Blood of the Watcher (The Dark Ability Book 4)

by D. K. Holmberg

  Pouring the heartstone carefully, he made certain that it covered the entirety of the steel and silver plate. Unlike with the grindl, he hadn’t been able to feel any pattern with his fingers. He could see the pattern, but if this didn’t work, he risked destroying the plate.

  With the heartstone layered over the plate, he stepped back and brought the iron pot to the coals to keep heating it so that he could clean the remaining heartstone from it. As he did, there was a flash of yellow light from the form, and the four sides framing it fell away, hitting the floor of the smithy with a clatter.

  The heartstone exploded outward, and Rsiran was thrown back.

  Hot metal flew toward him.

  He ducked, but as he did, he pushed against the heartstone. Had he not had a connection to it, and probably if he had not held the crystal, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. As it was, he barely managed to keep it from hitting him.

  Taking a few steadying breaths, he released his connection to the heartstone where it fell harmlessly to the ground around the anvil.

  Rsiran dusted himself off, cursing aloud, as he reached for a blob of heartstone with the tongs. He needn’t have bothered. The heartstone had already cooled, but the explosion left it running toward the edge of the anvil, covering the plate entirely.

  Rsiran lifted it, forced to pry it free from the surface of the anvil.

  As he stood there, the door to the smithy opened and Jessa slipped inside. Once in the door, she flipped the bars in place that locked the door more securely. She watched him, an amused smile on her face. “What are you doing with that?”

  “Trying to keep it from exploding,” he answered.

  “It… exploded?”

  He motioned with his leg to the frames of the form lying on the floor. “After I poured the heartstone over it. I should have paid closer attention.”

  “Did you know that it would do that?”

  Rsiran turned the twisted lump of heartstone pinched between the ends of the tongs from one side to the other. “Heartstone doesn’t react to steel. And I’ve never had silver to test it with.”

  “But it did something similar with the grindl.”

  Rsiran nodded.

  “Should it have done that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think that Venass…”

  Rsiran didn’t know. With all the protection around the building, it almost seemed as if they didn’t want him reaching the metal. But what if that was the point? What if Venass had tried to draw him to it?

  “Who would know?” she asked.

  “Not a smith. They rarely mix metals. That was the purview of the Alchemist Guild.”

  Jessa’s smile faded. “Oh, no. Not the alchemists.”

  “I’m not going to go to them for help with this,” he said.

  She stared at him as if she didn’t believe what he said. One hand reached for her charm, and her fingers played with the violet flower she’d found today. “Did you figure anything out from it?”

  Rsiran touched the heartstone with his free hand and noted that it had cooled. He set it back on the anvil and picked it up with his hands, turning it. The metal might have exploded from the form, but what remained had taken on a distinct shape.

  “That’s strange,” he said.

  Jessa leaned over his shoulder and studied the heartstone. “What is? The crazy lump of metal you’re holding or that you nearly got blown up by a small sheet of metal?”

  Rsiran smiled. After the chaos within Thyr, it felt good to smile again. He tried not to think of what might have happened had he not had the ability with heartstone. “Both? But not that,” he went on. “There’s a pattern to the way the metal expanded.”

  “Expanded?”

  He held the heartstone out and shook it. “That’s what happened here. When the metal got hot, it expanded. Usually it does that, but there’s more control to it. This,” he went on, “this was an uncontrolled expansion. I’ve never seen it with heartstone.”

  When he worked with heartstone before, there hadn’t been any unusual properties to the metal. It always reacted the same. The only time it hadn’t had been when he attempted to combine it with lorcith.

  “What’s the pattern?” Jessa asked.

  Rsiran studied the heartstone, pushing away the sense of lorcith, ignoring the louder draw that it placed on him. He focused on the shape of the heartstone, straining for the connection.

  When it came to him, he frowned. There was no map, not like with the other plate.

  “This isn’t what we needed,” he said.

  “No? Then what is it?”

  Rsiran couldn’t tell what shape the heartstone had taken, only that there was a pattern, and the pattern was one he didn’t recognize.

  If he had better Sight, he might be able to see what shape the heartstone had taken, but then had he better Sight, he wouldn’t have needed to create the form and combine the metals in the first place.

  He set it down and surveyed the various forgings on the table. There was the other brick of heartstone, the shape of the map still drawing him. Nothing else of heartstone called to him in the same way, not even the sword that he’d made.

  The table contained dozens of other creations of his. The oldest were knives of different sizes, but the newer creations had taken on a different complexity as he began to master lorcith. Now when he worked with it, he often had something in mind, an intent of what he wanted to make, and selected the metal based on whether it would be able to help him form the shape.

  “Did you find anything,” he asked Jessa.

  She shook her head. “Found Brusus, but not Haern. He hasn’t seen him since we returned.”

  Rsiran wondered if that should worry him. With everything that they’d been through, any time they couldn’t find one of their friends made him nervous. It shouldn’t; if they were attacked, Haern was the most skilled of any of them, and would be the ablest to deflect an attack. Unless it came from someone like Thom. He’d shown that he could control Haern.

