Black Steel

by Steve Perry

  Kee laughed. “My parents were certainly that, interesting. When I was born they were studying birds, so

  ‘Kildee.’ It’s a variant of `killdeer,’ which is supposed to be the cry the things make. The ones my parents were observing on the day I was born were mudbirds. The things lived on a lake shore and ate bugs.

  Glamorous, right?”

  Sleel chuckled. He told her the story of how he had chosen his own name.

  “What was the name your parents gave you?”

  He told her.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  “Yeah. I was named after a plant found on my homeworld.”

  She smiled. “Well, it’s no worse being named after a plant than it is a bird.”

  “Unless the plant only grows on animal dung.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. A kind of sheep. Apparently the species didn’t exist before the sheep started crapping in pastures.”

  She laughed, and he enjoyed the sound. He found that he very much liked making her laugh.

  But that pit-of-the-stomach feeling was there, too, as if there was some danger in being this close to her.

  Something was there, something he didn’t want to think about. Back into the cave, Sleel. The beasts are outside in the dark prowling, and if you don’t run and hide they will get you for sure.

  The three days went quickly for Wu. She enjoyed the camping as she had before, but it was different sharing it with somebody. On the one hand, she gave up the feeling of total solitude, and the peacefulness of being alone in the wilderness. She always downpowered her com when she came here, so that nobody could break into the quiet.

  On the other hand, sometimes a thing shared made it greater and not lesser. So this trip had been. Sleel was relaxing, becoming more open, and while there were times when she would have grabbed him and given in to the desire she felt, she had not allowed herself to do so. It would have stopped something happening in him, she felt, and the immediate pleasure would have perhaps stunted something greater.

  She wasn’t sure, and she wanted to be sure.

  She watched now as Sleel stood in the river, shaking his head and slinging the water from his hair as he came from under the surface. That, she felt, was what was going on. Too much of Sleel was surface. He had depths, but he kept them hidden, from her, and, more importantly, from himself. That was her job as a teacher, to show Sleel how to get to the center of himself.

  Well. Nobody had ever told her it would be easy, had they?

  Abruptly, she felt a pressure, as if being watched. She scanned the river, looked into the air and woods, but saw nothing. Both she and Sleel had been aware of the sensation almost the entire time they had been here. There had to be something to it. But-what? And-who would be watching them? It made no sense. Why would anybody be interested in them?

  Sleel emerged from the water and began to dry himself with one of the thin towels they had brought. Wu looked away. The next step was back in Kyrktorn. Time to go and take it.

  Chapter TWENTY-THREE

  “HERE IS YOUR soul,” Kee said.

  They sat the in kitchen of her dojo, Sleel looking at the little chunks of black metal lying on the table.

  There were several different kinds, ranging from a bar about the thickness and length of his hand to smaller, rectangular pieces not much bigger than large coins. Maybe a dozen in all.

  “A little fragmented, ain’t it?” he said.

  She said, “Well, yes, we’ll do some blending. Here, look.” She took a small flatscreen and began to draw on it using a light stylus. Sleel watched the simple design take shape. It took only a few moments. When she was done, she passed the flatscreen to Sleel.

  “Looks like the top part of a squared-off exclamation point,” he said.

  “It’s the cross section of a sword, viewed from the end,” she said. “The top of the drawing is the back ridge, the bottom the edge. Each of the shaded areas represents a different kind of steel. There are five metals in our family’s construction method. The edge is the hardest, the middle the softest, the others somewhere in between. These will be melded together by heat and pounding, folding, blending at the proper time, then reworked until the blade takes shape. When it’s finished, you will have a sword that will take and hold a razor edge, but that will be flexible enough so that it will give and not break with hard use.”

  “Such as chopping off heads?”

  She nodded once. “In the old days, the swords were tested by cutting various objects, bundles of straw, wooden staves, dummies, copper plate and so on. During one period, the testing was done on the bodies of criminals. They would stack the bodies atop one another in a pile-sometimes the victims were still living-and see how many the blade would cut through when swung by a strong arm. The result would then be chiseled onto the tang by the swordmaker.”

