She must have seen it in his face. ‘I am old,’ he growled. ‘I know.’
‘You are old, yes, as am I,’ the hoarse whisper acknowledged. ‘Age brings its own strengths and removes those we previously possessed. When you think, you can draw on a life of lessons, so it balances the loss of a little alertness. It is no great failing that you heard me not, for I move like a cloud’s shadow. It is the way I was taught to walk, and it has never left me.’
His eyes snapped up, new life within. ‘You were taught?’ At last, a grain of knowledge of her past.
She gave a slight smile. ‘It has been a long time, what seems a different life, but yes, I was once an acolyte.’
‘An acolyte to whom?’
She just shrugged and walked to place a vase with fresh flowers on a table. He knew from past frustration that there was no point in pressing her.
She was back at his side and lifted the box from his hands as he stared at the dancing flames, her finger stroking at the softness of the velvet interior.
‘You worry about its safe return, do you?’
He sighed. ‘The truth?’
‘Would I ask otherwise?’
It was not easy to say, but the words came nonetheless. ‘I have had what was in that box for half a century and a score more years, and was with the boy who now straps it to his belt for less than the time it takes the sun to move a finger’s width, and yet I fret more for his safe return than that of the knife.’
She gently shut the box and rubbed at the wood absently with one thumb as she thought on it.
‘Sometimes…’ She carefully placed the box back in its alcove and slid the brick back in place, taking care to ensure its fit rendered it indiscernible from its immovable neighbours. She stared at the brick, her back to him. ‘Sometimes we must turn our eyes and our thoughts from that which we hold dear, and trust to the gods to watch over it. And, more, trust the object of our anxiety to be strong enough to fulfil its purpose.’
He nodded slowly. ‘And prepare for their return. For return, they must.’
****
They travelled on foot, for they had been advised that the terrain would not be amenable to horses or camels, though they did bring a sorrowful-looking mule to carry the bulk of their supplies. It was sure-footed and happy to walk at two-legged pace.
The reason for walking soon became apparent a day from the city. Cassian had directed them inland in a great arc that would take them away from curious eyes that may glance their way from atop the city wall and then eastwards towards the area known as the Plain of the Axeduel, and the reason for the name became as apparent as the need to walk, for both sprang from the same feature. The huge gently sloping slabs of rock underfoot, the smallest the size of an average marketplace in the city, were littered with clefts hacked from the ground when, legend told, two axe-wielding gods had fought a mighty battle. Where the blades had missed the foe and bitten into the rock, the long tapering gullies had been left, some too narrow for anything other than a small animal to enter, others of a size that could accommodate a city warehouse. Where the sweat of the gods had landed, it was said, it had melted the very rock itself, and sure enough, the surface of the slabs was pocked with small holes, from the size of a fist to that of a washing bowl, though Brann thought it was more like great slabs of reddish-brown cheese rather than from sweating gods. Either way, a horse would have snapped an ankle within the first hundred yards.
They were dressed once more as they had been in the desert, and Brann was glad of it. If anything, it was even hotter here, the rock beneath them holding the heat and baking them from below as much as the sun was roasting them from above.
After a further day of walking, they stopped. They had entered the area fully now, and the vastness of their task was apparent. The bare rock stretched to the limit of their vision, and it was impossible to walk more than a hundred paces at a time, and often far less, before it was necessary to pick a path around a crevice. Brann looked around the party; not one of them exuded any sort of confidence and Hakon looked as mournful as the mule.
Cannick scratched his ear. ‘They give you any directions from here?’
Brann shook his head. ‘I don’t think they know themselves. This man took himself here to get away from people, and he seems to have picked the right spot.’
Cannick looked at the three women and Marlo. ‘You locals know anything about this area? Where we might start?’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Breta grunted. ‘I came off a ship when I was sixteen and went straight into Cassian’s compound when my parents and sister managed to shit and spew themselves to death within a week.’
