Boric stared silently out at the work-room for some time. He couldn’t begin to make sense of the complex operations taking place down there. Finally, he said, “So what are they making? Weapons?”
Milah laughed. “No, Boric. They’re making mirrors. Like the kind that I showed you twenty years ago, but much improved.”
“But why? What do you need so many mirrors for?”
“All sorts of things,” Milah replied. “Communicating with Leto at the Buren-Gandt, signaling commands to the goblin army units, coordinating the trains…But we sell most of them. We’ve sold dozens of them to kings of the Six Kingdoms and other noblemen. I don’t think we’ve sold any in Ytrisk yet, because it’s so far away, but I’m sure we soon will. Merchants use them for communicating orders to their suppliers and taking orders from customers. In fact, the merchant class is our biggest customer base. They’re starting to resell the mirrors at a profit.”
“What? How can you let them do that? They’re pocketing money that rightly belongs to you!”
“We don’t mind,” said Milah. “The merchants can go places we can’t. What is it to us if they mark up the price a bit? The customer gets what they want, we get what we want, and the merchants make a little money off the deal. What you fail to understand, Boric, is that life doesn’t have to be all about killing people and taking their stuff. These mirrors have the potential to make Dis a better place.”
“How’s that?”
“They can help us communicate with each other. More communication means less misunderstanding. And just imagine what could happen if a Quirini merchant could instantly know what an Ytriskian customer wants? Whole new routes of trade will open up. Everyone will be doing business with everyone else, all across Dis. The Six Kingdoms will be united in a way they never were under the Old Realm.”
“And if that fails, there’s always the goblin army, right?” said Boric.
Milah sighed. “Boric, this entire area is overrun with goblins. You know what they were doing before Brand arrived? Killing each other and occasionally sending raiding parties out to murder travelers on the road to Quirin. We put as many of them to work in the castle as we can, but we just don’t have enough zelaznium ore to keep them all busy making mirrors. So yes, we have a few thousand goblins marching around in front of the castle. What else are we going to do with them?”
“Brand is clever, I’ll give him that,” said Boric. “He seems to have thought of everything.”
Milah shook her head. “The goblin army wasn’t Brand’s idea. He wanted to exterminate them. It was Leto who thought of putting them to work. Leto organized the work-room as well. And I guess you saw his operation at Burn-Gandt. Impressive, isn’t it?”
“More like terrifying,” replied Boric. “Dwarves crawling all over in the hellish glow from that furnace…what is that infernal machine anyway?”
“One of Leto’s inventions,” Milah said proudly. “You see, the dwarves dug too deep in the mountains — ”
“I knew it!” cried Boric. “They released some unspeakable evil from deep inside of Dis, didn’t they? That machine is the only thing containing it. I’m telling you, Milah, I could feel the evil pouring out of that thing.”
Milah laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Boric. There’s no evil in it. It’s just a machine. Leto calls it a steam engine. You see, the dwarves dug below the water table and the mines kept flooding. They had been using hand pumps to pull the water out, but they aren’t practical on a large scale. Leto had read about an alchemist who had experimented with a spinning wheel that was powered by steam. You put the water in a tank and heat it, and the escaping steam makes the wheel spin. He applied that principle to a water pump, first on a small scale, and then on a much bigger scale at Buren-Gandt. Right now he’s experimenting with trying to make an engine that’s small enough and light enough to fit on a rail car. He thinks eventually we’ll be able to replace mules with steam engines that can run all day and night. Can you imagine?”
“It sounds awful,” said Boric. “And what’s wrong with mules anyway?”
“There’s nothing wrong with them,” said Milah. “But they do need to eat and sleep, and they can be a bit ornery. And of course they’re difficult to breed, because, well, being of two different species — ”
“What my lovely wife is trying to tell you, Boric, is that mules are half-breeds.”
Boric turned to see a man walking toward them on the scaffold. Brand. He looked the same as he did twenty years earlier. Boric drew his sword and advanced.
“Boric, stop!” cried Milah.
