Wraithblade Khopesh

A hooked sword, and nobody who saw it first had a word for the shape. The closest Kithul could get was the character the Peren write at the end of a question: a loop with a straight bit at the bottom. Dwayne said it was bigger than a sickle and he had used sickles; this was more designed than that, and it seemed old. They drew it, and the drawing was a khopesh. That is a Mól weapon, and Mól is a culture rather than a people, so it says where the thing was made and not who made it.

It is heavy. Held one-handed it looks wrong, a weapon that should be carried by someone who can carry it hung at the hip of a man who cannot.

Shuharim

The name came out of a green volume of the Encyclopædia. Shuharim, which translates as the shade-drinker; and in the same book, exactly once, the words that come out as the Wraithblade. Clan Zarkhûn made it. They were engineers and metallurgists, the Empire’s war-crafters, and they made it before the curse. The souls came later.

Its home is an altar deep in Wraithblade Keep, which bears no god’s mark at all: only a clean ring in the dust the shape of a sword. It does not stay there. It has gone out of that keep many times over seven hundred years. Of all those departures only one return was ever written down: somebody threw it back over the walls.

It had been broken once before, and it came back. So did the curse.

What it does to people

Not an aura, and not proximity. The curse looks for the hungriest and most influential person within reach, takes hold of them, and then seeds outward through the people that person has power over, the ones who are hungry themselves.

What it puts in a host is not new. It finds the anger already there and makes it very much louder, and a man made that much angrier is a man much easier to steer. Those it takes go sunken-eyed and dark-ringed and turn feral, and they stop being troubled by sleep or daze. The specters doing it can be seen by two kinds of people only: those the blade has already touched, and those with Peren eyes.

And it is addictive. Those near it feel a pull, a craving to hold it. Beltran kept the ones who craved it close and then removed them, often by arranging for them to do it themselves, and by Orvayne’s count that is at least a dozen men. Tazrih was visibly fraying for want of it by the end.

Whent had three of them inside him when the party took him alive, and Yara burned them out with a Barren-Lands rite of blood and silver.

How Beltran came by it

A goblin of the keep carried it. A mercenary crew was hired to strip Wraithblade Keep of Mól relics for a payout to retire on, from someone with money, and the crew was wiped out. Nazeera speared the goblin and died of her wounds at Ridh. Oshuun Karral choked it and took the sword and brought it to Beltran, about two months before the party learned any of this.

Beltran killed him for it. Orvayne gave that plainly, and Orvayne was in a position to know; Whent’s account, which has Oshuun merely gone afterwards, is the version of a man who was told less. It is also what the blade usually costs the one who carries it. It passes hand to hand through violence, and has done for centuries.

The taking

The party spent two seasons preparing to get it off him and never intended to destroy it in the street. They had a wire saw and a lead-lined box built for exactly this, on the reasoning that a curse takes hold through handling and a lead lining would let them carry the thing without touching it.

Outside the burning Color Stay, Beltran came through the door with the blade drawn and already bloodied. Mikhail had to hold against its pull before anything else could happen, and did, coming out of it wanting the sword only in order to shut it away. Then Koa charged. He gave a tell, telegraphed a swing, and let Beltran settle into exactly the guard he wanted; and instead of the killing blow he brought the hilt down on the wrist bone. The choice was deliberate and it was the whole plan: the sword mattered more than the man. The Khopesh clattered into the road.

Mikhail went down on it with the Oubliette and scooped it up in the cloak without letting skin touch steel.

Campaign Updates

The Oubliette held it out of the street and off anyone’s skin. It did not hold it long. Within days the blade was moved into the lead-lined box that had been built for it, at the cost of one more will save, and from that moment nobody felt it. It rode a hundred and eighty-two miles north on a horse, through the burned village of Ridh and into Wraithblade Keep, and the woman who was going to break it never studied it at all, so that it could not begin working on her before she swung.

Hinta had spent the week at the keep’s anvil learning what her ancestors had done. Electrum runs through a Mól blade woven like a web rather than set as a core, and she could feel the pattern of it in the ring of a struck blade. That was also the answer: because the electrum is the pattern, the weakest point of such a weapon is everywhere in it at once. Her calipers, awakened that same week with a piece of her own essence, showed her where.

Koa lifted it out of the box and onto the anvil so that she would have to touch it as little as possible, and it came up hungrier than it had ever been. It went for him first and he held. It went for her and she held, barely. Her test swing widened the weak points and did not close them again, and the blade understood what was happening. Its last pull was the strongest it had ever made, and it was made at Koa, offering him command over the council, over the ooze under Haudh-Gwenn, over Gwenivere’s condition, over Orsugo. He heard the poison in it and told her to keep working.

At the word the hammer came down. It did not crack in two. It broke like glass, a spray of pieces throwing heat, and seven hundred years of bound souls went free with it. The barricaded door beside the anvil was already burning: gnolls who had followed them up from Ridh had come over the walls and burned through it while both of them were fixed on the sword. Koa hurled the hilt into a corner of the room, took Hinta by the arm and ran, and the keep was alight behind them when they left it.