Mongoose shrugged. ‘I don’t know where I am from. Can’t remember much before Cassian’s place but streets hard under my arse and a begging bowl in my hand. Cassian’s wife even gave me my name. I was twelve, they believed, when they took me in, and as far as I know my name before then was Girl.’
‘Doesn’t matter where we’ve been or who we are.’ Sophaya walked forward from the group to stare over the landscape. ‘No one knows anything about this place. No one from the city comes here. No one in their right mind from anywhere comes here.’
‘Which, I guess,’ Cannick said, ‘is why our mad smith came here.’
Grakk was scanning the area with the tube he had let Sophaya use in ul-Detina. ‘There is one advantage in this terrain: should a man build a house between here and the horizon, we would see it.’ He snapped the tube shut with an air of finality. ‘We do not.’
Brann looked at him. ‘If we don’t know anything about what is here, then all we can work from is what we do know.’ He looked around his companions. ‘All we may know is that he is a man and he works metals. At the very least a man needs food, and a smith needs something to burn and metal to work. Do you see a ready supply of any of this around here? Unless he can eat and burn rock, he must be getting provisions from somewhere.’
Grakk smiled, and pointed south. ‘The fishing villages. Pine trees were one of the main reasons they settled there, for the trees become their boats. They grow aplenty between the villages and the plain right along this stretch of coast. They have some small areas of crops and livestock, but their diet is, of course, mainly from the sea. From the villages he can source food, wood, clothes, even charcoal. And, though they will have their own, the villages will always need the work a smith can offer with repairs and replacements.’
Brann was satisfied. ‘Then I say, in the morning we follow your finger. He will not want to have to carry his supplies overly far. When we encounter a village, we can ask if they know of him.’
A collection of nods and shrugs indicated their acceptance, and the next morning their path turned south. Slowly they made progress, and eventually a smudge on the border of land and sky was revealed by Grakk’s looking-tube to be a line of trees.
The tribesman was happy. ‘The coast, and the villages, lie to the other side.’
They had not even reached a point from where the trees were defined to the naked eye when Sophaya gave a shout and a point. Their eyes were drawn to another smudge in the distance, but this one was far closer than the horizon and in a single location. And rising a short distance towards the sky.
Grakk’s tube was already at his eye. He smiled. ‘Smoke.’
They grinned at each other and Hakon whooped and slapped Brann on the back with a force that felt like his eyeballs would be ejected.
They angled their course and headed in as straight a line as the crevices would allow. With every step, though, Brann’s nerves grew. What if it was not the right place? Some of the ravines had contained water, springs leaking to the surface, and dry brittle vegetation had fought to emerge as a result. What if some of that had burst aflame from the sun? It was not unknown.
As they closed, his fears were banished. The unmistakable dull ring of metal pounding metal began to reach their ears, and their pace quickened in anticipation, much to the clear annoyance of the mule.
Gere
ns stopped. ‘Do you notice something?’
They clustered beside him, frowning.
Breta sounded impatient. ‘I see nothing.’
‘Exactly,’ said Gerens. ‘Where is his house? And his forge?’
A smile spread over Grakk’s face. ‘He is in a crevice. Thanks be to the gods that a smith makes smoke, else we might never have found his lair.’
They hurried towards the grey plume, becoming aware that it emanated from one of the larger openings, a gully around three times the length of a ship and twice the width at its top in the centre, narrowing to maybe a third of that at the floor level. It maintained its width for most of its length, tapering sharply to a blunt point at either end. Most significantly, a small brook, the gurgling water sparkling in the light from the high sun, ran through a gently winding groove it had cut in the floor over the gods only knew how many thousands of years, disappearing through a crack in the rock at the near end and running from a pool at the other, into which, Brann presumed, it arrived through an equivalent opening from its underground course.
The stream ran directly through structures that had been created near to the pool by fixing two wooden roofs from one side to the other. The building closest to the pond had walls enclosing it. The other comprised merely the roof itself and was the forge, a fact evinced by equipment therein which could be seen under the angle of the roof.
