Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The Fifth Furnace Ring sat exactly five floors beneath the king’s table, and you could tell.

A lift carried them up the face of the mountain, a great counterweighted platform of oak and brass that rose through the glowing rock on chains as thick as Fel’s waist, creaking and swaying and dripping sparks. When it stopped, they stepped out into a corridor of black glass lit by orange light, and the sound reached them at once: a thin, bright, endless thread of music trickling down through the stone from far above. Fiddles. Horns. A great many people laughing at once. Somewhere over their heads the feast of the new year was still in full swing, and the chandeliers of the Banquet Halls shivered with every dance, so that fine gold dust sifted from the ceiling and settled on their hair like snow.

“That is the king’s own hall,” Orrin murmured. “Five floors up.”

“I can smell the roast boar from here,” said Thara.

“You cannot.”

“I can taste it.”

They walked along the corridor past doors of bronze and doors of silver and doors of plain iron, each marked with a mason’s sign. At the end, where the glass gave way to bare rock, stood the largest door of all. It was a single sheet of dull red copper twice the height of a man, with a knocker shaped like a hammer, and over the lintel, in letters that had been burned rather than carved, ran the words:

WIDEFORGE. KNOCK ONCE. IF I’M NOT IN, I’M IN.

“That,” said Veyra slowly, “does not make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” said a voice from behind the door, vast and cheerful and slightly out of breath, “if you’re a smith! Come in, come in, mind the sparks, don’t touch the blue one, it bites!”

The door swung open on its own.

Heat rolled out like a wave. Beyond it lay a smithy so enormous that Fel stopped in the doorway and simply stared. It was a whole cavern hollowed from the living rock and hung with chains, tongs, hammers, bellows, rows of half-finished blades, and long racks of iron bars glowing from cherry red to dazzling white. Four forges burned along the far wall, each a different color. In the center, on a block of stone as wide as a wagon, sat an anvil so large and so scarred that it looked less like a tool than a sleeping animal.

In front of it, humming loudly and totally off-key, a dwarf was beating a sheet of red-hot steel into a bowl.

He was not tall. That was the astonishing thing. He could not have stood higher than Fel’s chest. But he was wide. He was built like a barrel set on two thick pillars, with a chest like an upturned cauldron and shoulders that seemed to begin somewhere around his ears. And his arms! They were thick as tree trunks, corded and scarred and shining with sweat, and each swing of the hammer sent a ripple through them like wind through a field. Yet he was not fat. There was not an ounce of softness on him anywhere. He was a single dense mass of muscle, like a boulder that had learned to walk.

He wore a leather apron stitched from so many patches that the original had long since vanished, and a pair of smoked spectacles pushed up on his bald, gleaming forehead. His beard, red going to grey, was singed off in an uneven curve across the bottom, as though he had once fallen asleep in front of the furnace. As he brought the hammer down one last time, with a clang that shook dust from the ceiling, he looked over his shoulder and grinned, a huge, gap-toothed, gloriously delighted grin.

“Visitors!” he roared. “On the first day of the year! Somebody must want something badly!” He tossed the hammer in the air, caught it behind his back, and strode over, wiping his hands on his apron. “Haldor Wideforge! Master of the Fifth Ring! Hammer to the Throne for forty years, sacked twice, and taken back both times because they couldn’t find another man who could do my work!” His small bright eyes, the color of old brass, looked them up and down. “And who in the name of my grandmother’s anvil are you?”

“We were sent by the Registrar of the Transition Office,” said Veyra.

“Hjalda?” The grin widened. “Did she cry?”

“A little.”

“She always does. Terrible woman. Best friend I have.” He turned to Orrin, and the grin faltered. His eyebrows rose. “You’re…”

“Orrin Halvane,” said the Vessarine, with a small bow. “Of Aelun.”

“A Vessarine!” Haldor breathed. He took a step backward, which in him was like watching a boulder change its mind. “In my yard! I have not seen one since the Nine-Thousandth Year. I was a lad. I held the lamp for the Chorister while she sang.” His eyes had gone suddenly wet, and he rubbed them roughly with a hand like a shovel. “Ysolde. Her name was Ysolde.”

“She was my mother,” said Orrin.

For a moment the smith could not speak.

“Well,” he said at last, hoarsely. “Of course she was. You’ve got her chin. By the forge.” He took a long breath and hauled himself back into good humor by main force. “And what can the Master of the Fifth Ring do for the son of the Chorister of Aelun? Name it.”

“There is a thing,” said Orrin.

