“Stop!” Hrym shouted, throwing up a wall of ice in a semicircle around them. “I am not a demon! I am afflicted by a demon!”
The bluish shadows of Lais and the master struck the other side of the ice wall, and the man even tried to climb it before pausing—more miraculously, he made it almost halfway up before sliding down. After a brief inaudible conferral with Lais, the master said, “What’s the difference?”
“It’s the difference between someone having a leech stuck to him, and someone being a leech!” Rodrick called.
Another quiet discussion, and then the master said, “All right. Take down the wall, and let me examine this cursed sword.”
“Do you promise not to attack us?” Rodrick said.
“My student says she owes you a debt. As she is in my charge, that debt extends to me. I will not harm you unless you attack me first.”
“Hrym,” Rodrick whispered, “I know you can’t really control it, but if you discover some deep reserve of inner fortitude, please use it to keep from having one of your … outbursts … in the next few minutes.”
“Oh, fine, put the burden on me,” Hrym said, not quietly at all. “Might as well tell someone afflicted with a pox to use his inner fortitude not to get spots all over his face.”
“Yes, fine, point taken.”
The wall dissolved, splashing their feet. Lais and her master stepped daintily out of the way, but Rodrick just resignedly let his boots get wet. Wet feet were the least of his problems today.
Lais frowned. “You never told me your sword was cursed.”
“Tainted,” Rodrick said. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it.”
“He only just told me a day or two ago,” Hrym said.
“Lay the sword down,” the master ordered.
“You won’t … hurt him?” Rodrick said.
The master looked at him, face blank, then slowly shook his head. “Your … friend … is in no danger from me.”
Rodrick placed Hrym on the ground, and the master crouched, passing his hands over the blade without touching it. “This taint inside him, though,” the man said. “That will eventually consume him. The sword—Hrym, is it? Hrym, your mind will gradually be overtaken by the taint, until there is nothing left of you, and then you will unleash your powers in a frenzy of destruction. I saw the wall you made. You have other powers of ice?”
“I’m more or less a white dragon in sword form,” Hrym said. “It’s a long story.”
“Mmm.” The man betrayed no expression. “I would like to speak to your friend, Hrym. Lais will keep you company.”
The master took Rodrick’s elbow and steered him away, as Lais began chatting with the sword, voice all forced conviviality. “So, how long have you been a magical sword of living ice?” she said.
“Are we out of your friend’s earshot?” the monk murmured after they’d walked some little distance away.
Rodrick nodded. “His hearing is no better than a man’s, as far as I know.”
The monk sighed. “Tell me, how long has he been tainted?”
“Mmm … roughly a year, since he was first exposed. There were no signs for a while, not really, just the occasional flash of red light. Then he started to giggle, and talk to himself. Then the flashes and the giggles started to presage what I’ve been calling ‘fits.’ Explosions of ice magic and bursts of random chaos. He made a mess in Absalom, and nearly blew a hole in a ship on the way to Jalmeray, and caused some trouble for us in Niswan with an explosion a few days ago. The attacks are coming more frequently.”
“How did this happen? Were you fighting at the Worldwound?”
“Something like that,” Rodrick said, but the monk’s scowl made it clear he wouldn’t accept vague answers. The real story was too complex, and didn’t paint Rodrick in the best light. The monk seemed an observant sort, so Rodrick chose his words carefully. “I was part of a group, last year, searching for what I was told was an ancient vault that contained a great artifact.”
“Lais mentioned you were a treasure hunter. Dangerous work, but it is one way to see the world.”
Rodrick nodded. “Including parts of the world no sane person would ever want to see. When we arrived at the vault, however, we discovered it was actually the prison of a demon lord. A mad priest was attempting to let the demon free, and Hrym sacrificed himself by freezing the man solid in magical ice—along with Hrym himself. I wasn’t pleased with my friend’s sacrifice, though, so over the course of several months, I dug Hrym out of the tomb of ice and freed him. By then he’d … picked up some of the demon’s taint, through proximity.”
“Spellstealer,” the monk said, and Rodrick started. He’d only heard that name once before, when a druid speculated about Hrym’s true origins. “There are one or two surviving examples of such ancient swords in Vudra,” the monk said. “We have lost the making of such things, if we ever knew it. Those swords are not intelligent, like Hrym is. They merely soak up magic from other objects, and from casters, temporarily gaining the properties of the spells they steal, though they are not without their dangers—some say they take a toll on a man’s soul. How did Hrym come to be as he is?”
