The Shadowsteel Forge (The Dark Ability Book 5)

by D. K. Holmberg

  “Do you see anything?” he asked Jessa.

  “Thought maybe your lorcith sensing might pick up something. I don’t see anything here but shades of gray.”

  That meant that without the sword, the hall would be pitch black. Jessa saw only grays when the darkness was that absolute. With the sword, he was able to see the walls and everything around him. “Well, my sword isn’t so strange, after all,” he said. “Because I can see more than you this time. Now who’s the babe?”

  She flashed him a grin and started pushing on the stone until it clicked. “I didn’t say that I could see nothing, And you’re still the babe in the dark, but that’s okay. That’s why you have me.”

  A door swung open, and heartstone interspersed with lorcith lined the walls. Somehow, he hadn’t detected it even though it was only on the other side of the wall. Now that the door was open, though, he had full awareness of both.

  “Tell me you see this,” he said.

  “I see it. Don’t know what it means.”

  Rsiran didn’t, either, but the way the two metals alternated created a pattern, and that pattern pushed against him. Whatever else this did, it seemed designed to work against his lorcith abilities, and possibly even to counter his ability to Slide.

  They reached the end of a hall. “Look at this,” Jessa commented.

  Rsiran swung the sword around to light his way and saw what she was pointing to. There was the outline of a door, with a small loop of metal for a handle. The door appeared to be set into the lorcith and heartstone pattern so that the opening created a zigzagging pattern. The entire section of the wall pushed against him.

  “There’s something here,” he said. “Or there was.”

  “Let me see if I can open it.” Jessa pulled out her lock-pick set and began working at the lock that he had barely noticed. The more he focused on the lorcith, the more the heartstone began to pulse at him. When he shifted to the heartstone, then the lorcith began to pulse against him. They countered each other, a painful balance that forced his focus away so that he could barely keep his mind focused. Standing here, he would struggle to Slide, and he would struggle to detect either lorcith or heartstone distant from him.

  “This is a prison,” he said softly.

  Jessa turned to him and frowned. “What? Why would they have a prison here? We’ve already seen the kind of prison the Forgotten uses. This isn’t one of them.”

  “This is meant for me.” That was the only explanation he could think of. They had learned enough about his abilities that the Forgotten had come up with a way to counter them. And unlike what Venass had used on him, this might work.

  Had Evaelyn shared this with Venass?

  “Rsiran, they wouldn’t have had the time to create something this elaborate in the time between when they discovered us and when we returned.”

  He didn’t know if that was really true. This wasn’t necessarily complex, more of a regular pattern that served to push against him. “Let’s see if there’s anything on the other side.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. What if you’re right and this is a prison for you?”

  If it was, then he wanted to know, and he wanted to know if there was a way that he could escape if it came to that. “Can you open it?”

  She sighed and returned her focus to the door where she worked at it for a few moments. The slender, metal lock pick tinkled against the stone before the lock snicked open. Jessa pulled on the handle and stepped away from the door.

  Holding his sword out, he saw that the inside of the room was exactly as he expected. It was a cell. There was a low cot, an empty ceramic basin, and nothing else other than a musty smell of filth.

  He held the sword out, looking from wall to wall, trying to understand what this might have been used for. Someone had been kept here, but why in this place? Was there someone else who had the ability to anchor to both lorcith and heartstone? He had thought himself unique with that ability, but maybe he wasn’t, and maybe the Forgotten had found another who they had kept here. From the stink in the room, he knew that they had kept someone here.

  “Rsiran,” Jessa said. “Look here.”

  She stared at a part of the wall above the cot that Rsiran had missed. With the light from his sword, he was able to see a series of patterns, one after another, the shape of which he had seen before. The last time had been many years ago, but there was no mistaking it. It was the same pattern that was on Alyse’s lorcith necklace.

  “Great Watcher,” he whispered. “They kept my father here.”

  Chapter 10

  They left the cells, and Rsiran looked for anything else that would tell him where Inna and the other Forgotten had been. His thoughts kept drifting back to the cell, and the uncertainty about what would happen were he trapped in something like that.

  Jessa squeezed his hand. “Stop it.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” he said, holding the sword out from him.

  “I can see the way that room is bothering you, but it shouldn’t.”

  “Why shouldn’t it bother me?” He stopped in the hall that led back to the heartstone room. “It shouldn’t bother me that there are Elvraeth—Forgotten or whatever—who have created an entire room designed to hold me? Or that others have tried the same thing, over and over? Eventually, someone will find a way, and even with all of my abilities, it will work. And then… and then…”

  When he couldn’t finish, Jessa pulled him into her, holding him for a moment. “And then, your friends will come for you. You have it in your head that you’re the one who is responsible for saving everyone, but it’s never been about that. We work together. All of us.”

  Rsiran swallowed the lump in his throat. He knew that Brusus or Haern would come for him, but he was the one Venass was after, the one the Forgotten Elvraeth had been after. At first, he thought they wanted his abilities, but if his bloodline was what Della claimed, they wanted him for a different reason now.

  “Do you want to go home?” Jessa asked.

