The Complete Book of Swords

Tom

An Old Friend
Fred Saberhagen-
:worthy:

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THE TWELVE SWORDS: PROPERTIES

THE 12 SWORDS
FARSLAYER
Remarks: Farslayer when thrown at a foe will travel any distance necessary to reach intended target. Skewers the heart (in case of a demon, the physical object housing the life). No physical or magical barrier (except, of course, SHIELDBREAKER) is effective.
WOUNDHEALER
Remarks: Actually not a weapon. When plunged into body causes no pain or damage--quite the contrary. Heals any injuries or disease, as long as spark of life remains. Will not raise dead or restore youth. Can be used prophylactically, e.g., a man can hold this Sword embedded in his flesh and jump off a cliff, or face an armed attack, without being hurt more than momentarily. Caused Jord the Smith to regrow his amputated arm, over a period of months.
WAYFINDER
Remarks: Aims itself physically, geographically, twisting in the hand to point in the direction of whatever goal user asks for. If necessary will point, unerringly, to the proper intermediate goal or destination, person, place, or thing.
SOULCUTTER
Remarks: On being drawn from its scabbard, induces utter, incapacitating hopelessness and despair--beginning with the person who draws it, spreading slowly to those nearby, then farther. Under Soulcutter's influence no human activity seems worth the effort. Radius of operation enough to cover a fair-sized battlefield. Whole armies may be induced to throw down their weapons. This Sword will prevail over MINDSWORD when the two are brought into direct conflict.
SIGHTBLINDER
Remarks: When drawn, causes others to see its wielder as someone they desperately fear, or desperately love. Perception may switch from one to the other and back again. The SW. Of STEALTH itself generally becomes invisible in use, thus can be used to strike a treacherous blow.
STONECUTTER
Remarks: Cuts stone of any kind (diamonds, granite, etc.) neatly and smoothly as cheese. Great for undermining forts, escaping dungeons, setting ambushes. Marvelous sculptor's tool.
DRAGONSLICER
Remarks: See DRAGONS. Penetrates easily the thickest armored scales and finds the vital spots of these otherwise almost invulnerable monsters.
SHIELDBREAKER
Remarks: violently trumps any and all other weapons, physical or magical, passive or active. DEMONS and WARBEASTS also count as weapons for this purpose.
COINSPINNER
Remarks: renders bearer incredibly, magically lucky. Anyone attempting harm to user has amazing bad luck, swallowed by an earthquake if necessary to save user.
MINDSWORD
Remarks: inspires fanatical loyalty, obedience, worship of wielder. Can even cause GODS to fall down and worship humans
DOOMGIVER
Remarks: anyone attacking user suffers whatever injury (s)he is trying to inflict. Was destroyed by SHIELDBREAKER very early in the series.
TOWNSAVER
Remarks: in physical combat very similar in effect to SHIELDBREAKER, but only under limited conditions: when defending some place of human habitation, as a castle, village, house, cave, etc. Also does not defend its wielder against injury.
There's more description on the page.
 
SABERHAGEN'S BERSERKERS®

EXCERPT from :

BERSERKER
by Fred Saberhagen

I, Third Historian of the CARMPAN RACE, in gratitute to the Earth-descended race for their defense of my world, set down here for them my fragmentary vision of their great war against our common enemy.

The vision has been formed piece by piece through my contacts in past and present time with the minds of men and of machines. In these minds alien to me I often perceive what I cannot understand, yet what I see is true. And so I have truly set down the acts and words of Earth-descended men great and small and ordinary, the words and even the secret thoughts of your heroes and your traitors.
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Taken from PRISONERS' BASE


In the beginning, in his first minutes of being held captive by the damned machine, Lars Kanakuru had cursed its metallic guts for keeping him alive. The damned berserker machine ignored his curses, though he was sure it heard them, even as it had seemed to ignore the missile he had launched at it from his small oneseater spacecraft. Lars never saw what happened to the missile. But he had seen on his instruments how the damned berserker had extended forcefield arms, reaching out many kilometers for his little ship, and he saw and felt how it pulled him into the embrace of death.
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A Brief Excerpt