“Apparently a white dragon sat on him for a very long time, until Hrym soaked up not just the dragon’s magic, but also something of its mind. The dragon’s intelligence and love for gold, anyway—the rest of Hrym’s personality, I think, just developed on its own. The effects seem to be permanent. At least, he’s been like this for a very long time.”
“That is very interesting,” the monk said. “Worthy of study, too. But for now, we have a greater problem. This taint will grow, as you have seen already, until there is nothing left of the Hrym you know. I fear that may happen soon. If he truly has the powers you say, and he begins to lash out unceasingly…”
“He’d cover this whole island in ice,” Rodrick said. “I’m sure the mystics and arcanists in the capital would be able to stop him eventually, but … it would take a long, bad time. Fighting Hrym would be easier if he were a white dragon—those, at least, can be killed. How do you kill a magical sword?”
“There are ways.” The monk’s voice was grim, and Rodrick grabbed his arm.
“No. No killing him. If you don’t see a way to help Hrym, I’ll take a ship out into the deep ocean, where one more ice floe won’t do any harm, and stay with him until his mind seems entirely gone.” Rodrick knew that point might well come after it was impossible to escape Hrym’s icy madness, or even after Rodrick had been killed by accident, but Rodrick only had one true friend in this world, and he intended to remain true, just this once.
The monk looked at Rodrick’s hand on his arm, but Rodrick didn’t release the grip. The monk nodded, then patted the hand in a friendly way. “All right. I think we might be able to heal him—or, at least, give him a chance. Much of the power for the healing will have to come from Hrym himself. Is he strong-willed?”
“He’s the most stubborn creature I have ever met.” Rodrick released his grip. Also cantankerous and lazy, but those were less comforting adjectives, so he left them out.
“Good.” The master strode back to Hrym. “Friend sword! Do you wish to drive this taint from your body and mind?”
“Nothing would please me more. I don’t like being unable to trust myself. Distrusting everyone else, that’s fine, that’s natural, but I prefer reliability in my own mind.”
“Then I will return in a moment.” The monk disappeared into his burrow, and returned shortly afterward carrying a black disk the size of a dinner plate. The monk sat down cross-legged, the disk in his lap. The thing was made of smooth stone, with a groove etched into it, swirling into the center.
“Is that some kind of magic?” Rodrick asked. “Can it cure Hrym?”
The monk grunted. “Magic, yes. Cure, no. But it might enable Hrym to cure himself.”
The old man picked up Hrym and placed him across his knees, the blade resting on the disk. Rodrick tried not to grimace. If Hrym had one of his fits now, the monk might be badly injured, and his magical plate broken too. “Rodrick, it’s not necessary, but it’s possible you could lend your psychic energy to help Hrym. The process is not without its dangers. Even struggles within the mind can have real consequences. Are you willing to try?”
“For Hrym? Anything.” That was at least two entirely honest statements in one day. Rodrick would have to be careful such things didn’t become a habit.
“Then sit, and touch his hilt.”
Rodrick did as instructed.
“I’d like to help, too,” Lais said.
“It’s very dangerous,” the monk began. “You could be hurt, or killed, or have your mind destroyed.”
Rodrick’s mouth twisted. The monk hadn’t gone into that much detail about the dangers when he’d mentioned them to him.
“My debt.” Lais shrugged, as if that said it all.
The monk shook his head, and Rodrick expected him to begin a speech that was some variation on “Young people today are foolish and disrespectful,” but instead he said, “As you wish. Take Rodrick’s hand.”
She did, giving it a reassuring squeeze.
“What’s going to happen?” Rodrick said.
“You’re going to fight a demon,” the monk said. “And defeat it, if the gods are good.”
“Well, the good gods are good,” Rodrick said. “But there are evil gods, too, like this god of betrayal Lais mentioned, and they’re evil…” He trailed off, not just because no one was paying attention, but because the monk was humming. It was a low hum, just a hair too variable to be called toneless, and it was rhythmic, a single deep repeating syllable. An answering sound emerged from beneath Hrym, as if the disk itself were singing, or vibrating, or resonating along with the monk’s hum. As Rodrick listened—he couldn’t stop listening, any more than he could stop his fingernails or hair from growing—his own heartbeat and breathing seemed to slow until they sounded in sync with the hum. His surroundings became hazy, the hills around him and the jungle beyond on one side and the sea beyond on the other turning to watercolor paintings of themselves.
