lumpy golden pendant. “Inside this sun-steel heart is a drop of my own soul.”
“Your soul? How did you do that?”
“I call it soul-breaking.” He put the pendant away. “It’s only a little painful and strange, and only for a moment. Soul-breaking can do the most marvelous things. For instance, if you seal a drop of your soul in a lump of sun-steel as I did, your body becomes just as timeless as the metal itself. I call it the transitive property of the soul. Never rusting, never tarnishing, never changing.”
“Never? Does that mean you’re immortal?” she whispered.
Omar nodded. “I am indeed, and that little discovery was only the beginning. I wanted to know everything. I had so many questions. What connects the steel to the aether to the soul? Is there even more to it that I haven’t found yet, like angels? Is heaven a tangible place, a place you can actually walk into? And ultimately, can we learn to meet God face to face? I had this notion in my head that a sun-steel compass would lead me along a path of aether all the way to the gates of paradise where I would ask the Almighty about, well, everything. The meaning of it all, the meaning of life itself, all the secrets of the universe.”
He sighed. “So I traveled all the way to Nippon, where I founded a temple full of monks who searched for sun-steel and studied its secrets. Of course, one of the first things these monks did was learn to forge sun-steel into a weapon. Their idea, not mine. Thus, the seireiken was born. The spirit-sword.” He gestured to his shining blade leaning in the crack in the floor.
“Where does the light come from?” Freya asked.
“From the thousands of souls sealed inside it. Those divine sparks heat the sun-steel until it glows so hot that it can only be contained with clay.” Omar tapped his sword’s scabbard. “But the great wonder is that if you hold the sword, you can see the faces of those souls, and hear their voices.”
“Just like Wren’s rinegold ring. She can see her dead mistress in her ring, too. Whose souls are in your sword?”
Omar shrugged. “Mostly old priests and doctors and scholars. I collected them on their deathbeds. For the most part.”
“The dead warrior you spoke of before, the one who taught you to fight.” Freya nodded slowly at the sword. “He’s trapped in there, isn’t he?”
“Ito Daisuke.” Omar smiled wistfully. “He challenged me to a duel in Marrakesh.”
“And he lost.”
“Oh no, he beat me quite easily.” Omar laughed. “I was ever the scholar and never the warrior. No, young lady, I had no chance against him. But I only had to cut him in the foot with my seireiken to draw out his soul and leave him cold on the ground.”
“But, if that’s true, then is Leif’s soul in there now as well?”
“Now that is a very good question! And as I said before, if I had fought him a few years ago, the answer would be yes. But since then I have learned the fine art of iaido, the art of drawing the sword, the art of the perfect cut. So now, with a great deal of effort, I can wield my seireiken without killing. Of course, I had to learn to do that to study the plague victims here. I certainly couldn’t help the reavers if I kept killing them with the slightest cut, could I?”
Freya glanced in the direction of the bones on the slope behind them. “You’ve been trying to cure the plague?”
“With very little success, I’m sorry to say.”
Erik tapped his little steel knife on a rock, and when Freya looked at him, he signed, “He said they caused the plague, him and Skadi. Ask him about that.”
“He wants to know… about the plague?” Omar squinted at Erik’s hand. “Is that right?”
Freya’s eyes went wide. “You can understand him?”
“I’ve seen hand-speech before. Yours is new to me, but I’m pretty good with languages. I should be. After all, I know most of them. Did you know that Yslander is almost identical to Old Rus?”
“What’s Rus?”
Omar smiled. “A faraway place. Anyway, you asked about the plague, and since you’ve come all this way into the wilderness in search of a cure that does not exist, I shall tell all.” He paused and frowned. “Eight? Yes, eight years ago I boarded an airship in Marrakesh bound for the northern wastes of Europa, and-”
“Airship?” Freya slapped her hand on the ground. “The skyship in Hengavik!”
“What? Oh, yes, that’s right. You’ve seen that too, have you? Well then, I can skip over that part. We crashed, obviously. Not that it was my fault, mind you. I was just a passenger.” Omar frowned at his sword, his brown face painted a ghostly white by its light. “You see, I was looking for a special place, an island from an old fairy tale. A country of seers who communed with the dead, a lost paradise where all the secrets of life and the universe were kept hidden from the world. An island where shining cities of sun-steel kept the land itself warm and fertile when it should have been buried under a wall of ice.”
“You mean Ysland?”
“I mean Ysland.” Omar nodded. “Imagine my horror and misery as I lay beside the wreckage of the airship in Hengavik, staring up at those damned volcanoes spewing their smoke and ash into the sky, listening to some man tell me that there was no gold on the whole island.” His frown softened into weary resignation.
And then he chuckled. “So much for paradise. So much for finding all the answers to all my questions. Paradise. God. The universe. It cost me my left arm to learn nothing at all. But it cost the rest of the crew their lives. Except the captain, that is.”
“What do you mean, it cost you your left arm?” She stared at him. His left arm was exactly where one would expect it to be.
“Hm? Oh.” He held up his left hand. “Looks just like the original, right down to the little hairs on my knuckles. It was torn off in the crash, the original, I mean. This new one grew back in less than a day. I screamed the entire time.” He shook his head. “Not my finest or proudest hour.”
Freya peered at his hand. “It grew back because of the rinegold? Because you’re immortal?”
Omar nodded. “Break me, and my little pendant will set me right again just as fast and as painfully as it can.”
“What would happen if someone cut off your head?”
The foreigner looked ill. “I have no idea, and no wish to find out. Maybe my body would grow a new head, or my head would grow a new body, or both, and then there’d be two of me, which is a fairly awful thought. Or maybe I’d just die. Wouldn’t that be something?”
Again Erik tapped his knife and signed, “The plague?”
“Ah yes, quite right, my quiet friend. The plague.” Omar glanced up as though trying to remember. “Well, after the crash, I met a charming woman who called herself a vala, which seems to mean shaman or witch or something to you people, and this woman, Skadi, was quite interested in the airship, or what was left of it.”
Omar stretched out sideways on his bed, propped up on one elbow. “So the captain, a beautiful Mazigh nymph who kisses quite forcefully, by the way, began teaching Skadi about the ship and I began sulking about my rotten luck. But as it turned out, Skadi was as obsessed with steam engines as I was with sun-steel. She took us to King Ivar, and there was some politicking and romance, all very boring, and finally Skadi married the king and set out to save the entire country using the Mazigh engine. Tapping a volcano to bring back the trees, would you believe? Anyway, the captain and Skadi built a new engine-”
“Ivar’s Drill,” Freya said.
“Yes, the drill. And they started drilling to release the magma. It was an ambitious plan. It might have even worked.” Omar shrugged. “And once they got up and running, I shook myself out of my gloom and decided to help. After all, they were digging a hole. Who knew? They might have even found some sun-steel in there. So I offered my services as foreman of the team and oversaw the last four months of drilling, right up to the day when we found the hot spot and Skadi brought the king to oversee her triumph over nature.”
“And you released the plague?”
“No, fair lady, we released about a thousand mosquitoes, or as you say, bloodflies. They must have been lying dormant in some pocket in the rock. They swarmed up out of the hole and stung the poor king nearly to death right in front of me. I suppose if I had been standing in that spot, they would have stung me instead, to no effect except my own immense though momentary discomfort, and none of this plague business would have happened. But they stung the king, and he became the first of your damned monsters.” Omar picked at the fur of his blanket.
