Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [24]
“Why do malices want babies?”
He held out his hand and turned it over. “It’s the inverse of what the sharing knives share. Children unborn, and to a lesser extent, young, are in the most intense possible period of self-making of the most complex of grounds. Malices building up to a molt—to a major self-making, or self-remaking—seem to crave that food.”
“Couldn’t it steal from pregnant animals?”
Dar raised a brow. “If it wanted to molt into an animal body instead of a human one, perhaps.”
“They can and do,” Dag put in. “The Wolf Ridge malice couldn’t get enough humans, so it partly used wolves as well. I was told by patrollers who were in on the knifing of it that its form was pretty…pretty strange, at the end, and it was well past its first molt.”
Fawn made a disturbed face. So, she noticed, did Dar.
Dar continued, “Anyway. Secondly, you drove Dag’s unprimed knife into the thing.”
Fawn nodded. “Its thigh. He said, anywhere. I didn’t know.”
“Then—leaving that knife in place, right…?”
“Yes. That was when the bogle—the malice—picked me up the second time, by the neck. I thought it was going to shake me apart like a chicken.”
Dar glanced at her scars, and away. “Then you drove in the actual primed knife.”
“I figured I’d better be quick. It broke.” Fawn shivered in the remembered terror, and Dag’s left arm tightened around her. “I thought I’d ruined it. But then the malice dropped me and…and sort of melted. It stank.”
“Simplest explanation,” said Dar crisply. “A person carrying something very valuable to them who trips and falls, tries to fall so as to protect their treasure, even at the cost of hurting themselves. Malice snatches rich ground. Seconds later, before the malice has assimilated or stored that ground, it’s hit with a dose of mortality. In its fall, it blindly tries to shove that ground into a safe spot for it: the unprimed knife. A malice certainly has the power to do so by force and not persuasion. End result, one dissolved malice, one knife with an unintended ground jammed into it.” Dar sucked his lip. “More complicated explanations might be possible, but I haven’t heard anything in your testimony that would require them.”
“Hm,” said Dag. “So will it still work as a sharing knife, or not?”
“The ground in it is…strange. It was caught and bound at a point of most intense self-making and most absolute self-dissolution, simultaneously. But still, only a farmer’s ground after all.” He glanced up sharply. “Unless there’s something about the child no one is telling me. Mixed blood, for example?” His look at his brother was coolly inquiring and not especially respectful.
“It was a farmer child,” Fawn said quietly, looking at the soil. It was bare at the base of the steps, with a few broken hickory husks flattened into the old mud. Dag’s arm tightened silently around her again.
“Then it will have no affinity, and is useless. An unprimed knife that gets contaminated can be boiled clean and rededicated, sometimes, but not this. My recommendation is that you break it to release that worthless farmer ground, burn it—or send the pieces back to Kauneo’s kin with whatever explanation you can concoct that won’t embarrass you—and start over with a new knife.” His voice softened. “I’m sorry, Dag. I know you didn’t carry this for twenty years for such a futile end. But, you know, it happens that way sometimes.”
Fawn looked up at Dar. “I’ll have that back, now,” she said sturdily. She held out her hand.
Dar gave Dag an inquiring look, found no support, and reluctantly handed the sheathed knife back to Fawn.
“A lot of knives never get used,” said Dag, in a would-be casual tone. “I see no special need of rushing to dispose of this one. If it serves no purpose intact, it serves no more destroyed.”
Dar grimaced. “What will you keep it for, then? A wall decoration? A gruesome memento of your little adventure?”
Dag smiled down at Fawn; she wondered what her own face looked like just now. It felt cold. He said, “It had one use, leastways. It brought us together.”
“All the more reason to break