Infinity Blade: Awakening by Brandon Sanderson

fell to his knees, bowing his head. “Your ways are mysterious and wonderful, great master. Too grand for my mind to comprehend.”
    “I didn’t want her running off with the blade, Eves,” the God King said, still playing idly with his knife.
    The boy was quick-minded. When the God King had remotely disabled security on his throne—covering what he’d done by implying damage to the throne had caused the lapsed security—the boy had immediately seen what to do. Good thing, too. She had to be a minion of one of the other Deathless. The Killer of Dreams, perhaps? Or Vist? Both coveted the Infinity Blade. They weren’t the only ones.
    Well, the boy had recovered the blade. That was just as well; better the foe he knew than the foe he did not.
    The God King’s hand hovered above his input panel. The boy and the girl were no longer trying to kill one another. Pity. The God King could make out no sound; those systems actually had been damaged in the fighting.
    He needed more redundancy there. He hated discovering where he’d been insufficiently prepared.
    He pushed the button on his input pad. In doing so, he shut down and destroyed the entire deadmind system in his old palace. That one button-push remotely wiped all the memories, then set the fail-safes to destroy the deadminds’ mechanical housings. In moments, the palace systems were completely unrecoverable.
    The cameras had to be turned off too. Unfortunate, but he had his other means of keeping watch on the boy.
    The God King stood up. “Come.” Twelve knights in black armor fell in behind him as he strode from the room. “It’s time to pay a visit to the Worker.”
    “T HE D EATHLESS won’t leave you alone,” Isa said. “Not as long as you have that sword.”
    “What do you know about the sword?” Siris replied, tapping his razor on the washbasin.
    He’d stripped to the waist, and was standing in a bafflingly luxurious bathroom. It appeared that the God King, despite being immortal, had still needed to use the privy. There was a silver one in the corner. The mirror was almost as long as the wall, the washbasin was gold, and the polished razors were incredibly sharp. Isaline sat beside an enormous tub turning the water on and off. His mother would have loved a tub that large, though she’d have used it for washing clothing. The water came out warm .
    “Well, I know that someone seems to want that sword badly,” Isa replied. “They sent those golems to get it. It must be important.”
    He raised the razor to his skin. “Nice lie. You came here for the sword specifically, didn’t you?”
    Isa sat primly, giving no reply.
    “Well?” he asked.
    “Give it to me,” she said, “and I’ll spread a rumor that I killed you and took it. They’ll believe me. You’ll be free to go back to your simple life.”
    “What makes you think I want a simple life?”
    “You’re the son of a farmer or something, whiskers. It comes with the package.”
    Siris washed off the razor, keeping a close eye on her in the mirror’s reflection. Would she take the crossbow to him again? So far she hadn’t, though he did catch her slipping a fine hand mirror into her pouch.
    “You have your vengeance,” she continued. “The God King is dead by your hands.”
    “So you believe me on that now?” he said dryly.
    “Sure. Why not? You have a bit of a godslayer look to you.” She was eyeing his chest in the mirror, smiling appraisingly to herself. He resisted the urge to grab his shirt and throw it on. Being leered at was an . . . unfamiliar experience.
    Nobody should look at me like that, he thought. I should teach her, show her, make her bow. I—
    He cut off that line of thought, razor frozen at his cheek. Where had those impulses come from?
    “Look,” Isa said, rising, strolling toward him. “So you’ve done it. You killed the God King. Congratulations. You do realize that now every Deathless in the world is going to come hunting you for that blade, don’t