“We are all tired,” the herdsman observed. “Perhaps we will not have to fight.”
“Not for this cursed ‘water.’ Useful for boiling a chicken or two, but we can’t take it with us.”
“Maybe we can.” Ehomba was ignoring the swarming, slithering, advancing rabble to concentrate on the geyser. It hissed and sputtered angrily as it spewed from the earth. In his right hand he still held the sky-metal sword. Now he raised and aimed it—not at the salivating, noisome creatures that were humping their way toward him and his friends, but toward the geyser. This time the blue glow that emanated from the wondrous blade was so deep as to be almost purple.
“Hoy, long bruther,” Simna exhorted him, “the enemy’s over this way.” Though fatigued, Hunkapa Aub and Ahlitah had lined up on either side of him.
Ehomba continued to point the radiant sword at the geyser. “Otjihanja told me that the sky metal can command more than the wind that rushes between worlds, and do more than send small ghosts of itself into battle. It also holds deep within its core the essence of the place where it was born.”
Simna kept an uneasy eye on the advancing horrors. “So you’re telling me it can spawn the heat of the fire in which it was forged? Somehow I don’t think the ability to command heat is going to do us much good in Skawpane.”
“Not where it was forged,” the herdsman corrected his friend. “Where it was born.”
Something leaped from the point of the sword to the geyser. A streak of impossibly dark blue, a flash of muted silver—Simna was looking the other way when it happened. There was a loud, violent cracking sound, like stone being shattered, only far more highly pitched.