“In . . . insatiated? Insociated? A word that means you say stupid things and are never likely to change.”
“I don’t think we have word for that.”
“I’m sure I knew one,” she said. “Stupid language. It doesn’t have enough words.”
“How many words does your language have?”
“Many. Many, many, many. We have seventeen different ways of saying a person is no longer hungry.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Nonsense. You just have to be patient.”
“I’m beginning to wish you hadn’t learned that particular word.”
She grinned, getting out bowls and dishing out the soup. “You are a patient man, Siris of the Lost Whiskers. Did you not spend twenty years practicing with the sword? All to achieve a single important goal? That is patience.”
“I’m not sure it was,” he said, taking the bowl. “I only did all of that because it was expected of me. Once I started, it built upon itself. Nobody would let me do common things, like wash clothing. They’d insist on doing it. I needed to train. Keep training. Always. At a feast, I couldn’t eat the good foods, because everyone was watching.”
“I watch you every morning, with that sword, working until you sweat. That is not the mark of an impatient man.”
“I train because it . . . it’s what I am. I can’t explain it. It’s as natural to me as breathing. You wouldn’t call a man patient for reaching the ‘milestone’ of continuing to breathe for twenty years straight.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes, continuing to breathe is a tough enough prospect.” She grimaced at her bandage. The wound was healing, but slowly. Getting a sword though the stomach wasn’t the sort of thing you just shrugged off.
Unless you were Siris. He looked down at the God King’s ring on his finger.
Isa followed his glance. “We haven’t discussed,” she said, “what I said. About the ring . . .”
“It’s all right,” he said, stirring his soup. He took a sip. It was fantastic. How did she do that? It was just boiled leaves and chopped-up bamboo shoots. “I figured it out.”
“You did?”
“I must be of the lineage of one of the Deathless. That’s why I can use the rings. It’s why the God King was interested in my bloodline.”
“Wait. He was interested in your bloodline? Why?”
“I haven’t mentioned it,” he said. “But I’m pretty certain he set up the system of Sacrifices. It might . . . it might be that my family is the reason for his entire dominance of this area. It’s why he treated people with such tyranny—to encourage my bloodline to come fight him.”
“This changes everything,” she whispered.
He frowned at her.
“Deathless rarely have children,” she explained. “Some say that the children of a particular Deathless can challenge them, steal their immortality. Whatever the reason, there’s an unspoken rule among them. No children. They . . .”
“What?”
“It’s said that long ago, when they first seized power, the Deathless slaughtered everyone who was related to them.”
He fingered the Infinity Blade, buckled at his side. Well, that means I’m probably not related to the God King, he thought. He tried to get me to join him. He succeeded in getting one of my ancestors to join him. He’d not have kept us around if we could threaten him.
That relieved him. Though, one of the Dark Thoughts—as he’d started to think of them—crept into the back of his mind. A panicked sense that felt Isa knew too much, that she needed to be taught to hold her tongue, to fear him.
These things weren’t really thoughts. They were more basic than that. Instincts. Impulses. He fought this one down. They came to him frequently these days. Too frequently.
The conversation hit a lull. As he was finishing his last bites of soup, the nearby bamboo stalks rustled. He immediately stood, hand on sword, until a small form slipped out of the forest.
TEL had turned himself into dark cloth using Isa’s coat, and in doing so, had shrunk down to about three feet tall. He still had gemstone eyes.
The golem entered the clearing of their camp, then bowed. It took orders from Siris—so long as those orders didn’t violate previous commands. Siris didn’t trust the thing, particularly after Isa had warned him that the Deathless had ways of communicating over great distances.
But if TEL was a spy, he already knew the most important fact about Siris—namely where he was. Siris faced the option of either destroying the little golem or putting him to use. TEL had ignored orders to “go away” and “stop following me.”
He didn’t feel like destroying the thing. He just . . . well, he couldn’t. It hadn’t done anything against him, not overtly.
“Well?” Siris asked.
“The pathway is easy,” TEL said in a voice that was faintly reminiscent of rustling cloth. “I watched the sentries for three hours and seventeen minutes, and it is as the Lady Isa says. Four champions. I saw one of them slay a petitioner. Even the first champion is quite skilled.”
Siris rubbed the pommel of the Infinity Blade.
“You need to go eventually,” Isa said, looking up at the sky, which still held to its overcast gloom. “We can’t forage out here forever, and eventually those knights hunting you will realize they’ve lost our trail. They’ll spread out, and this direction—through the passes—is a natural place to search.”
“Can you make it?” Siris asked.
“Riding? Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Is that a brave front, or is it the truth?”
“Both?”
He took a deep breath. In her condition, she probably wouldn’t be able to recover the Infinity Blade if he fell. Still, it made him feel better to have her there to try. At least someone other than TEL would have a shot at the blade.
“Let’s go then.”
They didn’t break down camp; they’d probably make their way back here for the night before striking out for the Worker’s prison. Assuming he won. Assuming this Saydhi even knew the information he wanted. Assuming she kept her word and told him.
Those were a lot of assumptions, but this was the best option they had. Siris helped Isa onto the horse, smacking the thing in the face when it tried to bite him.
TEL walked over, then dropped. The black cloth unraveled, turning green, and plants sprouted. A few moments
later, TEL crawled free, now the size and shape of a small cat made entirely of leaves. He leaped up onto the horse’s rump, then settled back.
They set out, a solemn group passing through dew-wetted stalks of bamboo. Siris wore the God King’s ring, with its healing and teleportation powers. His fire ring had stopped working; the disc he’d dropped into the vent must have melted. Siris would rather have the healing anyway, and wearing more than one of the rings caused them to interfere with one another. You risked triggering the wrong ability, and Siris would prefer not to start himself on fire when trying to heal.
“So the God King was hunting your family,” Isa said speculatively as she rode. “Whiskers . . . it might have to do with that sword.”
He walked around a moss-covered stump. “Yeah. It does.”
She raised an eyebrow at him from horseback.
“I . . . uh . . . learned something from the minions in the castle, and TEL mostly confirmed. The blade needed to drink the souls of people related to my bloodline in order to activate. That’s why the God King lived, even though I stabbed him with it.”
Instead of looking betrayed that he’d withheld the information from her, she just grinned in a self-satisfied way, as if proud of having pulled the secret from him. “Now that is interesting. You don’t have any estranged brothers that just happen to be evil, do you? It would be terribly convenient.”
He laughed. “No, my only relative is my mother.” Well, her and—
He froze in place.
Isa pulled up, and TEL poked a green, catlike head out from behind her, leaf-ears perking up.
“Hell take me,” he whispered, pulling free the Infinity Blade. “The sword might be active after all, Isa.”
“Then the God King—”
“No. After beating him, I went into the palace dungeons. I met a man who served the God King, a man who claimed to be one of my ancestors.” Siris turned, looking toward her. “The daerils in the place, they said the God King felt only one more soul was needed. I slew my ancestor; that might have been enough.” He turned the silvery blade; it glistened in a beam of filtered sunlight.
“Great,” she said. “So all we need to do is hunt the God King down and kill him again. How hard can it be to locate, fight your way to, and slay a god?”