The Great Hall of Viewing seemed even larger than normal this morning, its high ceiling streaked with clouds that drifted across it, mirroring the sky outside through some long forgotten crafter skill. Heather stared up at it wistfully, transfixed as always by its magic. She was determined to one day figure out how it had been done.
Frankle sat beside her at the front of the hall, jiggling his legs nervously under his robe. He didn’t understand how Heather did it, how she calmed her nerves so easily. She seemed oblivious to the large crowd forming in front of them. The eyes staring up at them. The doubt and judgment in their gaze.
Ugh. He felt like he would throw up.
‘And how are the two stars of the show?’
Frankle looked up to see Petron smiling down at him, his eyes kind. Immediately the wave of nausea passed. ‘Um … okay I guess. When do we start?’
Petron studied his face without replying, then turned to Heather. ‘Still trying to figure out how they did it?’
Heather snapped out of her musing and smiled warmly at Petron. ‘I’ll work it out one day, you’ll see.’
‘I’ve no doubt of it.’ Petron chuckled.
‘Do you think they’d let me up there, to study the surface first hand? After this, I mean?’
Petron studied the crowd: the various crafters, Black Robes, and guards chatting together, mingling and sharing knowledge in a way that would have been impossible only a few months previously. Before the Sisters fell, before Cortis. Before Wilt.
He turned back to Heather and Frankle, his face serious. ‘If you can prove what you said you could do, if you can show others how it is done, then I don’t think anyone here will have the power to stop you getting as close as you want.’
Petron patted them both on their shoulders and moved to the front of the audience. The ceiling above was a deep cobalt blue as he raised his hands toward it and all chatter in the hall instantly ceased.
‘Good people of Redmondis. Masters. Crafters. Wielders. Guards. Those who have yet to find their true path. Welcome.’
Over a hundred pairs of eyes locked on Petron. There had been rumours circulating through the stone corridors about this morning’s presentation. Wild rumours. If even half the gossip was true, the event was one not to be missed.
Petron himself had started this new tradition, this forum to encourage the schools to share knowledge between them, to break down the walls of habit and prejudice that had formed around them under the rule of the Nine Sisters. Everyone had already found value in it in some way, and each attendee looked forward to the weekly assembly. It was just one of many small alterations to the conditions within Redmondis that Petron had implemented with a far reaching effect.
‘I won’t waste your time with introductions. You should all know our two subjects.’
Petron waved Heather and Frankle to their feet and they both shuffled forward.
‘Heather is a young crafter who has shown just some of her value to all of us in the recent weeks. Frankle is an even younger wielder, perhaps not so well-known as yet. But I suspect that will soon change.’
Frankle’s shy smile deepened and red flushed his cheeks.
‘They are here to show us something extraordinary.’
With that Petron moved to the side and joined the audience, his eyes keen.
Heather and Frankle stood silently in front of the crowd for a few moments, dumbstruck. Then Heather spoke.
‘We all here know of the recent troubles. We were all touched in some way.’
The understatement in Heather’s words sent a murmur of agreement rippling through the crowd, but it soon quietened.
‘One of the rumours you have all no doubt heard is that of the moonsteel blade the Cantor Cortis wielded. The weld blade.’
The murmurs grew in volume again. Everyone had heard that particular tale, though not all believed it. Moonsteel was such a rare and little studied element that its very existence was often questioned.
‘I can only assure each of you here that such a blade does exist. I held it myself.’
Heather drew a long guard’s knife out from behind her and held it up for the crowd to see. ‘This, of course, is not a moonsteel blade. Simply a guard’s sword, like so many of you carry.’
Heather waved the blade back and forth as if to further demonstrate its ordinariness. ‘I have made some modifications to it, though I doubt even other crafters would easily recognise that fact.’
She spun the blade in her hand and offered it hilt first to the nearest guard. ‘Here. Please. Does this blade strike you as in any way altered?’
The guard—a young man not long out of the training grounds by the look of him—took the blade and gave it a few swings before shaking his head and smiling shyly.
‘Pass it around if you will,’ Heather continued. ‘See if any of our learned friends here have anything to add.’
The guard passed the blade to his neighbour, an elderly crafter who held the steel close to her face before sniffing and shaking her head. She then passed it on to a master standing beside her, his black robe stained with age and dust. He too seemed to find nothing amiss.
So it went as the blade was passed along the first row of the audience. Finally it made its way to Petron’s hands. He was about to pass it back to Heather without comment when he stopped and tilted his head as if listening to a faraway sound. ‘There is something. Faint … an openness.’
Heather accepted the blade from his hands. She turned to the crowd.
‘As always, Petron is correct. Opened is a very apt term, as it happens. We all know that strong steel is forged by folding metal, layer upon layer, hammering each together to become a single, stronger form. So too was this blade. What I have done is not so much reverse that process as … loosen it. The result is a blade much weaker than it looks. If I were to raise this weapon against any of the others in this room, it would shatter in the first few strikes. However, if my wielder friend would help me …’
Frankle almost missed his cue, finally stumbling forward, his face still flushed with embarrassment.
