Chapter 268: Drawing the Holy Sword (2)

Ketal stepped through the door and let it fall shut behind him. The sound was soft, a clean click that seemed to tuck the world outside away.

Out in the outer court, Cretein watched the door for a moment longer, then turned and approached the first man who had gone in and come back with empty hands. The challenger sat on a bench with his shoulders slumped, the fight gone out of his posture. Cretein kept his tone even.

“May I ask what the trial was this time?” he asked the man.

The man blinked as if the question itself were a surprise. “Am I allowed to say?”

“I am Cretein, Commander of the Holy Knights of Elia, God of the Sword,” Cretein said, offering a brief nod that was almost a bow. “We need to understand the trial’s content. I will not attempt it myself, nor will I disclose it to the general crowd. This is so we can prepare in case something goes wrong.”

Too often, people who could not accept failure tried to force the sword free and caused trouble before the followers could calm them. The church had learned to ask.

The man nodded and rubbed a hand over his face.

“There was nothing to it,” he said at last. “A big hall, bright as a field of white stone, and the Holy Sword stuck in the floor at the center. That was all.”

There were no restraints—no obstacles.

“Nothing at all,” the man said. “I tried everything I could think of. Grip, stance, breathing, a prayer someone taught me once, even a little spell to steady the hand. The sword did not budge. At about the five-minute mark, it felt like a wind came from nowhere and pushed me out. Next thing, I was in the corridor.”

“Understood,” Cretein said. “Thank you.”

So the content was simple on the surface. Five minutes alone with the sword and whatever counted as one’s worth. If one could not claim it in that time, the hall expelled the challenger. It sounded straightforward.

Can Ketal draw it?

Cretein wondered.

He did not try to answer the question even in his own head. There was no known standard. Sometimes the sword chose greatness already proven, sometimes it chose a beggar who had never held a blade. If raw strength were the measure, the choice would be simple, and no one would call it holy. Cretein was still turning the thought when the ground hummed under his boots.

A low vibration rolled through the court. Heads turned at once.

“Did you feel that?”

“It’s from the sword’s hall.”

Another tremor followed, clearer, like a plucked string running under stone. Cretein’s first thought was that Ketal had put his hands on the hilt and heaved. Even that simple picture carried absurd scale; for the floor to speak of it out here, the effort inside had to have been monstrous. He felt a flicker of admiration and tucked it away.

The man is trying to draw the sword

, he told himself, and left it there.

However, inside the chamber, the scene did not match the simple picture anyone outside held in their minds.

A bright whine cut the air, high and thin as a blade rubbed along glass, and lines of gold sketched themselves into existence. Swords grew out of light. Ten, then twenty, then more, until dozens wheeled through the air like a flock of knives. Holiness was not a smell, not a color, yet its pressure was unmistakable, a heat without warmth that made the inside of the ribs feel clean. The swords came at Ketal with the unhesitating purpose of a hawk’s stoop.

He did not meet them. His foot struck stone and his body went loose in the way that only looks like relaxation to people who have never trained. He slipped by one blade as cleanly as if his shadow had stepped left while he stepped right. He folded at the waist, let another pass over his back, twisted along the arc of a third so that its point seemed to chase the line of his shoulder and never quite catch it.

Blades slammed into the floor again and again. The hall filled with impacts, bright stabbing sounds that stacked into a storm of noise. Golden blades quivered where they had buried themselves to the hilt. In a heartbeat, the floor looked like a graveyard for weapons, and in the middle of that forest of blades stood Ketal without a scratch.

“So this is the sword’s trial,” he said, delighted. “Excellent.”

He was wrong, but there was no one to tell him that. He kept moving. The gold in the air shivered, almost as if it understood mockery. The number of blades multiplied until they were beyond counting; at a glance, there were a hundred, perhaps more, arrowing in from all directions.

“Good,” Ketal murmured. “Now I can see it clearly.”

He had measured the rhythm in a handful of passes. He had watched how the blades formed, where they took their lines from, how the room’s geometry bent their flight. He drew a breath, set his heel, and went forward.

