Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [23]
“Fluke,” muttered Dar, though more faintly. Craning anew at the cord. “Yeah, that’s life with Spark. Just one fluke after another. Seems no end to them. You were halfway through explaining a making. Go on.”
Dag, Fawn realized, had been through the process from the donor’s side at least once, if with some maker up in Luthlia and not with Dar. In addition to whatever he had learned from being around his brother, however intermittently.
Dar took a breath and went on. “So at the end of the knife-making, we have a little of the pledged donor’s ground in the knife, and that ground is…well, you could say it’s hungry for the rest. It wants to be reunited with its source. And the other way around. So then we come to the priming itself.” His face was stern, contemplating this, for reasons that had nothing to do with her, Fawn thought.
“When the knife is”—he hesitated, then chose the plain word—“driven into the donor’s heart, killing him, his essential ground begins to break up. At this very point of dissolution, the ground is drawn into the knife. And held there.”
“Why doesn’t it just all dissolve then?” Fawn couldn’t help asking, then mentally kicked herself for interrupting.
“That’s another aspect of my making. If you can fluke it out, good luck to you. I’m not just a bone-carver, you know.” His smile was astringent. “When someone—like Dag, for example—then manages to bring the primed knife up to a malice and plunge it in, the malice, which eats ground and cannot stop doing so, draws in the dissolving ground released by the breaking of the knife. You could say the mortal ground acts as a poison to the malice’s ground, or as a stroke of lightning to a tree, or…well, there are a number of ways to say it, all slightly wrong. But the malice’s ground shares in the dissolution of the mortal ground, and since a malice is made of nothing but ground, all the material elements it is holding in place fall with it.”
Fawn touched the scars on her neck. “That, I’ve seen.”
Dar’s brows drew down. “How close were you, really?”
Fawn held out her arm and squinted. “About half my arm’s length, maybe.” And her arms weren’t all that long.
“Dar,” said Dag gently, “if you haven’t grasped this, I’ll say it again; she drove my primed knife into the Glassforge malice. And I speak from repeated personal experience when I tell you, that’s way, way closer than any sane person would ever want to be to one of those things.”
Dar cleared his throat uncomfortably, staring down at the knife in his lap.
It popped out before she could help herself: “Why can’t you just use dying animals’ grounds to poison malices?”
Dag smiled a little, but Dar scowled in deep offense. Dar said stiffly, “They haven’t the power. Only the ground of a Lakewalker donor will kill a malice.”
“Couldn’t you use a lot of animals?”
“No.”
“Has it been tried?”
Dar frowned harder. “Animals don’t work. Farmers don’t work either.” His lips drew back unkindly. “I’ll leave you to make the connection.”
Fawn set her teeth, beginning to have an inkling about the piglet insult.
Dag gave his brother a grim warning look, but put in, “It’s not just a question of power, although that’s part of it. It’s also a question of affinity.”
“Affinity?” Fawn wrinkled her nose. “Never mind. What happened to my—to Dag’s other knife?” She nodded to it.
Dar sighed, as if he was not quite sure of what he was about to say. “You have to understand, a malice is a mage. It comes out of the ground, sessile and still in its first molt, a more powerful mage than any of us alone will ever be, and just gets stronger after. So. First, this malice snatched the ground of your unborn child.”
Fawn’s spirits darkened in memory. “Yes. Mari said no one had known malices could do that separately. Is that important?” It would be consoling if that horror had at least bought some key bit of knowledge that might help someone later.
Dar shrugged. “It’s not immediately clear to me that it makes any