On the Wheel

by Timandra Whitecastle

All those times you ran away. This is where they led you.

  I know.

  Stay down. You’re no use. Just give in.

  Suranna. He pressed the back of his head against the pillar, trying to use pain to block what was forming in his mind. He hung in the dark for a time beyond his measure, lapping it all up greedily. Embracing the darkness like a lover. A faint stirring, like a whisper on the borders of hearing. The sound of Suranna’s laughter. She would never leave him. Even without the curse, she was trapped inside him forever. He felt a chill of realization, felt the black truth of it.

  You’ll never be worthy. Of anything.

  No.

  He opened his eyes, straightened, and walked back around the pillar.

  Vashti rose from the destruction, tall and proud. Guards had gathered around her, pointing their weapons at Bashan. Guards previously kept away by the power of the Blade. Black lines ran from her eyes, marring the perfect white paint of her face. Her lips glistened with blood.

  Bashan was standing very still in the circle of sharp points, gazing at the rubble at his feet. Diaz watched him for a moment, expecting him to raise the magic protection once more. However, Bashan did no such thing.

  “Bashan?” Diaz’s voice sounded tired, even to his own ears.

  “It’s over,” Bashan said, dusted hands grabbing hold of his dark hair, leaving streaks of white like he had aged in a second.

  “What is?” Vashti sniffed, wiped her bloodied nose on the back of her hand.

  “I’m…free.” Bashan frowned.

  “Of what?” Diaz asked the question no one else did. He turned his head back to where he had left Nora’s body. He thought he’d seen the shadows move in the corner of his eye. A stab of hope pierced his chest, only to be dashed to pieces.

  Bashan’s gaze swept the throne room, jumping here and there, as his hands clenched into fists.

  “That last sweep,” he muttered. “I felt the blast. And it tore away from my hands. It must be here. Somewhere. Help me search, Telen. No one else must ever touch it.”

  “No.” Vashti raised her hand. More people were rushing into the throne room. “Stay where you are.”

  “No,” Diaz said.

  Bashan stopped and straightened.

  “No?” he asked Diaz in disbelief. “What do you mean no?”

  “I mean I won’t help you search for the Blade. Not again.”

  Bashan blinked rapidly. “What?”

  Diaz shook his head slowly and turned to leave.

  “Telen!”

  “No.”

  “Where will you even go? The wights won’t take you in. And you certainly won’t go back to the south to Suranna. The truth is, you can’t do shit without me. I gave you purpose, Telen. Purpose!”

  “Then I shall have to improvise.” A small smile hushed over his mouth.

  “Don’t you want to be free of your curse? I can help you. I will help you.”

  Diaz’s boots ground to a halt. He half turned.

  “I’ll never be free. So what does it matter?”

  Bashan stared. Diaz resumed walking away.

  “Fine,” Bashan spat after him. “Fine, be that way. As though I need you. I don’t. I don’t even need the Blade, do I? I never did. No one needs that thing in their head.” He shuddered, then unsheathed the sword girded on his hip and let it fall before Vashti’s feet with a clatter. “You win, woman. You take the throne, take what power you can, take it all—you’ll need it against those old lords on the council. But if you find the Blade, do not take it for yourself, not even in your greatest need. Believe me on this. I will turn my back on this fucking nightmare and never see that damn thing again.”

  “You expect me to let you go after you threatened me, after you threatened this city? My city?” Vashti drew herself up, mouth pinched, as she hurled her words against him. But Bashan had turned away. Vashti snapped her fingers, and two guards blocked his exit. “I can’t let you leave.”

  “No.” A shadow of his former self flickered across Bashan’s weary face. “You can’t let me stay. That’s politics, sweet illegitimate half-sister.”

  Diaz kept on walking toward the huge doors. A crowd had gathered, forming a loose circle around them. He saw a small group of pilgrim masters barring his path. One of them was the elderly master from the delegation earlier. Diaz tried to recall his name, but was distracted by movement on the far wall. A silver reflection danced there, twisting and snaking, breaking in a prism of light. Then, in a blink of an eye, it was gone.

