The Legend of Broken

by Caleb Carr

  For the last time during this audience, the faces of all at the Groba table reflected utter confusion. “How—?” the Priestess managed to express in alarm; and then the Father asked, in a more coherent expression of concern:

  “My lord Caliphestros—how can you know of the Riddle of Water, Fire, and Stone? And what can you tell us of its meaning and use?”

  “Little more than you yourselves can—just yet,” Caliphestros called over his shoulder, raising a hand as he departed. “But it is good to know that we are all indeed concerned with the same problems, is it not?” Caliphestros and Stasi, without any encouragement, continued on their way out of the Den, seeming weary with the place. “I bid you good night. Tomorrow begins our great work, and we must be rested and ready …”

  Keera and Veloc turned to issue more formal and acceptable words of departure to the Groba, while Heldo-Bah, like Stasi herself, simply wandered toward the long stone hallway that led out of the Den, scratching at his head and various other parts of his body.

  “If you do not mind, Lord Caliphestros,” he could be heard to say in the stone hallway, “I shall sleep with you and your friend under the trees and stars, tonight. They are good people, Keera and Veloc’s family, but I would rather be in the place that suits me best, and worries me least …”

  “And you are welcome, Heldo-Bah,” Caliphestros answered, his voice now fading altogether. “But do not keep Stasi awake with your snoring, for it is one of many human sounds she detests …”

  Back in the Den of Stone, the Groba Father looked up and down the great table at his fellows. “Well—what say we: sorcery or science?” Then he gazed at the stone hall once more, as he answered his own question with another: “Or does it really matter at all, when we consider the forces that are even now bearing down upon our people …?”

  And to that query, not even the Priestess of the Moon had an answer.

  Upon the mountains south of Okot, Caliphestros and his surprising new order of acolytes create an inferno as fearsome as Muspelheim; while Keera, for the first time, begins to wonder if the old man’s passion holds danger for her people …

  THE THREE BANE FORAGERS had long since learned that both Caliphestros and Stasi had the capacity to almost instantly distinguish between persons of quality and compassion and those more common humans, ungenerous and cruel in nature. And among the most reliable and generous of people to be found in Okot (or anywhere else) were certainly Keera’s family—not only her own and Veloc’s parents, Selke and Egenrich, but the tracker’s children: the still-recovering boys, Herwin and Baza, as well as the storm of energy, curiosity, and youthful wisdom that was the youngest, Effi, so like her mother in many ways, although more circumspect, and now having been exposed to the kind of tragedy and sadness, brief but scarring, that teaches wise children not to be bitter or selfish.

  The morning after Caliphestros, Stasi, and Heldo-Bah slept outside the welcoming family’s home, Keera followed Caliphestros’s instruction to assemble every miner, ironmonger, and smith that lived in the central and outlying settlements of Okot so that they could listen to the requirements of a plan that, in a matter of days, would so arm the central corps of Yantek Ashkatar’s troops that they could hope not only to defeat even the soldiers of Broken, but to do so at a point far north of Okot, thus keeping the exact location of the long-hidden community safe.

  Because of this, ancient mines dug into the sides of the mountains above Okot that had long lain sealed and dormant were now reopened, in order that they could join those few that were still active, as well as allow the Bane to more easily gain access to veins of a special iron ore that had been propelled from the night sky into the Earth countless ages ago. In addition, the miners digging into the mountainside were told to bring their day’s or night’s gatherings of coal (the main substance with which the unique iron ore would be smelted) to Caliphestros, before any thought was given to using them to fuel the new, smaller but far hotter and more numerous forges that the old man designed. The fiery effect of the forges was increased by the thousands of torch lights that lit the way into and around the mines, creating an ever-expanding impression that the Bane had bargained with their old gods, and been allowed to tear open a terrifying gateway into their underworld: the dreaded Muspelheim.

