The First Book of Swords

The gods conscript village blacksmiths to work a forge none of them could have built. Vulcan runs the job, the mortals swing the hammers, and one of them, Jord, comes away an arm short and holding his pay: a sword called Townsaver. Twelve swords come off that anvil, and the gods scatter them among humans to see what happens. It is a game, and the pieces are alive and have not been told they are pieces.

Each Sword does one thing, absolutely. Coinspinner supplies luck. Woundhealer heals anything. Farslayer kills whoever it is named at, at any distance. Doomgiver turns back whatever is aimed at its holder. Shieldbreaker cannot be beaten by another weapon. The rules are published up front, in a verse called the Song of Swords that stands before the story, and the plot then runs on collisions between them: which blade meets which, and what the rules say has to happen when they do. Underneath the mythology sits Saberhagen's own science fiction. This is Earth tens of thousands of years after a nuclear war, in the same history as his Empire of the East.

The book follows Mark, who grows up believing he is Jord's son, and it is fair to say the Swords are better drawn than the people carrying them. It is also a third of a story. Three short books came out across 1983 and 1984, and this one sets the board without clearing it. The pleasure on offer is a magic system with published rules, solved by argument rather than by escalation, which is the appeal Sanderson later built a career on, arriving here twenty years earlier and with far less ceremony.