  He turned back to the group of pilgrim masters. “Move aside.”

  The elderly master stepped up, his lips formed in a sad smile.

  “Diaz, one moment.” He clasped his hand to Diaz’s shoulder in a fatherly gesture, though surely, Diaz thought, amused, he must be the younger of them both.

  “Unfortunately,” the master continued, “I have more ritual words I would wish to skip. Telen Diaz, it fills me with great sorrow, but…”

  “But you no longer accept me as a master of the pilgrim order?”

  “I’m very sorry.” The elderly man sighed deeply and then shook his head. He radiated regret to an extent that Diaz almost believed him.

  “Don’t.” Diaz shrugged the man’s hand off his shoulder. “You have no right to do this.”

  “I am a master on the order’s council.” The man licked his lips. “I assure you, I have the right.”

  “No, you don’t,” Diaz said. “I made my vow to the code. The code judges, not you, nor I.”

  He pushed the man aside, making to walk past him when he heard Vashti gasp. Diaz looked over his shoulder at Bashan, expecting to see him getting himself in trouble. But Bashan was still standing in front of his half-sister, her guards shifting positions to tackle a new threat emerging from the shadows of a pillar.

  Surprise ran through Diaz like hot wires reaching from his head to his toes. As though lightning had struck, the air in the hall seemed to waver before him, sizzle. He sucked in a breath, feeling like he had received a blow to the head.

  Nora.

  It was Nora.

  She was alive.

  He felt like falling to his knees, too weak to stand.

  She was walking toward the throne in twitching and jerking movements. Her eyelids fluttered as emotions swept across her face: joy, pain, anger. Anger. Anger.

  Silver threads shot out from her scalp. They wove back and forth as though alive, turning raven black as they slunk over her shoulders, replacing her patchy hair with the semblance of her typical long braid. Thorns of silver punctured the dark red burn on her face from underneath the skin, pulsing like tiny needles mending her flesh. The tear in her clothes still dripped with dark blood, but the skin showing through it was nearly unblemished, only something like a streak of lightning embedded, showing off where her body had been torn in two.

  But she was whole. And breathing.

  The ring of guards around Bashan backed away from this new devilry. For a moment, Bashan and Nora stood only a few feet apart. Then he smiled nastily and stepped out of her way.

  “I wish you much joy,” he said.

  Nora’s head swiveled to look at Diaz, white-hot flames erupting under his skin as she did. He gasped at the intensity of Suranna’s hold over his body, the intensity of her greed for the Blade. What seemed to Diaz like a gust of wind blew Nora’s wild hair out of her face as she approached him. Her eyes fixed on him; they seemed to have red pupils among the silver shine.

  “No,” he whispered. “You were dead.”

  Her face suddenly calmed, focused.

  “Diaz.”

  She stepped up to him, and her hand reached out for his, her touch hot like a desert wind on his tattoos. Her fingers slid up the tender skin of his forearm in a caress. A pleasant tingle ran down his spine, but at the same time he felt Suranna’s magic straining inside him. Charcoal-black hands swept across his body, claiming it from within as their own. Nora’s hand stopped on his shoulder and their eyes met once
more.

  Her mouth opened and shut a few times. “Help me,” she whispered.

  “Nora?”

  His arm prickled under her fingers as two forces battled within him: tongues of blood-red fire licking across him on the one side, charcoal fingers reaching deep into him on the other. Tearing up, retreating, burning across the hardness of muscle. He felt heat plunge into his body, pulling, seeking, and ruthlessly drawing out the poison of Suranna. One last rearing up, one last struggle over who would get to keep her hold over him.

  Nora’s lips glistened. He leaned forward, dizzy with the many sensations washing over him, his hand touching the scarred part of her face, the silver still squirming under her cheek. He wanted to tell her it was all right. He knew she was trying to free him from Suranna’s magic, but he’d always carry the queen’s pain-filled memory with him. And he could bear it, could live with it. But he couldn’t bear seeing her this way.

  “Nora?” Desperate now. Her name through clenched teeth.

