Cold Iron

by Miles Cameron

  Aranthur could feel the man’s death. It came at him suddenly, and he realised that he had felt it when he first opened the case. The man had been a merchant or a scholar – from Volta, he guessed. They’d killed him on the road for his horse and his case, which was redolent with the personality of the man – and his death. He’d been touching it when he died, or close by.

  Drako put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I’m no Magos,’ he said, ‘and I feel it too.’

  ‘I can’t take his clothes,’ Aranthur said.

  ‘They’re as nice as mine. Let me get my Lightbringer and he’ll exorcise the poor man. Summer Sun, something bloody nasty happened to leave this much … this much pain.’ He put a hand on the case. ‘Damn.’

  His anguish sounded genuine, but Aranthur felt as if there was a great deal unsaid.

  The old priest came and lit a censer. His exorcism rite was complex and involved two forms of incense and a trance, and Aranthur watched in fascination – though there was very little to see after the initial ritual.

  Eventually the priest’s eyes opened. He released a long sigh and rose stiffly from his cross-legged trance position. Except that Aranthur saw the priest focus first on his acolyte, and nod, and Drako’s face registered a spasm of anger.

  Then the old priest winced and smiled at Aranthur.

  ‘I am not as young as I once was,’ he said. ‘You did well to ask me. They thought he had something more – and they tortured him for it.’ He shook his head. ‘He was already dying, with a crossbow bolt in him. Ugly, ugly, and then we killed them, anyway, so that their evil was itself for nothing.’

  ‘You took no part in the killing,’ Aranthur said.

  ‘Did I not?’ The old priest put a hand on Aranthur’s head like a father with a very young child, and Aranthur, who at times had a very high opinion of himself, was humbled. ‘I might have prevented it, but I failed. The working I intended to end the fight merely allowed a slaughter of the guilty. I certainly have blood on my hands.’

  ‘Prevented it?’ Aranthur asked.

  Tiy Drako shook his head. ‘He means that if we had taken other paths, we would not have allowed this event to occur.’

  The Lightbringer turned, and his glare was frightening.

  ‘I mean more than that, O all-knowing disciple,’ the priest said with flat anger. ‘Had I been more alert, I might, for example, have been on my feet and in among the soldiers so that they grew calmer and less violent. It is the duty of the Lightbringer to do good actively, and not accept a passive role. I should, at least, have been the first to die, insisting that they not harm any but me. But I was dozing, having read all day.’

  ‘Surely—’ Aranthur began.

  The priest smiled. ‘Young man, I’m a Lightbringer, not a fool. I do not pretend to perfection or enlightenment, nor do I try to convince you I have achieved any such state. I merely describe how, had I been nearer perfection, I might have behaved. Fear not! I do not accept responsibility for their deaths. I took no action to help them. Or hurt them. Unlike my disciple, who put one foot back on the path of violence, and who now stands here contemplating carnality.’

  Drako looked as if he’d been struck.

  The priest laughed. ‘Is she more beautiful than your soul, my friend?’

  ‘Forgive me, Lightbringer,’ Drako begged.

  Again the priest laughed. ‘I? Forgive you? You have done nothing against me. It is against yourself you sin. I find her beautiful as well – I merely see her from a greater distance than you. Were I nearly perfect, I would see her only as a soul.’

  ‘Yes.’ Drako sounded more wistful than crestfallen.

  The priest opened the case. The beautiful smell was still there, but it did not exert aura.

  ‘Master, if something can receive spirit, or aura …’ Aranthur knew that the Ars Magika and the houses of theology had different terms for almost everything. ‘If the case can be imbued with the dead man’s torment,’ he went on, ‘why can I not put a working into an object?’

  The Lightbringer assumed a serious expression.

  ‘You can,’ he said.

  Aranthur shook his head. ‘I’ve been told that it is impossible.’

  Lightbringer Kurvenos nodded and pursed his lips.

  ‘Then why do you ask me?’ he said softly.

