Infinity Blade 01- Awakening

you might become?” She pulled something out and tossed it to him. A cloak, nicer than the one he’d used to pack up his armor. “Tie that on, let it drape over your left side. Maybe it will hide the weapon well enough to turn aside questioning eyes.”
    He lifted up the cloak, looking at it carefully, wary of some kind of trap.
    “I sewed deathfang spiders into the collar,” she said dryly.
    “Just being cautious,” Siris said, throwing on the cloak, letting it fall as she’d described. It did an acceptable job of hiding the sword. “Thanks.”
    They walked a little farther along the dusty trail. It wasn’t really a road. In another part of the countryside, it would have become overgrown long ago. Here, where the weather was hot and the terrain was stony, there wasn’t enough life to overgrow anything.
    Siris trudged along beside the horse, his armor feeling like bricks on his back, trails of sweat making their way leisurely down the sides of his cheeks.
    “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Isa asked.
    “Beautiful?”
    “The rock formations,” she said, nodding to the side. The ground there fell away into a series of gullies, then rose sharply in a ripple that exposed lines of strata shaded red, yellow, brown, orange. “I’ve always loved this part of the island.”
    “Island?” Siris said. “We live on an island?”
    “A big one,” Isa said, sounding amused. “But yes, Lantimor certainly isn’t a continent. You could ride from one end to another in about a month.”
    “Lantimor,” he said, working the word over in his mouth. Someone else’s name for where he lived. Names like that belonged to the Deathless. Everyone he knew just called it the land or the area.
    “So naive,” Isa said, mostly under her breath. She probably didn’t realize he’d heard.
    He kept his eyes forward, trying not to let her words dig at him. He didn’t care if he was naive. He didn’t. Really.
    I’ll show her naive. I’ll show her what it’s like to know truths. Pain like the world crumbling, shame like it might consume you, guilt like a sky of lead . . .
    He stilled himself, hand shaking on the hilt of the Infinity Blade. The sweat beads on the sides of his face grew larger.
    “Did you really best him?” Isa asked. “In a duel?”
    “The God King? Yes. For all the good it did. He isn’t dead.”
    Isa pursed her lips.
    “What?” Siris asked.
    “Raidriar—you call him the God King—is said to be among the greatest duelists of the Deathless.”
    “It was part luck,” Siris said. “Any duel is. A dodge at the last moment, an attack in the right opening. He was good; better than any I’d faced.”
    She shook her head. “You don’t understand. Raidriar is thousands of years old, whiskers. Thousands upon thousands . You think he hasn’t faced skilled opponents before? He has. Hundreds of them—many of them Deathless who have lived, and trained, as long as he has. And you say that you beat him.”
    “What? You think I found this sword sitting in the midden heap or something?”
    “No. But a shot with the crossbow to the back could work. It wouldn’t kill him, but it might knock him out for a little while, let you steal the blade. Hell, hit a Deathless with enough destruction, and they’ll need to grow a new body. Cut off his head while he sleeps, then take his sword, get out before he comes back . . .”
    “I fight with the Aegis Forms,” Siris snapped, hand growing tight on the sword hilt. “I follow the ancient ideal. If a man faces me with honor, I will return it.”
    “Might as well have thrown that in the midden heap,” Isa muttered. “That’s where it belongs.”
    Siris said nothing. You couldn’t explain the Aegis Forms to someone who didn’t understand, who didn’t want to understand. When he and the God King had fought, they’d shared something. They’d set out to kill one another, and on one level, they had hated one another. But there had been respect too. As warriors who followed the ancient ideal.
    Of course . . . as he considered it, the God King had known that he wasn’t fighting for his life. Immortality would make it a whole lot easier to follow the Aegis Forms.
    Before talking to the minions in the castle, he hadn’t even known that Deathless could restore themselves to life. He’d known the God King had lived a long time, but had figured a sword in the gut would end any man, no matter how old he was.
    Naive. Yes, she was probably right.
    “You didn’t