Heather smiled and whispered to him. ‘Forget them. Just do as we practised. You know you can do this.’
The words calmed the rush in Frankle’s mind, and he forgot his embarrassment, forgot the crowd and the surrounding hall, focused all of his attention down on the blade. He calmed his breathing and felt himself dropping into a weld.
All sound died away, and he floated in stillness. Far below a rushing river of power surged and flowed, aware of his presence yet unable to reach him. Always waiting, calling to the secret part of his mind. In front of him, a hundred possibilities stretched out, welds waiting to be formed and wielded, sent out to strike down onto his enemies. Frankle’s mind remained calm and separate.
That’s right. Like this.
The voice came from all around, from the weld itself. A familiar voice, one he had known for too short a time. One he knew could not be here, but listened to nonetheless. Instructive and calming, a guiding light in the darkness.
Delco’s voice.
A memory stretched out before him, a shimmering weld wall, a blade entering it and merging with its form. A reimagining of what was possible.
Some part of Frankle reached out and took the blade from Heather’s hands.
The memory changed. No longer did Frankle watch from the background as Delco merged the moonsteel blade with the weld wall; instead he now stood beside him, the shimmering surface right in front of his face, another blade in his hand. He reached toward it and the weld wrapped around him, sucking him down into its vortex, pouring out and up his arm, into the hungry steel.
The weld folded itself into the waiting blade, its essence captured and held in this new form. Frankle could feel the blade bend and flex in his hand as it welcomed the power into itself, stretching and testing its new boundaries. He watched it run silver as the weld entwined itself into it, fascinated by the sight, yet always aware of the figure standing beside him.
Frankle knew Delco no longer existed except here, in the timeless land beneath the surface world. He wanted to turn, to grab his moment and whisper a few words, make a connection, but his neck was locked in place. At last, by force of will, he moved his head.
‘Frankle. Open your eyes.’
Too late. Always too late. The memory dropped away, and he rushed back toward the surface world, the real world. Back to the limitations of time and space.
‘Frankle?’
Heather’s voice brought him all the way back, and he opened his eyes to see her studying him. He smiled, and the concern in her eyes melted away.
‘I’m okay.’ He whispered the words, yet they seemed to echo in the silence of the hall. He looked down and saw both his and Heather’s hands wrapped around the hilt of a shimmering silver blade. A weld blade. Moonsteel.
They turned to face the audience and held the blade aloft, and a gasp of astonishment burst out from the crowd. A moment later chaos broke out, a hundred voices all demanding an explanation of the impossibility they had just witnessed.
It took Petron some moments to calm the bedlam and make himself heard. ‘Please, good people, be silent. You have questions. We all do. What I will say is, what you have seen here is not a trick. And perhaps most importantly, it is repeatable.’
The consequences of Petron’s words slowly made their way into the mind of each audience member, and all sound died away in a hush of awe.
A weld blade. They had found a way to forge moonsteel! A force armed with such weapons could shake the world.
Petron turned back to Heather and Frankle, who still clasped the blade between them. He smiled, though his eyes spoke of a deeper concern. ‘You have done a great thing today. A great and dangerous thing. Redmondis will never be the same. Let us hope it is not the first step down a dark path.’
11
When Shade opened his eyes, he found himself crouched in the dirt, the clearing he had stumbled into no longer there, wiped from existence. The trees huddled close around him now and the sky above was darkening to grey.
Night was coming. He was already late.
At fall of night
Wise spirits take flight.
A weak glow to one corner of the sky where the sun was setting pointed him in the right direction, and he hurried off, consciously keeping his eyes down, not wanting to risk glimpsing anything more.
The surrounding trees were silent, each knowing what he had almost seen. The Guardian. Forbidden for any to lay eyes upon—even the Others respected that much. He would likely face trouble when he got back to Nurtle. The trees had sent word ahead, of course. They couldn’t help themselves.
The silence and lengthening shadows played on his mind as he travelled, twisting his thoughts, swamping him in guilt. He had spent too long in Weverly. Angered something. He should have just seen what he could and headed straight back to make his report. Instead he had scavenged.
Like a common rat, Nurtle’s voice in his head scolded. Like a common rat.
When the last bank of trees finally gave way to open sky, the stars twinkling into being in the fading light, he had wound himself so tight with worry that he half expected an escort to be waiting for him at the edge of the small village he called home. Waiting to take him and march him straight to Jared. Instead, the few villagers he saw seemed not to notice his passing.
As he moved further into the township, away from the overbearing trees, he found his thoughts lightening. A smile found its way onto his face and he waved a greeting at a couple of folk still toiling in their fields, determined to make as much use of the dwindling light as they could. He recognised one of them. Stord. He’d delivered some of Nurtle’s medicines to his family the past winter. The man stood up and stretched his back, returning Shade’s greeting with a distracted wave, and the last of Shade’s fear seemed to melt away. He was home.
Maybe he had gotten away with it.
‘Shade!’
Nurtle’s angry cry rung out across the village, impossibly loud, immediately wiping all positive thought from Shade’s mind.
‘Shade! I know you can hear me. Come home, now!’