  ‘Because the spirit of the dead man was palpable in the case. I felt it. Tiy felt it. You exorcised it. Hence, it was there. Spirit or aura can be worked – manipulated. Thus …’

  The priest nodded, obviously pleased.

  ‘You must be someone’s favourite student.’ He fingered his long beard for a moment. ‘I will tell you. I suspect otherwise you might be of the kind who will experiment, to the detriment of your soul and others. A servant of Darkness can create an object of great power by first manipulating a person – or an animal, although that is weaker – in a way that alters that person’s aura to suit the needs of the Dark sorcerer. And then—’

  ‘He kills his victim in the presence of the item.’ Aranthur sat back on his heels and whistled. ‘Ritual sacrifice.’

  ‘Death is one of the strongest powers,’ the old man said. ‘Only in death can spirit be fused to dead matter.’ He paused. ‘Even that is not strictly true. The ancients had glyphs and sigils that could inscribe power on metal or stone. And some material objects are receptive to spirit: the kuria crystal; some metal alloys; surely you have heard of the Seven Swords …?’ He blinked. ‘I wax pedantic.’ He smiled.

  Aranthur began to speak and paused.

  ‘Ask,’ said the priest. ‘I am here for you, not for me.’

  ‘Are there also Darkbringers?’

  The old man shook his head. ‘Some would have it so, with an endless procession of horrible conspiracies. But I have walked the world for seventy years and some, from the Outer Sea to the Assinia, and I have never met one. Men and women need no help from organised evil cults to be selfish and brutal – do they?’

  Drako laughed ruefully. ‘No, master.’

  Master Kurvenos nodded. ‘I confess that there are people who use the powers of Darkness to increase their power. Who, knowing the true path, turn their backs on it and go the other way, seduced by the lure of this world. Some even profess that there is only this world.’ He shrugged. ‘They are the ones who create artifacts such as you describe. Long ago, men made many artifacts; before that, the Dhadhi made more. There – I have told you something interesting, have I not?’

  Aranthur shook his head. ‘Incredible. Why have my Magi not told me this?’

  Kurvenos smiled. ‘Have you ever asked?’ He waved his hand. ‘Enjoy your new possessions. By liberating his spirit, you have made them truly yours.’

  ‘What do I owe you, Master?’ Aranthur asked.

  The Lightbringer looked away.

  Drako nodded. ‘I will take care of that. A Lightbringer is above considerations of mere money. Or should be allowed to be.’ He smiled. ‘Two chalkes would do it, I think.’ His smile widened to a grin. ‘And a shot of your carbine!’

  Aranthur realised that while the Lightbringer had been speaking, his acolyte had laid everything in the case out on the clean straw and then had run his hands carefully over the inside. The man was still looking for something – looking meticulously.

  But he hadn’t found it. Whatever it was.

  Aranthur considered challenging him. He thought of the Lightbringer, of the acolyte – of the possible ramifications.

  Not worth it.

  One thing you learned as an Arnaud peasant was when to take what was given and avoid conflict. Sometimes Aranthur managed to keep his mouth shut, and this was one such time.

  So he repacked the case instead, carefully brushing straw from all the shirts. The acolyte knelt by him, helping him, and running his fingers over the doublet and hose. His attempts to be secretive were now revealed.

  Or the man was just nosy.

  Minutes later they were in the deep snow beyond the inn’s yard and barns. Ev
ery step broke through the crust, so that both young men – and Lecne Cucino, who joined them on invitation – were wet to the crotch. But the cold didn’t touch them, as they slogged back and forth to a stunted tree, setting an old board against it. Lecne took a shoeing hammer and put an old prayer card onto the board. He pointed at it – a woodcut of death with a sickle reaping the lives of men.

  ‘Let’s see if we can kill death,’ he said.

  The other two young men were silenced by the comment. Aranthur felt it was ill-omened, to say the least.

  Still, in a few moments they had replaced the priming in the mechanism’s spoon-shaped pan and shut the cunning little cover that seemed to operate on some internal spring and catch.

  ‘Want me to do this?’ Drako asked. ‘I’ve shot a puffer.’