  But why, some workers could occasionally be heard to ask, was any deep coal mining necessary at all, when the mountains were already so covered in young and old trees of all varieties—trees that could easily be used to fuel the old cripple’s forges? That the city of Broken itself needed coal was not difficult to understand: the summit of Broken mountain was, as has been seen, primarily composed of stone, and been shorn of nearly all its readily accessible stands of heating timber during the kingdom’s early generations, as had the plain north of the Cat’s Paw. Indeed, it was well known that direct control of new supplies of wood and coal, along with all metal ores found in the great forest (primarily iron and silver), were two of the chief reasons that Lord Baster-kin so coveted Davon Wood. Yet Caliphestros not only insisted on coal, but on personally examining every piece of it that was brought out of the mountains, surrendering much of the little nightly rest that it was his custom to take and instead relentlessly searching through the cartloads that Bane miners, with blackened faces and bleeding hands, dragged under his practiced eye. He was seeking a type of black rock that was marked by certain qualities, qualities that took the miners long days to recognize in the darkness beneath the ground, but that they eventually learned to identify by the light of day quickly enough: qualities of weight and texture, all of which made it well suited to transformation by fire into yet another variety of fuel, related but not identical to coal, that was vital to the creation of Caliphestros’s near-miraculous grade of steel.

  But in truth, for all the talk among the Bane townspeople of the mines and forges above Okot resembling, to an ever-increasing extent, some sort of terrible entrance to the most fiery of the Nine Homeworlds, a passageway that would eventually disgorge those agents that would cause the end of the old gods and perhaps of the world, Caliphestros privately told Keera that all such tales were but myths, while the work that he was directing on the mountains above Okot, whatever its sinister nighttime appearance, was in fact, like all undertakings to which he applied himself, based on such scientific learning as had been developed and carried on by men and women like himself for hundreds if not thousands of years. These refinements, which so closely resembled sorcerous transformations to the ignorant, were carried out upon the mountains that brooded over Okot not because the spot had been appointed as the site at which the end of the Earth or the imminent arrival of infamous demons would take place, but because the position of the caves within allowed the Bane metalworkers to capture the only winds in the area strong enough to heat the coal and charcoal in Caliphestros’s furnaces to so great an extent that they could do the work that must, at this critical hour, be done.

  One particular mountaintop cave, meanwhile, became both Caliphestros’s private new forge and the scholar and Stasi’s temporary home. The panther herself slept above the cave, as much as she did within, during these days, for the old man worked long hours, producing (or so the Bane thought) additional weapons in order to keep some vague pace with the Bane smiths to whom he had taught many of his secrets. During these restless hours, when Caliphestros turned his mental and physical efforts to ever more arcane experiments, Keera became the old man’s sole assistant; and such only after she swore not to reveal what he was in fact doing. The work in the Bane mines and the mountaintop smithies multiplied daily: Caliphestros knew that the Bane had always been extraordinarily clever and imitative people, who, once shown how to do a thing, required little repeated instruction to achieve their object. All the special coal and special charcoal they created did, indeed, create sufficient heat to allow Caliphestros to himself smelt what the Bane workers came to call the “star iron,” because the iron ore itself was brought from deep in the mountains and the mines where it had p
resumably been embedded hundreds of years ago, after hurtling down from the heavens. That iron was combined, first and above all, with the remarkably high quality charcoal that Caliphestros had taught his smiths to create, a combination that produced a steel capable of not only attaining but holding an edge of fearsome sharpness. Some Bane smiths swore that there were traces of other elements in the ore, a tale that reinforced the other-than-Earthly origins of the “star iron,” although none among these same smiths could even guess at what those other elements might be. This new style of heating and smelting, brought back from the East via the Silk Path by Caliphestros during his youth, allowed even the highest grade of ore, what the Bane called “the star iron,” to be heated to so uniform a consistency that it could be masterfully united with another iron—one of equal purity but also of greater resistance to fracture or breakage—with the object of giving the blades both mighty durability and at the same time astonishing cutting power. After this, the combination was folded and refolded, worked and reworked, pounded together by smiths until there were hundreds of layers in each uninterrupted strip that became a weapon; and any one of these weapons was capable of becoming higher in both strength and sharpness even than that which Heldo-Bah had demonstrated to the Groba, and far superior to anything manufactured outside the realms of the East.

