Infinity Blade 01- Awakening

them.”
    “The same could be said of a persistent rash,” he said, “You know, I considered—for just a moment—using the disc on him.”
    “Nams?” she said with a start. “You were going to draw the heat from my horse to start a fire?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’d have killed you.” She said it frankly, though she blushed. “We’ve been through a lot together, Nams and I. More than you and I have, whiskers.”
    “Well, TEL indicated he didn’t have enough heat in him for it to work. Makes sense to me. I’m pretty sure he has a heart made of iron, blood as cold as a mountain snow.”
    She raised an eyebrow.
    “I saw him eat a baby once,” Siris added. “And not even one of the loud, crying types. A sweet giggling one. Pure evil, I tell you.”
    She shook her head, sipping the soup. “You’re insulated.”
    He raised an eyebrow.
    “No?” she said. “Not a word in your silly language?”
    “It’s a word,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean what you think it does.”
    “In . . . insatiated? Insociated? A word that means you say stupid things and are never likely to change.”
    “I don’t think we have word for that.”
    “I’m sure I knew one,” she said. “Stupid language. It doesn’t have enough words.”
    “How many words does your language have?”
    “Many. Many, many, many. We have seventeen different ways of saying a person is no longer hungry.”
    “Sounds complicated.”
    “Nonsense. You just have to be patient.”
    “I’m beginning to wish you hadn’t learned that particular word.”
    She grinned, getting out bowls and dishing out the soup. “You are a patient man, Siris of the Lost Whiskers. Did you not spend twenty years practicing with the sword? All to achieve a single important goal? That is patience.”
    “I’m not sure it was,” he said, taking the bowl. “I only did all of that because it was expected of me. Once I started, it built upon itself. Nobody would let me do common things, like wash clothing. They’d insist on doing it. I needed to train. Keep training. Always. At a feast, I couldn’t eat the good foods, because everyone was watching.”
    “I watch you every morning, with that sword, working until you sweat. That is not the mark of an impatient man.”
    “I train because it . . . it’s what I am. I can’t explain it. It’s as natural to me as breathing. You wouldn’t call a man patient for reaching the ‘milestone’ of continuing to breathe for twenty years straight.”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes, continuing to breathe is a tough enough prospect.” She grimaced at her bandage. The wound was healing, but slowly. Getting a sword though the stomach wasn’t the sort of thing you just shrugged off.
    Unless you were Siris. He looked down at the God King’s ring on his finger.
    Isa followed his glance. “We haven’t discussed,” she said, “what I said. About the ring . . .”
    “It’s all right,” he said, stirring his soup. He took a sip. It was fantastic. How did she do that? It was just boiled leaves and chopped-up bamboo shoots. “I figured it out.”
    “You did?”
    “I must be of the lineage of one of the Deathless. That’s why I can use the rings. It’s why the God King was interested in my bloodline.”
    “Wait. He was interested in your bloodline? Why?”
    “I haven’t mentioned it,” he said. “But I’m pretty certain he set up the system of Sacrifices. It might . . . it might be that my family is the reason for his entire dominance of this area. It’s why he treated people with such tyranny—to encourage my bloodline to come fight him.”
    “This changes everything,” she whispered.
    He frowned at her.
    “Deathless rarely have children,” she explained. “Some say that the children of a particular Deathless can challenge them, steal their immortality. Whatever the reason, there’s an unspoken rule among them. No children. They . . .”
    “What?”
    “It’s said that long ago, when they first seized power, the Deathless slaughtered everyone who was related to them.”
    He fingered the Infinity Blade, buckled at his side. Well, that means I’m probably not related to the God King, he thought. He tried to get me to join him. He succeeded in getting one of my ancestors to join him. He’d not have kept us around if we could threaten him.
    That relieved him. Though, one of the Dark Thoughts—as he’d started to think of them—crept into the back of his mind. A panicked