  “How nice.”

  “A good sword would cut through at least two, sometimes three bodies before stopping.”

  She was serious, Sleel saw. “Too bad your sword was made after those days,” he said, joking. “You’ll never know how it rates. “

  Kee touched the hilt of her weapon where it lay on the table.

  “According to my four-times great-grandmother, this is a four-body sword. That’s what it says on the tang.”

  “Jesu Christo,” Sleel said. He stared at the pieces of metal on the table.

  “The swordsmith who will do most of the work is one of half a dozen in the galaxy who can still make such things,” Wu said. She and Sleel were in her flitter, traveling to the far village of Ogami, nine hundred kilometers from her dojo. “His name is Miyamoto Bergamo, he was born on Earth and he is about a hundred and fifteen T.S. years old, give or take a few years. “

  “Shouldn’t he be retired?”

  “His youngest apprentice is sixty,” she said. “There are six of them at his foundry, four men and two women. They make about seven swords a year, I would guess. Sometimes as many as eight.”

  “As many as that,” Sleel said. “They must have other income. “

  She grinned. “It isn’t necessary. A Bergamo blade isn’t something you can pick up in the neighborhood market. They run about a hundred and eighty thousand standards each.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. And there is a five-year waiting list, if you qualify to get on it.”

  “A hundred and eighty thousand stads is a pretty steep qualification,” Sleel admitted.

  “That’s only a minor part of it. He won’t make a sword for you unless he thinks you are worthy of it, not for ten times the money. I am given to understand that he once turned down two million stads from a wealthy asteroid miner because the man was impolite.”

  “Well, I hate to point this out, but I’m not sure I’m up to his qualifications. Not to mention that I might have all of five thousand stads in my account. “

  She chuckled. “I don’t have that kind of money, either. But Bergamo’s family and mine have an old arrangement. Goes way back. They, ah, owe us a debt.”

  Sleel lifted one eyebrow.

  “Five or six hundred years ago, the Bergamos ran into some trouble. The Wu family rescued them. They have been working it off since.”

  “Must have been some fairly major trouble.”

  “I am given to understand that it was, yes.”

  “That doesn’t help with the other part, though.”

  “No. But we’ll see about that when we get there.”

  Ogami was hardly a village. As far as Sleel could tell, Bergamo’s foundry and living quarters was it, if you didn’t count some storage buildings scattered here and there, and some kind of grazing animals that looked like a cross between a goat and a pig. And geese; there were geese waddling back and forth in a flock of about twenty, honking and digging bugs and whatnot from the lawns.

  “Big town,” he said as she set the flitter down near the foundry. Heat came from a vent on top of the building, fogging the cold air as it rose.


  Kee didn’t respond to his comment.

  She put the flitter down near the largest of the buildings. “He’ll be in the foundry,” she said. “I’ve never come here when he wasn’t. I think he sleeps there.”

  The two of them alighted from the vehicle and started for the building. It was only a few meters from the flitter pad, but halfway there, Sleel paused and looked around.

  Kee raised one eyebrow.

  Nobody was visible, save the geese, who had set up an excited honking at the sight of the new arrivals.

  Great. Watch-geese.

  “I feel somebody watching me,” he said.

  She nodded. “Me, too. I haven’t been able to spot anybody.”

  “Neither have I. But they’re there. Somewhere.”

  “Who? And why?”

  “I dunno. I guess that’ll come later.”

  They continued to the foundry, the geese still scolding them loudly.

  At the old-style hinged door, there was a small permanent holoproj installed at eye level. It showed a sword dummy-Kee had one like it at the dojo, made from hardfoam and used to practice cuts and thrusts. This dummy’s head lay next to it on the invisible ground, and the body was full of rents and gouges and holes that pierced it all the way through in places.