The first blade met his hand. It shattered. The second, he seized by the spine and twisted until it fractured like sugar glass. He swept an arm, and a cluster of points went wide and bit into the stone behind him. Shards fanned out across the floor with the hiss of sand.

The sort of attack that would have skewered the Mercenary King if he had tried to wade through it head-on broke against Ketal’s body like surf against a pier. The room itself seemed to flinch. The sword at the center shivered once, a small motion that felt like surprise.

Ketal did not spare it a glance. He ran at it, light on his feet despite the wreckage, and covered the ground in a handful of strides. He reached out and closed his fingers around the hilt.

The world pushed back.

It was not air that moved him, not a gust or a force one could plant one’s weight against. Space itself seemed to lean. The floor stayed where it was, and yet it felt as if the distance between the hilt and his hand lengthened by a finger’s breadth, then a palm, then an arm. The room made room, and Ketal slid back across the floor with nothing to show that he had moved.

He grinned anyway. “So now we are in the second phase.”

Of course, the trial would not be only a hail of blades followed by a simple tug. He set himself to be ready for whatever came next.

What came next was a voice.

“Please step back, monster,” it said, clear and feminine, a bell-struck tone that seemed to hang for a moment after the words themselves were finished.

Ketal halted and looked up. “You can speak.”

“I am the Holy Sword,” the voice said. “The blade granted by the great gods. Of course I can speak. I have not spoken until now because you were a thing to be excluded, not a thing to be addressed. I have opened my mouth because excluding you so easily is not the certainty I expected.”

“I see.”

“You are overlapped,” the voice continued. “You have veiled yourself as if you were a thing that belongs to this world. That is how you hid your nature from the eyes and reached this place. I am the Holy Sword. I can perceive your essence. Your ploy has failed.”

“You do enjoy the sound of your own voice,” Ketal said mildly. The voice was pretty. The content, less so. The mismatch amused him in a way he did not bother to hide. “So the attack was not the trial.”

“It was not,” the sword said. “It was a rejection. Things like you have no place before me and no place upon the earth.”

Ketal rubbed his chin rather than answer at once. He had guessed as much. The others who had gone before had returned pale with disappointment and weariness, but their clothes were not torn, their skin had no cuts, their breath ran even. If the hall had attacked like this for every contender, there would have been blood.

Only he was under assault.

“That’s a bit unfair,” he said, and he meant it in the technical sense rather than as a complaint.

He was not surprised. The gods had an assortment of opinions about him. Kalosia looked upon him with favor. The Spirit God had declared neutrality. Ferderica had done everything a being of their kind could do to mark him as an enemy. The Holy Sword descended from a decision of the Hall of the Gods, so disfavor from that quarter made a certain kind of sense.

“All right,” he said. “It still works as a trial.”

“It does not,” the sword said. “It is nothing but exclusion.”

“It

is

a trial,” Ketal said, cheerful and stubborn.

“Forgive me,” the sword said after a beat, and something in the tone went dry. “Have I misunderstood the word

exclusion

? I have not conversed with anyone in centuries. It is possible my understanding is out of date. If so, I would thank you for a correction.”

“You know exactly what it means,” Ketal said. “You are attempting to exclude me.”

However, to Ketal, whatever one chose to call it, it was still a trial.

“All I need to do is defend against your attacks and draw you out,” he continued, smiling. “That makes it an entertaining trial.”

“You are broken,” the sword said quietly. “And then broken again, in the same place. Perhaps that is what allowed you to come here. In a way, I suppose that makes you whole again—one full turn back to the start. I almost feel pity for you. But even so, I am the Holy Sword.”

The air sang again. Light wrote itself into edges. Swords poured into being by the score. They had more weight in them than before, more intention.

“I was given to guard and to keep,” the sword said in that bell voice. “I will exclude you.”

***

Out in the court, faces tilted toward the inner wall as if they could see through it by will. Cretein checked the sun and counted under his breath. Five minutes would be up any moment, yet Ketal had not come out.

Is he simply refusing to leave?

Cretein thought.

A man like that could plausibly hold position against an expulsion force. Cretein exchanged a glance with one of his knights and nodded. They would go to the threshold and confirm that nothing inside had gone wrong.