Rodrick felt a sense of lightness and disconnection, but rather than rising out of his body, as astral travelers were said to do, he seemed to be sinking into himself, down to unimagined depths, to the interior of some vast subterranean inner space. The only things in the world that seemed real as that warm and welcoming darkness engulfed him were Lais’s fingers clutching his one hand, and Hrym’s hilt in his other. That, and the sound, the hum, the heartbeat of the world—
Then he was somewhere else.
* * *
The three of them—Rodrick, Lais, and Hrym—stood on a vast field of snow. Everything was icy white, except in the distance, where the jagged broken peak of a red stone mountain loomed, smoke boiling into the sky, rivers of molten rock running down its sides, a brighter shade of red. “Volcano,” Rodrick murmured. Were volcanoes supposed to be blood red like that? He’d heard of them, but never thought to see one. Was he seeing one now? The monk had said Rodrick could lend Hrym his “psychic” energy, which suggested this was a mindscape, or some kind of waking dream. The monk had also said it was dangerous, which meant Rodrick should tread more carefully than he normally would in a dream.
Lais squeezed his hand, and he stopped looking at the volcano to look at her. Not a dream, no, because she was still entirely clothed—and was she taller than before? He was sure she was. She’d been quite short, to begin with, head barely to his chest, and now she could very nearly look him in the eye.
“Look what Hrym has become,” she said.
Rodrick was still holding Hrym’s hilt, though it felt strange now, smooth and curved, and when he looked, he saw why.
Hrym wasn’t a sword anymore. At least, not here. Here, Hrym was an immense white dragon, easily twenty-five feet long from snout to tail, and Rodrick was holding one of the talons of the dragon’s foreleg. Rodrick waited a moment for panic, or bowel-loosening terror, or overwhelming wonder, but there was nothing like that. He didn’t even feel surprise—it wasn’t like he’d failed to notice he was standing next to a dragon, holding its dagger-sized claw. He just hadn’t thought much about it. The dragon was just Hrym.
Even sitting on his hindquarters, Hrym still towered over them, and he turned his serpentine neck to regard them. His head was covered in slender horns, oddly frilled or webbed. “Ha,” he said. “This is more like it. I’m fully ambulatory. I believe I could even fly. I could get used to this.” He looked around the field. “No gold here, though. Can’t say I entirely approve of that.”
“That volcano,” Lais said.
“The taint,” Rodrick said. “That’s where the demon is. I think we’re inside your mind, Hrym.”
As they watched, the volcano shuddered … and grew, rising another ten feet, cracking the ice all around it. Hrym roared, a full-throated dragon’s fury. “It wants to melt me,” he growled. “We’ll see about that. You two. Climb on.” Hrym crouched down low so they could reach his back.
Rodrick had never, even once, dreamed of riding a dragon, but Lais scrambled up onto Hrym’s back like she did it every day. Rodrick followed, surprised to find that Hrym’s scales were neither cold nor hot, and that they were easily rough enough for him to climb his way—slower than Lais had—to a place behind Hrym’s neck. They got themselves settled, Lais holding on to the dragon’s neck, and Rodrick behind, holding on to Lais. It would have been nicer to have her pressed against his back, but this probably wasn’t the time to think of such things.
Hrym beat his vast wings and they rose into the air, skimming low over the ice, the volcano approaching at a shocking speed, growing larger and larger. There was no sound but the buffeting wind, and Lais’s delighted laughter—all right, it was fun to fly on dragonback, though the imminent clash with a demonic taint rather spoiled Rodrick’s enjoyment—and, in the background, that low, rhythmic, chanting hum the monk had used to send them or guide them to this place.
Hrym landed on the slopes of the volcano, and where his claws touched, ice spread out, covering the red rock, with great hisses of steam rising up everywhere. Hrym roared again, and unleashed a blast of freezing breath, a wave of cold so thick and dense and frigid that it made his usual attacks seem like flurries compared to a blizzard. Everywhere his breath struck, the red rock turned to white ice, and Hrym threw back his great head and laughed. “Is this all it takes? Freeze the taint? This will be easy, then.”
Rodrick groaned. “Hrym!” he shouted. “Never say ‘this will be easy!’ I’m convinced there are whole legions of gods who lie in wait just to hear variations on that phrase, so they can teach us the folly of thinking things might work out for the best!”
“Ha!” Hrym said. “You worry too much, Rodrick. You always have. This is my mind, after all. I think I know it a little better than you do.”
MY MIND a voice boomed, seeming to come from the volcano, but also possibly from everywhere else too.