  Aranthur almost gave way, and then changed his mind, although as a student he disliked the omen about death and the mechanism made him afraid. His hands were shaking.

  He attempted to analyse his feelings, as the Magi taught, but his mind was a whirl of impressions and impulses, because it had been that kind of day.

  He raised the weapon and put the butt carefully against his shoulder under Drako’s shouted instructions to ‘Keep it tight, tight!’

  The weapon had a tiny ring on an equally tiny staff that folded up out of the stock to form a rear sight. It was simple enough to place the weapon’s front sight – a tiny white ball of silver – in the rear sight’s circle. He placed the white ball on the playing card of death and jerked the trigger bar.

  The flat crack shocked him. So did the lack of movement from the carbine. Where he had expected a blow, he felt only a slight movement, as if the weapon was a living thing.

  The three walked to the old tree. The board was untouched, but there was a hole a fist higher than the top of the board – two fists above the prayer card.

  ‘Not bad,’ Drako said. ‘You pulled the bar too hard, and it lifted the barrel. Let me have a go.’

  He showed the other two how to load the piece as he went, first putting a charge down the barrel from a small cow horn full of the silver-black powder, and then tamping it with the ram-stick under the barrel. Then he took one of the small round balls out of the pouch made for them and put it on the barrel. It was too big. But not very much too big – the ball went about half its own diameter into the barrel and stuck.

  The other two young men came up to help. There was an odd tool in the case, like a ramming stick but only two inches long, set in an egg of polished bronze. But it didn’t make sense.

  ‘I can show you,’ Iralia said.

  They hadn’t noticed her coming out, but there she was, sensibly clad in man’s clothes, with high hose and boots.

  Mutely, they handed her the weapon.

  She took the bronze tool and placed the short ram-stick – which had a cupped end – on the ball, and pushed very hard, her mouth tightening with effort. The ball popped into the barrel. Then she took the longer ramming stick and placed it against the ball in the barrel, took the pretty little hammer, and drove the ball all the way down. She showed them that there was an engraved mark on the ramming stick to show that the ball had been driven all the way home.

  ‘You shoot it,’ Drako said. ‘You loaded it.’

  ‘Why, thank you!’

  She raised the weapon, placed the short stock against her shoulder, and pulled the trigger bar in almost the same motion.

  They all saw the card take the hit, and splinters exploded from the back of the board. The distant hills echoed the sound of the shot after some delay.

  ‘Oh!’ they all said, and then they applauded her.

  ‘Not just a pretty face,’ she said, mostly to Drako, who made a face at Aranthur as if to say I never suggested otherwise.

  Drako had a remarkable quality, which came out as each of them loaded and shot the weapon several times. That is, he was content to allow Iralia to take over the loading. He did not press his knowledge.

  Aranthur’s third shot hit the card precisely, his lead ball obliterating death’s skull face. All of them hit the card. Drako hit it every time.

  Iralia smiled. ‘I love the smell,’ she said. ‘I always have.’

  The powder stank of sulphur like the public baths, the thermi, in the City, but with another tang, almost like salt.

  ‘Now we clean it,’ Drako said.

  Iralia agreed. ‘This is a very fine weapon – as good as mine. I even think I might be able to name the maker.’ She examined the breech and the muzzle and then shook her head. ‘Intriguing – a masterwork, and unsigned.’

  Lecne nodded. ‘I know nothing of puffers. Ha! That’s not even true any more. I love you people. But I know workers. I bet it’s the work of a journeyman as a try piece for his mastery. We have a superb copper kettle like that – nicest one we have.’

  Drako nodded. ‘I think you have something there.’

  Iralia joined in. ‘I suspect it’s from a shop in Volta – you see how plain it is, and yet so elegant? Volta. You Byzas have to put flowers on everything, or the rising sun of the world, or the First Invocation or some pious saying. In Volta, they add nothing.’

  Aranthur laughed. ‘Perhaps the Byzas engravers are simply more skilled.’

  Iralia gave him a look that might have been pity.

  ‘You need to get out more often,’ she said. ‘But I mean no offence.’

