The Hammer of the Sun (41 page)

"Save that you'd have had it sit up and beg!" puffed Roc, reaching for a finer file. A few strokes more, and he wormed his way on hands and knees into the reopened cavity till only his substantial rear protruded. "And how you made it so close a fit…"

"I measured the bar closely to start with," said Elof. "I knew how the heat would expand it; and while it was hot I looked among the crystals in the duergar fashion, and saw where to lay each blow…"

"… is quite beyond me, I was about to say." A chain clanked suddenly. "That's it! Snug and in place! Well, there's the air-shaft mechanism, counterweight and all! Your furnace is yours for the testing anytime." He reappeared, brushing grime out of his thick thatch of hair. "Whew! How'd you like your soot? Congealed, caked or just plain loose and powdery; do you take your fancy!"

"There's a great deal of it…" remarked Elof thoughtfully.

"Only just noticed that? Times were when we were working down here I thought we'd kill every fish in the Great River, bathing at the day's end."

"Yes… but why? There's more here than there should have been if he was only burning coal or wood with the earthfires; and it's too pure, some of it. As if… as if the soot itself was part of what he was creating… almost as if he were seeking to reduce it somehow…"

Roc raised his eyebrows. "Soot? What use might that be to a smith? More like a curse
to
this one!"

"You did not study among the duergar, or in Morvanhal. The pure stuff of such a burning has many uses. For one, it may change steel, smelted deep among its very crystals; so was Kermorvan's sword made, that can hew plain iron unscathed. And when very pure it can be formed into many strange substances; it was Marja who reminded me of that, long since. Wood or coal will yield it, but more easily still stonesblood that is their cousin. The duergar know of many. Some of the true mastersmiths in Kerys of old made trial with the stuff, and I have many of their accounts among Amylhes' library; I may be able to improve upon their methods. In fact
it
was some of those I meant to try here first, for this furnace is so well suited… so that now, by all the Powers, I begin to wonder if that smith of old was not upon the same trail…" Suddenly he snapped his fingers, and reached up to one of the wall ledges so sharply that he all but overbalanced; clouds of soot flew up as he swept his hand impatiently along it. "Not that one…" he muttered, brushing another. "Nor this -"

"Are you out to choke the pair of us?" coughed Roc, but Elof paid him no heed, scraping along the shelves of stone till at last his hand closed upon that same smooth hank that he had first felt.

"This!" he hissed. "By all the Powers, it can't be' And yet what else? Spun…
spun
!"

"It's not hair, that's for sure!" muttered Roc, tugging at a loose strand and managing only to cut his finger. "Is this one of your strange substances, then? You never know, it might well be. I've never seen or heard of anything like it before, and I'll wager you haven't either."

Elof riffled the glossy stuff between his fingers. "Then you might lose," he murmured. "I think - I am not sure, mind you, but I think - that I have. Heard, and seen."

"Among the duergar, I suppose," grunted Roc, but Elof shook his head.

"No. They knew of something like it, but they did not make it. Can you not tell by the very look of the stuff? And by the very feel of it… Powers, it burns in my hand!"

"Seems cool enough to me!" muttered Roc in surprise, stroking it gingerly. "Just black, shiny, fine, and sharp as…" His voice tailed away, and when he looked up into Elof s face his ruddy cheeks had paled beneath their sooty crust. "
Gorthawer
?" he whispered, and Elof inclined his head.

"Remember what I told you once, of those moments when I poured the lightning down upon it -and of what I saw?"

Roc's voice fell very quiet. "That it was no single substance at all, but made of a tangle of fine filaments, compressed somehow…"

"Into a sword. My sword. Someone's sword before me. Whose, I hardly dare think…"

Roc whistled, and hefted the hank in his fingers. "So that's the secret of that blade, eh?" He twisted it in his muscular hands. "Stronger than steel, it could well be. So likely it was some smith of Kerys made it, then, by binding filaments like these…"

"No," said Elof dully, staring beyond him into nothingness. "Not like these…"

"But you said -"

"Not
like
these. These."