BERSERKER BLUE DEATH
by Fred Saberhagen


The bright orange lights of the alarm began to flash as if in deliberate synchronism with the first notes of live wedding music coming from the electronic organ. The lights of the alarm were positioned all around the top of the circular wall, about three meters high, that rimmed the huge domed room, and they extended up against the lower portion of the huge clear dome itself, making it impossible that they should not be seen. The orange lights were eerily beautiful against the driving, rolling whiteness, shot through with distant pastel colors, that seemed to fill all space outside the dome.
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A brief excerpt

BERSERKER FURY
by Fred Saberhagen

One smashing impact after another buffeted the little spy ship, the blasts coming so fast some overlapped. Wave-fronts of radiation hurled by weapon explosions smote like atmospheric shock waves against sagging defensive fields and melting armor. A few minutes ago, under the first probing phase of the attack, the ship had quickly lost its disguise, revealing its egg-shaped Solarian hull to the optelectronic senses of the killer, the berserker computer that was directing the attack from a thousand kilometers away. Ever since that moment of discovery the onslaught of beams and missiles had come on furiously and without pause, as if the berserker were enraged and triumphant. As if a computer could feel those emotions, on having exposed the ship's deception, ferreting out a Solarian artifact inhabited by badlife.
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A brief excerpt



BERSERKER KILL
by Fred Saberhagen



PROLOGUE:

The ship was more intelligent in serveral ways than either of the people it was carrying. One task at which the optel brain of the ship excelled was computing the most efficient search pattern to be traced across and around the indistinct, hard-to-determine edges of the deep, dark nebula. Most of the time during the mission the ship drove itself without direct human guidance along this self-selected course, the yawning, million-kilometer chasms in the clouds of interstellar gas and dust that made up the Mavronari.
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A brief excerpt



BERSERKER MAN
by Fred Saberhagen

PROLOGUE

Well, Elly Temesvar thought gravly, we've given it a good fight, done better than anyone might have expected, considering how little ship we have to fight it with.
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A brief excerpt

BERSERKER'S PLANET
by Fred Saberhagen

Taken from: CHAPTER ONE

The dead man's voice was coming live and clear over ship's radio into the ORION'S lounge, and the six people gathered there, the only people alilve within several hundred light years, were listening sttentively for the moment, some of them only because Oscar Shoenberg, who owned ORION and was driving her on this trip, had indicated that HE wanted to listen. Carlos Suomi, who was ready to stand up to Schoenberg and expected to have a serious argument with him one of these days, was in this instance in perfect agreement with him. Athena Poulson, the independent one of the three women, had made no objection; Celeste Servetus, perhaps the least independent , had made a few but they meant nothing. Gustavus De La Torre and Barbara Hurtado had never, in Suomi's experience, object to any decision made by Schoenberg.
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A brief excerpt

BERSERKER PRIME
by Fred Saberhagen

CHAPTER ONE

The noise came snarling out of the distance, through the air and open windows, penetrating bedrock and reaching up into the foundations of Timber's capital city. It invaded the graceful building called the Citadel in the form of an ominous, droning bass note, blended with a grim vibration of even lower frequency. The latter component of the sound seemed to Plenipotentiary Gregor to be resonating somehow in his own aging bones. Gregor thought the projectors being tested, the planet-guarding weapons that could incinerate a spaceborne battleship at a range of thousands of kilometers, must be at least five kilometers from where he stood. The bulk of their output would of course be pouring up and out into space, but still enough energy was being wasted around the edges to shake a faint fall of dust out of the Citadel's fanciful grillwork, so delicately carved, in a time of peace, from ancient stone.
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A brief excerpt