He unslung the staff.

Haldor Wideforge held it the way a man holds a sleeping child.

He washed his hands in a basin of clear water, dried them on a white cloth, and carried the staff to a table beneath a great hanging lamp. Then he pulled the smoked spectacles down over his eyes and began to turn it with the tips of two enormous fingers, inch by inch, humming softly under his breath. Nobody spoke. Even the forges seemed to dim.

“Spirals,” he muttered. “Twelve hundred to the span, and not a flaw in the line. Her grandmother’s grandmother made this, or hers. It is very old.” He reached the fork and stopped. “And here.”

The crack ran through the left prong like a hair through glass. He did not touch it. He bent closer and closer, until his nose was almost on the metal, and breathed in.

“It’s a wound,” he said.

“Yes,” said Orrin. “That is what I told them.”

“No, you misunderstand me. A crack is a crack. It’s a break in the grain, and I could weld it in an afternoon. But this has been struck. By a note. A voice too big for the metal.” The smith straightened. His eyes were bright and troubled. “The metal is still whole. It’s grieving. It wants to be mended, and it can’t be mended with iron, or steel, or even silver. The old makers made this out of something that sings.”

“Aelunite,” said Orrin.

“Aye. Voice-metal, the old dwarves called it. The only metal in the world that rings on its own. It can’t be mined or smelted, and the art of making it was lost with Aelun.” His jaw worked. “I’ll tell you a thing, songbird. I want to fix this more than I’ve wanted anything in thirty years. I’ll do it for nothing. Not a copper.”

“That is very generous,” said Orrin, startled.

“It’s not generous, it’s greed. I want to touch that metal again before I die.” Haldor leaned on the table. “But I can’t mend it with what’s in my yard. I’d need a shard of fresh Aelunite. A fistful, at the least. And there’s only one place left in the world where it still grows.”

“Where?”

The smith did not answer at once. He walked to the nearest forge and stood looking down at a bar of steel glowing in the coals, as though it might speak.

“Have you heard of the Pits?” he said.

“Pits of what?” said Thara.

“Of Rising Ashes.” He said it softly. “That great hole in the right mountain, like a mouth. You’ll have seen it, coming in.”

Fel had. He remembered the black ragged hollow in the flank of the right mountain, scarred and gaping, looking out across the plain.

“That’s the entrance,” said Haldor. “To the dungeon. Or what’s left of it.”

He told it slowly, in his deep rumbling voice, with his back to them and the red light on his face. Long before the dwarves came to the mountains, he said, there had been a hollow in the earth beneath them, a natural shaft going down and down, cavern upon cavern. It had a thousand floors, laid down like the pages of a book by nothing but time and water and the breath of the world. Things lived in it that had never seen the sun. In the old days, the dwarves had gone down in small bands with lanterns and picks, and come back with gems and strange metals and stories.

“And then they lit the Forge,” said Haldor. “Ten thousand years it’s burned. And a fire like that eats, lass. It gives off ash, and the ash had to go somewhere. It started sinking into the Pits, a floor in a century at first, then faster. Now a quarter of the dungeon is gone. Two hundred and fifty floors, from the bottom up, buried to the roof. And every floor that fills pushes what lived there upward. The beasts, the crawlers, the things made of stone. Higher and higher, with nowhere left to climb but out.”

A cold stillness fell over the cavern.

“That’s why the right mountain is a fortress,” said Brannoch slowly.

“Mm-hm. It was a mining town once. Now it’s barracks and training yards, and everyone in it is paid to hold the line.” Haldor turned. “If the things from the deep floors ever break out all at once, they’ll come straight across the Pass into Dun Vurrim. And Dun Vurrim has stood nine thousand years. I don’t care to see it fall in my lifetime.”

“So the king pays for the loot,” said Thara, who had a gift for the essential.

“By weight. Every guild in the city sends parties down. They bring back gems, bone, ore, whatever they can carry, and the crown pays for it. A monster killed on the thirtieth floor is a monster that isn’t on the fifth.” He shrugged his huge shoulders. “It’s a hard bargain, and a bloody one, but it works. Mostly.”

“And the Aelunite?” said Orrin.

“Is in the creatures.” Haldor held up a thick finger. “Amolites. Living crystal. They look like boulders until they open their eyes, and their hearts are the pure metal, grown by ten thousand years of singing to themselves in the dark. They live below the fiftieth floor. A man would have to go down fifty levels, through everything the ash has driven up, and keep going, to find one. And then he’d have to kill it, which no one man has ever done.” He looked at Orrin. “I’m not asking you to. It was a hope, no more. But bring me the heart, and I’ll make that staff sing like the first morning of the world.”

