by Mike Shevdon
We sat around the table in the kitchen, Ben, Jeff, Lisa and James opposite Blackbird and I, while Meg fussed around us.
"I still don't see the difference," Ben Highsmith repeated, scratching his head.
"Believe me," I told him, "We would not be sitting here talking like this if it was remotely like the Quick Knife. "
"But we made it the same," he protested.
"And it's definitely iron," Blackbird said. "But not like the Quick Knife. Rabbit is right; we would be able to tell straight away if it was the same. We would know as soon as you brought it anywhere near us, either of us." Our hopes of restoring the knife to this year's ceremony and reinforcing the barrier against the Seventh Court were melting away.
"Do you know anyone else, anyone you could recommend?" I hated to ask, but it was all I could think of. Ben Highsmith blustered, but it was his son who answered.
"There's no one else does the kind of work you need. That's why we've kept the skills alive all these generations. And there's none alive that's better with iron than Dad. Dad, sit down, he's only asking what you'd ask in his place."
Ben had stood up ready to defend his honour, but then sighed and slumped back into his seat, resting his chin in his hands. "I s'pose," he admitted.
"Are you sure there's no way of mending the old one? I mean, it's potent enough, it's just not in one piece," Blackbird asked him.
Ben answered. "No, No. It won't take a weld and it can't be braised. Melting down the metal will return it to solid iron, but not in the way you want. Broken is broken with cold iron." We lapsed into silence again. "Can I see the broken one?" Lisa asked.
She hadn't said a word until now, sitting close to her grandfather as if she dwelt in his shadow. He was as startled as we were that she'd spoken.
"Fetch it out for her, will you?" he asked me.
Blackbird unzipped her bag and extracted the box with the knives in it, sliding it across the table towards them. "If you don't mind, Rabbit and I will go and stand in the yard while you look at it."
They waited while we stood and trooped outside into the yard. Even then, the prickling sensation down my spine, the ache in my bones, told me the moment the box was opened.
"What are we going to do now?" I asked Blackbird. "I don't know what we can do. Get them to make another? Is there any reason it would be better than the one they've already made? Maybe they've lost the art, in which case we can only ask them to experiment and try and regain it. Whatever happens it will be too late for this year, maybe too late for all of us. If the barrier collapses…" She let the words trail away and kicked a stone across the yard. It bounced unevenly across the concrete.
I felt the dull ache subside and knew they had finished examining the knife before Ben Highsmith emerged, his granddaughter trailing behind him, her father following her out to stand watch behind them. "This Quick Knife is useless, right?" He questioned Blackbird, brandishing the box.
"The broken knife can't be used for the ceremony," she confirmed, "unless it can be repaired well enough to cut a hazel rod?"
"Nah, but Lisa spotted something neither Jeff nor I had seen. I'd show you but… "
"We'll take your word for it," I told him.
"The blade of the knife has been hammered after it cooled. You can see it if you hold it up to the light. Jeff and I didn't believe her at first. We didn't even look for hammer marks, but sharp-eyes here spotted it." He smiled down at her and ruffled her hair affectionately. She grinned up at him, basking in his praise. "So why don't you hammer the new one?"
"It looks like the original has been hammered cold and we know that if you hammer cold iron, it shatters. The metal's too brittle to take it. That's why we weren't looking for hammer marks."
"Then how could it have been hammered in the first place?"
"That's what Lisa wants me to try. She wants to see if the old knife can be hammered. If it can, then that might explain the difference between the knives. Or it could just shatter."
I looked at Blackbird. She nodded. "Do it," she told him.
We followed them to the back of the farm being careful to avoid the plume of smoke being whipped off the top of the chimney by the stiffening breeze. The forge was there, the bed of coals still burning from their night's work.
"Unlike copper, iron isn't usually hammered cold," Ben told us. "The knife we made for you was heated in the forge until the iron became ductile and then it was hammered into shape. Keeping it hot and hammering it drives out the impurities so you end up with something you can work with. That's wrought iron." He went through the low arch into the forge. Neither Blackbird nor I made any move to follow him. He raised his voice and moved about in the dimness within, donning a leather apron and collecting things together while he continued explaining, raising his voice to be heard through the open doorway of the forge. "Cold iron is harder to make," he called out to us. "A very particular ore is put though an ancient process to produce a lump of coarse iron called a bloom. The bloom is reheated and then hammered to drive out the impurities. It has to be cooled slowly enough to allow the crystals to form, but hammered enough to drive out the impurities. Hammer it too much and it'll shatter, too little and the impurities will make it brittle and it won't take the shape. Cool it too fast and it'll develop fracture lines, too slow and it'll be soft and never take an edge. It's all in the making."
He picked a hammer from a rack and hefted it, standing in the shade of the doorway. "You'd better stand back in case it shatters," he told us, picking a safety visor from a hook.