Roc dropped the filaments as if they had turned to snakes. "
What
? Don't be daft, man; how can you be so sure?"

"The gauge of them is the same. I have held that sword
too
long not
to
know the stuff
of it again
. I feel it, Roc; I can feel the blade in my grasp even as we stand here."

"I think you've shed your wits!" barked Roc, backing away. "There must still be some bad air here -"

"No, Roc.
You never know
, you said. But for once I do know; it is not only a feeling. Do you look on those shelves behind you, and see again what we saw when first we came down here."

… "Old vessels, pitchers, moulds - sword-moulds, by Hella's tresses!" He snatched one off the shelf and held it up, then turned to Elof with a look of dawning understanding. "It's much like the shape of Gorthawer… much! But it's not the same, not wholly…"

"No," said Elof quietly. The crystal lamp was beginning to dim, the light of day it had gathered to fade; from the corners of that ancient furnace the long shadows were beginning to close in. "That one was flawed. You are not quite tall enough…" And he reached high over Roc's broad shoulder, to where the shorter man saw a sudden gleam among the disturbed soot. "He who laboured here was a taller man than either of us; and I would guess, a better smith. But even he had his failures…" And from the long-neglected shelf, amid a cloud of soot, he drew forth a twin to the black blade, bare-tanged and gleaming as he had first drawn it from the marsh, from the hand of one centuries dead; save that midway down it was warped and cracked as if some impatient hand had wrung it and flung it disgustedly aside.

"
Vayde
?" Roc's growl had thinned to a dry whisper, and it trembled. Elof had seen him stand indomitable against so much; but he feared the dead.

"
No/"
cried Elof, himself desperately afraid as the only friend left him backed from him, to the stairs. "I tell you,
no
! I am only who I am, whom you have known… Alv, Elof! That's all! Not some long-dead necromancer - of that at least I was never more sure!"

"But you are linked with him," breathed Roc heavily, and suddenly he began to shout. "Can you deny it now? Dare you? What then? Did he come and visit you in that marsh? Has his power reached down the years to you and shaped your destiny? Do you dance to a dead man's strings, that his blade you wielded, his furnace you have found,
his very face you wear
?"

Elof stood dumbfounded in the sooty air, swaying before this assault, helpless and confused. "I don't know," he cried, "I… don't… know! Roc, I'm as unnerved as you are… more! Help me, Roc! Or I'll be truly lost -"

Roc stopped in his tracks, and ran his hands down his forge-apron; soot crusted on the sweat in his palms. He breathed like one who has run a long course. "I tell you straight," he said, "I'd half a mind to be up those stairs and slam down that door."

"And what then?" said Elof bitterly. "Open the other doors?"

Roc hung his head. "I don't know… Half a mind, maybe. I'd have thought better of it once I'd got my wind back…" He picked up the lamp, now scarcely brighter
than a glow in that
gloom. "Hel, man, let's get out of here, into the clean air; this murk's got into our minds. I wish to Hella I'd never come down here! I never will again! And no more should you!"

"I agree, my friend," sighed Elof, as Roc gingerly helped him up the steps. "But I must. What was made here must be made again; or our doom may yet be more certain. Have you forgotten our need?"

"No. But what makes you so sure the answer's in this pit of sorcery? The makings of another sword? It'll take more than that to set us free!" Elof shook his head, too spent to speak. "What then? The Tarnhelm again, do you think you can shape another such out of that stuff better than you can from metal? For I can think of naught else you were sure of!" Again Elof shook his head. But as they came to the door he reached within his tunic, where he kept Kara's token, and drew out something that slipped from his grasp and fluttered to the ground like a golden leaf. Roc stooped to it; and gazed up at Elof in greater awe than before.

"You can't mean… You do! Well, I've said once or more than once I'd believe anything of you; but
this
..." A shadow crossed his face. "You're not meaning I should -" He could not continue.