This content has been misappropriated from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Orrin was silent for a long time.

“Thank you,” he said at last, very quietly. “That is more than I hoped.”

“Don’t thank me.” Haldor turned away, scrubbing at his eyes again. “Thank your mother.”

It was Thara who said the thing nobody had.

“So, Fel,” she said, in a bright, strained voice. “Didn’t you have a question too?”

The smith swung around. “Did you?”

Fel had been standing at the back with his arms folded, trying very hard to be invisible. Now there was nothing to do but ask.

“My swords,” he said. “They’ve stopped working.”

“Stopped?”

“They used to answer me. When I called, something answered.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Now they’re just metal. The Wise One in Sorticia said I should come to the forge, and the smiths would understand. So.” He swallowed. “Will you look?”

The smith’s face went completely still.

“Show me,” he said.

Fel drew Falling Star.

It came out of the scabbard without a sound: a long dark blade, black as a hole in the night, with a thin silver edge, and at the base of the guard a single ruby set deep in the steel. In the red light of the forge it looked like a small and watchful eye.

Haldor Wideforge gasped.

It was not a loud gasp. It was a small intake of breath, the sound of a man struck in the chest. The hammer he had been holding all this time out of long habit slid from his fingers and hit the floor with a clang that rang through the cavern. He did not even look down.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, boy. Oh, look at that.”

He took the sword from Fel’s hands.

He laid it on a cloth of grey felt and held a tiny lens to his eye. He went over the edge inch by inch, without a word. He tapped the flat with a fingernail and held his ear to the steel to hear its note. He balanced it on one finger, sighted down its length, laid a candle behind the blade and watched the light come through the edge, and a long, slow breath went out of him.

“Look at the line of it,” he whispered. “Not a wobble. Not a hair. Whoever drew out this blade could pull a thread straight with a hammer.” He touched the edge with his thumb, and the thumb split, and he did not flinch. “Sharp. Gods, it’s sharp. It would cut a falling leaf in four. And the temper! Hard at the edge, soft at the back, and no seam between. You can’t see where the one becomes the other. It’s as though the blade grew that way. As though it was born.” He closed his eyes. “In two hundred years, I haven’t held another like it. I don’t know that I could even copy it.”

“What’s it made of?” said Fel.

“That I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t?”

“Not by looking.” Haldor opened his eyes. “I could cut a sliver and drop it in the fire, and see what burns. That’s how you find out. And I’d be worse than a fool to do it. If I cut a sample out of that temper, even the smallest, I’d break the heat balance of the whole blade. It would never be the same.” He laid it down tenderly. “No. I’ll not do that to a thing so lovely. You’ll have to live with not knowing.”

Fel breathed out. He had not known he was holding his breath.

“And the other?” said Haldor.

Fel unslung the golden saber.

If the black sword had made the smith gasp, the golden one robbed him of speech. It lay across Fel’s palms, bright and curved, glowing faintly in the dark of the forge like a coal that has just been blown on. Haldor put out a trembling hand, touched the flat of the blade with one blunt fingertip, and withdrew it.

“Krashing Fyr,” Fel said quietly.

“Is that its name?” The smith breathed. “Then it’s well named.”

He lifted it with both hands, as if he were afraid it would break. He examined it exactly as he had the first, but with an even deeper tenderness, as though it were something not merely made but loved. The candlelight passed through the metal like honey. He murmured to himself in the old tongue, and twice he laughed softly, like a man hearing a joke in a dream.

“That’s not just good,” he said at last, in a thick voice. “That’s the best I’ve ever held. Do you see how the curve runs? One pull of the hammer, and the whole sweep is true. A man can’t pull a curve like that out of metal. I don’t know what it would take.”

“Is it really gold?” said Thara.

Everyone turned to look at her.

“What? It’s gold-colored. It’s shiny. I’m just asking what everybody is thinking.” She folded her arms. “If it’s gold, I can tell you what it’s worth, and I’d like to know.”

Haldor looked at her for a moment. Then he began to laugh.

It started as a rumble deep in his enormous chest and grew until he had to put the sword down and hold on to the table. He wheezed. He wiped his streaming eyes. “Gold!” he managed. “Oh, lass, that’s good.” He pressed a hand to his ribs. “Do you know what gold is? It’s soft. It’s the softest metal there is. I could bend a bar of it with my two thumbs. You could dent a gold spoon with your teeth. If you made a sword of gold, you couldn’t cut a loaf of bread with it. It would fold like a leaf and take an edge like a wet noodle. No. This blade is harder than steel and tougher than anything I’ve ever worked. It isn’t gold. It couldn’t be.”