  She was grasping him so tight her fingernails dug into his skin. A searing white-hot pain erupted under her hand, and he gasped, jerking away instinctively.

  As he reached across to clutch his shoulder, he felt nothing but warmth flow over his hand. He looked down. His shoulder was a torn, ragged mess, the blood, his life force, pumping, spurting out of him with every rapid heartbeat. He tried screaming, but only managed to open his mouth with a strangled sigh.

  The rest of his arm was still in Nora’s hand, ripped from his body.

  It was enough. His eyes gave up trying to make sense of it all.

  Through the haze of pain, he saw beautiful, black-clad Nora, unharmed by the bright fire raging around her, burning up his flesh to ashes in her outstretched hand. Silver snakes coiled around her limbs, her fingers playing with the flickering flames as her dark hair threaded with silver and whipped across her terrible face. She laughed.

  Then the pain took him and he saw no more.

  Enveloped in the dark.

  From the Forge

  How to make a knife

  In the afterword in Touch of Iron, I briefly took you through the process of charcoaling. Sticking with the blacksmithing theme, today I’m going to give you a very short run down of how smiths make a knife. Disclaimer: I’m a fantasy novelist, and NOT a blacksmith. I have never made my own knife before – never done any metalwork, actually – but I’ve watched, and researched, and naturally would really like to make my own knife one day. That is, if I didn’t assume I’d be really bad at it.

  So the first thing a blacksmith does is forge her1 own steel (for which she needed charcoal, remember?). I won’t go into much detail here, but the quality of the steel was a whole lot trickier to manufacture back in the day, and we often forget that the flexibility, strength, sharpness, and resilience of our modern steel was something a medieval blacksmith would be aiming for, but could never achieve. No. Not even the Japanese. (Ok, maybe a Masamune blade could match the quality of your kitchen knife, but seriously, could you pay for one? Yeah, me neither.)

  Anyway, a smith would weld several iron rods or layers of iron plates together through heat, and then hammer them into one single piece, folding, folding, folding them into each other until finally she’d have a roughly blade-shaped piece of metal.

  The next step is trimming the excess, usually through grinding. And I’m inching closer to my point, so bear with me. The grindstone was a necessary medieval metalworking tool. It could be found in every single forge. Every blacksmith would have one and use it. The earliest representation of the round sharpening ‘machine’ with a crank handle is in the Carolingian manuscript Utrecht Psalter (dated around 830 AD). Later the rotary grindstone was improved with a treadle; some were even powered by waterwheels. Often two people were needed to grind a knife (or any other blade): one operating the crank or treadle (mostly an apprentice), while the other would lie on a plank above the grindstone to grind the tapering sides by eye – which is why it was usually done by the master. Thus was born the phrase: ‘nose to the grindstone.’ (Wikipedia Grindstone article)

  With the blade shaped, ground, and tapered, the steel must be hardened. Going back to Masamune and the legendary superiority of Japanese blades, this step is where the ‘magic’ happened. Crafting a blade was considered a sacred art in medieval Japan, one that took many people, many days or weeks, and many Shinto rituals that accompanied the entire process. Today we know that steel is iron combined with a certain small percentage of carbon. So how, in the absence of science, were the master swordsmiths in Japan able to achieve such technical excellence anyway? Obviously they could see iron, and in the smelting process were able to separate the iron from the ore, looking out for impurities like slag, phosphorus, and other waste. But they couldn’t see the carbon they were adding in form of charcoal, or could they? In the hot center of a furnace, the iron and carbon combine at an atomic level, and the blade changes color. And so, in ancient Japan, on an auspicious night (usually during a new moon), the master swordsmith would sit in his darkened forge, take out the blade from the furnace and look for a shadow passing through it. (Dare I say they were looking for a Ghost in the Shell?) That shadow was the steel transforming, the carbon and iron combining. The phase shift would only be there for a moment, then gone. Mono no aware. Hey presto, high quality steel knives.

  This book is called On the Wheel which harkens back to that grindstone wheel. It’s a part of Nora’s smithing heritage, of course, but it also describes what is going on throughout this book. I’ll let you make your own connections, but the imagery of cycles, revolving, excess being ground down to essence, passing shadows, and transformation was very consciously put in.

