The Anvil of Ice (10 page)

First, though, he made the frame, and that was a simple enough business; it resembled the
ordinary
light helm worn by warriors for skirmishing or scouting, where swiftness was their best protection. One band of fine bronze circled the brow, two hoops crossed the head from front to back and sideways; between them went a stiff leather lining and over that a layer of mail rings. The rings hung down in a curtain to shield the back of the neck, and could be fastened across the throat or the lower part of the face. Then he began on the long labor of crafting the rings, engraving the lengths of steel wire and shaping them, not into plain circles but into peculiar distortions which would let them mesh easier and lie closer, to the good of both armor and virtue. These he would blend piece by minute piece into the pattern, sometimes overlaying them with smaller rings of gold and copper to highlight its lines. It was a long labor, almost another month, and when the mail was complete he held it up in the light of the forge. It was as if the waterfall had overwhelmed the chamber, for the mail reflected a great shimmering wave of light across the dark walls, and the rings rang and chuckled like water among stones. For a moment Alv thought of the hillside streams of his childhood, and felt suffocated in this shadowy, sea-sonless place. Then, shrugging, he turned to the frame, secured the mail to the leather interior, fitted these together to the frame and hammered the last bronze rivet flat with a die that stamped a binding symbol. "Well?" demanded Roc, who had been holding the die for him. "That's
as much as was on the Master's pattern. What're
you waiting for?"

Alv stared a doubtful moment at his creation. There seemed to be nothing inconspicuous about that glistening thing. Still… He raised it as if to put it on his head—

And the Mastersmith reached out and received it graciously. He too looked at it a moment, as if puzzled, and then quickly placed it on his head, smoothing the mail out around his neck. The rings rang more quietly; nothing else seemed to change—but then the Mastersmith reached up and fastened the mail across his face. The rings shone as brightly in the forelight, but somehow the tiny gaps between them grew harder, deeper, more black, until night seemed to seep out of the helm like thick lampblack ink. The highlights still shone, but behind them it was as if the mask itself and its wearer drew further and further back into the shadow, blurring, quietening, becoming indistinct. It was like a pond draining and drying in the darkness, leaving nothing but a few gleaming puddles. Knowing someone stood there, Alv and Roc strained their eyes and could just make him out. Otherwise he would have seemed nothing but one of the insubstantial shadows that darkness creates. In a forest, anywhere with cover, he could have walked unheard, unnoticed, as good as invisible.

Behind the young men the library door swung open. Ingar walked in, and stopped short at the sight of Alv and Roc. "Seen the master anywhere—What're you two gaping at?"

There was a sudden trill of metal, and the Mastersmith stood bareheaded before them with the helm swinging from one hand. It was Ingar's turn to stare; the younger men whooped with laughter, but Alv's faded in him as he caught a flicker of some deeper disquiet on the journeyman's heavy face.

"A pretty enough prentice piece, Ingar, do you not think so?" inquired the Mastersmith with quiet satisfaction.

"A fine work," said Ingar, equally quietly. "May I see it?" The Mastersmith looked at him a moment before handing it over. He rolled it around in his thick fingers, held the mailwork up to the light, and let out a long slow whistle. "There's more powers than one in this, if they can be tapped! Complete it, and—"

"That is what I intend to do," said the Mastersmith calmly, taking it from him. A look passed between them, one Alv caught but could not understand. "But that is beyond Alv's concerns, for the moment. Your second piece is accepted, boy, with honor. But now to your third! Rest now, and what it is you shall learn—in the morning. You also, Ingar and Roc, it is late enough. Sleep you well."