But Boric could think only of his curse — of what Brand had taken from him, and the monster Boric had become.
“Tell me how to break the curse, Brand, or die where you stand!” Immediately regretting this couplet, Boric tried again. “Tell me the secret or die!”
Brand drew his own sword. It was identical to Brakslaagt, but without the Elvish markings. “There is no secret!” Brand protested. “Or if there is, I don’t know it. I never meant for you to turn into a wraith, Boric. It was an accident!”
Boric fell upon Brand, swinging his sword at Brand’s side. Brand parried. “An accident!” Boric cried. “It was an accident that you gave me a cursed sword?”
“I didn’t know about the curse,” insisted Brand, parrying another blow. “Those seven blades were an experiment. The elves were still trying to figure out how to control the power of the mineral. Obviously something went wrong.”
Boric sliced from the right and then feinted left, throwing Brand off balance. Brand was a decent swordsman, but no match for Boric. Boric wedged his blade between Brand’s cross-guard and blade and twisted. Brand’s sword fell to the scaffold. Boric took a step forward and raised his blade to Brand’s throat. “You lie,” Boric hissed.
“Please, Boric,” said Milah, behind him. “He’s telling the truth. Zelaznium is very tricky to work with.”
“Zelaznium?” Boric asked, trying to remember where he had heard the word. “The stuff the mirrors are made of? Why would you put that in swords?”
“Because the swords serve the same purpose,” said Milah.
“Nonsense,” said Boric, pressing the tip of Brakslaagt against Brand’s throat. A trickle of blood ran to Brand’s collarbone. “Tell me how to break the enchantment!”
“It’s the truth, Boric,” gasped Brand. “I don’t know any more about the curse than you do. When the first wraith showed up here ten years ago, he frightened me nearly to death. That was King Loren of Avaress. He had been run out of a dozen towns and finally came here because he had no place else to go. They kept coming every few years after that. I try to keep them busy, bossing the goblins around and whatnot, but it’s not an easy existence, being a wraith. They were ecstatic when I sent them to chase after you. I hope they weren’t too aggressive.”
“Liar!” howled Boric. “You bribed Captain Randor to kill me!”
“What? No! Why would I do that?”
“To turn me into a wraith, of course.”
“Twenty years after giving you Brakslaagt? If I’d wanted you dead, you’d have died long ago, Boric.”
Boric pulled the sword back just a hair. “Then who had me killed?”
“My best guess is that it was your brother, Yoric.”
“Yoric is dead!”
“Apparently not. He reappeared shortly after your death, leading a ragtag band of Vorgals into Brobdingdon. Evidently he faked his death on Bjill. He produced a will that indicated you had selected him as your heir. It was widely believed to be forged, but no one dared oppose him for fear that the Vorgals would lay waste to the city. And that clubfooted nitwit you had placed on the throne didn’t exactly rally a lot of popular support. Yoric is now King of Ytrisk. I understand he even married your widow, Urgulana, to help secure his claim.”
“Lies!” cried Boric, pressing the sword again to Brand’s throat. Brand’s whole story was preposterous, particularly the part about Yoric willingly marrying that
beast Urgulana. “This is your last chance. Tell me how to break the curse or die!”
“Boric, please,” pleaded Milah. “Don’t kill him. If not for my sake, then for Leto’s.”
This gave Boric pause. He was having trouble keeping up with the number of bizarre nonsequiturs in this exchange. “Leto? What does your son have to do with any of this?”
“It’s what I was trying to tell you before you attacked me,” Brand said. “I’m a half-breed. Like a mule. Half-human and half-elf. As a result, I’m sterile. I can’t have children of my own.”
“But then how…?” Boric began.
“I was already pregnant when I met Brand,” said Milah. “Brand is the only father he has ever known, but we’ve never withheld the truth from Leto. He’s your son, Boric.”
Boric stumbled backward, bracing himself against the railing of the scaffold. His meeting with Brand was not turning out at all the way he had planned. If he could have dropped his sword, he would have. “Is this…are there any more familial revelations you’d care to make, Milah?”
