"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.
Only where Elof s new fortifications stood were the raids blunted, for they rarely dared afford the time to lay siege to a town so defended, and the labyrinthine barrier as it spread blocked the quick influx and escape upon which their strategies depended. When Nithaid could fall upon such a band of raiders heavily engaged against a town, or trap them between the slender garrison of the barriers and his own army, he wiped them out to a man; but otherwise he was left floundering with his heavy forces from place to place after reivers who darted in and out like fish nibbling a bait. Only by surprise and good fortune could he intercept them; and he seemed to be having less of both. In many places he left garrisons, but one might fall into undisturbed idleness, another be overwhelmed by unusually large numbers, another worn away by repeated harassment; all were equally destructive. Often he had to face minor mutinies among his levies when they heard of their homelands being pillaged while they were kept chasing some elusive threat halfway down the border. All this grew worse, and his standing, which by Elof s creations and his own fierce energy had been greatly enhanced of late, began once again to suffer. Even his own warriors grew louder in their grumbles, and more ready to remember that for all his claims to Ysmerien blood he held the throne by the right of a usurper only, and that through an Ysmerien great-grandfather his children had a better right than he. Even at his court, since he was so often absent, this came to be said openly, and less than eagerly discouraged by his sons. So Roc reported, for as often as ever he went abroad to aid in the fortifications, and Elof was left to his lone and gloomy labours.
It was from one such excursion that he returned, early in the next winter that was the seventh of Elof s thralldom, and found his friend seated at their table with a great mass of filament before him, and a strange smile on his face. He was clad as if to celebrate in some of the fine garments that Nithaid had sent them; but Roc did not fail to notice how stiffly and gingerly he rose, nor that his crutches were new and of steel, nor that the end wall of the forge had a stained and blackened cast to it, as from the passage of great heat. As Elof offered him his hand in greeting he took the arm instead, and saw Elof wince as he gripped the bandages beneath; looking closely, he saw that his friend's cheeks had a sheen to them as of new scarring, tight and papery.
"You've been doing it, haven't you, you daft bastard?" Roc hissed, gripping harder in his anger. "Going down there to work, and all by yourself - fired your bloody clothes, didn't you - eh?"
"It was the only way…" said Elof faintly, and sat down, clutching his arm. "The only way untried… The lesser the wound, the slower it is to heal, so it is with me, I think. No grave burns, but many scorches, that is all… And it is done, Roc! Done! I have burned the rock-oil with minerals to its finest form, and spun it into thin chains of matter, crystals finer than thread. Was that not worth a flaying from the fires? The filament is made anew! And with it our hopes!"
Roc shook his head resignedly. "The filaments, maybe; but all the rest? How'll you come by the materials you need? Crystals take time to grow; and where can you find enough gold for…"
"That taxed me also!" said Elof, smiling darkly once more, "But no longer. Nithaid is returned, have you heard?"
"Aye; he had me to the palace, to quiz about the state of the fortifications. He is hard-pressed, that one; he leaves the field only to tighten his grip on the heartlands, and raise more money for the campaigns. It's rumoured he plans a new minting of coinage…"
"He does," said Elof, still smiling. "But he has need of my aid with it. Last week that slime-ridden lord his treasurer came calling on me with great chests of gold, his knees knocking at the very sight of me; but still he demanded that I use my arts to so debase the stuff as to increase it by a quarter, and leave even the minters unable to tell. Wonderful, is it not, to what heights I am elevated in the hands of this king? He makes me his thrall, his murderer, and now his counterfeiter; a noble advancement, is it not?"
"Tell him you can't do it!" urged Roc, outraged. "It's no more than the truth -"
"I sent word back that I could, and would," rejoined Elof.
Roc shook his head in surprised disgust. "But man… can you do it?"
"I believe so - though that reflects less on the skills in me than the lack of them in the coiners. They would scarce notice if the gold were debased by half, so long as it took their die-stamps prettily enough."
"By half -" exploded Roc, and then he began to chuckle. "You'd better be right, my lad!"
"About the coiners?"
"About your plan! Make the best of that gold, for I fear you're going to need it! But whence comes the other stuff?"
"I sent word I needed that for the coining. The first boatload arrived this morning." Roc stared at him wide-eyed, and exploded into laughter.
"He's fostered your felon's instincts only too well, I see!"
But Elof's smile did not change, and Roc understood suddenly that it was rigid with self-disgust. "He has. And if one day it should lead me to forget that I am a mastersmith, and no common assassin, be it upon his head."
The winter that came was harder even than those before, and it was among banks of snow and bitter winds that Elof entered the eighth year of his thralldom. He scarcely noticed; he was too busy, labouring with Roc upon the king's gold, or by himself in the depths of the furnace chamber. Roc was glad to see that his burns were healing, and that he took no further such risks; he seemed to feel now that he had greater cause to keep himself as
whole and ready as he could. Only at times, when he could not sleep of a night, he would go stand hip-deep in the snow that not even the rising earthfires could dispel now, and gaze long into the skies, whether clouded or frost-clear; and for that Roc hardly had the heart to rebuke him. But he saw no more wings. It seemed that Kara had vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared. Chests of gold went ashore and were received at the mint without complaint, the more so as Elof had set within the tainted gold a potency which might cloud a prying mind; the new-made blanks rang as clear and heavy as any pure gold between the dies. Upon one face, as was customary, the sign of the Sun between the Horns was set; but upon the other was shown Nithaid in his armour bestriding a dying Ekwesh warrior, for he wished the coins to embody the confidence of his realm and rule.
"And so it does!" said Elof bitterly. "For it is as false at heart! More false even that he himself suspects!" He let the coin slip through his fingers onto the table, and from there roll unregarded to the floor, and wiped one hand against the other as if to shed the taint. Then, gathering his crutches, he heaved himself upright, swung towards the door and slammed it behind him in an icy blast of air. Roc looked after him and shook his head sadly; but he did not neglect to pick up the coin and stow it carefully in an inner pocket.
Elof floundered out through the snow, climbing laboriously to the summit of the hill, drinking in deep draughts of the clean air as if to wash out the clinging taint of dishonesty. A cold north wind had scoured the sky to a dome of onyx traced with diamond, glittering and hard. The oaks looked suddenly aged, for the snow clung to their bare branches in place of missing foliage, and they drooped beneath its weight. In summer this little grove was a place of peace for him, a green shade where he could lie and be lulled by the drone of insects and the thousand shifting shadings of the broad leaves. Stark and cold now, it held little promise of peace for him; and yet it helped strangely to lean his aching head against the coolness of the gnarled bark, and know that somewhere beneath life and growth went on in hope, readying for the spring that was not far off. He had done well to spare these ancient trees.
The Hammer of the Sun Page 31
