Take up the broken sword and the steel brings up its memories. At the very bottom of them a fire four hundred years old wakes and offers you a deal. Win, and one notch of her seal burns. Lose, and she goes out with you.
In a desert empire that turns on the name of the sun god, the slave gladiator Yasin walks onto the sand with his price written down at four hundred and twelve silver. Inside the broken sword shoved out of the armory is Sherazan, a djinn of fire sealed away four hundred years ago, and she is the one who puts the deal on the table first, with his life as the collateral. Every single victory cuts Yasin's price down and burns away another notch of the seal that holds her. The more his hands, the hands that read whatever a piece of steel has been through, dredge up an opponent's habits and the last breaths of dead men, the less the fire inside the blade has to say. That getting closer to freedom and losing her are the same direction is something the two of them work out at different speeds.
- The night you come back off a tenth straight win, and for the first time Sherazan neither mocks it nor congratulates you, just withdraws quietly into the fracture of the blade.
- The instant your fingertips run along the old scimitar in an opponent's hand, and everything that steel remembers, eight bouts of habits and one missed step, pours into you whole.
- The moment the adjudicator cuts eight silver off the price in the ledger, and you realize that the sound of coming one line closer to freedom is, inside the sword, the sound of one more notch of fire going out.
The night you come back off a tenth straight win, and for the first time Sherazan neither mocks it nor congratulates you, just withdraws quietly into the fracture of the blade.
