Same Root, Different Blade
The scent reached him around midnight.
Kyle paused while tending to his blade at the second-floor window of his lodgings. The smell of iron and ash. The smell of the world in agony—threading its way like a single fragile strand through the heart of a city of a hundred thousand souls.
It was a wedge.
One of the stones pulled from the canyon lay somewhere in this city, and someone had just unwrapped its cloth.
Kyle gathered Grau. The iron sword went at his waist, the cloth-wrapped Grau across his back. In the order he hoped he would never need to draw them.
“...Hey. Where are you going? It’s midnight.”
“To get some air.”
“With two swords on you? Hey, solo action is forbidden—”
“Hugo.”
Kyle looked back from the doorway.
On the table lay the wooden sword Hugo had spent the entire evening carving. He had said it was for Finn. He claimed to have bought the wood with money meant for capital souvenirs, and though his knife work was clumsy, he had sanded it a hundred times. Beside the wooden sword lay tomorrow’s preliminary bracket sheet, three circles drawn in Hugo’s handwriting around the opponents in Kyle’s group.
He could not carry the warmth of this room on his back tonight.
Looking into his friend’s eyes, he stripped the lie away.
“If you follow me tonight, you will die. This is not speculation. It is fact. If I am not back by morning, report to the captain. Tell him the sword that slew the canyon’s giant beast is here in the capital.”
The sleep vanished from Hugo’s face. He opened his mouth to argue, then lost the words at the look on Kyle’s face. In the end he thumped his own chest once with a fist. The same gesture Geralt used. He must have picked it up somewhere.
“...By morning. If you’re even a breath late, I’ll come looking myself—not the captain.”
The thread of scent flowed eastward through the city.
Midnight in the capital was an entirely different place. The boisterous energy of the Martial Arts Festival lingered only on the main avenues; the alleys had already gone cold. Kyle took to the rooftops. He slipped past the night watch’s torch routes twice and through the gap left by a changing patrol bell once. Learning to hide had come before learning the sword, and after ten years the old skill returned to him soaked in cold sweat.
The scent thinned and thickened in turns. The cloth was being opened and closed again. It was calling him. Come.
He passed the wealthy quarter, passed the marketplace, and the trail ended at the abandoned shipyard beside the river. In the shadow of a half-collapsed dock, in a place the moonlight could not reach, it waited.
A grey stone pillar. The southern wedge. Its cloth half peeled away, resting atop a pile of scrap lumber.
And beside it, a man sat.
Grey hair. A face whose age could not be read. His black coat blended so seamlessly with the darkness that for a moment it was impossible to tell whether what sat there was a person or simply another shadow. A single sword lay across his knees.
“You came.”
The man spoke without raising his head.
“I knew you would if I unwrapped the cloth. In this city there is only one nose that can catch this scent. I cast the bait, so the fish had to come.”
“...Leave the stone. It is not yours to take.”
“Not a thing. An inscribed origin.”
The man rose. There was no sound in the motion. Kyle’s spine caught the first warning in that silence. This man stood above Geralt.
“Even a dead stone retains traces of the Connecting Sound. One strand out of seven. Gather the inscribed origins of the remaining six along with the main body—and the Connecting Sound can be played in reverse. As a waking note.”
“...Who are you?”
“Giving my name would mean nothing. That old man would never have spoken of me.”
For the first time the man lifted his head. Moonlight touched his eyes. They were grey. Like the mad beasts of the canyon, yet not. If the grey of the beasts was sickness, the grey of these eyes was a choice.
“So you are Leonhardt’s child.”
The name fell into the open.
A name Kyle had not spoken aloud once in ten years. A name Geralt had sworn to carry to his grave. This man uttered it as casually as if naming a stone by the roadside.
“That name—how do you know it?”
“How? Ha.”
The corner of the man’s mouth twisted. It resembled an old scar more than a smile.
“We learned the same sword from the same old man. Long before Leonhardt took you in—I was the first one he claimed. The judgment he passed on the two of us never changed in all his life. The vessel worth passing it to, and the vessel that must never receive it.”
Split from the same root, yet warped.
The story the canyon’s sword scar had whispered was now speaking with its own mouth before his eyes. This was the senior disciple under the same master. The blade the master had refused to bequeath stood there.
“I am Marcus. Remember it. Since it is the name your master tried to erase, it is only fair that you carve it back into memory.”
“...If you are the senior disciple—”
“Curious? Of course you are. Leonhardt never once spoke of his first pupil in all his years.”
Marcus ran a finger once across the wedge’s emblem—the hawk perched upon the blade. The gesture was intimate. Like touching the nameplate of his own house.
“Do you know what this pattern means? You were probably told only that it is the mark of the old masters. The hawk sits upon the blade. To avoid being cut, it must forever shift its feet. That is the fate of the watcher—the destiny we nearly inherited.”
“We.”
“Yes. We. Once upon a time.”
Something flickered in the man’s grey eyes for a single instant, then closed.
“Enough old tales. Stories of the dead master come after the sword.”
The sword moved from knee to hand.
“Let us test the vessel, child. What Leonhardt poured into you—the sword will speak most honestly.”
From the first exchange, Kyle understood.
He could not see the next move.
If Geralt’s six-tenths strength had been a mountain, this was an avalanche. It had no form. Neither orthodox nor irregular, a blade whose very sword logic was twisted. Block and it coiled around you. Redirect and it clung. Dodge and it arrived first.
On the third clash the cloth at his shoulder tore. On the seventh a thin line opened on his cheek and blood trickled down. He had not even felt the cut. This sword delivered pain with delay.
