"02 - Sword Singer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Jennifer)

"He does this," I told her. "You know that. You've seen him do it before."
She pursed lips, raised pale brows. "Bit more violent this time."
"So am I." I got up, winced, rolled my head from side to side. "Del--"
"The stud's all right." She turned. "How are you, Tiger?"
Now she asks. "Fine." Flexed wrists, fingers, wriggled shoulders up and down.
Then I unsheathed the sword to make sure all was well with my weapon, as any
sword-dancer will do, and as often as necessary.
Hoolies. This thrice-cursed Northern butcher's blade.
It is not mine. Not really, although I use it when I have to. It is borrowed,
taken from a dead man who had no further use for it. I hated him, dead as he
was; hated it, although the latter emotion was more than a little silly. But
looking at the sword, touching it, wearing it, using it in my profession,
reminded me time and again that my own shodo-blessed, blued-steel blade was dead
as the man I'd killed in the circle beneath the moon.
Singlestroke.
Well, no sense crying when the aqivi's been spilled.
But I hated the thing. No sense, either, in denying it. Or in denying it
frightened me in some weird, indefinable way.
The sword was Northern. Not Southron, as Singlestroke had been; as I am.
Northern-forged, Northern-blooded; --a jivatma, what Del called a
blooding-blade, because the man who had made it his own had sought out a
respected enemy in order to quench the blade, to blood it, in some unknown
Northern ritual. Here in the South, it's different.
Sunlight ran down the blade. Alien runes worked into equally alien metal took
life in the light and writhed, though it was only an illusion... or so I've
always maintained. For me, there is no magic; I am not Theron, who quenched the
blade, and I don't know its name or the key to bring the sword to life.
But he had, in the circle before I killed him. He had, and I'd seen all the
brilliant lights of what Del called the palette of the gods: purples, violets,
magentas, all lurid luminescence. Each sword had a soul (for lack of a better
word) as well as a name, and that soul marked its passing in a glowing tracery
of light, a delicate lattice of visible color. Generally only when keyed, but a
little of it showed in the blade even when quiescent: Del's was salmon-silver,
Theron's palest purple.
Or had been, before he died.
It had been a magnificent dance, while it lasted; a test of skill, strength,
training and, on one side, treachery. How we danced, did Theron and I, in the
name of a Northern woman.
A sword-dancer called Delilah.
Mouth grim-set, I sighed, expelling the air through my nose. The twisted hilt
was cool in the heat of the day. Too cool; not even when we'd been riding in the
blazing Southron sun for hours on end did the unprotected metal grow warm. An
odd, eerie silver, ice-white/blue-white, like the snowstorms Del had described.
But snow and snowstorms, like the sword, are alien to me. Born of the Southron
sun, knowing heat and sand and simooms, I couldn't begin to comprehend (or even
envision) the things she told me existed in her cold, Northern land.
All I know is the circle.
"One day," she said, "you will have to make your peace with Theron's sword."
I shook my head. "Once we can spare the time for me to seek out the shodo who
trained me--or one of his apprentices--I'm trading this thing in on a real