  For, while the occasional daring seeker of a European trading fortune, or traveler of great renown as a swordsman, might journey far to bring back examples of this remarkable steel from the most distant realms of the East to the markets of their homelands, Caliphestros alone had understood the formula for the manufacture of the steel well enough to record it, during his travels on the Silk Path. He had then brought it back west with him, and awaited the day when the loosing of this seminal substance would create weapons that would change the very rank of power among kingdoms in the West where they were used—just as they had already done in the East.

  And yet, even as Caliphestros made a gift of the knowledge of how to create the star iron to Keera’s tribe of diminutive outcasts, Keera herself—perhaps the most perspicacious member of her tribe—remained far from easy about all the reasons why he might be doing so. His obvious motives—revenge, for himself and for Stasi, contempt for how the Broken state had changed since the death of his former patron, the God-King Izairn, and the desire to end the dangers of disease that seemed not to be invading the city on the mountain, but rather to be emerging from it—were apparent and easily understood; although Keera nonetheless wondered, at certain moments—moments when the old man’s blood and ire were truly racing—if it would ever be truly possible for her or anyone else to comprehend the inner feelings that drove a man who had lived as long, colorful, and mysterious a life as Caliphestros.

  As it only could have, the vital portion of the explanation of the mystery that Keera had built in her mind around the old man and his behavior came without any spoken question on the subject, one night when the winds atop the mountain ridge were building to what seemed an especially portentous fury. With ever more days of massive effort by increasing numbers of Bane laborers piling one atop the other, the southern horizon above Okot had never seemed to crack open with such great and purposeful fire; and, being as the mountaintops upon which the Bane forged the weapons with which they hoped to blunt any aggressive moves by the Tall army or Lord Baster-kin’s Guard stood at an even higher elevation than did the point upon Broken’s mountain where the Inner City, the House of the Wives of Kafra, and the High Temple were all located, it seemed only too likely that the God-King and his family and minions (to say nothing of the average citizen of the walled city) could not help but look out at that southern horizon and wonder what was taking place. Was their own god, Kafra, preparing some divine punishment for the Bane, one that would make the sacrifice of Broken’s young men, whether in the Guard or in the army, unnecessary? Or were, indeed, the demons of the old faith’s fiery Ninth Homeland preparing to enter humanity’s realm, and punish the subjects of Broken for having abandoned them in favor of the strange deity brought back by the followers of Oxmontrot from the world of the Lumun-jani, by first weakening the unfaithful with plague and then releasing their own demoniacal powers upon the kingdom north of the Cat’s Paw?

  Keera’s secret work assisting Caliphestros in his private cave, guarded against all prying eyes by Stasi, only heightened this air of mystery; for the truth was, as she soon learned, Caliphestros was not producing a marginally additional number of spearheads and dagger and sword blades within that cave, but something altogether different. Every few nights, the forager, the old man, and the panther would journey to bog pits among the mountains above and below Okot, the existence of which Keera had never thought anything more than a danger to passing travelers. From these, the old man would extract buckets of a strangely pungent liquid, lighter and thinner than pitch as well as more inflammable, and then they would bring these back to his cave, where he would combine them in various mixtures with strangely colored powders and extracts from the very Earth, always working toward Keera knew not what, save that he produced a broad array of foul-smelling, combustible half-liquids and fluids, all of which he would speak of, at times, but none of which he would fully explain. Only when she returned to her home and her children, Keera believed, did Caliphestros complete these experiments; and in this fact she found reason for uneasiness as much as amazement.

