The Destiny of the Sword by Dave Duncan Read Free Book Online

knowing which was the case now, but he suspected that the next move was up to the mortals—why else would the ship have been encased hi mist? It was as if they had all been shut in a closet, as he himself had many times in the past locked up an errant protege to meditate upon his shortcomings. By afternoon he was becoming seriously concerned.
    He sat himself on his favorite fire bucket and surveyed the deck. Up on the fo’c’sle, the adolescents were clustered around Novice Katanji. From their antics, he guessed mat the boy was telling dirty stories. The women had mostly gathered on the poop, knitting, mending, and chatting softly. A couple of men were fishing... without much success, he noted glumly.
    For once there was no fencing lesson in progress. Adept Nnanji was sitting on the forward hatch cover with Novice Matarro and Apprentice Thana, grouped around three crossed swords. That was a stupid swordsman custom for reciting sutras. Priests taught sutras while pacing to and fro—much healthier and more sensible, letting exercise stimulate the brain.
    Lord Shonsu sat alone on the other hatch. The crew understood that he needed to think and they left him alone when he wanted privacy, as now. He did have his slave beside him, so he probably would not think of himself as being alone. They were not talking, however, and that was unusual. Shonsu was probably the only swordsman in the World who talked with his night slave —except of course to say “Lie down.”
    Shonsu was whittling. He had taken up whittling after Ov, spending hours with scraps of wood and tools pilfered from the
     
    ship’s chest. He refused to say what he was doing and he obviously did not enjoy doing it. His hands were too big for delicate work—they fit a sword hilt better than a knife handle. He scowled and chewed his tongue and nicked his fingers and spoiled what he was doing and started again. And he would not say why.
    A sour sulfurous odor mingled with smells of woodsmoke and leather. They had met that before. Shonsu said it must come from RegiVul, where the Fire God danced on the peaks. A pale dust was settling on the planks.
    Honakura sighed and sought a more comfortable position. The pains were getting worse. He remembered how his mother had baked bread when he was a child, and how she had run a knife around the inside of the pan to loosen the loaf so that it would come out cleanly. That was what the Goddess was doing to him—reminding him that death was not to be feared, mat it was a beginning of something new and exciting, not an end. When he had left Haim with Shonsu, he had offered humble prayers that he might be spared long enough in this cycle to see the outcome of the Shonsu mission. Now he was not so presumptuous. He thought he might be happier not knowing.
    If anyone had suggested to him half a year since that he could ever be friends with a swordsman, he would have laughed until his old bones fell apart in a heap. Yet it had happened so. He liked that huge slab of beef. He could even admire him and he had never admired a swordsman before. Of course Shonsu was not a swordsman at heart, but he tried very hard to obey the dictates of the gods, and struggled to reconcile his own gentle instincts with the killer requirements of his job. They were incompatible, of course. Shonsu knew that and was troubled within himself. But he tried, and he was a decent and honorable man.
    Strange, therefore, that his divine master had not trusted him enough to explain exactly what his task was to be. That lapse had obviously bothered Shonsu, and still did. He thought he knew now what it was. He had been quite implacable toward the sorcerers once he met them—implacable for Shonsu, that is. Yet he had gathered wisdom at Ov, wisdom he could not or would not
     
    explain, and since then he had been more deeply troubled than ever.
    Honakura was certain that he had a much better idea of what Shonsu’s mission was than Shonsu did. He no longer wanted to