  Of Gjalp and wights

  Originally the beginning of this book read a little different. Our gang simply marched back over the Suthron Pass, and there was a bit of a tumble and rescue over a cliff, but everyone got to the Temple of the Wind safely.

  I know – boring, right?

  Harry, my editor and alpha reader, pointed out that it wasn’t working, and encouraged me to rewrite. He also stressed I should work out the zoology behind the wights a bit more. How different were they to humans, how do they reproduce, and how exactly could a wight male and a human female have offspring….

  I’m a fantasy writer, man, not a xenobiologist!

  Anyway, I sat down and put my thinking cap on. And thus the original journey over the Suthron Pass was trashed, and instead I thought: wouldn’t it be fun to have Bashan steal a boat and let them cross over that way instead of the land road, and then all kinds of stuff goes wrong? A lot more conflict, a lot more insight into the characters, and how they work together. Oh, and freaking ghoulish mermaids! Yeah, gotta add those!

  Thus the gjalp were born from a mixture of norse and germanic mythology, and etymology of words (pronounciation is close to ‘yalp’ by the way.) I’ve relied on the Beowulf translation by Seamus Heaney for the term wight already (wiht unhælo, line 120 – ‘unholy wight’. Heaney translates this as ‘God-cursed brute.’ However, anyone who knows the Isle of Wight just off the British coast will know that ‘wight’ could mean many things, not only ‘brute.’ Similarly, just as there are unholy wights, there are also wiht leoht – wights of light. Tolkien knew this well which is why The Silmarillion shows a distinction between the Elves who have seen the First Light of the Trees, and those Dark Elves, who didn’t. And oh my god, I just compared my wights to Tolkien’s elves … Dammit. But you knew that, anyway, after reading the story Owen tells about the Isle of Awakening, didn’t you?) So, since I had already grounded the wights in that Old English, Anglo-Saxon culture, my fluency in German poured into the creation of the names like Gimmstanhol – Gem Stone Cave. Gjalp was just another step in that same direction, making the biological connection between these mermaids and the wights. Originally as much half-wight as Diaz is, the gjalp have naturally evolved further to their current form.

  Another interesting piece of information perhaps: Gjá
lp was a giantess in the Norse sagas, a jötunn (‘eotena’ in Beowulf … Come on, you’ve seen Marvel’s Thor, right? You know Loki Laufeyson is from Jötunheim?). As such, she is of the older race – Odin, Thor et al are Æsir – and connected to the element of water. She is also sometimes referred to as one of the nine mothers of Heimdallr. There’s also a story in which Thor is crossing a river, and throws a stone at Gjálp, who was standing in ravines on both sides of the river, one leg in each, causing the water to rise to his shoulders. He then proceeds to kill her, and her sister, and her father. (This is not Marvel’s Thor, after all.)

  Let’s just say there was a link, and perhaps serendipity led me to it.

  1. I’m sure that in the history of mankind, there must have been a few male blacksmiths, too. But I chose the female pronoun, because … take that, Patriarchy!

  Thanks

  As with all complex endeavors, rather than a single person crafting a master blade, several metal working artists had to contribute to make one – so also with this book. The idea of the author as the lone genius artist is a myth. Credited with the creation of a master blade, Masamune has often been named alone, though in reality, he certainly did not forge it on his own.

  Like him, I too was not alone in the construction of this book, and I am not ashamed to say I recruited the help of several other accomplished craftspeople.

  First and foremost, my thanks go to my editor Harry Dewulf, whose invaluable guidance helped me hammer out the rough shape, and then define it all the clearer. Harry, you are my brother-in-arms in the trenches of story-telling, and you know I can’t write without you.

  Thanks to my beta readers Cate, Sarah, and Hermione who weren’t afraid to point out where the narrative needed to be folded and hammered into line a bit more.

  Thanks to Kira Rubenthaler of BookflyDesign, my copy editor, my specialist polisher, who brought out the beauty and made the words shine. I always look forward to getting my manuscript back with your notes!