A single drop of blood slid from his cheek, fell from his chin. Kyle heard the sound it made striking the scrap wood. Time had stretched enough for him to hear his own blood fall. It only stretched like this before a blade above Master level.
The sword was lying.
He remembered the words his master had spoken by the campfire when he was young. Do you know what the most wicked sword in the world is? It is not the fast sword or the heavy sword. It is the sword that lies. The shoulder speaks left but the blade comes from the right, the breath is drawn in but the sword is already there—when you meet such a sword, what should you do? After poking the fire for a long time, the master had answered.
Do not meet it.
Only now did Kyle realize that had not been an answer about swordsmanship, but a memory of one man.
When the path ahead cannot be seen, abandon the desire to see. Kyle stopped trying to read ahead, stopped trying to receive, and struck from the same stance. Against a sword that could not be seen first, he offered one that could not be seen first either. Two lies collided in the air and sparks scattered across the river.
After five exchanges the line across his stomach vanished. He was in no position to defend.
After ten exchanges he unleashed everything. For the first time in twenty-two years, his full power.
The scrap lumber of the old shipyard was shredded by the sword wind. The framework of the collapsed dock was sliced away and fell into the river. Two grey shadows tangled beneath the moonlight, parted, and tangled again. Had anyone been watching, they would not have believed the speed belonged to human beings.
And in the midst of that height he had never encountered before, Kyle felt something strange.
His sword was rejoicing.
The thing he had kept pressed down for ten years, the thing locked beneath the line of his stomach, the thing he had never once drawn to its limit—everything was being pulled out. Only when he stood on ground where he might die did his lungs finally open wide. His master had always smiled only in places like this.
Beyond twenty exchanges, light began to rise along Marcus’s blade as well.
It was not aura. Aura would have possessed color. What climbed his sword was light stripped of color—grey. Like the fog of the canyon, like the eyes of the mad beasts. Wherever the grey energy flowing along the blade touched, the scrap wood did not split; it rotted.
He had wrapped the breath beyond the seal around his sword. Something a human should never embrace.
And from behind him—Grau began to cry.
Still wrapped in cloth, low and long. The same resonance as the sound the living wedge was said to make. His own grey awakening to answer the enemy’s grey. For the first time in ten years, his master’s sword was making a sound.
“Ha! That’s it! That footwork!”
Marcus laughed as he swung his blade. The laughter was so genuinely delighted that it became even more hideous. His gaze flicked once to the weeping sword on Kyle’s back before falling away.
“So Leonhardt poured everything into you! Not what he cherished, but every last drop! Oh, this is bad—too precious to kill, too dangerous to leave alive!”
On the fiftieth exchange the iron sword screamed.
He had known. From around the fortieth exchange the ring of the blade had changed. Each time it met the grey energy, the iron rotted from within. It had been a good sword. From his apprenticeship days for ten years, it had endured the day he threw away his resignation letter, the shadow wolves, the troll, and even six-tenths of Geralt. But this opponent was not something a sword could withstand.
At some point Marcus’s blade struck the same spot on the iron sword three times—and on the third, the old iron blade that had endured ten years snapped from the middle. The broken half spun through the moonlight and fell into the river.
The sound of water seemed to stretch on forever.
The weight he had carried for ten years was suddenly halved in his hand. The grip of the remaining half was still warm. Kyle squeezed that warmth once more.
He retreated three steps with the broken sword still in his grasp. Grau on his back grew heavier. Inside the cloth, the blade was trying to awaken.
Marcus’s gaze stabbed into that back.
“Draw it.”
“...”
“I know what you carry on your back. I waited ten years to see that grey again. Draw it, child.”
His hand rose toward the shoulder strap.
A sword that ignored order was the kind his master hated most—the old lesson seized his wrist for a moment. But this was not outside order. He drew only for matters of the seal. The man before him was one who would break the seal. The reason Grau wept and the reason his palm burned pointed to the same answer.
Just as the knot of the cloth was half undone—the sound of a bell rang from across the river. The night watch’s patrol bell. The commotion at the shipyard had reached them. Several torches were racing quickly along the riverbank.
Marcus clicked his tongue. Then, as if by magic, he sheathed his sword.
“The fun has been spoiled.”
“...You intend to end it here?”
“For tonight. The vessel test is finished.”
The man nudged the broken half of the iron sword once with his toe.
“You look ready to receive with a half blade. That look passes. However, child, I have no intention of breaking you here. Shattering an unripe vessel is waste. Finish ripening—fortunately a good kiln has opened. The crown prince’s banquet, I mean.”
“...You plan to enter the Martial Arts Festival?”
“They say there are a hundred thousand spectator seats. Surely one will be empty.”
It took the form of a joke, yet it was not. Kyle’s mind involuntarily painted the image of that grey sitting in the middle of a hundred thousand people.
“...Leave the stone.”
“I am taking this. It is a dead strand anyway. The living ones are elsewhere—ah, yes. Before I go, I will teach you one thing. Tuition. You showed me a good sword, after all.”
Marcus slung the wedge, cloth and all, over his shoulder. The shoulder that had sliced a house-sized giant beast in one stroke now carried a stone pillar like a bundle of firewood.
“You intend to visit the grey boundary. To confirm the main body. By obtaining some title or other, legally, slowly.”
“...”
“I will tell you in advance what you would learn by going.”
From the darkness that had already swallowed half the man’s form, the final words flew like a blade and buried themselves.
“Your master did not die.”
“He became something worse than death.”