the mundane details of his life, were about to be jettisoned. Once he reached through the fire, he would be purified, perfect, streamlined down to his essential purpose. He would bring a sinful race to its ordained end. It was the will of the gods.
Smith, the old Smith that was about to be cast off like a garment, looked away from the whirling fire.
The others were watching him. Mr. Silverpoint’s gaze was blank, enigmatic. Lady Svnae was biting her nether lip, her dark eyes troubled. Lord Ermenwyr stood with arms folded, doing his best to look nonchalant, but he was trembling. And Willowspear was staring from one to the other, and at the bright fire, and horror was slowly dawning in his face.
Why was the boy so upset? Ah, because he had a wife, and a mother, and a child on the way. Personal reasons. The concerns of mundane people, not heroes.
Clear before his eyes came an image of little Burnbright disconsolate on her perch in the kitchen, and of Mrs. Smith singing in her cloud of smoke. Fenallise.
Smith flexed his hand.
“I need to borrow your axe,” he said to Mr. Silverpoint. That gentleman nodded solemnly and handed it over.
Smith knelt.
He laid his blue arm out along the rock and struck once, severing his hand and arm just below the elbow.
There was one moment of frozen time in which the arm lay twitching in its pool of black blood, and the severed end reared up like a snake and something looked at him accusingly, with glittering black eyes. It told him he had failed the gods. It told him he was a commonplace and mediocre little man.
Then time unfroze, and there was a lot of shouting. Lady Svnae had torn the sash from her dressing gown and knelt beside him, binding it on the stump of his arm, pulling tight while Willowspear broke the axe handle and thrust it through the tourniquet’s knot. There was blood everywhere. Smith was staring full at Lady Svnae’s splendid bare bosom, which was no more than a few inches from his face, and only vaguely listening to Lord Ermenwyr, who was on his other side saying, “I’m sorry, Smith, I’m so sorry, you’ll be all right, I’ll make you a magic hand with jewels on it or something and you’ll be better than new! Really! Oh, Smith, please don’t die!”
Smith was falling backward.
“You see?” he told no one in particular. “It was just a metaphor.”
“I’m impressed,” said Mr. Silverpoint, nodding slowly.
Smith lost consciousness.
He spent the next few days in a pleasant fog. Willowspear never left him, changed the dressings on his arm at hourly intervals and kept him well drugged. Lord Demaledon came often to advise; he and Willowspear had long sonorous conversations full of medical terms Smith didn’t understand. Smith didn’t mind. He felt buoyant, carefree.
Lady Svnae brought him delicacies she had prepared for him herself, though she was not actually much of a cook, and she kept apologizing to him in the most abject manner. When he asked her what she was apologizing for, she burst into tears. When he tried to console her, he made an awkward job of it, having forgotten that he no longer had two arms to put around anybody. So then he apologized, and she cried harder. Altogether it was not a successful social moment.
Lord Ermenwyr came several times to sit beside his bed and talk to him. He chattered nervously for hours, filling the tent with purple fumes as he smoked, and Smith nodded or shook his head in response but couldn’t have got a word in with a shoehorn. Principally the lordling discussed magical prostheses, their care and maintenance, and the advantages of complicated extra features such as corkscrews, paring knives, and concealed flasks.
And there was an afternoon when Smith lay floating free on a tide of some subtle green elixir that banished all care, and watched through the opened tent-flaps as a drama unfolded, seemingly just for his entertainment. Mr. Silverpoint was seated in a black chair, with a naked blade across his knees. The Yendri war-leader was brought before him in chains.
A lot of talk followed, in words that Smith couldn’t understand. Most of the Yendri leader’s lines were badly acted, though, he seemed given to melodrama, and Smith would have jeered and thrown nutshells at him but for the fact that he couldn’t spot a snack vendor in the audience, and no longer had an arm to throw with anyway.