Jeff pulled his daughter away behind him, standing at an angle to the doorway. Blackbird and I moved well back behind a stone wall, well aware of what flying fragments of cold iron would do to either of us. From our position we couldn't see into the forge, but we knew when he took the broken blade of the Quick Knife from the box.
There was a long pause and then a characteristic sound
'Tink… tink… tink… tink… Thonk!'
Then a pause.
'Tink… tink… tink… tink… Thonk!'
Every time he hit the knife it made a jarring note that accented the wrongness in the metal. It was like scraping fingers down a blackboard, but a hundred times worse. By the time he was ready to stop I had a thumping headache and Blackbird looked no happier. Jeff and his daughter crowded back into the forge to view the results. Blackbird and I had no wish to get closer to the knife or the forge, so we stayed outside. The headache had intensified and I was seeing vague images, like brief mirages, in the periphery of my vision. I felt Blackbird's hand on my arm. "Are you well?" I nodded, sending needles of pain through my forehead making me grimace.
"It's done now. They've finished," she reassured me. There was an animated discussion going on between Jeff and the old man. They were arguing technicalities and sparking off each other. The argument died as quickly as it started. They put the knife back into its box and brought it back to us.
"It's still whole," Ben told us, "though the metal has started to crack. If I had continued it would have broken again."
"So is that a yes or a no?" Blackbird asked him.
"I think the lass has the right of it: it was hammered cold. Remember though, simply dropping it onto a hard floor was enough to break it in the first place. "
"That was a fault in the metal," Jeff interrupted.
"Regardless, if we cold-hammered the new knife then it would crack and break."
"Not if we had the right tools," Jeff interrupted again. "Jeff, we've been over this. The anvil would need to be enormous and specifically made for the job and the hammer would have to be tuned to the metal. Even then…" His frustration at his son evaporated as he watched the expressions on our faces change. "What?" he said. "This anvil? How enormous would it need to be?" Blackbird asked him. "Big. Bigger than anything we've got."
"About this long, so high?" She hopped around, miming the distances, unable to spread her arms wide enough to encompass it.
He looked askance at her theatrics
, but nodded.
"We saw it," I told him. "It's in London, hidden." I described the anvil sitting on the island amid the dark water of the underground river.
"It sounds right, but without a hammer that's tuned to it, it only solves half the problem."
There was a pause while we thought it through.
"You wouldn't want to separate the hammer from the anvil, would you?" Blackbird suggested.
"No," I agreed, "But you wouldn't leave it lying around either, not where someone could appropriate it for some other purpose. It might get lost."
"Or stolen," she added. "You'd lock it away."
"Somewhere close by," I agreed.
"Somewhere safe."
"But we can't open it. It's sealed, remember?"
"Would the two of you mind telling me what on earth you're talking about?" the old man interrupted. We described the square iron door in the wall, neither of us mentioning the two visitors that had come to inspect it while we had been there.
"But it's locked and we don't know how to unlock it," I told him.
"And you reckon there's a hammer in this lock-box? "
"Where else would you put it? It has to be there."
He scratched at his unshaven chin. "You might be able to break into it, but it sounds like you'd need heavy cutting equipment. Any idea how thick the door is?" We both shook our heads. "The door is flush to the wall and not easy to get at. It's set in the wall above head-height over a thin ledge where it would be almost impossible to set a ladder, let alone apply any leverage once you had climbed it."
It was his turn to shake his head. "Even if there is a hammer in there, it doesn't sound like you'll be able to get at it without unlocking it."
"There must be a key." Frustration rang in Blackbird's tone.
"Are you sure the key's not with the anvil?" Jeff suggested.
"No, there's nowhere to leave it where it would be safe. Besides, why leave the key with the safe? There'd be no point in locking it if the key is with it. Are you certain you don't have a key here, handed down through generations, a family heirloom perhaps? "
"We can look," Jeff volunteered.
We followed Jeff back into the kitchen and he started pulling out drawers looking for keys.
"Jeff, I'm trying to put lunch together. Do you mind?" Meg Highsmith protested as Jeff started turning drawers out onto the kitchen table.
"It's urgent," was all he said and continued pulling things out.
Ben went into the room with the dogs, amid much snuffling and a low growl from the big dog at us. Ben emerged with a wooden box filled with bits of rusty broken tools, orphaned cutlery and old keys. He spilled the lot out onto the table. Meg folded her arms and sighed as they began sorting through the oddments. "If you tell me what you're looking for I might be able to help," she offered.
They carried on sorting, but explained the dilemma of the missing key. There was a growing pile of old keys in the centre of the table, but none looked likely. "It has to be quite large," I told her, picking up an ornate brass key. "The keyhole is square and about a quarter of an inch on each side. The thing is, it didn't look as if the lock turned."
"No, it didn't did it?" agreed Blackbird. "How do you turn a square key in a square hole?"