  He would need to make something like the bracelets for Haern.

  Rsiran turned to the bin of lorcith and focused on what he wanted, much as he had when trying to make the bracelets for Jessa. He placed the image of Haern in his mind and focused on the concept of protecting him, of preventing someone from Reading and Compelling him.

  None of the lorcith responded.

  Rsiran tried again, listening, knowing that at least one of the dozens of lumps of lorcith in the bin would have to respond, but none of them did. All ignored his request.

  Either the lorcith didn’t want to help Haern, or Rsiran wasn’t convincing enough in his desire to help Haern.

  He sighed, and leaned on the table.

  “What is it?” Jessa asked.

  “I wanted to help Haern. I wanted to find something like I made for you.”

  She held up her wrists, studying the bracelets. “I wasn’t sure about them at first. They dig into my arms, you know? But when Thom came at us, they went so cold that they burned. It was as if they absorbed whatever he tried to do to me.” She smiled. “Glad you made them for me. After what happened with Evaelyn, I don’t want to risk anything like that happening again. I don’t want to risk anything happening to you.”

  “That’s why I thought I could try to forge something similar for Haern, but none of the lorcith responds.”

  “Maybe none of these pieces are meant to help him.”

  He nodded, a part of him wondering if it was something about him, or whether the metal didn’t want to help Haern.

  Since meeting Haern, Rsiran had conflicted feelings about him. Haern made no attempt to hide the fact that he wanted to ensure Jessa’s safety, going so far as to essentially attack Rsiran under the guise of trying to help her. That had helped Rsiran learn about his connection to the lorcith, but a part of him remained uncertain about how much he could truly trust Haern.

  Maybe the lorcith responded to that.

  Rsiran pushed t
he thought away. Maybe all he needed was to find a different piece of lorcith that would be more responsive. But that meant going to the mines.

  And he needed to return to the mines, anyway. It had been too long since he’d last been there, and too long since he felt the breath of the mines blowing against him, something that he once would have found difficult to believe that he’d miss. Besides, he still hadn’t learned why the supply of lorcith had been controlled and limited by the Elvraeth.

  “Anyway,” Jessa said, tugging on his hands and drawing his attention back to her, “Brusus said that Upper Town seems agitated.”

  “Agitated?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t know what it means, only that’s how he described it. You know Brusus, though. He can be dramatic at times.”

  Brusus was usually pretty well connected to the goings on throughout the city. Some of that was through the bribes that he made, and some came from other connections that he had. Brusus kept most of that to himself.

  “Are you still trying to convince yourself that you’re some kind of horrible person?” Jessa asked.

  Rsiran inhaled deeply. When he worked at the forge, regardless of what metal he chose, there wasn’t the opportunity to allow himself to feel bad. Standing in front of the heat pushed away all thoughts, good and bad, leaving him with nothing more than a blank mind. And peace.

  “Not right now,” he said.

  Jessa studied him for a moment. “Does that mean that you’re going to find a way to feel bad about yourself later?”

  Would he have to kill again? Would he feel the same surge of excitement when he did, a thrill that he should not have, if he did?

  Those were questions he had no answers for, and wouldn’t until it came to actually confronting whatever he would be faced with, and whether or not it meant that his friends—what he considered his family now—were in danger.

  And if they were in danger, could he really feel bad about what he might be asked to do?

  When answers didn’t come, Jessa smiled at him. “Come on, Rsiran. We’ve got a different issue to work through.”

  “What issue is that?”

  She focused on the table where many of his forgings rested. She touched a few of the more recent creations, shaking her head as she did. “Such skill,” she whispered. “You didn’t have this same skill when you first started.”

  “That’s the issue?”

  “No, but another reminder.” She sighed and looked up at him. “Where do you think he went?”

  She meant Thom. “I don’t know if he can Slide, but Venass would have helped. The scholars know something about Sliding,” he said. At least, they knew something about the way to influence Sliding, even if they couldn’t Slide themselves. The way that he’d been drawn to Venass had proven they understood Sliding, as did how they had been pushed away from the Tower as they left. “I just don’t know how they would have known where to find him.”

  “What did Thom say about knowing that we were coming?”

  “Only that he knew I was coming. He said that I was loud.” Rsiran still wasn’t sure whether that meant that he’d actually heard him, and that the barriers that he used and depended on to keep him safe weren’t effective, or whether there was another way he knew.

  Could it be the fact that he’d Slid them all to Thyr?

  Della mentioned the ripples that she noticed when he Slid, and how they were more prominent with each person that he brought with him. Carrying three through a Slide would have been enough for Della to hear, and maybe enough for someone less skilled, someone like Sarah.

  And he had detected the sense of lorcith before they reached Thyr, however briefly. What if Valn and Sarah were with Venass and had been the ones to warn Thom?

  “The ripples that Della mentioned, right?” Jessa asked.