But Elof shook his head and smiled. "No indeed! Have we not said often enough that you could get free with ease? Nithaid hardly cares about you. I am the halter about your throat, and to me it falls to take the risk, or perish in trying. But whatever befall, you will still have a part to play, a hard and a dangerous one…"

Roc grinned and rubbed his hands; his fright had drained out of him. "So long as we're getting somewhere at last!"

"We may be. But who knows how much time is left us? Kara showed us that, whatever she intended, and perhaps also pointed us our way. But it is not yet ours to take!" He slammed the sloping door of the furnace, and twisted the screws that held it tight; then he turned to the remade mechanism and began to wind the wheel.

The soft dragging squeal of the doors in their runners echoed up, setting Elof s teeth on edge. Then beneath their feet a dragon coughed, and the stone quivered to a vast remote roaring. Roc watched tensely as he wound the wheel still wider and set in motion the waterwheel that drove the air-vents. They both kept a tense eye upon a row of tall stems rising from the ground along the length of the furnace, stalks of dark metal set about with leaves of gold; in seconds, no more, the first leaves quivered and began to curl in upon themselves, and the second soon followed. But only when the leaves of the third were curled tight did Elof spin the wheel backward, to close the doors below. The whine of the air-shafts died, and a last puff of vapour came spurting up through the vents, mephitic and biting, before Roc was able to close them, and choke off the growl of the unquiet earth beneath. "Well, they work, by all the Powers!" exclaimed Elof, peering through streaming eyes at the writhing leaves. He had shaped them from webs of many metals laid together in layers, often gossamer thin, and with many virtues worked into them, of consistency not the least. Each layer was chosen carefully to expand at a different speed under the heat that rose up the stem from its roots in the furnace roof, and so pull and twist each leaf this way or that, gauging for those above the intensity of the fires below. He frowned slightly. "Fiercer even than I had expected, for so brief a firing! We must take great care, Roc; Vayde or whoever, it was a brave man who worked this forge before!"

"Or a cracked one! Unless the fires are burning hotter since his day? It's a long time since, remember."

"Maybe… but wouldn't they rather have cooled, being so close to the air?"

"Why should they, when nothing else has?"

"How do you mean?"

"Don't you remember? How Trygkar said the fire-mountains have grown fiercer since his grandfather's day; and I've heard others say the same. As if the land itself was warring with the Ice… Ach, leave it, man, it's safe for now! Do you come outside for some air and a drop to celebrate; my face'll fall off if I don't get a stoup of wine into it!"

But they had to walk some way from the forge, for
that last exhalation from the vents still hung in a dark cloud in the still air, and the oak trees drooped with darkness on their leaves. Elof watched it, preoccupied, till the reviving river breeze whisked it away like the remnants of a dark vision; only then did he feel at all like celebrating. "To our labours!" he said crisply, clinking his goblet against Roc's. "For though now I know the thing I need can be made and I have the furnace to make it, yet it may be a while before we have cause for toasts again!"

In that he was a true prophet; for all through spring into summer ran his trials, and more and more frustrating they grew. Many and subtle were the stratagems he was driven to devise, the compoundings, Mendings, reducings he had to essay in the search to shape anew that hair-like filament with the dark sheen. A dark miasma hung often over the forge and the small beasts of the island fled its environs. Once the very spring was poisoned below the forge; the fish died in its outflow, the swans came no longer to the quiet pools, nor the little mammuts to wallow and spout. Elof, for all his desperation, was grieved at this, and more careful in future, even devising measures to shield the trees from the airs of the furnace. But he did little else; and had his master been more demanding he could hardly have escaped detection. Nithaid, though, had other and more pressing concerns, for the Ekwesh went on as they had begun, harrying the lands in small bands that did less actual harm than before, yet wrought havoc and spread panic by their very elusiveness. Nor had they any need to slacken their campaign in the summer months, as when they were mustered in a full army, for a part of each clan could direct the thrall-gathered harvests in turn, while the rest were raiding.