It would have been an idyllic scene; idyllic to a deaf man. The sound of the hammering was accompanied by a relentless stream of curses and invective that was so varied and inventive that some of it seemed new to Cannick and all of it was impressing Hakon.
Brann moved to the lip of the gulley and cupped his hands about his mouth. ‘Hello!’ he called, hoping it would carry above the sounds of the forge. ‘I seek…’ He searched in his head for the name told to him. ‘I seek the smith, Tarkanan Dar Tenaat.’
The hammering stopped.
‘Piss off!’
The hammering restarted.
Brann tried again.
‘I bear a gift for you.’
This time the hammering didn’t even stop. ‘What gift would I need? I have all I require. Why have you not yet pissed off?’
‘It is a gift from Alam-ul-Nazaram-ul-Taraq.’ There was a stirring behind him from his colleagues, but his attention was on the scene below.
‘Why would I want anything that decrepit old bastard has to give? You have one last chance to piss off before I come up there myself and stick this poker right up your arse. And it is glowing hot, by the way.’
Brann took a breath. He would soon have to march down there regardless. ‘It is a gift that fell from the sky many lifetimes ago.’
The hammering stopped in an instant and a small wiry man emerged from the cover of the roof. It was hard to tell if he was dark from natural skin colour or from the forge, and he wore only breeches and a leather apron that extended to his knees. His head swivelled until he found Brann. ‘You took this long to tell me that? What are you waiting for?’ He pointed to slightly further along the side Brann stood at. ‘There. Bring your friends if you like.’
‘Decent of him,’ Hakon murmured.
A shallow path had been cut into the wall of the crevice and the party wound its way down. The hammering had started again and they waited short of the forge, the mule taking advantage of the cool water running beside them.
A burst of steam filled the forge and the man emerged. ‘Tricky moment. Joining two pieces. Got to do it at exactly the moment the iron is hot enough.’ He looked at Brann. ‘This gift from the sky?’
Brann nodded and turned to the mule, which ignored him as he pulled a hessian bag from the load on its back. It was heavier than he had anticipated and his appreciation of Gerens’s strength was heightened at the thought that the boy had borne it from the citadel through the journey they had taken, and without fuss or complaint. He made to hand it to the smith, but the man waved him away and gestured at a rough table sitting just outside the forge. As Brann sat it there, the man removed his apron and took a rag from the back of his breeches, wetting it and using it to wipe grime from his face and hands. The skin beneath was as dark in colour as the material he would be asked to work with.
He flashed a grin at the boy that came and went in the time of a blink and strode to the table. Drawing open the top of the bag, the smith reverently removed the Star Stone. He turned it over in every direction, before lifting it high and squinting at it against the sunlight.
Eventually, he nodded. ‘It is what you say.’ He laid it down gently and extended his arm, placing his palm over Brann’s heart. ‘I am Tarkanan.’ Brann felt it would be inappropriate to suggest that there were not many other contenders for that identity in the immediate area. ‘And you are?’
The hand was still on his chest, so he copied the gesture as he spoke his name.
The man frowned as he dropped his arm. ‘Not the most common name in this part of the world. A Brann fought in the Arena, then the Rat Runs, and lived.’ He raised his eyebrows. Brann nodded. ‘That makes sense.’
‘You heard out here?’
‘I heard in the village where I barter for food.’
Brann indicated the Star Stone. ‘Can you work it?’
‘How would I know? I haven’t tried.’
‘Will you try?’
‘What smith would let the chance pass? Or fail to devote their life to trying?’
Brann smiled. ‘That sounds dedicated enough, sir.’
‘I will start in the morning.’ He pointed at Hakon and Breta. ‘I will need him. And her. I lack muscle.’
‘I don’t think that will be a problem. But will you not have to extract the metal from the rock? I have no knowledge of the process, but it would seem lengthy to me.’
The smith frowned. ‘Extract?’
Brann pointed. ‘From the Star Stone.’
