exhausted, but he pushed himself now beyond his limits, struggling open-palmed toward her. “Come to me!” he yelled again. But the sword ignored him, and before he could get to her there was an explosion of green light as the sword struck at her again. Once again Zero succeeded in deflecting it with her staff.

Xemion realized what was happening. “It can't cut through your staff,” he yelled, “because it's made from a sunflower not a tree. It can only cut through the things in the spell that made it: wood and metal and—” The rest of his words were lost in the shouts of the crowd as the sword rushed at Zero with enormous speed. But Zero had heard enough of what Xemion said. She held the staff at an angle to absorb the force just as Lighthammer had trained her to do. She let it spin her a little and came round, staff up at the ready. The next thrust came faster, then the next and the next. Soon a flurry of strikes and feints broke out. This was a fight of maximum motion that should have overcome even the most skilled swordsman, but Zero had fought this sword before and she was beginning to know its ways. Nothing it did could get past her guard. Seeing the sword begin to lag and fade, several of the terrified children stranded atop the loft made the mistake of cheering Zero on. Unfortunately this attracted the sword's attention. If it couldn't get around her guard, it could certainly get around theirs. Abandoning Zero, it soared back to the beams that supported the loft. The children now began to shriek in earnest as it slashed mightily through the first beam, causing one whole side of the loft to lurch downward.

“Come to me!” Xemion screamed again, but the sword would never be fooled by this ruse again. If he wanted it to stop he would have to say it and mean it. It carefully positioned itself for another swing at the loft, but by this time Zero had seen its purpose and was standing in front of the beam, guarding it, her staff held before her in both hands.

“Make it stop!” she screamed angrily at Xemion as the sword came at her.

It struck quicker than it ever had, hurtling down with full force on the staff, but still the sunflower stalk held. This enraged the sword. As Xemion staggered and swayed in the centre of the hall, he called out in his most spellbinding voice, trying to stop the sword. But this only seemed to make the weapon more frantic. It hacked and hacked, but Zero followed, warding it away from the groaning beam.

Meanwhile, Belphegor the Nain, his brother Tomtenisse Doombeard, and several others were struggling to stand one of the long stone tables on end so they could lean it up against the wall and rescue the children.

To make matters worse, the wood from the severed staircase had been ignited by one of the fallen chandeliers and it was burning fiercely a few feet away from the lone beam that was supporting the loft. Zero tried to keep herself clear of it. Her fight was accurate, valiant, and brave, but slowly the spell-made sword came at her and began to drive her toward it. And every time it succeeded in getting inside her defences it would hack away a little piece of her breastplate so that after a time, the clasps that kept the two sides together were cut through and began to come undone. Jagged images of her mother ripping her clothes off in a crying, screaming rage burned through Zero's mind and her terror all but overcame her, but she willed it away as best she could.

“Make it stop!” she screamed even more desperately at Xemion. She was tiring, but the sword was tireless. Grey with exhaustion, Xemion stood near her now, trying to get close enough to grab the sword's hilt. “Stop. I command you!” he screamed.

Zero was near enough to the fire now that she could feel its intense heat. With the next hack of the sword, the last link in the clasp of her armour was cut through. The breastplate spun open. Another hack and it fell in two pieces. She was fighting now in her tunic. Terrified, she picked up the largest piece of her breastplate and used it as a shield.

Xemion kept trying to grab the sword, but he was slow and weary and it easily dodged, avoiding his grasp as it closed in on Zero. Soon she would be overcome. The children screamed. The terrible moment was upon them. The sword had finally stricken the last fragment of the shield from Zero's hand. There she stood, backed up against the fire as the loft teetered above her. With one quick, sharp blow the sword steered the sunflower staff into the flames.

“No!” Zero bellowed as her staff began to burn. She held it as long as she could, but it was dry and hollow and the flames began to lick up its length from the inside, climbing to her hand. She swung the staff back and forth, trying to put the flames out. She spun it, leaving a brief wheel of fire rolling through the air, but within seconds her knuckles were scorched and she had to throw it down. There, finally, she stood defenceless and terrified before the dreaded spellcraft. And now Xemion knew the sword would end it just as Vallaine had feared it would end. The sword drew back, its shining point aimed surely at her wildly beating heart. It seemed to notch itself into place in the shadows like an arrow in a crossbow. The children on the loft wailed with terror. The Nains hollered with rage. The Thralls shrieked. But nothing could prevent the flight of that sword to Zero's chest.

