Driving the Point Home
by Matt Boothman
originally published in Of The Sword, a micro-fiction anthology podcast that released a short story about a unique sword every day in September 2023
Here comes today’s challenger, heading to her doom.
See her now take up the ‘Blade of Challenge’. Test its heft. Give it an experimental swing, a step and a thrust.
See her now mount the dais, oh so tragically eager, to where our great war-liege waits so still and humbly on their knees. See now the war-liege close their eyes and proudly bare that pristine chest.
I don’t know if I can stomach another of these. Always the same. The challenger looks down upon the war-liege. Savours that. Marshals her resolve. Sets both hands at the hilt and – ouch, no mercy in this one – drives the blade home and – down she goes.
What’s that shocked look on your face for, you young fool? I warned you!
I warn them all. Waiting their turn to die, charged with their righteousness. I try to tell them, the rite of challenge has nothing to do with divine favour, less than nothing to do with worthiness to rule. It’s just a silly trick sword I ensorcelled to make a point. You’d think a sword would be the perfect way to make a point! But I’m sorry to say this one’s proven nothing but trouble.
I only wanted to end a debate I’d been having with my companion, Florin of Solonstad. Yes, that Florin. In all our long acquaintance, he never would stop going on about the noble art of swordplay. He lived his life by the elegance of the blade and the fluidity of its forms. I said, my dear Florin, a sword is, and can only ever be, a tool of violence; and he who visits violence will always be met by the same.
Dear romantic Florin wouldn’t hear a bit of it. So I thought, I know what’ll get the point across. And I took to my spellforge and I made him a trick sword that stabs you in the back.
It’s a simple enough bit of spellcraft, but elegantly wrought, if I say so myself. The wielder sticks the point in another person and, via the principle of sympathetic inversion, the steel displaces into their own back instead, piercing them while their opponent goes unscathed. He who visits violence … Florin could not help but learn the rightness of my view, I thought.
Except, the first time Florin drew the blade in anger…
Well. He bloody died.
I maintain the idea was poetically sound. Reaping the rewards and so on. But in a more practical sense, Florin was rendered unable to benefit from the lesson I’d enchanted the blade to teach him. I don’t know why I didn’t expect it. Perhaps in my conception, Florin was too vital and hearty to be felled by simple spellcraft. But…
And I’ve been trying to get the cursed thing back ever since. It was taken by Florin’s opponent as a trophy, or possibly by some enterprising squire. It was a battle, quite chaotic, so hard to be sure. It is somewhat in the nature of this particular blade to change hands often. It remains longest in the possession of those least willing to use it, which I suppose is a cousin to my original lesson; but use it they do, in the end, every sorry one of them, and around and around it goes.
Until it came to Krasp. Yes, the ever unscathed, survivor of five score challenges, our fine war-liege here.
You see, while my blade is a singular failure at teaching what I forged it to teach, that does not mean it can teach nothing. Its wielder is left in no position to reconsider his stance on the nobility of swordplay, but a cunning enough bystander can learn the sword’s secret easily enough. Especially given a manipulative nature and a ready supply of lessers to observe.
Great Krasp was once the bag-carrier in a gang of scoundrel scavengers, if you can believe it. The gang came across the blade on a battlefield. I did forge it very fine, very eye-catching. Some middling members of the gang came to blows over it while Krasp looked on. From that alone they formed their theory, and with knowledge of their compatriots’ sore spots and rivalries, they tested that theory until it was certain. And with the gang in shreds they took the blade to other shores and began the business of building a myth.
So you see all they say about judgement and worthiness is so much nightsoil. All who strike the war-liege with the so-called ‘Blade of Challenge’ strike only themselves. Divine judgement, poppycock. It’s simply a trick sword let out into the world by a foolish spellsmith who wanted a noble man to think himself base. Poor Florin died noble, his ideals intact to the end. And with every life my blade takes, I hear an echo of his voice. You cannot teach a lesson about peace at the point of a sword, he says. A sword is, and can only ever be, a tool of violence.
Performed by Marcus Rothenberg
Audio editing and sound design by Ezra J. Wayne
Produced by Ezra J. Wayne and Tal Minear