"Maybe it's a round key that goes in a square hole?" remarked Jeff.
"Maybe, but then where do the 'key' bits go; the bits that trip the levers?"
James Highsmith had watched all this from the far end of the kitchen table, but now he stood up and started talking in low tones to his mother.
"I don't know, James. Ask them," she told him.
He turned to us, glancing at his father. "There's this PlayStation game…" he started.
"James, not now!" The disappointment in Jeff's voice at the change of subject to his son's passion was palpable. "Jeff. Hear him out." Meg Highsmith stood behind her son. This was clearly a point of friction between the man and the teenager and it looked like Meg had had to stand between them more than once.
James hesitated, but at a nudge from his mother he started speaking again.
"In the game you collect an ornate dagger, early on in the game. I thought it must be a magic one; you know, effective against certain types of monster? But after a while, you stop using it because it's useless. It's much more effective to use the bigger weapons." Jeff sighed, but subsided at a look from Meg.
"Then, when you get into the later levels there are people that try and buy it off you, or steal it, or trade it for something. It got so I kept it just because everyone wanted it. Anyway, you get to the big castle at the end and the drawbridge is up, the gates are locked, but you need to get inside to fight the big boss."
He paused, but found only blank faces. I don't think any of us had ever played on a PlayStation.
"The thing is, there's a little gate which you can get to by climbing around, but when you get there it's locked. The keyhole is a funny shape, like a thin diamond. The only way of opening the gate is to put the dagger into the keyhole. Then you're in. "
"And?" said his father.
"I think what James is telling us is that while we are all looking for something shaped like a key, that may not be what we need," said Blackbird.
"You said the keyhole didn't turn," James pointed out. "Maybe it doesn't need to, if you have the propershaped thing to put into it?"
"So we're looking for something that could push into a square hole about so big." Blackbird held her thumb and forefinger apart to show them the size. Everyone looked blank.
"That makes it worse," I said. "We were looking for a needle in a haystack. Now we don't even know if it's a needle." James looked crestfallen so I added, "But James may be right. A literal key may not be what we're searching for." That brought back a hesitant smile. Jeff and his father started putting things back into the drawers and boxes they had come from, much to the relief of Meg. They cleared away the mess and James wiped the table and began laying out cutlery for lunch. James looked at his mother and she turned to us. "Will you stay for some lunch after all?" she offered. It was rather unfair to change our minds two minutes before it was served, so we made excuses and said we would go and sit in the sunshine while they had their meal. We walked around the back of the farm, past where the forge still smoked, and sat upwind on a low wall looking out across the fields. "It could be anywhere," I said to her. "Actually, I don't think it could." She glanced sideways at me.
"I think the hammer was locked away to prevent the Seventh Court from hiding or damaging it, but there would be no point in keeping it safe if you couldn't get to it when it was needed, and no one knew when that might happen. If you think about it, everything has been left in place if you knew where to look. "
"What about the anvil? That was pretty well hidden. "
"But you knew where it was because of the vision. And I knew where to find you because Kareesh sent me her message."
"So you still think Kareesh is behind all this."
"Yes. She is the link that ties it all together. I still don't know why she didn't just tell us what to do, but I'm sure she has her reasons."
"Well, there's nothing in the vision to tell us where the key might be. There's nothing small enough to fit. And I've found all the pieces now, even if they're not quite right in my head. I know where to find the silhouette of the cat. We've found the anvil in the hall of water and we've been to Australia House. The vaulted roof is the crypt of the church where the Way started and the green twig is the mistletoe on Meg Highsmith's kitchen wall. The whirling leaves were on the way where we stopped in the copse, and the closing door was in the tunnels under Covent Garden. The only missing piece was the wrecked bedroom, striped in sunlight, and I woke to that this morning."
She shuffled along the wall slightly so she was next to me and she could slip her arm through mine. "It was a bit wrecked, wasn't it?" she reminded me. "Yes, it was." I clasped her hand into mine and we watched the changing light over the fields as the clouds rolled across the sky
, comfortable in silence. My mind drifted with the clouds, sifting through the memories of the last few days. It amazed me how quickly I had adjusted to all of the changes in my life, but with Blackbird leaning against my side I had the inescapable feeling that it would be OK. We would find a way.
"If you are right," I said to her, "then Kareesh has given us all that we need. We have the anvil and the knives. We think we know where the hammer is. We have a smith who can work the metal and enough time to finish the job. We just need the key. James had the right of it when he said it might not literally be a key, but we're thinking about this in the wrong way. We're thinking of all the things that could potentially be keys when actually we only need to look at what we've been given."
"We haven't been given a key," she pointed out.
"We know it would have to be kept somewhere safe from the Seventh Court. We know the Seventh Court doesn't have any humans. If you didn't want the Seventh Court to have the key, but you did want the other courts to be able to access it, where would you put it?" As I talked ,I realised where the key was and how we would get it.