There was a sickening thud when it struck, and an eye-burning burst of sparks. For several seconds, everyone was blinded, but then, as the darkening sparks fell to the flagstone floor, all could see what had come to pass. There lay Xemion, flat on his back with the hilt of the spell-made sword protruding from his chest. At the last moment he had summoned all his remaining strength and flung himself in its path.

By now the Nains had succeeded in getting one of the stone tables up against the wall. They began climbing up and rescuing the children. Barrels of Glittervein's beer were overturned to put out the fires. Furious, desperate mothers began to secure and soothe their terrified children. And there stood Zero, her breast heaving with the effort of each breath as she looked down over the fallen Xemion, her hand covering her mouth, almost remembering him. At that moment there was a terrible howl. It was Bargest. He had finally disobeyed his master's order to stay put outside the Panthemium. Those who had not fled the castle watched the giant dog as he approached his master's body. Sniffing and whining his way forward, he leaned his long snout over Xemion's chest and emitted a grievous, long whimper. “Please. Please, O moon. O stars, I beg you,” the dog whispered as he began to lick Xemion's wounded brow urgently. “O Earth, I entreat thee.” In the midst of this, with an errant nudge of his nose, Bargest knocked the sword hilt over and onto the floor.

But where was the rest of the blade if it wasn't stuck through Xemion's heart and into the floor? Zero bent over him, gently opened the hole in Xemion's chain mail and tunic, and saw the darkening bruise where the full force of the blade had struck him. There was no incision, nothing imbedded. She looked around, and for the first time saw the sparkling, golden particles that were falling all around them like stardust. And then she realized — all but the hilt of the sword had shattered and burst into a million pieces when it hit his chest. A second longer and Zero might have also noticed that, after landing softly on the grey flagstones, the particles began to move slowly toward one another, little particles forming bigger particles. But just then there was a rattling gasp as the fallen Xemion, whose own sword had been unable to pierce him, attempted to take in air. Someone cried out “He lives! He lives!”

There was a gurgling sound and Xemion suddenly coughed and his eyes fluttered open. He tried to focus. Seeing Zero, he tried to speak, but no words would come, just croaks and coughs. Zero stared down at him, frightened and confused, still breathing so heavily from her own exertions that her lungs felt as if they were burning. A streak of blood-matted hair hung down the side of her face where the wound still brimmed and dripped. The arm of one side of her tunic had been scorched by fire and still smouldered. His eyes closed and a name came to her lips. She said the name — “Xemion” — and a tiny welcome morsel of peace entered her heart. Then she turned and ran down the aisle to help Asnina the Thrall, who, having fainted from the pain of the sword thrust through her shoulder, was just now regaining consciousness.

The next time he opened his eyes, Xemion became aware of another face peering at him. Much of it was covered in blood and his vision was blurry. It was hard to focus. “Do you realize what you've done?” Veneetha Azucena shouted. As she bent in closer he could see that the blood had run like a cloak all down one shoulder and was slowly dripping off her fingers. “You have betrayed us. You've betrayed us!” she shrieked.

Xemion was only dimly aware of what happened next. He couldn't remain conscious. Hands grabbed his body and lifted him. The one they called Zero, the one he knew as Saheli, shouted something. He heard Bargest's growled supplications, and then, just as everything was slipping away, a voice that might have been Vallaine's said, “Get him out of here. We can't have him anywhere in this city.”

Xemion felt himself being lifted and carried along. His last thought as he lost consciousness completely was of the sword.
What had happened to it?

⚔

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the scattered particles of the sword were gravitating toward one another. First the blade reassembled — all but one small particle — its point. For a while it slowly revolved, seeking this one infinitesimally small missing piece, but when it came full circle and still hadn't located it, it began to jerk and tug its way across the stone floor in search of the hilt. This it found easily, close to the place where it had fallen from Xemion's chest. Then, just as these two pieces joined with a click that emitted a sudden, brief light, Veneetha Azucena reached down and grabbed it, her hand and wrist likewise lit by that sudden brightness, which lingered for several seconds.