The man was bemused. ‘You are as ignorant as the primitives who named it. This is not rock with metal through it. This is the metal, nothing more. The gods did not hide their gift, but gave it to us in its glory that we may try to prove our worth by solving the mystery of working it.’
Brann looked at the artefact with even more respect.
‘Sir?’ It was Marlo. Brann noticed the way that everyone was more respectful to someone reputed to be mad. If you did not know what the person would do next, he supposed, it was well to try to keep them happy. ‘I also have something for you.’ He handed Tarkanan a small parchment, folded, tied and sealed with blue wax. He looked at the others and shrugged. ‘I was only asked to deliver it. I have no idea as to its contents.’
‘Neither should you, too,’ the man continued. ‘Now, you may make your camp by the pool. Do not drink the water downstream from the forge, as you know not what is in it. And do not piss in it upstream of my house, as I want to know what is in it. Any questions?’
Hakon spoke up. ‘I have one, sir.’
The smith looked at him. ‘Yes?’
‘In your homeland, do you greet women in the same fashion as you greeted Brann?’
Cannick rolled his eyes and Grakk said, ‘Ignore him, please. He is a barbarian in spirit.’
Tarkanan, however, was impassive. ‘Indeed we do.’
Hakon grinned, but Breta turned to him. ‘Try it and you lose your hand.’
The campfire was welcome in the chill night air. With no clouds to blanket the heat, it disappeared into the sky as soon as the sun dropped below the horizon. Brann wondered if the people here even knew what a cloud looked like. Well, inland anyway; he had seen a few over the sea.
‘It’s a fair-sized house,’ Hakon mused. ‘You would think we could fit in there in some fashion.’
Mongoose looked up. ‘It is his right to reserve his privacy. We showed up out of the blue. And if we had ventured into this land with no means of camping overnight, we would probably not have made it this far.’ Mongoose and Breta had been easing their way into a company who had already been through much together, and thei
r reluctance to join freely in conversation was a symptom of that. However, the smaller gladiator’s strong sense of propriety had already started to show on occasion and, this time, it had forced her tongue.
Grakk shared her view. ‘She is correct.’ His eyes slid to Brann. ‘You mentioned a name when you shouted to the smith.’
‘Tarkanan Dar Tenaat? That’s the smith himself.’
‘We are aware of that. The other one.’
‘Oh, Alam-ul-Nazaram-ul-Taraq. I’m actually quite surprised I managed to remember that.’
‘Several of us are wondering why you hadn’t thought to mention it before.’
Brann shrugged. ‘You know him?’
‘Know of him. You don’t perhaps recall having seen him sitting to the side of the Emperor at the Throne Room in the Sky?’
‘Of course. I thought he was an old retainer, perhaps, or a senior official. Maybe even a beloved former servant.’
‘He did indeed serve the Empire.’ The tribesman’s eyes rose to meet his. ‘As Emperor.’
Brann didn’t know what to say. Grakk looked at Marlo. ‘You did not know either, though you met with him when bearing messages?’
Marlo was pale. ‘I had never seen him or his image when he was in power, and he stepped aside when I was a young boy. I am still struggling to believe I was in the presence of Alam the Magnificent.’
Breta grunted. ‘And probably soiling your breeches since he was also known as Alam the Merciless.’
‘There is that, too,’ the boy conceded, his smile noticeably absent.
‘So now we know who our benefactor is,’ Brann said. ‘But what good does that do, other than impress us and cause Marlo to lose control of his bowels? Another holds power now, and he is just an old man.’
‘He is indeed an old man,’ Grakk said quietly, ‘but until Alam loses his wits or dies, he will never be just an old man. Alam ruled with the ruthlessness of an assassin and the tactical cunning of a general. His Empire grew and was ordered: every dominion knew its place and its place was in thrall to Sagia. He looked outwards, but fought his battles in the corridors and shadows of the court to enable him to do so. The current regime looks inwards, at the life the dominions can bring to the palace, and looks less at the far reaches of the Empire.’
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