  He nodded.

  “And those ripples are bigger when you’re carrying others, aren’t they?”

  “That’s probably what it was,” he said. He hoped that it wasn’t something else, that Thom had managed to penetrate the barriers that he used to protect himself, but would he really have known?

  He should have thought about it before now, but maybe there was a reason that he hadn’t. Maybe that was the reason he’d been so eager to attack. “We need to go to Della,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “We’ve been saying all along that Thom probably knew we were coming.” Jessa nodded. “And if he did, what if he Compelled me?”

  “I thought you could protect your mind so that he couldn’t?”

  Rsiran had thought the same, but then Thom had managed to mask the presence of heartstone from him. If he could do that, and if the implant somehow made him that much stronger at Compelling, it was possible that Rsiran had been affected.

  “I thought so, too, but after what happened,” he said, looking over to where the heartstone had exploded, “I need to be certain.”

  Chapter 24

  After grabbing three small knives—he no longer liked going without something that he could push if needed—Rsiran Slid them to Della’s home. Each time that he visited Della, he had the memory of the first time he had come, when he had needed her Healing services more than anything. That had been before he had been willing to embrace his ability, and before he had known about the extent of his connection to lorcith.

  As usual, a cozy hearth glowed with a warm light. The smell of the mint tea that Della preferred permeated the air, mingling with the scents of the herbs and ointments that she mixed for her healing. A single lantern glowed near the back corner, giving even more light.

  Della stood behind the counter where she worked with a thick ceramic bowl, pressing a long pestle into it with a steady motion. She barely looked up as they emerged.

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” he said to her.

  She sniffed, set the pestle down, and dusted her hands across her dress. Usually, she was dressed in vibrant colors, and today was no different, with stripes of orange and red spiraling around her dress. Her gray hair was tied back and twisted into a tight bun. “I’ve told you before, Rsiran, that you have no need to be sorry. Besides, I can always tell when you’re making your way here.”

  She pulled a jar off the shelf behind her and propped open the lid, taking out a pinch and sprinkling it into the bowl on the counter. Then she picked up her pestle and began grinding again, moving with a steady determination.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Jessa said.

  Della looked up and arched a brow. “Not many places you don’t go together, now are there?”

  Jessa smiled. “I thought you told me to keep him in my Sight.”

  “That is what I said now, isn’t it?”

  Rsiran hadn’t heard that before, but shouldn’t be surprised that Della was giving Jessa instructions on watching him. Probably Brusus had some as well.

  “So you’re worried about what I detect?”

  “Not what you detect,” Rsiran said. He stepped over to the counter and looked into the bowl. She worked a thick greenish paste and pulled another jar off a different shelf and placed three pinches into the bowl. “But what others can detect when I Slide.”

  “Not much to worry about in the city. There aren’t too many with my particular talent.” She looked up from the bowl and fixed Rsiran with a steady stare.

  “There’s another in Elaeavn who can detect Sliding,” Rsiran said. Why hadn’t he told Della about that sooner? Would she know Sarah?

  Della paused and studied him. “Another? There hasn’t been another outside the…” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Who have you seen in Elaeavn?”

  “A woman named Sarah. She was with another, a man named Valn, when I saw them. They were following me.”

  Della nodded slowly. “That’s why you’ve been training with Haern?”

  “You knew about that?”

  Della sniffed. “Not much that I don’t know about when it comes to you.” She tapped the side of her head. “Remember what I told you abo
ut my connections, those that formed after I held the Great Crystal?” He nodded. “Those connections let me See, much like Haern, only mine is different.”

  “Do you know of her?”

  Della set the pestle down and stared at him for a moment. “I don’t know who else might follow the ripples of your Sliding, Rsiran. If there are others, you are already in more danger than we realized.”

  “I know.”

  Della sniffed. “And still you Slide here, carrying another with you, knowing how the ripples form.”

  “Did you feel them?”

  Della grabbed a spoon and started stirring the paste in the bowl, pulling it out and sliding it into another jar. She worked carefully, almost as if avoiding touching the paste. When she was finished, she carried the spoon and the pestle over to the fire where she set them in the flames. The spoon began burning, sending blue and green sparks sputtering into her room. The pestle simple charred, the same sparks shooting off it until the paste was burned free.

  She glanced at Rsiran, as if waiting for him to ask what she was making. He was curious, but Della was a master Healer, and there were more herbs and medicines in her home than he could even begin to name.

  “You think you’ve found some way to hide yourself? Is that why you risk coming?”

  He tapped the sword he still wore beneath his cloak. There was less need to carry the sword in Elaeavn, and more risk—if he were caught with a sword, the punishment was severe—but he liked the idea that his Sliding couldn’t be deterred when he carried it with him.

  “You think heartstone keeps you safe?” she asked.

  He thought that it had, but had never tested his theory. “They can’t Slide past it.”

  “Yes, but you can. What if it matters little about the metal and more about the individual doing the Sliding?” Della asked.