But again Alv found himself unable to sleep. His mind had grown used to racing, and without the effort of the work in hand to distract and exhaust him it kept him awake long hours into the night, worrying over everything, great or small. What would he be given to create next? Why had Ingar reacted so strangely today? Could it be jealousy, perhaps? What more could the helm do? And, as every night, he thought of Kara. Where was she now? He laughed to himself, bitterly. How wide was the world? He had lost her, failed her—

A sound of thunder shook him, and he sat bolt upright in bed. A storm? But there'd been no flash at the window. It came again, and this time he knew beyond all doubt. It was coming from below. The great hammers were at work. He sat and listened for a moment. He slipped into his tunic and went to the door. Why wasn't the house in an uproar, with that din? And yet in the intervals he could hear In-gar's snores drifting down the stairwell. So it had to be the Mastersmith again, about some secret work…

He closed his door and stood there indecisive, torn between his desire to slip down and see what was happening and his fear of having his immunity found out. There was no telling what the Mastersmith might do, then. Why risk anything now, when he was so near his goal? But the need awoke again in him that was to rule his whole life, the need to know, and step by hesitant step it forced him down the cold stairs, through the hall and down to the echoing forge below.

The door was shut, and he did not dare lift the latch; sound and movement might be noticed. He stooped to the keyhole; it was wide, and he could see right across the forge. There were the plunging shadows of the hammers— but even as he watched they fell silent, and he shrank back, afraid the Mastersmith was somehow aware of him. But then he heard the explosive hiss of something being plunged into the quenching trough, and a moment later the rasp of a heavy file. He dared to look again, and saw the Mastersmith clearly, at his bench now, working away at something clamped into a large vice. After a few moments he freed it, picked up something else, tried the two together and nodded calmly to himself. Then he took a hammer and what looked like a die, and began to tap in rivets. Something rang and rippled as he worked, and Alv felt a sliver of the Ice against his spine—it was the helm, the Mastersmith was completing it! And sure enough, when he had finished he held it up, just as Alv had, turning it round and round to look for any slight damage. Alv gaped. The helm now had a front to it, an eyemask that looked to be of silver steel, cast in the form of hawklike glaring eyes. These were outlined by a thick rope of twisted wires, flattened onto the metal; the hammers must have been for making that and welding it onto the mask. The Mastersmith stared at this for a moment, then lifted the helm and placed it on his head with careful ceremony, like a crown. He made no move to fasten the concealing mail. For a minute he strode back and forth, crossing and recrossing the narrow viewpoint of the keyhole; Alv could see his lips moving, but heard no sound. Then a hand swept up the mail to hide his face, the shadows seemed to deepen and he strode out of view. Alv waited for him to reappear, but he did not. The moment grew longer and longer, and Alv felt less and less safe where he was; the Mastersmith, visible or invisible, might come out of that door at any moment. At last he straightened cramped legs and tiptoed slowly and carefully back up the stairs. But when he reached the hall he froze in horror. There were footsteps on the stairs! He scuttled back into the shadows by the front door and crouched there, quivering with fright, as he saw the Mastersmith himself, still wearing the helm, but with its mask now open, come down the last few steps, walk casually across the flagstones and down the stairs Alv had just come up. The stairs which were the only way down to the forge…

Back in his bed, Alv lay awake and brooded. The smith might easily have gone through into the library and up those stairs to the far end of the hall—but then Alv would have heard him, his footsteps, or the creak of the library's heavy outer door. Could the completed helm now mask all these sounds, as well? What other, stranger, powers did it now confer?
Of moving subtly
… He drifted off to sleep, trying to draw comfort from a vision of Kara—but why were her eyes so cruel—predatory—hawklike?

"This technique is called pattern-welding," said the Mastersmith. "Do you remember reading about it?"

Alv screwed up his eyes. "Yes, Mastersmith, I do. An ancient method of forging a strong blade, when they had little good steel and no easy way of making it."