  Under the dummy was a thin line of blue lettering. “THIS COULD BE YOU IF YOU ENTER UNINVITED,” it said.

  Sleel chuckled. “Graphic security. I like it.”

  But the door was unlocked and opened to Kee’s touch on the control. Inside, a short hallway led past a fresher with showers, a kitchen, and two rooms with couches and chairs in them. Another door connected the hall to the foundry proper. Sleel followed Kee through the door.

  It was hot, despite a blast of cold air flowing down from the coolers on the high ceiling, and noisy.

  Somebody was banging on something, steel on steel. The sound had a certain rhythm to it, a hard clank, followed by a pair of softer taps. The place smelled of metal, of something overcooked to the point of being burned, and there was something peppery in the air that made Sleel’s eyes water.

  “Over there,” Kee said.

  Sleel looked. A bald old man held a strip of red-hot metal with a long-handled set of tongs or a clamp of some kind, keeping it flat on a giant anvil. In his other hand he had a hammer. A woman of sixty, with long red and gray hair held back with a kind of mesh band, whacked the metal hard with the hammer she held. The bald man tapped the anvil next to the strip twice, and the woman hit the long bar again. That was the source of the almost musical banging. The old man tapped his hammer and moved what Sleel figured was a very rough sword blade, and the woman banged away. The two workers wore firemesh over fabric jumpsuits that might once have been white but were now more of a sooty gray; they also had thick sweatbands around their foreheads.

  Behind the two was a furnace, the interior lined with some material that glowed almost blue-white, visible through a sheet of denscris plate about half a meter square.

  The old man said something and the woman held her hammer back. He approached the furnace, touched a foot control, and the protective plate slid aside. Sleel could feel the blast of heat from where he stood, a good fifteen meters away.

  The old man put the blade into the furnace and turned away. “Two minutes,” he said. A voice-actuated timer on the furnace lit and began flashing backward from 2:00 toward zero.

  “Ah, Wu-sanita!” the old man said.

  Kee bowed as the old man approached, smiling at her.

  Sleel observed the old man carefully. Hundred and fifteen, eh? He looked pretty good for that age. Bald as an egg, no hair except for salt-and-pepper eyebrows thick as winter caterpillars, mostly salt and not much pepper. His skin was ruddy, probably from the heat, lined and wrinkled, most of those smile lines, given how they fell into place as he grinned at Kee. His nose was large and sharp, his ears big, and his teeth looked natural and well kept. He wasn’t much bigger than Kee, but the forearms that came out of the firemesh and three-quarter-sleeve coveralls were wiry and looked strong enough.

  He came to stand in front of them.

  “Master Bergamo,” she said, bowing again.

  He nodded once, a military bow. “Such a pleasure to see you again, Wu-sanita. You honor my house.”

  He had an accent Sleel couldn’t place, something sing-songy in his voice.

  “The honor is mine, Miyamoto-san. “

  The old man looked at Sleel.

  “This is Sleel,” Kee said. “My student. He needs a sword.”

  The old man said nothing, watching Sleel. Sleel kept his face impassive. Guy wanted to get into a staring contest? Fine.

  “I would furnish the steel,” Kee said.

  The old man looked away from Sleel at Kee.

  “Zhaverfrayshtol, ” she said.

  The old man continued to stare at Kee. His face gave nothing away.

  She nodded, once.

  The old man nodded in return.

  Some kind of fugue going on, Sleel figured, but he couldn’t read it.

  “Two days,” the old man said. “I have nearly gotten that piece of junk”-he waved at the furnace-“ready for tempering and even my incompetent assistants can probably manage that on their own.”

  The woman who had been hammering on the sword with Bergamo came up behind him and said,

  “Incompetent assistants? Your skinny little ass! Pay no attention to him, Kildee. His hormones are all stirred up; he hasn’t gotten drained since the start of the week. I’ll take care of him tonight, he’ll be much more pleasant in the morning.” With that, she reached over and squeezed the old man’s left buttock.

