The lead-lined box

A small ornate box, lined with lead over red felt, and heavier than anyone wanted: about twenty pounds of it. It exists because of a single piece of reasoning worked out at a war-council: a cursed thing takes hold through interaction. Handle it, or stare at it too long, or keep it too close for too long, and it has you. Simple nearness is not enough. So the plan was never to destroy the Khopesh outright. The plan was to take it off Beltran, shut it in something, and keep it shut until somebody could end it.

Aldo ordered it at the best custom smithy in Haudh-Gwenn (big enough for a khopesh), alongside a wire saw, and the party supplied the wooden box to be lined. Four gold, three days. It came out heavier than promised, because lead does not go as thin as the smith had hoped and he used more of it; when he tried to charge for the difference, Koa argued him down on the grounds that a man’s word should mean something in that town, and paid nothing extra.

It sat uncollected through most of a season, was proposed for a second job it never did (hiding a crystal from the death-tree, so the tree could not feel it coming), and was finally picked up in disguise, because the smith knew perfectly well who had ordered a lead box sized for a khopesh.

When the blade was struck out of Beltran’s hand in the street outside the burning Color Stay, the box was not what caught it; Mikhail went down on it with the Oubliette and scooped it up in the cloak. It got the sword the next morning. The blade still reached for whoever was nearest, and Koa would not have it calling to Ashanti or to Hinta with the party gone, so he took hold of it one more time, held against the pull, and shut the lid on it himself.

Nobody felt it after that. Not on the ride, a hundred and eighty-two miles north on Koa’s horse to Wraithblade Keep; not through the week the two of them spent walled up inside with gnolls on the courtyard side of the door. Hinta went to the anvil having studied the sword not at all, which was the point of keeping it boxed, and Koa lifted it out and set it on the anvil himself so that she would touch it as little as possible. It came out hungrier than it had gone in.

What the box carries now is unlit wood cut from the Twisted Grove’s death-tree, which takes the life out of a bare hand closed around it. The box goes inside the Oubliette, and in there the draining stops altogether.