Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

“We prime it with a death. A donated death, one of our own. In the making, the knife is bonded, matched to the intended primer, so they are very personal, d’you see.”

Fawn pushed herself up, increasingly riveted and increasingly disturbed. “Go on.”

“When you’re a Lakewalker who means to give your death to a knife and you’re close to dying—wounded in the field beyond hope of recovery, or dying at home of natural causes, you—or more often your comrade or kin—take the sharing knife and insert it into your heart.”

Fawn’s lips parted. “But…”

“Yes, it kills us. That’s the whole point.”

“Are you saying people’s souls go into those knives?”

“Not souls, ah! Knew you’d ask that.” He swiped his hand through his hair.

“That’s another farmer rumor. Makes so much trouble… Even our groundsense doesn’t tell us where people’s souls go after their deaths, but I promise you it’s not into the knives. Just their dying ground. Their mortality.” He started to add, “Lakewalker god-stories say the gods have… well, never mind that now.”

Now, there was a rumor she had heard. “People say you don’t believe in the gods.”

“No, Little Spark. Somewhat the reverse. But that doesn’t enter into this.

That knife”—he pointed to the blue hilt—“is my own, grounded to me. I had it made special. The bone for it was willed to me by a woman named Kauneo, who was slain in a bad malice war up northwest of the Dead Lake. Twenty years ago. We were way late spotting it, and it had grown very powerful. The malice hadn’t found many people to use out in that wilderness, but it had found wolves, and… well. The other knife, which you used yesterday, that was her primed knife, grounded to her. Her heart’s death was in it. The bone of it was from an uncle of hers—I never met him, but he was a legendary patroller up that way in his day, fellow named Kaunear. You probably didn’t have time to notice it, but his name and his curse on malices were burned on the blade.”

Fawn shook her head. “Curse?”

“His choice, what to have written on his bone. You can order the makers to put any personal message you want that will fit. Some people write love notes to their knife-heirs. Or really bad jokes, sometimes. Up to them. Two notes, actually. One side for the donor of the bone, the other for the donor of the heart’s death, which is put on after the knife is primed. If there’s a chance.”

Fawn imagined that bone blade she’d held being slowly shoved into a dying patroller woman’s heart, maybe someone like Mari, by… who had done it? Dag?

Twenty years seemed terribly long ago—could he really be as old as, say, forty?

“The deaths we share with the malices,” said Dag quietly, “are our own, and no others’.”

“Why?” whispered Fawn, shaken.

“Because that’s what works. How it works. Because we can, and no one else can.

Because it is our legacy. Because if a malice, every malice, is not killed when it emerges, it just keeps growing. And growing. And getting stronger and smarter and harder to get at. And if there is ever one we can’t get, it will grow till the whole world is gray dust, and then it, too, will die. When I said you’d saved the world yesterday, Spark, I was not joking. That malice could have been the one.”

Fawn lay back, clutching her sheets to her breast, taking this in. It was a lot to take in. If she had not seen the malice up close—the rock-dust scent of its foul breath still seemed to linger in her nostrils—she was not sure she could have understood fully. I still don’t understand. But oh, I do believe.

“We just have to hope,” Dag sighed, “that we run out of malices before we run out of Lakewalkers.”

He held the sheath-pouch down on his thigh with his stump and pulled out the blue-hilted knife. He cradled it thoughtfully for a moment, then, with a look of concentration, touched it to his lips, closing his eyes. His face set in disturbed lines. He laid the knife down exactly between himself and Fawn, and drew back his hand.

“This brings us to yesterday.”

“I jabbed that knife into the malice’s thigh,” said Fawn, “but nothing happened.”

“No. Something happened, because this knife was not primed, and now it is.”

Fawn’s face screwed up. “Did it suck out the malice’s mortality, then? Or immortality? No, that makes no sense.”

“No. What I think”—he looked up from under wary brows—“mind you, I’m not sure yet, I need to talk with some folks—but what I think is, the malice had just stolen your baby’s ground, and the knife stole it back. Not soul, don’t you go imagining trapped souls again—just her mortality.” He added under his breath,

“A

death without a birth, very strange.”

Fawn’s lips moved, but no sound came out.

“So here we sit,” he went on. “The body of this knife belongs to me, because Kauneo willed me her bones. But by our rules, the priming in this knife, its mortality, belongs to you, because you are its next of kin. Because your unborn child, of course, could not will it herself. Here things get really… get even more mixed up, because usually no one is allowed to will and give their priming till they are adult enough to have their groundsense come in fully, about fourteen or fifteen, and older is stronger. And anyway, this was a farmer child.

Yet no death but mine should have been able to prime this knife. This is a…

this is a right mess, is what it is, actually.”

Though still shaken by her sudden miscarriage, Fawn had thought all decisions about her personal disaster were behind her, and had been wearily grateful that no more were to be faced. It was a kind of relief, curled within the grief.

Not so, it seemed. “Could you use it to kill another malice?” Some redemption, in all this chain of sorrows?

“I would want to take it to my camp’s best maker, first. See what he has to say.

I’m just a patroller. I am out of my experience and reckoning, here. It’s a strange knife, could do something unknown. Maybe unwanted. Or not work at all, and as you have seen, to get right up to a malice and then have your tools fail makes a bit of a problem.”

“What should we do? What can we do?”

He gave a rough nod. “On the one hand, we could destroy it.”

“But won’t that waste… ?”

“Two sacrifices? Yes. It wouldn’t be my first pick. But if you speak it, Spark, I will break it now in front of you, and it will be over.” He laid his hand over the hilt, his face a mask but his eyes searching hers.

Her breath caught. “No—no, don’t do that. Yet, anyhow.” And on the other hand, there is no other hand. She wondered if his sense of humor was gruesome enough to have had exactly that thought as well. She suspected so.

She gulped and continued, “But your people—will they care what some farmer girl thinks?”

“In this matter, yes.” He rolled his shoulders, as though they ached. “If it’s all right with you, then, I’ll speak of this first with Mari, my patrol leader, see what notions she has. After that, we’ll think again.”

“Of course,” she said faintly. He means it, that I should have a say in this.

“I would take it kindly if you would take charge of it till then.”

“Of course.”

He nodded and handed her the leather pouch, leaving her to resheathe the knife.

The linen bag, however, he picked up to put with his arm contraption. His joints crackled and popped as he stood up and stretched, and he winced. Fawn sank back down on the tick and stole a closer look at the bone blade. The faint, flowing lines burned brown into the bone’s pale surface read: Dag. My heart walks with yours. Till the end, Kauneo.