The Binding

Chapter Ten

Leif swung a narrow sword over his right shoulder. His arm streamed through the air as he held the metal as if it had always been there. His body flowed as a melody would if it possessed physical form. He flipped the hilt of the sword in his hand and thrust the point toward the ground, stopping an inch before it pierced the wood floor.

   "This is a glaudius. Bloody good one. It's steel," Leif explained. "It can't kill us. Most of these weapons are made of hard metals— bronze, iron or steel."

   "They are meant to withstand brute force in battle," Ezra continued. "But the most it can do is slow us down. If you want to kill an Avati, you have to use silver."

   "Silver? Isn't that a bit cliché?"

   Leif huffed. "Of course it is. Silver is strewn throughout thousands of years of mythology for a reason."

   "But silver is a soft metal and won't be of much use against any one of these," Ezra said gesturing toward his wall of weaponry. It looked like a shiny wall of death.

   I considered the showcase of weapons before me. "So if a mortal were to stab one of us with silver what would happen?"

   "Nothing," he answered. "Oh, it would hurt like hell but no more than any other metal. Silver is highly conductive. It's the most conductive metal for electrical current. Electricity is our life force; it's in every cell in our bodies. To kill an Avati, the electrical impulses that sustain us must be interrupted. Drained."

   He picked up the gladius feeling the balance of weight in his hand. An expression I'd never seen before flitted across his features for an instant and then disappeared. "The electrical current from the attacker's body travels through the silver and arcs with the victim's. Then the attacker's body..." he paused, searching for something. "I don't know how to describe it... It acts as a kind of sieve."

   Leif continued, "Their energy surges into the silver and through the attacker's body like a conduit. The more fatal the injury, the faster the person's energy is drained and absorbed into the earth."

   "It's excruciating. More than you can imagine. The death of an Avati is very rare," Ezra said, he sounded like he was trying to be reassuring. "And not just because of the pain. There's always a cost. When the energy from the victim's body is drained, it takes some of the attacker's with it. The older and more powerful the Avati is the more energy they lose, the greater the risk. That's the price. It takes weeks or months to fully recover if it doesn't kill them outright. Sometimes both die. No Avati would put themselves in such risk unless they had no other choice."

   Leif nodded. "That is when we are most vulnerable if we have any enemies."

   "We don't attack or kill each other lightly or without considerable cause," Ezra said.

   Considerable cause? The words sounded reasonable and yet toothless. What is considerable cause? What is one man's weighed against another's, or a society's? What about from civilization to civilization? I wasn't sure what kind of answer I was searching for.

   I stood and approached Ezra's blades. I picked up a long wooden carving. It was about a foot long and carved like some kind of fish, resting on ornately designed metal fins. There were two metal pins at the top. I pushed one of them down and slid out a long curved knife. The opposite end revealed a deadly two-pronged fork.

   "Wood handles won't work, or bone. You can't use spears or bullets either," Ezra explained as he watched my hand tilt the blade in the sunlight. "It would have to be cast entirely of silver and maintain constant contact with the user's skin to complete the current."