  “Not yet.” A part of him wanted nothing more than to return to the smithy, to fire up the forge, and to make something. Anything. Clear his head so that he could begin to think, and maybe come up with what he needed to do. But they were here, and the palace appeared empty. He would stay and hopefully find what they might have missed when he had been here before.

  As they approached the door to go back into Evaelyn’s heartstone room, Jessa released his hand and started toward a far wall. The corridor was simple stone, nothing ornate, but she trailed her fingers along it, as if impressed by the skill that had gone into it. She turned back to him, a smile on her face.

  “I can’t believe I missed it.”

  “Missed what?”

  “Look at this wall. Everything else around here has been lorcith, and heartstone, right?”

  Rsiran nodded. “What’s your point?”

  “Only that they don’t impede you Sliding, but Inna and the others were different, weren’t they? They had the same restrictions that you had when you first began to Slide. They couldn’t get past heartstone. Maybe not even lorcith if it’s presented in the right way.”

  Rsiran stopped at the wall, starting to understand what Jessa was getting at. There was no lorcith in the wall, not even any streaks of the ore. From finding the cells, they knew that the Forgotten had known enough about working with lorcith to use it in their work, and with the smiths they had abducted, they would have known how to add lorcith to whatever they wanted. Why not here?

  Focusing on lorcith, he searched through the wall. It had been his capture in Venass that forced him to learn this skill. When he’d been trapped there, he had discovered how he could trace the lorcith, and follow it with his mind. Beyond the wall, there was a subtle sense of lorcith. Nothing more than a faint presence, much like what he’d sensed when he had chased the Slider from the Aisl Forest.

  He withdrew from his awareness of the lorcith, and glanced at Jessa.

  She shook he
r head. “You’re not leaving me here.”

  “What if—”

  “You get stuck in the wall? Or you Slide us to some place we can’t get out?” She shrugged. “That’s a chance I’m willing to take. But I’m not staying here.”

  He took her hand and pulled them in a Slide toward the faint sense of lorcith.

  When they emerged, they were in a wide chamber that appeared to be similar to the other side of the wall. The gray stone had a ridged texture that had been added to it. Lorcith flared in his mind. Rsiran turned toward the source of the lorcith and found it on the far side of the room, glowing softly.

  A stout oak table, heavily lacquered, held a collection of sharp instruments. Scissors, a few slender knives, and needles. All were made of bright steel that shone from the light of his heartstone sword. None of them held his attention.

  Next to the instruments, were small items of lorcith. A few sharp, barbed pieces of metal, paired. A slim, curved plate about the size of his fist. A few circular disks of the same size with strange patterns etched into them.

  “What is this?” Jessa asked.

  “This is where Venass used the lorcith to modify the Forgotten,” he answered. He hesitated even touching the lorcith. Even knowing that it couldn’t harm him wasn’t enough to make him willing to touch pieces of metal that were meant to go inside of the Elvraeth.

  Jessa touched the plate and pulled her hand back. “It’s hot.”

  Rsiran looked at each of the items. “These need to be destroyed,” he realized. Even the lorcith begged for that release.

  “What are they?”

  “These,” he said, pointing to the paired lorcith piercings, “are what Venass uses to control lorcith.”

  “Like the scholar had through his lips.”

  “Not only his lips, but yeah. That’s what they do. He also had piercings in his stomach, and arms, and…”

  Rsiran struggled to remember where exactly the scholar had them, but couldn’t. Inna and the other Forgotten had used a similar technique to gain power over lorcith. And now he knew where they had done it.

  But it required the skill and knowledge of Venass. It wasn’t simply that you could take the metal and use it on anyone, he didn’t think. The shaping of the lorcith was important. Rsiran thought of how he had created the bracelets he and Jessa wore, and how they inhibited Reading and Compelling.

  The bracelets drew his gaze, as he realized how similar what he had done was to what Venass did with lorcith. But not the same, was it? With the lorcith that he used, he asked the metal to assist him. There was a partnership to it that Venass had not had. With the piercings on the table, there had been no partnership, only the desire to force it into the patterns and shapes that the forger had desired.

  “What about this?” Jessa asked, pointing to the plate she’d touched.

  “I think that’s like what Thom had.”

  “And Haern?” Jessa asked.

  Rsiran nodded. “Before…”

  She blinked and turned away, leaving Rsiran feeling guilty for reminding her of what her father had done for Haern.

  “And these?” She pointed to the circular shapes that didn’t really seem to fit in with the rest of what they saw out on the table.

  “I don’t know.” He listened to the lorcith within them, but didn’t have a good sense of what they would have been used for.

  As he listened, he realized there was other lorcith here, but not out on the table. He searched around the room until he came upon a rolled piece of parchment. Rsiran slowly unrolled it and noted that it appeared to be a schematic of sorts, plans for something much like what Shael had asked him to build.

  “What is it?” Jessa asked, looking over his shoulder.

  “I… I don’t know. Shael had something like these.“ He stared at the page a moment more and then folded it up to stuff in his pocket to study later. His eyes scanned the rest of the room and fell upon a strange box, one that was not formed from lorcith or steel, but a combination of many different metals.