That voice. It had to be the voice of Kholerus, the demon lord whose prison Hrym had been pressed up against for all those long months. The demon had never spoken while Rodrick tried to free Hrym, perhaps because its prison made communication impossible, but he had no doubt the monster was speaking now—or whatever fragment of the demon’s identity Hrym had absorbed into himself, along with its taint of chaos. It was a voice of hissing fire and cracking stone.
THIS SWORD WILL BE THE VESSEL OF MY COMING, it boomed. MY TAINT WILL CONSUME HIM, AND CORRUPTION WILL SPREAD TO ALL WHO WIELD HIM, PASS FROM THEM TO ALL THEY TOUCH, UNTIL I AM MULTIPLIED ACROSS THE LAND.
“That sounds … bad,” Rodrick said.
“We’d better kill it, then,” Lais said.
“How do you fight a volcano?”
“You don’t,” she said. “You fight the thing that lives in the volcano.”
She pointed as something came crawling out of the volcano’s opening. The creature was, thankfully, a great deal smaller than the imprisoned demon lord Rodrick had glimpsed—which meant it was only twice the size of the dragon Hrym, instead of a hundred times as large. The wormlike thing slithered out, its eyes black, bulging, and multifaceted, like clusters of fish eggs. The demon’s mouth was full of grinding mandibles and oozing sores, drooling a flood of pus and spit that struck the molten rivers of rock and sent up foul-smelling clouds of smoke. The demon’s long, segmented body followed, endless red-and-black coils that were part serpent, part eel, and part millipede, with hundreds of twitching legs underneath, each tipped by a trio of daggerlike claws.
“Fine,” Rodrick said. “Then how do we fight that? It looks no easier to kill than a volcano would be.”
“I find that going for the eyes is a good approach.” Lais leapt from Hrym’s back.
Rodrick slid down to the ground, unsure whether he planned to join her or stop her, but Hrym rushed ahead of either of them, spraying ice in torrents and roaring, and attacked the demon head-on. The two of them rolled and fought, Hrym slashing and clawing as he exhaled ice, the demon scrabbling with its countless limbs. Rodrick stared, then noticed Lais running toward the creature’s rear end, where a stinger curled lethally, tall as a small tree. When she reached the monster, Lais seized one of its legs—nearly as tall as the woman herself—and twisted. To Rodrick’s astonishment, she tore the leg free, tossed it aside, and moved on to the next. If the demon lord noticed, the pain didn’t seem to count when compared to its ferocious battle with Hrym, but she at least was doing something.
But what could Rodrick do? He wasn’t a master of unarmed combat, and he didn’t even have a sword—
Suddenly, he had a sword, a duplicate of the longsword Hrym had been disguised to look like. He blinked. Well, fine, but armor—
He slumped under the weight of a full suit of plate mail, of the sort he’d only worn twice, and those times as part of complicated scams, not battles—
The weight lessened greatly, though the armor didn’t seem to change; it just got lighter. Rodrick began to smile. This might not be a dream, exactly, but it was like a dream, in that thoughts could affect it, to some extent. He should have realized when he’d noticed Lais was taller here than in reality—some subconscious desire for more stature had translated itself to actuality here.
Well. Let’s see what conscious desire could do.
The ground abruptly receded as Rodrick grew himself to giant proportions. He wished the helm away, then changed his mind and made it transparent, instead, then made the whole suit of armor into magical ice instead of impossibly lightweight steel. The sword, too, shifted to resemble Hrym in his true form—or his sword form, anyway; maybe this dragon was his true form, in some more fundamental sense.
Rodrick towered over the demon lord now, and he swept his sword down in a great arc, bisecting the monster’s body. The severed segments sprayed hideous ichors in green and yellow, and its back end thrashed wildly, unwilling to die. Lais somersaulted away from the thing’s throes, then got the hang of the trick herself, growing to a size matching Rodrick’s. She grabbed the end of the demon lord still connected to its head and began to twist while Rodrick set about chopping its still-living back end into tiny chunks.
NO! the demon boomed, and it tried to grow, too, and to heal its wounds, but it was no match for an onslaught on three fronts. When next it opened its hideous maw to shriek, Hrym shoved his head inside the cavernous mouth and breathed ice down Kholerus’s throat.
The demon lord’s body crystallized, turning blue, and when Rodrick struck it with his sword, the great worm shattered into fragments. Rodrick ground anything that resembled an eye, or a tooth, or a tongue into icy dust as fine as sand, and Hrym raged about, hurling ice at the volcano until it was all just a smooth hill of whiteness blending in with the plain.
Then they stood and stared at one another. “Is that it?” Rodrick said. “Did we—”
The distant background hum stopped, and the white world vanished.