  ‘None taken,’ Aranthur said. ‘I am Arnaut, not Byzas.’

  She flushed, and he wondered if he was cursed to always say the wrong thing to her.

  Aranthur let the argument go. Even with a horse to carry him, he was aware that the morning was gone and the afternoon was pressing. The four of them went inside and under Drako’s careful ministry, the weapon was opened. The complex mechanism was removed, and then the barrel, which hooked in and out of the breech and had two wedges held with pins.

  Iralia brought her own puffer to the kitchen table.

  ‘I think you know more about taking one of these apart than I ever learnt,’ she said. ‘I just shoot them.’

  Drako asked the cook for boiling water and a little rakka oil. He took the barrel off Iralia’s puffer and took both barrels out in the yard, where he poured boiling water through them, creating clouds of stinking steam. At first the water ran black, but after a moment it ran clear. Then he ran wads of tow – the combings of the flax crop – into the barrels and dried them, and oiled them.

  Then he laid the mechanisms on the kitchen table with the cook’s grudging permission.

  ‘I call this part the lock,’ he said. ‘I suppose early ones – in my father’s time – looked like door locks.’

  He showed Iralia the inside of her lock, with brown rust and old grease and some black dirt or powder fouling.

  ‘You could grow carrots in this,’ Drako said, and smiled.

  Iralia shrugged. ‘Go ahead, smart boy. Show me how to clean it.’

  Drako nodded. ‘I will.’

  He heated the lock a little, putting it on a brick in the fireplace, and then – before Iralia could protest – he poured boiling water over it. Immediately he picked it up with tongs and put it on the hearth.

  ‘The water can’t cause rust on the metal if it vanishes from heat,’ he said.

  Aranthur didn’t think that his physical logic was sound – but practically, his actions worked. The lock was mostly clean, with a few brown streaks of rust. He took a wad of tow, balled it up and put some oil on it, and then pressed it into the ash at the edge of the hearth until the tow was almost grey. He used it to polish at the streaks of rust.

  ‘A real gonner or an armourer could have it apart, and make the lock shine inside as well as out,’ he said.

  But when he was done, and had poured water over it again and then put the rakka oil over everything, the lock looked like a miracle in steel.

  Iralia unbent as they cleaned. She helped Aranthur work on his carbine while Drako worked on her lock. Of course, the new carbine needed much less work, an
d Aranthur was afraid of its complexity – the inside of the lock was like a world in miniature. But before the clock on the wall counted the second hour, both weapons were clean and oiled, and Aranthur had fetched his sword, and cleaned and oiled it, too.

  ‘Curious beast, that sword,’ Drako said with a smile.

  Iralia immediately loaded her puffer, and tucked it in her belt.

  Aranthur grinned at all of them.

  ‘I – really – have to go.’ He looked around. ‘I feel very fortunate that I have met you three. The last day has been …’ He shook his head. ‘Like something out of a story book.’

  They all kissed him, even Iralia.

  He picked up the carbine case and his new travel case, and carried them out to his new horse, feeling that it was all a little unreal. Then he saddled the heavier horse, checked the gelding’s shoes, saw to it that his mare had food, and brought his horse round into the front of the inn.

  Lecne was waiting – and so was Tiy Drako.

  ‘I’m not slipping away without paying,’ Aranthur said.

  ‘You really don’t seem the type,’ Lecne said. ‘You owe nothing. We are in your debt.’

  Aranthur smiled. ‘I accept, only because I’m a poor student. But I would like you to keep my mare for a few days – perhaps even a week. And I’ll pay for her.’

  He described the contents of the travel case and handed over four chalkes, the round silver coins of the Imperium.

  Tiy smiled. ‘Are you sure you aren’t an aristocrat?’

  Lecne took the coins. ‘We could have a hard winter without Pater,’ he said. ‘I won’t refuse good money when you have some. But you’re welcome here when you don’t, too.’

  Drako nodded. ‘I’m not a real priest, but that was well said, brother.’

  Aranthur hugged each of them.

  ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said to Lecne.