Forging the Darksword - Margaret Weis [160]
The sword lay like a corpse at his feet, the personification of the catalyst’s sin.
“Destroy it!” he gasped hoarsely, and was actually stretching out his hand to take hold of it, with some wild notion of hurling it into the very heart of the blazing coals, when Joram knocked him aside.
“Are you mad?”
Losing his footing, Saryon stumbled backward into a stack of wooden forms. “No, I am sane for the first time in days,” he cried in a hollow voice, picking himself up. “Destroy it, Joram. Destroy it, or it will destroy you!”
“Going into the fortune-telling business?” snarled Joram angrily, “You’ll rival Simkin!”
“I do not need cards to see the future in that weapon,” Saryon said, pointing at it with a trembling hand. “Look at it, Joram! Look at it! You are Dead, but life beats and pulses in your veins! You care, you feel! The sword is dead! And it will bring only death.”
“No, Catalyst!” Joram said, his eyes as dark and cold as the blade. “For you will give it Life.”
“No.” Saryon shook his head resolutely. Gathering his robes about him, he sought for the words to argue with Joram and make him understand. But he could look at nothing, think of nothing, but the sword lying upon the stone floor, surrounded by the refuse of its making.
“You will give it Life, Saryon,” Joram repeated softly, lifting the weapon clumsily in his hand. Bits of clay clung to its surface. Thin tentacles of metal, from where the molten alloy had run into small crevices within the mold, branched out from the body. “You talk very righteously of death, Catalyst. And you are right. This”—he shook the sword awkwardly, almost dropping it, its weight twisting his wrist—“is dead. It deals death. But the blade cuts both ways, Saryon. It deals life as well. It will be life for Andon and his people, to say nothing of the others out there Blachloch plans to exploit.”
“You don’t care about any of that!” Saryon accused, breathing heavily.
“Perhaps I don’t,” Joram said coldly. Straightening, tossing the curly mane of black hair back from his face, he stared at Saryon, the dark eyes expressionless. “Who does? The Emperor? Your Bishop? What about your god even? No, just you, Catalyst. And that is your misfortune, not mine. Because you care, you will do this for me.”
Saryon’s tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. Words seethed in his brain, but found no utterance. How could this young man see into the very darkness of his soul?
Seeing the catalyst’s agonized face and wide, staring eyes, Joram smiled once again, that eerie smile in which there was no light.
“You say we have brought death into the world,” he said, shrugging. “I say death was already in the world, and we have brought life.”
The sword lay upon the anvil. Joram had placed it once again into the coals, heating it until the metal was malleable. The weapon glowed red, taking on the properties of the iron in the alloy rather than the white-glowing darkstone. Now, with ringing blows of his hammer, the young man beat the edges of the blade thin. Once the weapon was tempered, he would use a stone wheel to grind the point and edges to cutting sharpness.
Saryon watched Joram work, his mind in turmoil, his eyes glazed and stinging. His head pounded with the hammer blows that jolted through his body.
Life … death … life … death … Every hammer blow, every heart beat, struck it out. Saryon had been wrong. The sword wasn’t dead, he realized now. It was alive, terribly alive, twisting and jerking, seeming to revel in every blow. The noise was unnerving, but when Joram finally cast the hammer aside, the terrible silence was louder and more painful than the hammer’s pounding. Gripping the sword firmly with long iron tongs, Joram looked grimly over at the catalyst. Hunched miserably in his robes, Saryon shivered with a chill sweat.
“Now, Catalyst,” said Joram. “Grant me Life.” He spoke in a mocking voice, imitating Blachloch.
Saryon closed