“Oh, a while ago,” he said.
“More than a while.” The old ladies chuckled. “We were barely more than children when he was last here.”
Asha frowned. “Really? This man?”
“Oh yes!” They nodded merrily. “But where is that magic sword of yours? The one you used to slay the Bull of Heaven?”
Gideon winced. He looked sideways at Asha. “It wasn’t the Bull of Heaven, I swear. It was just a big bull. A regular bull. Just very dangerous.”
“Ah. And you had a magic sword?” Asha glanced at his belt, but no weapons hung there.
His face wrinkled with awkward embarrassment. “Sort of. It’s not magic though, I can promise you that.”
“So what happened to it?”
“Well, I had it modified when I was in Marrakesh a few years ago.” He held up his right arm with the strange brass gauntlet. Then he yanked back a small lever on the side, there came a sharp click and hiss, and a shining white blade shot forward out of the flat box on the side of his arm. The blade extended two hand-lengths beyond his fist, protected by the thick leather glove.
The short sword had a triangular blade, rather wide at its base and narrowing quickly to its point, and the steel itself blazed with a pure white light.
Asha grabbed Priya and pulled her away from the man. “Get that thing away from us.”
Gideon’s eyes widened. “No, please, it’s fine, I’m sorry.” He pulled the little lever again and the blade shot back into the device on his arm. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” He held up his empty hands.
“It’s not fine,” Asha said, drawing a steel scalpel from her bag to point at him. “I’ve seen swords like that before. They don’t just kill, they steal souls!”
Gideon nodded, his sad eyes fixed on Asha as his hands sank slowly to his sides. “Yes, I know. But it’s all right. I’ve never used mine on a person. I swear.”
“Liar. It’s the souls that make the blade glow, and yours is glowing brighter than the sun.”
“Yes, but not from killing people. It’s from destroying other swords like it.”
Asha hesitated. “It is?”
Kahina nodded. “I’ve seen him do it once.”
The two old ladies nodded. “We saw him do it, too, when we were girls.”
“Gideon?” Priya spoke softly. “How old are you?”
“Ah.” He touched the little golden pendant hanging from his neck. “Well, that’s a bit of a long story.”
“Then tell it,” Asha said. “And if I don’t like what I hear, I won’t let you walk out of here to use that sword again.”
“All right, I’m happy to tell you.” He grinned again. “Although, I sort of doubt that you could stop me from leaving.”
Asha lifted her other hand out of her bag to display the scalpels and needles arrayed between her fingers like claws.
Gideon blinked. “Oh my. All right, let’s sit down.”
5
Gideon raised his eyebrows and inhaled slowly. He said, “I was born about two thousand years ago in the city of Damascus, although the city was already old at that time. I had a pretty unremarkable life. My father made bricks. My mother died when I was young. I played in the streets until I could work, and then I made bricks for a few years. When war broke out between Damascus and Tyre, I was summoned to fight. There were a few battles and I fought pretty well, so when we returned I was made a full-time guard in the king’s palace.”
Gideon sat on the ground fiddling with a blade of grass. The two old women sat on their bench, while Asha and Priya sat on the edge of the well. A pair of young boys ran out and sat near the old women, who shushed them.
“A few more years passed. Then a man came to visit the king. He was a scholar of great renown called Master Bashir. He had studied with the wisest men in Aegyptus and India and other places I had never heard of. But for all his wisdom and knowledge, he was still just a man. He counseled the king by day, but played dice and drank wine in the city at night. And one night there was a fight. I happened to be nearby and saved Bashir from a couple of gentleman with unpleasant intentions and very large swords.” Gideon grinned and shrugged. “So Bashir asked that I be assigned to be his personal bodyguard. For a few months, I followed him around and pulled him out of fights. One particular night he was so drunk that I actually had to carry him home. He was laughing, babbling that he didn’t really need me, that he couldn’t be killed, or that he wished someone would kill him. He kept babbling until he passed out.
“The next morning, he was so grim, so serious. I’d never seen him so miserable. And that’s when he told me that he was thousands of years old. I thought he was crazy, of course, but Bashir explained that he had found a strange metal that could control aether and human souls. And he had devised a way to make a person immortal,” Gideon said. “It was a hard life, he said. Living forever. Living alone. But he had made other people immortal too. An entire family in Aegyptus, for starters. And he had just returned from India where he had made a young prince immortal. Bashir said this prince was the paragon of every virtue, and he hoped to see what might happen if a kind ruler were to rule forever. But Bashir had not given this prince an immortal companion, and that little oversight was what had made him so sad when I met him. He felt guilty, you see.”
“How?” Asha asked. “How did Bashir make people immortal?”
Gideon lifted the golden pendant from his chest again. “He draws out a tiny portion of a person’s soul and traps it in the sun-steel. The steel never rusts, never weakens, never changes, and it transfers these qualities to the person whose soul is sealed inside. He had a pendant like this too. And he made this one for me.”
“This man, Bashir, divided your soul?” Asha asked.
“Yes. And not just mine. There were two others in Damascus, at about the same time. A nun and a courtesan.”
“Why you? Why them?” Priya asked.
Gideon shrugged and returned to bending and twisting his blade of grass. “I’m not really sure. Obviously I wasn’t a prince or a priest, and just barely a soldier. Just the sort of man who would run into a tavern to rescue a stranger from a fight. The nun cared for the sick and the poor. The courtesan… well, I don’t really know what he saw in her.” He winced and gazed out over the fields.
“Two thousand years?” Priya smiled. “And I thought I was old.”
“Why? How old are you?” asked Gideon.
“A little more than two hundred, I think.”
He grinned. “I bet you’ve got a great story to tell too.”
“Let’s stick to yours,” Asha said, folding her arms across her chest. “What have you been doing for two thousand years, and where did you get that sword?”
Gideon touched the brass gauntlet. “Bashir said that in the past he had given his knowledge of sun-steel and soul-breaking to others, but he had come to regret that decision. So he taught me a little about the steel, and he taught the courtesan a little about souls, and he taught the nun a little about aether and made us swear never to share our knowledge with each other. And we didn’t.
“I traveled the world, looking for something to do with myself. It didn’t take long for me to find that there were people who had forged swords of sun-steel that stole the souls of their victims. And that’s when I realized what I needed to do, what I wanted to do. I would set those captured souls free. So I found a man with a sun-steel sword that blazed brighter and hotter than any other, and I stole it. And now I use that sword to shatter the others.” Gideon shrugged. “Been doing it ever since.”
“And that sets the souls free?”
“Some of them.” Gideon nodded. “But some are always drawn into my own blade, as well. If I ever manage to destroy all the other sun-steel, then the final task will be to destroy my own sword, somehow. If there was any other way to do it, I would. But a sun-steel blade can only be broken by something hotter and harder than itself. And that means another, stronger sun-steel blade.”
Asha blinked. “So you’ve been fighting these people and freeing captured souls for two thousand years?”