  Still, knowing that the Tall in Broken, from the lowliest worker to the God-King, might well be viewing all the fiery activity in the mountains of Davon Wood with real dread and fear was cause for ever greater joy; just as it was when—with the wind rising to a particular fury, creating especially plentiful fire, and with the heat and sparks of the now dozens of exile forges rising in great upward showers—momentous news arrived from those units of Ashkatar’s army that patrolled the barrier of the Cat’s Paw: a column of Broken troops were advancing on the river. It happened that, when this intelligence came, Keera was outside Caliphestros’s cave, beside Stasi at the jagged mouth of the place, a spot where the panther often sat, ever ready to spring forward, as her human companion within brewed and mixed the strange substance that absorbed him so.

  It was, predictably, Heldo-Bah and Veloc who brought the news of this march to the old man’s cave, the pair being the only Bane, besides Keera, who had the courage to approach Caliphestros when he was laboring at his seemingly mad doings therein.

  “Great man of science!” Heldo-Bah called as he reached the cave’s entrance. “Come with us! Come and see the column of men that approach on the main road from Broken to the Plain, with torches lit in the night to show us just where they are!”

  Caliphestros emerged from the cave, his skin smudged with the smoke and ash of his work, his face sweating as he pulled himself along upon his walking platform with his crutches; and it seemed, even to Heldo-Bah, amazing that a crippled man should be capable of such difficult labors of the mind and body. The wind was continuing to blow with true ferocity, causing the old man’s robe to drag directly across his body, and his beard across his face, as well; but his skullcap remained in place, and an expression of wilder emotion than any of his forager friends had ever seen him exhibit soon came into his features.

  “So soon?” Caliphestros said, staring only briefly at the winding points of lights on Lord Baster-kin’s Plain before moving to a large, naturally formed basin in the outer rock of the cave’s entrance, one that was full of rainwater. A small cake of the same soap that the old man had insisted the Bane diggers use during their march to Okot lay on the basin’s edge. “Then they cannot be the column of Talons that is on its way from Daurawah,” he said, as he began to scrub himself clean of the coal dust and other black patches on his skin that had formed during the smelting and smithing processes earlier in the day.

  “Not if they behave so stupidly as to light their path for us to see plainly,” Veloc replied. “Although how you could have known that the Talons went to Daurawah in the first place remains a mystery to me, Lo
rd Caliphestros.”

  “It was the only logical direction to take, if they needed to collect supplies and forage for their horses,” Caliphestros answered with a smile. “Besides, did not your tribe’s Outrager spies observe them taking the eastern road as they departed Broken?”

  “Yes,” Heldo-Bah said, spitting on the ground. “But to trust in the reports of the Outragers is folly—and even if one accepts that they were right, it does not explain your insistence that the plague was also active in the Tall’s port, Lord Caliphestros.”

  Caliphestros glanced again at the swaying treetops, and smiled slightly. “You must allow me a few secrets, Heldo-Bah.”

  But Keera, also glancing at the loudly rustling branches above, knew the secret of the old man’s wisdom concerning this subject, even if she could not, at that moment, see either the starling called Little Mischief or the enormous (and enormously proud) owl named Nerthus.

  “So—if it is not the Talons, the question becomes, Who is it?” Having voiced the question, the old man moved on his single wooden leg and crutches to stand beside Heldo-Bah, who was scratching at Stasi’s thick coat. Leaning against her other shoulder, the old man removed his walking device, then bundled the wooden leg and crutches, and slung them on his back. Climbing with little difficulty onto the neck and upper back of the panther, he settled himself as Stasi stood fully upright again, and Heldo-Bah took a step back “Well, whoever it is,” the old man continued, “Yantek Ashkatar must make his preparations—with all crossings over the Cat’s Paw save the Fallen Bridge destroyed, he must position his best men amid the Wood on this side of that pathway, so that he will, from the first, force these Broken soldiers to fight on the Bane’s chosen ground, and according to the Bane’s most practiced dispositions and maneuvers. Has he been alerted?”