“Then what is it?” said Fel.

The smith’s laughter died. He looked at the saber, and then at Fel, and for the first time since they had come into the yard he seemed unsure of himself.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know?”

“Not a clue.” Haldor spread his hands. “Boy, I’ve worked metal for two hundred years. I’ve handled meteorites and star-iron and the black glass from the vents. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He shrugged his huge shoulders. “But I’ll tell you what it looks like to me, though, boy.”

He reached into the pouch at his belt and drew out a coin.

He flicked it into the air.

It spun. It rose, glittering, toward the dark roof of the cavern, and turned over and over, so many times that Fel lost count, so many times that it seemed to hang there with no intention of ever coming down. It threw tiny gold flickers on the walls. And when at last it fell, it fell straight into the exact center of Fel’s open palm.

It was a coin the size of a thumbnail, round and bright and warm as a living thing. A faint steady glow came off it, soft and golden, and with a start Fel recognized it. It was the same light. The same strange, quiet warmth that lived in the blade of the golden saber.

“A brill,” breathed Thara.

Her face had gone completely white. She put a hand on the table.

“That’s a brill. That’s one brill. That’s a hundred thousand glims, that’s a farm, that’s a ship… and he threw it. He threw it in the air!”

“I carry it for luck,” said Haldor calmly.

“It’s the price of our heads!”

“Is it?” The smith raised his eyebrows. “Then I’ll thank you to keep your voice down, lass.” He looked at Fel. “Do you know what that’s made of, boy?”

“Gold?”

“No. That’s the trick of it. It looks like gold, but it isn’t. It’s something older, something with a secret. The old kings knew how to make it once. A material that burns quiet and never tarnishes and is stronger than any metal born of the earth. They struck a few coins from it in the old days, and gave it a name. And after they died, nobody remembered how to forge it, or what to put in the fire, or how long to hold the heat. It’s the oldest secret in the world of smiths.” He pointed at the saber. “And that is made of the same stuff.”

Fel stared at the coin. Then he stared at the sword.

“Whoever made that blade knew the method,” said Haldor softly. “The secret, the ingredients, the fire, the hand. I’d stake my forge on it. It means that blade is one of a kind. If there’s another like it in the world, I’ve never heard of it.” He took the coin back, with a gentle finger and thumb, and tucked it into his pouch. “Look after it, boy.”

“I will,” said Fel.

His mouth was dry. A small, quiet thought moved at the back of his mind that he did not entirely understand. Someone made this for me. He knew it was not true. It was only a feeling. But it did not go away.

“Now,” said Haldor, rubbing his hands together briskly. “To business. You said they stopped working.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell you what I think, and you won’t like it. Both those blades are perfectly sound. Not a crack, not a flaw, not a bent grain. If the trouble were in the metal, I’d fix it in a week.” He shook his head. “It isn’t in the metal. It’s deeper.”

“Deeper how?”

“It’s the link.” The smith picked up Falling Star again and looked into the ruby. “A blade like this isn’t only a blade. It’s a door. There’s something on the other side, a being, a power, and it comes through the steel when the wielder calls. That’s what makes it do what it does. And the connection between the door and the room has been severed.”

“Severed,” said Veyra softly.

“Cut clean through. Like an empty tombstone, lass. The stone is still standing and the name is still carved on it and the flowers are fresh, but there’s nobody underneath.” His voice was gentle. “The ones who lived inside these blades are gone, or have gone somewhere the blades can’t reach. It’s a very beautiful grave.”

Fel could not speak.

He thought of Silence. He thought of the white room and the woman with eyes the color of falling asleep in fear, and the voice that had said, Each time you call upon me, you will fulfill a request of mine. He thought of how it had felt to hold the golden saber in the Hall, in the dark, with the serpent bearing down, and how he had felt, for one wild moment, that someone was holding his hand.

“Can it be fixed?” he said.

“Aye. But not by me.” The smith set the sword down. “There’s only one way to wake a blade like that. You have to make a new connection. You have to find the ones who lived inside it, and reach them, and call them back. And the only place they can be is in the Realms of the Psyche.”

“The what?”