He shrunk into himself as he heard the words. She sounded furious. Shade sighed and sped up into a trot, headed for the far side of the village and Nurtle’s lone hut.
How much had the trees told her?
Rounding another hut he could see Nurtle silhouetted in her doorway, hands on hips, tapping her foot impatiently. Her eyes narrowed as she spied his figure in the darkening air, and she swallowed whatever her next cry was to have been, concentrating on staring him down as he hurried up to her.
As soon as he was within reach, though, her pose changed and a wide smile lit up her face. ‘You’re late.’
She reached out and pulled him into a hug, almost suffocating him as his face disappeared into her waist. Finally she released him and Shade stepped back, panting for breath.
He wanted desperately to explain, but didn’t know where to begin.
‘Never mind what you were up to.’ As always she could read his thoughts completely. ‘Come inside.’
Nurtle rested her hand on his tousled hair and shepherded him into the hut.
A wave of heat blasted his face as soon as he stepped past her. The fire in the hearth was blazing, baking the entire inside of the hut. He turned to ask her what it was for when he saw the other occupant of the room, lying on a single bed up against the far wall. A stranger.
Shade turned to Nurtle, his question clear on his face, but she simply nodded toward the figure on the bed. He stepped closer and suddenly knew the reason for the fire.
On this side of the room, only a few steps in, the heat of the fire was losing its battle against a deep cold. A bone cold, as if death itself were reaching out for him. Immediately his mind went back to Weverly, to the hut, to the thing that had chased him.
‘He’s sleeping. Leave him be, child.’
Nurtle approached the prone figure on the bed and replaced the cloth resting on his forehead. Her breath steamed out as she leaned over him, but she showed no sign of discomfort.
Shade looked down at the man, studying him. He was younger than he had first seemed. His face was drawn and gaunt, and his skin was pale and clammy in the firelight. He didn’t look at all healthy. His clothes, too, were a mess, none of them seeming to fit, a worn-out black shirt the only item that seemed like it actually belonged to him. He looked like he had been living rough for quite some time.
Nurtle finished tending to her charge and sat back, her voice tired. ‘He is someone who walks a dark path, one few have walked before and even fewer returned from.’ She turned to Shade then and smiled. ‘But you’ve met him before, haven’t you?’
Shade shook his head.
‘You don’t remember. Perhaps you didn’t encounter him in this form. But you recognise the pull, don’t you? The cold?’
Shade nodded, feeling suddenly guilty.
‘You thought it was one of them, one of the dark things that overran the village. You’re almost right.’ Nurtle stood up and moved back to the fire, rubbing the blood back into her hands. ‘He has gone deep, this one. Deeper than any wielder I have known. No wonder he caused so much trouble with the Sisters.’
Shade’s ears pricked at her words.
‘Redmondis. Yes. But he has left that life far behind now.’
Shade studied the man with renewed interest. From Redmondis. That meant he knew of the Black Robes.
He looked again at the black shirt the man wore, only now seeing the rough edges of the material where it had been torn short.
A Black Robe.
His pulse quickened at the possibilities. Maybe he could teach him about welds and wielders and crafters and all the legends he only ever heard people whisper about. He’d never actually laid eyes on—
He caught a glint on the far wall of the room, right beside the bed at the man’s head. A long silver knife was propped against the wall, glistening strangely
in the firelight. Glowing almost. It called to him.
He reached toward it.
Nurtle followed his outstretched hand and grunted, throwing a blanket over the blade, hiding it from view.
Immediately Shade felt something let go, as though a grip around his mind had melted away.
‘That is something best kept hidden, and certainly not for one such as you.’ She turned back to Shade and studied his face. ‘Now, young Shade, tell me about your day.’
Shade tore his eyes from the spot where the cloak covered the silver treasure and looked into Nurtle’s eyes. As ever, he lost himself in their depths and she saw through him completely, knew everything about him, inside and out. He let himself be guided to a seat in the centre of the room where the heat from the fire and the strange cold from the bed mixed into something approaching a comfortable temperature.
He gave her everything—the ruined village, the treasures he had found, the black smoke, the strangely silent trees, the cold that reached out for him through the stone, the rushed flight through the forest, the appearance of the Guardian himself just before darkness fell.
When he finished, he found his mind was clearer, as though he had freed himself of some burden he hadn’t been aware he carried.
Nurtle pushed a steaming bowl of soup into his hands. ‘You did well. Now drink. You need your strength.’
The thick, steaming soup calmed his thoughts even further as it warmed his belly, and he found his eyelids becoming heavy instantly.
‘That’s good. Now sleep. There is work still to do this night.’
Nurtle caught the half full bowl as it slipped from his hands and guided him down onto the rug on the floor as his eyes closed and his breathing dropped into a heavy rhythm.
As he slept, Nurtle covered him with a thin blanket, then stood with her hands on her hips, looking back and forth between the two sleeping forms.
Both so young. Too young. Or is that just what us old ones always think?
‘Sleep well, boys. There is no darkness here.’
With that she turned back to the fire and continued with her work. She was determined to be ready for what was coming.
The Forked Path Page 7