  He smiled at her.

  The furnace timer whistled at them. “Back to work, foolish woman. Would you let the steel burn up?”

  He looked at Kee. “Good assistants are hard to find. One has to make do with the dross one is burdened with.”

  “I’ll show you dross, you ancient hulk!”

  The old man laughed and ducked away from her pretended punch, hurrying toward the furnace where he retrieved the rough blade, now glowing bright orange.

  Kee led Sleel toward the kitchen.

  “How old did you say he was?”

  “Sex is in the mind, Sleel.”

  “Must be so.”

  “The woman is Vivian; she’s been Miyamoto’s assistant for forty years, his lover for maybe thirty-five.

  She keeps him in line. “

  “What did he mean about the two days?”

  “It’ll take him that long to finish the blade he is working, then he’ll start on yours.”

  “Just like that? No questions? How does he know I’m worthy? Because you vouched for me in that little fugue you two did?”

  “He knew the second he saw you. Yes, I vouched for you, but that wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t agreed. “

  Sleel shook his head, a thing he seemed to do a lot around Kee Wu. “More mystical stuff.”

  “Whatever you think.”

  “Patron,” the spy’s voice came across the light years, “they have gone to a tiny village called Ogami.

  There seems to be nothing there “Except Bergamo’s foundry,” Cierto said.

  “You know the place?”

  “I know the man’s work.” Bergamo had refused to make a sword for Cierto, or any of the hired emissaries he had sent to see the old man. Even so, he owned one of Bergamo’s blades, bought from the estate of a man who had died after losing the family fortune. By rights he should not have been able to purchase the sword, given that Bergamo had first option to buy it back upon the death of the legal owner. But money sang its song into the right ears at the right time, the weapon was his, and Bergamo did not even know that the owner had died.

  Well. That was not important. The House of Black Steel’s own family smith was one of two people in all the galaxy who could equal the old man’s skills; there was none better.

  “What are they doing there?” Perhaps this was a foolish
question, since a swordswoman going to see a master swordmaker ought to be easy enough to figure out; still, things were not always as apparent as they seemed.

  “We have not been able to determine this yet, Patron. The place is quite small and therefore difficult to approach without being seen.”

  “I pay you for results.”

  “To be sure. We have a man going in sub rosa tomorrow.”

  “Let me know what happens.”

  “Do whatever he tells you,” Kee said. “Your part in the process is fairly small; you’ll mostly be helping with the stretching and folding. Miyamoto will show you what he wants you to do, once. Once the blade is roughed out, the rest will be up to him and his assistants. It’ll take a couple of weeks for that part.

  Other apprentices will be working on the furniture, the tsuba, hilt, sheath, like that. A month or six weeks for the whole process.”

  “When does this start?”

  “At dawn in two days.”

  The geese began squawking the next morning, and Sleel went out to see what had disturbed them. Kee was already up, practicing with her sword behind the foundry, skewering the targets set up there.

  A man wearing several thousand stads’ worth of carefully tailored clothing alighted from a fancy flitter, attended by two assistants. Armed assistants, Sleel saw, despite their own specially cut coats designed to hide the hand wands. The trio moved to the foundry’s door and were admitted by one of the older assistants, a dark-skinned Temboan pushing ninety.

  Two minutes later, the trio emerged from the foundry. The rich man looked angry, the bodyguards slightly bored. On the face of it, it appeared that an application for the waiting list had been denied. That would have been cause for a smile, except that something felt wrong about it. Sleel couldn’t say what.

  None of the three men looked at him as they climbed into the flitter and fanned away, tossing up dust and small pebbles in their wake. Out there in the middle of nowhere and they didn’t look at him. He would have spared himself a glance or two, had he been them. Something wrong about them ignoring him.

  Sleel turned away from the now-distant flitter. Whatever it was, it wasn’t his business. He wasn’t a matador anymore; he didn’t have a client. He was here to do what Kee told him to do, her and that old man in the foundry. Nothing more.