“The dream-lands.” Haldor’s brass eyes held his. “There’s a place beyond the waking world that isn’t a place, where the spirits go that never took a shape. Not ghosts, boy. Not the dead. The ones that were never given a body. That’s where blades like these are born, in the old stories. A smith with the right art calls a spirit out of that country and binds it into steel. And when the cord gets cut, the spirit goes home, and you have to go and find it.”

“How?” said Fel.

“With power. A great deal of it. Two sorts.” The smith held up his fingers. “Aura, the strength of your life, that comes from the body and that you shape with your will. And mana, the strength of your mind, the deep well that every living thing has and almost none can open. Without them you’d be torn apart the moment you stepped through. A boy with your reserves would last about as long as a moth in a furnace.”

Fel swallowed. “How do I get them?”

“You train.” Haldor said it flatly, as though it were a law of nature. “You train in the arts of aura, how to hold it, shape it, spend it and take it back. You train the body to the edge of what it can bear, and then beyond. You train the mind to sit still in a storm.” He pressed a thick finger into Fel’s chest. “Every smith knows this. You can’t make a blade better than the steel in it. And you can’t make a man stronger than the limit of his body, not until he has reached the limit. Only a body and a mind that have reached their absolute maximum can go beyond it. There is no shortcut. There isn’t a trick.”

The word maximum rang in Fel’s head, and underneath it, the ring in his left palm gave a slow, deep, warm pulse, like a heartbeat heard through a wall.

“You’ll want a teacher,” said the smith. “A real one. Not a sword-swinger from a tavern. Someone who has walked in the Realms, or knows someone who has, and can teach you to hold your power without burning.” He jerked his head toward the door. “The Hall of Guilds. At the very bottom of this mountain, on the ground floor. A hundred guilds and more, every kind of master you can imagine. Look for someone who truly knows what they’re doing. And choose well. A bad teacher is worse than none.”

“How long do I have?” said Fel.

“Eh?”

“Before it’s too late?”

Haldor was silent for a moment.

“Five years,” he said.

“Five…” Fel’s voice cracked. “Five years?”

“Give or take a winter.”

“Five years!” He heard himself yell it and could not stop. “I can’t wait five years! The king’s still alive! People are dying, he’s…” His voice broke. “I need those swords now!”

“Boy.”

Haldor’s voice did not rise. It dropped, like a stone, and Fel stopped as if he had been struck.

“A severed link is a scar,” said the smith quietly. “It closes, slowly. Every year there’s a little less of the road left, and at five winters there won’t be a name on the tombstone anymore. The bond will be gone for good. I didn’t make that limit. I’m only telling you what is.” He put a hand, heavy and warm, on Fel’s shoulder. “But I’ll tell you something else. It depends on you, and on whoever teaches you. A good teacher and a hard heart could do it in a year. A bad teacher and a soft heart will never do it at all. Nobody can promise you the answer. Nobody can take it from you, either. Do you understand?”

Fel looked at the hand on his shoulder, and at the swords on the table. He thought of a spoon in the ash.

“Yes,” he said.

“Good lad.”

Behind him there was a soft sound. Veyra had not said a word through any of it, but she had come to stand at his shoulder, so close that he could feel the warmth of her arm. “We will find you someone,” she said quietly. “Together.”

“Mm,” said Brannoch, from the wall.

“Obviously,” said Thara.

Orrin only bowed his head. And Haldor Wideforge looked from one of them to the next, and a slow smile crept across his scarred and singed face.

“Aye,” he said. “I’d say you’ll do.”

They left in the early afternoon.

The smith saw them to the great copper door. He had handed Orrin the old cracked staff wrapped in white felt, and pressed it into his arms as though it were an infant. He shook Brannoch’s hand, and winced. And at the last, when the others had started down the corridor, he put a finger on Fel’s sleeve.

“The black one,” he said. “The one with the ruby.”

“Falling Star?”

“Aye.” The old brass eyes were gentle. “When you go to the Realms, boy, and you will, if you’re stubborn enough, you’ll find the ones you want. I’d wager my beard on it. But do one thing for me.”

“What?”

“Don’t make them promises you can’t keep.” Haldor’s mouth twitched. “They remember. The ones who were never born. They remember everything.”

He closed the great red door.

It shut with a soft, final boom, and the music from the Banquet Halls above swelled and faded and slipped away. Fel stood in the glass corridor with gold dust in his hair and a hundred thousand thoughts roaring in his head, and one thought beneath them all, clear and cold and steady, like a note held in the dark.

Five years.

He settled the swords at his back and hip, where they had always hung.

He did not feel afraid.