BERSERKER'S STAR
by Fred Saberhagen
copyright 2002 Fred Saberhagen

CHAPTER ONE

If the Templar colonel hadn't warned Harry Silver not to transport anyone from Hong's World to Maracanda--hadn't told Mr. Silver he'd better not even think of moving his ship in that direction--Harry might have managed to ignore the young woman and her heartbreaking story. And if Harry had ignored her, he certainly would not have listened to the two men who also claimed a pressing need to get to the same place.
A brief excerpt

BERSERKER THRONE
by Fred Saberhagen

Taken from CHAPTER ONE

Around the green and lovely world called Salutai, the sky was clear of terror, as it had been now for many years. Today the planet's dayside sky was almost clear of clouds as well, and at midday the face of the land beneath it blazed with the thousand colors of midsummer flowers.
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An excerpt

BERSERKER ROGUE
by Fred Saberhagen

ROGUE: (1) A deceitful, double-dealing evildoer . . . (4) A fierce elephant or stamodont that has been banished from the herd . . . (10) Having a peculiarly malevolent or unstable nature . . . (11) No longer loyal, affiliated, or recognized, and hence not governable or accountable . . . erring, apostate.

--Galactic Dictionary of the Common Tongue
A brief excerpt



SHIVA IN STEEL
by Fred Saberhagen



Chapter 1

Five thousand light years from old Earth, on an airless planetoid code-named Hyperborea, inside the small Space Force base that was really a sealed fortress, unexpected visitors were rare, and even more rarely were they welcome.
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A brief excerpt



BROTHER ASSASSIN
by Fred Saberhagen

Taken from Part Two:

His arms upraised, his gray beard and black robes whipping in the wind, Nomis stood tall on a tabletop of black rock twenty feet square, a good hundred feet above the smashing surf. White seabirds coasted downwind toward him then wheeled away with sharp little cries, like those of tiny souls in pain. Around his perch on three sides there towered other spintered crags and fingers of this coastline of black basaltic rock, while before him spread the immense vibration of the sea.
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A brief excerpt
BERSERKER ATTACK
by Fred Saberhagen

Taken from: IN THE TEMPLE OF MARS

Something was driving waves of confusion through his mind, so that he knew not who he was, or where. How long ago what was happening had started or what had gone before it he could not guess. Nor could he resist what was happening, or even decide if he wanted to resist.
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A brief excerpt

BERSERKER LIES
by Fred Saberhagen

Truth and lies, denieal and proof, creation and evolution, flesh and metal -- all have roles to play in the spinning and weaving of the threads of life. And in which element does the greatest power lie?
---Third Historian of the Carmpan race

Taken from: THE MACHINERY OF LIES
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A brief excerpt

BERSERKER WARS
by Fred Saberhagen

As life may transmit evil, so machines of great power may hand on good.

Taken from WINGS OUT OF SHADOW

In Malori's first and only combat mission the berserker came to him in the image of a priest of the sect into which Malori had been born on the planet Yaty. In a dreamlike vision that was the analogue of a very real combat he saw the robed figure standing tall in a deformed pulpit, eyes flaming with malevolence, lowering arms winglike with the robes they stretched. With their lowering, the lights of the universe were dimming outside the windows of stained glass and Malori was being damned.
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A brief excerpt



THE ULTIMATE ENEMY
by Fred Saberhagen

Taken from: PRESSURE

The universe has given life its own arsenal of weapons and I am no longer surprised that even tenderness may sometimes be counted among them. Even the most gentle and humble of living things may demonstrate surprising strength . . .
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A brief excerpt

BERSERKERS: THE BEGINNINGS
by Fred Saberhagen

For most men the war brought no miracles of healing, but a steady deforming pressure which seemed to have existed always, and which had no foreseeable end. Under this burden some men became like brutes, and the minds of others grew to be as terrible and implacable as the machines they fought against.

But I have touched a few rare human minds, the jewels of life, who rise to meet the greatest challenges by becoming supremely men.
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http://www.berserker.com/story-wolfcover.htm
 
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