“I think that’s pretty much it,” said Milah, rubbing her chin with her thumb and forefinger. “Leto is your son, the Witch of Twyllic is your mother, and your brother Yoric is King of Ytrisk. That about covers it.” Boric looked at Brand, who nodded. Brand was mopping the blood from his throat with his handkerchief.
“He’s the best of both of us, Boric,” Milah said. “He’s brave and clever and handsome like you, and he has my genius for inventing things. And with Brand’s influence, he has become a master of administration and organization. Very soon, in fact, I think he’s going to begin chafing at Brand’s control over him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sets off on some enterprise of his own. You should be very proud.”
Proud? thought Boric. Of a son I never knew I had? He reflected that Leto had known when they met that Boric was his true father. And yet he spoke condescendingly, even dismissively to Boric. Not to mention that he had Boric tied up and thrown in a cart for three days. What had Boric done to deserve such treatment? Another question nagged at him as well: “What did you mean that the swords serve the same purpose as the mirrors?”
“Long-range communication,” answered Brand. “It might help if I start at the beginning.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Shortly after Brand was left on the side of the Avaressian Road by his mother, a traveling merchant found him and brought him to an orphanage in Avaressa. He was badly treated at the orphanage and ran away when he was fourteen, living as a pickpocket on the streets of Avaressa. One day he lifted a small bag of silvery dust from an emissary of the court who had just returned from a summit with the dwarves to the north. Brand was fascinated by the substance: it was finer and lighter than silver and possessed some very strange properties. He noticed, for instance, that he could separate the dust into two piles and then form the first pile into some figure, such as a circle, and the second pile would mimic the first. Even if he put a box over the second pile, when he lifted the box he would see that the pile had formed the same shape as the first. Suspecting that some sort of magic was at work, Brand brought the dust to a local alchemist, telling him he could keep the dust if he could tell Brand where it had come from and what its secret was. The alchemist’s name was Zelaznus.
Zelaznus was fascinated with the strange dust and spent several weeks trying to discover its properties. He found that the remote action of the dust worked even when the two piles were over a hundred feet apart — even when buildings were in between them. Zelaznus also found impurities in the dust — a reddish powder that indicated the sample came from somewhere in the Feldspaal Mountains. Before he had been able to discover any more, however, a warrant was issued for Brand’s capture on several counts of theft from public officials. Brand fled the city, traveling through Peraltia to Feldspaal. After several months of searching, he found the mine where the dwarves had uncovered the strange mineral. The dwarves considered the mineral to be a curiosity of no particular importance; they had given some of it to human emissaries, knowing that humans tended to be fascinated by natural oddities (the dwarves being, in general, a far more practical people).
Brand suspected that the dust had the potential to serve a purpose much more valuable than the entertainment of idle nobles, but the zelaznium (as it would come to be called) was rare and nobody was mining it — the dwarves had only found a few tiny pockets of it while looking for veins of iron. Brand had quite a stash of gold socked away from his pickpocketing days — he had never planned on being a thief forever — but he didn’t have enough to pay the dwarves to begin mining for the mineral in earnest. He bought all the zelaznium the dwarves had (which fit easily in his backpack) and then took a huge gamble: he traveled deep into the Thick Forest to meet the elves, demanding his inheritance as a pretext for getting their help to uncover the secrets of the strange mineral. The elves agreed to send three of their most knowledgeable craftsmen with Brand. Being a wanted man in Avaress and needing secrecy for his experiments (lest someone else start mining zelaznium, increasing the demand and raising the price), Brand and the three elves made their way across the Wastes of Preel and set up shop in the valley now known as Brandsveid. At first any practical use for the magical properties of zelaznium eluded them, but they found that the metallurgical properties of the mineral were astounding: adding a small amount to steel made it far stronger, resistant to rust, and able to keep an edge. Brand began selling swords to anyone who would buy them. The swords were of only average craftsmanship — elves not being the best blacksmiths — but the quality of the steel made them more than a match for most blades. Eventually Brand had made enough money to hire dwarven craftsmen to forge the blades.