"Indeed," said the Mastersmith, running his fingers over the short rope of twisted wires. So far there had been no mention of what the rest had been used for, and Alv was not going to admit he knew. "But its very antiquity makes it more than that, for in the course of time it has gathered about it much, much lore. The first great smiths of our kind were taught it by those of the Elder kind, and they in turn by the powers they had revered and abandoned. Like the craft of mail, it takes complexity and makes unity of it, but greater complexity and a more solid unity. Great virtue can be bound up in it by those who have the skill. So—for your trial piece of weaponry, you will make me a sword! But a sword such as you might one day craft for kings, a sword with a virtue of command and obedience, of order and submission. You will prepare everything and shape the blade, but the completion is delicate work, and that may be left to me. It will be long in the forging, many months, I am sure—but when they are over, so will end your apprenticeship. And great things will await us all then, for the world is moving, moving…" He paused and sat back, staring into an infinite distance. At length he reached out and tapped the roll of parchment on the table. "Some references to start your studies, boy. More than one or two slates will hold, as you see. Open it and read!"

Fascinated, forgetting the mysteries that gathered around him, Alv unrolled the stiff crackling stuff and read the crabbed script. A page here, a page there, notes—a chapter— the reading alone would take weeks. "And that is not all," said the Mastersmith somberly. "You will require the ancient text
Ysthihain
, its first section on the symbols associated with command and dominion. I have made some notes in it of forms I found used by Ekwesh shamans, which appear to resemble many of ours, but in more archaic, purer forms. Also the
Skolnhere-Book
, left by a great smith from the east many centuries ago; it has pages on pattern-welding, and others on the powers of command."

Alv looked at him. "I do not remember even seeing those on the shelves, Mastersmith, let alone reading them."

"No indeed," said the Mastersmith drily, "and little it would have profited you if you had read them. They are on the North wall."

Alv's eyes widened, and he started to say something, but the smith held up a hand. "Wait! I am not making you free of it—not yet. Come with me now." They threaded their way between anvils and machines toward the library, where Ingar, scribbling furiously on a slate, paid no attention as they went past. The Mastersmith stopped before the racks of scrolls on the North wall, drew out one, and lifted a heavy fanfold book from a high shelf. Alv could see long tongues of parchment protruding from them both. The smith carried them to a table and opened them carefully. He touched the parchment strips. "I marked these for you, last night. See, from here to here in the
Ysthihain
scroll—and in the
Skolnhere-Book
, between this marker and this, to the end of this page." He pointed to the end of the leaf, crammed with crabbed black lettering in an archaic cursive script, interspersed with tight little drawings of symbols or elaborately ornamented characters in red and black. One, the distorted face of some crouching beast, grimaced out from beside the Mastersmith's finger. The wide margins were filled with his flowing script. "Thus far, and no further! Do not let your eyes stray to an earlier or a later page, to another book—not even by chance! You would find little profit in anything you chanced to learn!" Alv nodded, a little rebelliously. "Very well. And do not take them into the forge, they are too valuable."

That was reasonable enough, but Alv, watching the Master's retreating back, felt like disobeying it, simply out of spite. It was like having a drink snatched away from your lips after the first sip. What he had done so far might please his master, but not him. He felt he had learned almost nothing from any of it—not enough to let him strike out confidently on his own, as he planned to do. He might, with luck, be able to reproduce such a bracelet, if he could get the gold. But the helm was another matter. Information had been carefully measured out for him, so that he knew well enough what he was doing, but had only the barest grasp of why; there was nothing he could apply to any other work. And he had not even been allowed to bring it to its full strength, to appreciate all those powers his own skill had invested in it! And now it was happening again. Why? To make sure he'd stay? To tether him firmly to his master's apron strings?

He didn't want to believe that. He reined in his temper, remembering the gratitude and admiration he still felt, afraid of hasty judgments. But the doubt still hovered blackly around him. He looked across at Ingar, blissfully engrossed in transferring his notes onto parchment.
Does he ever feel like this—fenced in
—
cozened with false hopes—cheated
? Probably not. He had no driving ambition, no great reason for it; apron strings suited him very well. Ingar tossed down his pen on the slab, scattered fine powder onto the wet page and threw it aside with a satisfied grunt. Then he snatched up his slates and scrubbed them clean with a fold of his left shirtsleeve. He tossed them down, and caught Alv's eye. "Filthy habit," he said unapologetically. "I can never be bothered hunting for the cloth when I'm busy!"