Elizabeth Bear - Book of Iron

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer , she told herself. It was good advice: and for now, the enemy was Dr. Liebelos.

Except Liebelos was tossing her round-headed hammer casually to the rock beside the anvil and wiping the sweat from her palms onto her leather apron as she came forward. “Darling,” she said, extending her hands to Salamander. “I knew you’d come around. And you’ve brought your friend…”

She didn’t acknowledge Riordan at all, and her eye only skipped appraisingly over Bijou, Kaulas, and Prince Salih. She did give the guardian a considering glance, though.

“Mom,” Salamander said, “I’ve come to talk you out of this madness.”

“It’s not madness,” Dr. Liebelos insisted. “This is necessary. I’m a precisian, Wove. A scholar of order. Trust me when I tell you that it is a ticking bomb to have the Book present in the world in a form as capable and enduring as Maledysaunte’s. It is a pattern that will remake all our world in its image, with the Hag of Wolf Wood its possessed and terrible demon-queen.”

Bijou was close enough to Prince Salih to see his eyebrows rise in the light of the smithy. “A precisian complains of an excess of order?”

“Just because I am a scholar of order,” Liebelos said, “does not mean I am always its partisan.”

With a shrug of dismissal, she turned back to the forge and anvil. From here, Bijou could see that what she had taken for coals were no such thing. Pellets of stone filled the Forge Unquenchable, as Maledysaunte had called it, glowing white-hot. The air above them shimmered with heat as Dr. Liebelos moved toward the forge.

She lifted a set of tongs from a rack and reached into the coals with them. As if miming, she drew the tongs back, holding nothing in the tines.

She laid the nothing on the anvil. Left-handed, she took her hammer up. She raised it high and struck a ringing blow, hammering air against forged steel. In the flickering red light of those coals that weren’t, Bijou saw something begin to shimmer into existence between anvil and hammer, in the grip of the tongs.

Prince Salih glanced at Maledysaunte. “What’s to stop us from just walking up and grabbing her?”

“There’s magical energy accumulating with every blow of that hammer,” she said. Her pale face drew in over the bones beneath it, collapsing as if each strike against the anvil pulled blood and strength from her. “I can contain it. I will contain it. But the longer you wait….”

Salamander stepped forward. “Mom,” she said.

She paused at the edge of the hammer’s swing. Liebelos didn’t hesitate.

“ Mom !” Salamander yelled, more forcefully.

The hammer came down ever harder. Bijou could see the ropes of Liebelos’s muscles moving under sweat-slick skin. The sweat flew from her face, dripped from her nosetip to sizzle on the anvil. The blows reverberated within the enclosed chamber, dizzyingly loud, like the pound of a heart if you stood inside it. The anvil itself grew hot, hotter with every blow. The shimmering shape upon it resolved, clearer and clearer, like an image on a photographic plate emerging under the developer.

It was, of course, a book. A folio volume, as tall as the reach of Bijou’s arm, bound in hammered iron, the cover hinged more like a door than like the spine of a book.

Bijou saw Salamander nerve herself. She saw the moment when the white Wizard made the decision to step forward, under the hammer-blow. She saw Maledysaunte sagging, dropping to one knee in the limestone-laced mud of the cave floor, her head drooping as if her neck were a wilting flower’s stem.

And she saw Prince Salih step in as Liebelos drew the hammer back to her heels for one more tremendous swing, and catch the haft in his right hand.

“No more,” he said.

Liebelos tugged. The hammer would not come free. She released the hammer haft and whirled on the prince. “You must let me continue,” she said. “The fate of worlds hangs in the balance.”

“A life hangs in the balance,” Prince Salih said. He lifted the hammer one-handed, reversed it, and let the head rest on the floor. Upon the anvil before him, the book began to fade.

Maledysaunte lifted her head. She gasped in a breath, harsh and rattling.

“No,” said the guardian, in his voice without echoes. “This is not what happens now.”

He reached out, a gesture as effortless as the flow of oil across water, and grasped Salih’s right forearm. His hand closed. Bijou heard the sharp wet snap of a bone breaking.

Another man might have gone to his knees. Salih released the hammer-haft; it stayed steady for a long moment before falling sideways. Before it touched the mud, Salih had a pistol in his left hand, pressed against the guardian’s abdomen below the ribs.

He fired.

Pain as if someone had clapped a spiked palm to each of Bijou’s ears lanced through her head.

The guardian’s flesh jumped away from the impact as if the bullet had been a stone thrown into still water. The bullet thudded against the far cavern wall. Limestone powdered in the impact. The sound was lost in the thunder still ringing in Bijou’s ears. Then it collapsed back as seamlessly, leaving him whole and untouched.

He looked at Prince Salih as if terribly disappointed in him. The prince, dazed by his own gunshot or the pain of his broken arm, shook his head.

Carelessly, the guardian extended his arm and threw Prince Salih against the far wall. Bijou did not see him strike. She was already moving forward, Ambrosias at her side.

The guardian fixed her with a stare from the bottomless, lusterless black pools of his eyes. “Don’t.”

Bijou froze. She couldn’t hold his gaze; she twisted her face aside to see Maledysaunte climbing to her feet, the dead bard supporting her. Salamander crouched down, clutching her knees as if trying to make herself impossibly tiny and so go unnoticed. Kaulas stood over her, the picture of a protector, his kaftan flaring wide in the cavern’s constant breeze.

Bijou couldn’t hear his voice, but she wouldn’t even had needed to read his lips to know what words they were shaping. “I said not to trust him.”

“We didn’t,” Bijou snapped back, her words muffled and dull inside her own head.

The guardian’s words were not lost in the crashing thunder ringing through Bijou’s ears. They sounded just as flat as ever, and just as pellucidly clear.

“Dr. Liebelos,” he said, “pray pick up your hammer again.”

Belatedly, it occurred to Bijou to wonder how it was that he spoke their language, if he was a creature of ancient Erem.

Bijou could not spare a glance for Prince Salih. She hoped he was alive. In her peripheral vision, she saw Maledysaunte struggling to stand, propped by Riordan on one side. Kaulas moved forward to assist her, coincidentally screening Salamander from the guardian’s view. Behind him, Salamander—still hunched piteously—dug her fingers into the sand.

The ringing was dying down, though not fading away completely. Through it, Bijou heard Salamander saying over and over, “Don’t hurt my mother. Don’t harm my mother.”

Dr. Liebelos approached cautiously, crouching and reaching out to hook the haft of the hammer with her fingertips and slide it toward her. Mud and grit stained her trousers to the knee. Her fingers blanched white where they pressed the haft. She stood, dragging it toward her, and turned back to the anvil.

She swung the hammer high.

“Guardian!” Bijou cried, stepping toward him just as the hammer crashed down.