The elves and dwarves did not at first work very well together. They spoke different languages and evinced the mutual antipathy that was typical between the two races. Additionally, the elves were trying to move on to creating something with zelaznium that was not a weapon and they didn’t appreciate being interrupted with questions about swordmaking. It was this combination of miscommunication, general confusion, and outright hostility that resulted in the Seven Blades of Brakboorn — Brakboorn being an ancient Dwarvish word meaning something like “colossal screwup.”
But the Blades of Brakboorn turned out better than anyone expected. The dwarf who had forged them realized that the proportions of iron, carbon, chrome, and zelaznium were off when he saw that he had misread instructions that had been written using Elvish numerals. As soon as the blades were cool, he lay one across an anvil and struck it with a hammer, thinking it would shatter and he could reuse the metal for something else. But the blade wouldn’t shatter. Nor would it bend without great exertion, and the blade would snap completely straight as soon as he took his weight off it. Further experiments showed that the blades wouldn’t rust and could slice though bricks without dulling.
Brand discovered that the blades possessed an even more remarkable property: when one blade was pointed at another, it acted like one of Milah’s mirrors, reflecting the surroundings of the other mirror rather than its own. Brand obsessed with trying to find a practical purpose for the swords, and finally came up with one: by distributing them to some of the most powerful men in the Six Kingdoms — and holding onto one himself — he could receive glimpses of what was happening across the land of Dis. Of course, the holders of the other swords would have this power as well, so he ordered the dwarves to deface the blades with Elvish characters. When they were done, it was nearly impossible to see that the sword was sometimes reflecting events from hundreds of miles away. Only Brand’s sword, Orthslaagt, was allowed to keep its mirror-like sheen.
Brand traveled the Six Kingdoms with the swords, giving one to each king — or, when more practical, the prince who was most likely to become king. Most of the recipients were at first skeptical, but were won over by the obvious superiority of the blades. Boric had been the recipient of the last of the six, Brakslaagt.
After giving him Brakslaagt, Bra
nd followed Boric to Brobdingdon, having heard that there was a possibility of a Peraltia-Ytrisk alliance forged through Boric’s marriage of Urgulana. He witnessed the ceremony — and more importantly, Boric’s public rejection of Milah. Brand suspected that Milah was the daughter of Zelaznus (she was only a little girl when Brand came to Zelasnus’s laboratory years earlier), and that the mirrors she carried were infused with zelaznium. He approached her after her rejection and offered her a job. She traveled with him back to his workshop and soon they were married. A few months later she gave birth to Leto, whom she knew was Boric’s child, and they raised the boy together.
Brand’s workmen produced many more swords but were never able to replicate the Blades of Brakslaagt. Still, they made a hefty profit selling swords to the noblemen of the Six Kingdoms. Brand was proud to learn very recently that the sword Clovis had used to slay the Dragon of Kalvan was one of their making.
“I killed the dragon!” Boric growled in response to this. “The dragon just happened to fall on Clovis’s sword.”
“Well, then I suppose Brakslaagt deserves some of the credit as well,” agreed Brand.
“Brakslaagt!” Boric hissed. “A man is more than his sword!”
Brand nodded, smiling. “Well said, Boric.”
“So you’re just a businessman, is that it?” asked Boric. “You have no plans to conquer all of Dis? You’re just a well-meaning guy who has five walking corpses who do your bidding. And the goblin army, that’s just to give the goblins something to do, right?”
“It does keep the goblins out of trouble,” Brand said. “But I’m afraid the army is going to serve another purpose soon.”
“Aha!” Boric exclaimed. “You are planning an attack! Where? Quirin? Peraltia?”
Brand shook his head grimly. “We’re not attacking anyone,” he said. “We’re being attacked.”
“Attacked?” Boric asked. “By whom? Who would traverse the Wastes of Preel or the Vast Desert to attack you?”
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