The ground spoke before they could take a step.

The tremor that came through the floor now was not a hum or a murmur. It was a full-bodied shudder, the kind that makes a building remember that it rests on a planet and that planets move.

“What was that?”

People staggered. A few went to their knees with surprised oaths. Cretein swayed as he looked toward the sword hall.

For an instant, he imagined that Ketal had lost his temper and was venting power into the walls. The next instant taught him he was wrong. The vibration came again in bursts, like waves curling and breaking, and now the sound carried a shape. It was not a simple release. It was impact on impact, a clash of forces trading blows. In the hall of the Holy Sword, something was fighting something.

What is happening in there?

Cretein did not have an answer. He did know that the lines of the world felt tighter than they had a moment before.

***

A deep, rolling tremor surged through the chamber.

Blades poured from the air in a sheet of gold. Their quality and density were on a different level entirely, a true downpour of swords that left no path to slip through. Ketal had never intended to dodge this one anyway. He set his foot and drove forward.

Stone boomed under his weight. His body did not yield; the blades did. Brilliant golden edges struck him and crumpled or snapped, skittering away in glittering fragments.

The Holy Sword spoke, equal parts incredulous and sharp. “You are a monster. Then stop this as well.”

A resonant clang rang out, and the space around the sword vitrified. The world itself shifted. Distance and angle warped, and the air became gold; space turned into blades and fell toward Ketal like a collapsing roof. It was an attack that rewrote the rules of the room, the sort of power even a highest-level Transcendent would not survive.

“Oh,” Ketal said, and he was smiling. Even he could not dismiss this. He dug in, twisted through the hips, and threw his fist.

The strike shattered the weaponized space. Sound stacked on sound as the break rippled outward; the room lurched, the warded walls shivered, and the field that housed the Holy Sword quaked.

“Good heavens.” The blade’s voice came out stunned.

“As expected of the Holy Sword, you are strong,” Ketal said and sprang. In a breath, he was in front of the Holy Sword, his hand closing over the hilt.

“

Eek

.” The sword let out a thin, startled cry. S

pace convulsed and expelled him; Ketal slid backward across the floor as if the room itself had pushed him aside.

“Tricky,” he said, assessing.

“Where do you think you are putting your hands? You are not permitted to touch me,” the sword snapped.

“Your voice is shaking,” Ketal observed, tilting his head. The clear tone trembled like a newborn fawn’s legs. “Are you afraid?”

“Who, me? Do not be absurd. Even with your essence overlapped and hidden, I can feel a little of the grade and the wrongness inside it. Frankly, if I could move, I would have fled already. That does not mean the Holy Sword is afraid. Such a thing cannot happen.”

“The tremor in your voice is telling me otherwise,” Ketal said.

“You are mistaken.” The blade hurried on, changing tack. “Your body is unusual. It is less a body than a power. If I handle this poorly, I may be in danger. However, It will not matter. You cannot lay a hand on me. I am a tool the gods of the Hall of the Gods sent to aid the world, a device made to exclude what must not exist upon the Mortal Realm.”

“Are all Holy Swords this talkative?” Ketal asked it, and for the first time, a touch of weary amusement crossed his face.

“Talkative...?” the sword said, offended. “I am saying only what is necessary. I have spent centuries without a single conversation, stored in the vaults of the Hall of the Gods. I am pleased to be speaking. That pleasure may have made my words more numerous than usual.”

“I understand,” Ketal said, and he meant it. “It is unfortunate. You have my sympathy.”

To be stowed somewhere one did not choose and told to endure time without end—he knew something of that. The blade paused, almost as if moved, then caught itself sharply.

“You mean to shake my heart and then be gentle,” it said primly. “Frighten me first, then offer kindness—this is the shaking-bridge effect, is it not? I resisted, but if I hear it a few more times, I may truly become vulnerable.”

“That is not what I am doing,” Ketal said, puzzled.

“No more discussion,” the sword declared.

Light sang. Golden blades came down in a rush, and Ketal gave a short laugh as he launched himself forward to meet the storm.