Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [166]
The knife to cut open the vein would be heated, too, to prevent infection. There were several refinements that Dag recalled from the time he’d been bonded to Kauneo’s knife that were just not needed, here. In a moment of wild panic, Dag wondered whether he could fake it if this didn’t work—stab Crane with the useless blade before he could complain, and pretend to his audience that he’d actually made and bonded a true knife. But Remo and Barr would know, blight.
Dag found himself settling cross-legged more comfortably, as if for a healing, which was disturbing—right, let it join the yapping pack of his doubts to deal with later. This groundwork had even less room for irresolution than did patrolling. He glanced at Fawn and relieved her of one concern: “He can’t feel a thing anywhere below his neck. You can’t hurt him.” She nodded grimly. He tipped the bone knife down below Crane’s arm as Fawn, holding up the dead weight a little awkwardly, took Dag’s war knife and scored a deep cut on the pale surface of skin, squeezing it to make it bleed and drip.
And then Dag dropped down into that other world, of inner essence seen from the inside, close-up. The material world—the light of the afternoon, the bare trees, the stone slope, the rustling men craning their necks—faded like a ghostly vision, present but formed of fog, and the coursing torrents of the ground beneath it all became palpable to him. The men were roiling complexities, Fawn a blazing fire. Dag was his ground. The knife in his hand was a knotted pattern of potential. Crane…Crane was a dark and furrowed mess, but his blood dripped brightly.
Dag extended his ghost hand beneath the vivid stream, casting his mind back over the involution he’d known best: the one in his own pledged knife, which he’d watched be made for him by the maker in Luthlia. He had himself unmade it again in Raintree as part of breaking the malice’s deadly groundlock. The involution was the knife maker’s greatest gift, the cupped hands to hold the offered mortality. He folded his ghost hand around a splash of Crane. His current unwelcome affinity with the renegade might well be rendering this easier—add that dark thought to the pack, no time for it now. He let his ground flow into the furrow along the inner edge of the blade, there to join with the knife’s own waiting ground. Let it all set, solidify.
He pulled back, parting from that piece of himself he’d turned into a cup for Crane.
And gasped in astonishment. Ah, blight! I didn’t know it was going to hurt this much! He watched in horrified fascination as his ghost hand tore away from the part of itself caught in the knife. It felt like biting off his own finger. Ye gods, and Dar went through this every time he bonded a knife? Brother, I beg your forgiveness.
If the curl of ground was just right…I either have it now, or I don’t. If I don’t, I can boil the blade again and start over—many a maker’s apprentice has had to do just that, their first few trials. But beneath that was the stronger thought, mule-headed in its certainty: I have it.
He came back, blinking, to the surface world, trembling and cold as if from a deep healing. The bloody knife shook in his tight grip, but it was his left arm that ached, and his ghost hand felt on fire. A quick check found his groundsense down to a hundred paces. Again. I won’t be recovering from this in a day. But the groundwork was over. Everything after this was going to be…he declined to finish the thought, easy. Everything after this was going to be as blighted bizarre as everything before, likely.
Dag swallowed and found his cracked voice. “Now, at this point in a usual knife making, the maker would clean it up and give it to its new owner, to use later on. A good binding can last a lifetime.” By definition. He stuck his hand out rather blindly toward Fawn. She raised her brows at him, pried the knife from his stiffened fingers, and rubbed the spare blood from it