  He listened for lorcith, but detected none present in the box. But there was other lorcith here, only… he traced what he detected, until he reached a wall. “There’s something more here,” he said.

  Jessa touched the wall, much like she did before. Her fingers trailed along the stone and then she stopped. “There’s a door here. Hidden pretty well, but I can definitely see it.”

  “Can you open it?”

  She shot him a look. “Can’t you Slide through it?”

  Rsiran grabbed her hand, focusing as he did on the sense of lorcith on the other side of the door, and pulled himself beyond the door.

  Lorcith flared in his mind on the other side, more strongly than it should have.

  “Where is it?” Jessa asked.

  The room they emerged into was dark. Were it not for his heartstone sword, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything, but with it, he made out a line of tables staggered through the room. Light suddenly bloomed as Jessa turned on a lantern, releasing a bright bluish light that filled the small room.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  Jessa went from table to table, patting them as she did. “Looks like an infirmary. Some of the larger cities have these when they don’t have Healers like Della.” She traced her finger along one of the tables before pulling it back and examining it. “Blood.”

  “This was where the piercings would have been done,” Rsiran said.

  “All of this is a part of the Forgotten Palace?” she asked. “They didn’t work together with Venass before they started coming after you. Don’t you think it’s strange that they were able to suddenly build this space?”

  “Maybe they always had it,” Rsiran said.

  Jessa glanced to the walls before turning her attention back to the tables. “But why would they have something like this if they hadn’t partnered with Venass? That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Before they partnered with Venass, why would they have needed something like this?”

  Rsiran didn’t have a good answer, but Jessa was right that it didn’t make sense for this to suddenly be here. That indicated a sort of planning, but what would Evaelyn have been planning? Or had she been working with Venass for longer than he’d realized?

  He had assumed that Venass and the Forgotten were separate, but what if they weren’t?

  “What are you thinking about?” Jessa asked.

  “Only what you suggested. This would have been here for a while. And it’s off the heartstone room, a place that’s sort of separate from the rest of the Forgotten Palace. That seems to tell me that Evaelyn had wanted this to be separate. Maybe the other Forgotten hadn’t known what she was doing.”

  “But you saw what happened. How she had some of the Forgotten pierced.”

  “Some. But not all of them.”

  “Rsiran,” Jessa said, turning to him, and touching his arm, “I know what you’re thinking. You’re doing it again.”

  “Doing what?”

  “You want to think that your grandfather might not have been a part of what Evaelyn had been planning. And I’ll admit it’s possible that he wasn’t, but you don’t know that for sure. None of us do.”

  “Unless we find him and ask.”

  “You want to search for the Forgotten? Don’t you think we had enough trouble the last time we did that?” She rubbed her forehead where Rsiran knew she still suffered from headaches from the attack.

  “I don’t want to find all of them. And this time it will be different.”

  “You don’t know that. Just because we’re going searching for your grandfather doesn’t mean that it’ll be different for us.”

  He surveyed the room. With what Della had said about her brother, Rsiran had to believe the man was different from Evaelyn, that he would never have done what she had to her own people. That he had really tried to save Evaelyn, just like Della had said. Rsiran had to hold onto the hope that he was more like his grandfather than he was his mother,
or his father for that matter.

  “I don’t know what it means,” he said. “But I think I have to search.”

  “The guild thinks we have nothing to fear from the Forgotten, now that Evaelyn and her leadership are gone. That Venass is the only real threat that we have now.”

  “And they’re probably right. The palace is empty, so it’s likely the Forgotten who sided with Evaelyn are gone. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore them.” He took Jessa’s hands. “Listen, what if none of them sided with Evaelyn? What if they disagreed with her plans, or were Compelled by her? Don’t you think that we should find them? They might even be able to help.”

  Jessa laughed softly. “You don’t have to convince me. But I suspect you will need to convince Brusus and Haern.”

  Chapter 11

  When they returned to Elaeavn, Rsiran took them straight to the Wretched Barth. It was early in the day still, much earlier than when he would usually visit, and he wasn’t certain that Alyse would even be there, but he needed to see her. More than that, he needed to see the necklace. Inside the tavern, he found a few servers, but no sign of Alyse. Not even Brusus, though that was less unusual. He rarely spent his entire day in the tavern. More and more of it, though, especially now that the Barth had grown busier, and now that he actually owned the Barth and no longer had to hide.

  One of the newer servers, a young woman named Molly who had long, blonde hair and wide hips, caught him as soon as he entered and shook her head. “Brusus isn’t here. Said he would be back later,” she offered.

  “What about Alyse?”

  Molly glanced to Jessa before returning her gaze to Rsiran. “She’s not working until tonight.”

  “Tell my sister that I stopped by,” he said.

  Molly nodded. “You can see if she’s up there,” she said, motioning overhead.

  Jessa took his hand and led him through the tavern to the stairs hidden near the back wall. The Barth wasn’t an inn and didn’t have rooms for guests, only for those who worked here. Brusus had taken up quarters here, abandoning his small home and using the Barth instead, and Rsiran knew that Alyse had accepted Brusus’s offer of space here as well.