Kage Baker - The Anvil of the World

“Are you sure that’s safe?” Smith said, around the rivet he was holding in his teeth at that moment. He spat it out, smacked it into place, and resumed tapping. “You’ve annoyed him a lot, you know. I didn’t think he was capable of hitting anybody.”

“Neither did he.” Lord Ermenwyr snickered. “Another step in his journey toward self-knowledge. Now he’s decided to make amends by cooking for us on this jaunt.”

“Does he know how to cook?”

“He’s dear Mrs. Smith’s son, isn’t he? Bound to have inherited some of her culinary genius.” Lord Ermenwyr hitched up his trousers and squatted on the deck, staring in fascination as Smith worked. “And what a splendid job you’re doing! It just comes naturally to you, doesn’t it? You people are so good with—with hammers, and rivets, and anvils and things. It would really be a shame…”

Smith waited a moment for him to finish his sentence. He didn’t. When Smith looked up he was staring keenly out to sea, pretending he hadn’t said anything.

“Just before you got hit by the Sending,” said Smith, “You were saying a lot of ominous stuff about the collapse of civilization and dropping dark hints about other people getting involved.”

“Was I? Why, I suppose I was,” said Lord Ermenwyr in an innocent voice.

“Yes, you were. And you said something about a Key.”

“Did I? Why, I suppose I—”

“Breakfast, my lord,” said Willowspear, rising from the companionway with a kettle. He sat down cross-legged on the deck and began to ladle an irregularly gray substance into three bowls. Smith and Lord Ermenwyr watched him with identical appalled expressions.

“What the Nine Hells is that stuff?” Lord Ermenwyr demanded.

“Straj meal, boiled with a little salt,” Willowspear told him calmly. “Very healthy for you, my lord.”

“But—but that’s nursery food! We used to fling it at each other rather than eat it,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “And when it dried on a wall, the servants had to scrape it off with wire brushes.”

“Yes, I remember.” Willowspear lifted his bowl and intoned a brief prayer. “Your Mother lamented the wastefulness of Her unappreciative offspring.”

Smith stared at them, remembering the smiling inhuman thing that had summoned a horror from the deeps, and trying to imagine it as an infant throwing its porridge about. “Er … I usually have fried oysters for breakfast,” he said.

“This is a wholesome alternative, sir. Better for your vital organs,” Willowspear replied.

“All right, I know what you’re doing,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “You’re punishing me, aren’t you? In a sort of passive pacifistic Yendri way?”

“No, my lord, I am not.” Willowspear lifted a morsel of the porridge on two fingers and put it into his mouth.

“And I’ll bet the meal has been sitting in bins down there for months! There’s probably weevils in it. Listen to me, damn you! I had that larder stocked with nice things to eat.

Everything the merchant could cram in there on an hour’s notice. Jars of pickled sweetbreads and amphorae of rare liqueurs and candied violets. Fruit syrups! Plovers’ eggs in brine! Runny cheeses and really crispy thin fancy crackers to spread them on! That’s what I want for breakfast!” Lord Ermenwyr raged, his eyes bulging.

“Then I suggest, my lord,” said Willowspear, “that you go below and prepare your own meal.”

He raised his head and looked his liege lord in the eye. Smith held his breath, and for a moment it seemed that the very air between them must scream and burst into flame. At last Lord Ermenwyr seemed to droop.

“You’re using Mother’s tactics,” he said. “That’s bloody unfair, you know.” He sagged backward into a sitting position and took up the bowl. “Ugh! Can’t I even have some colored sugar to sprinkle over it? Or some syrup of heliotrope?”

“I could prepare it with raisins tomorrow,” Willowspear offered.

“I haven’t even got my special breakfast spoon.” Grumbling, Lord Ermenwyr helped himself to the porridge.

Smith took a cautious mouthful. It was bland stuff, but he was hungry. He shoveled it down.

“My lord?” said a voice like a hesitant thunderstorm. Cutt, Crish, Stabb, and Strangel stood watching them eat.

“What?” Lord Ermenwyr snapped.

“We have not tasted blood or flesh in three days,” said Strangel.

Lord Ermenwyr sighed and got to his feet, still dipping porridge from the bowl. As he ate, he scanned the horizon a moment. At last he sighted a fin breaking the water, and a pale shape gliding below the surface close to shore. He pointed, and through a full mouth said indistinctly, “Kill.”

His bodyguards were over the rail and into the water so quickly that Smith barely saw them move.

Moments later, cosmic retribution caught up with a shark.

“So there was this Key you mentioned,” said Smith, as he fitted the boiler dome back into place.

“So I did,” said Lord Ermenwyr a little sullenly, staring out at the whitecaps that had begun to appear on the wide sea. He ignored Willowspear, who was carefully setting up a folding chair for him.

“Well? What were you talking about?”

“The Key of Unmaking.”

Smith halted for a moment before picking up the wrench and going on with his work.

“That’s just a fable,” he said at last. “That’s just, what do you call it, mythology.”

“Oh, is it?” Lord Ermenwyr jeered. “It’s in your Book of Fire. You’re not a believer, then, I take it?”

Smith went on bolting down the dome. He did not reply.

“I am familiar with the Book of Fire,” said Willowspear hesitantly. “Though I confess I haven’t studied it. It’s your, er, religious history, is it not?”

“It’s the legends from the old days,” said Smith, getting to his feet. He wiped his hands clean with a rag.

“You’re not a believer,” Lord Ermenwyr decided. “Very well; but you must have heard the story of the Key of Unmaking.”

“I haven’t,” said Willowspear.

“I’ll tell you about it, then. Long ago, when the World was uncrowded and the personified abstract archetypes supposedly walked around on two legs, there was a God of Smithcraft, which was a pretty neat trick given that black-smithing hadn’t been invented yet.”

“Shut up,” Smith growled. “He was the one who worked out how to make the stars go up and down. He made the swords and tridents for the other gods. He designed the aperture mechanism that rations out moonlight, or we’d all be crazy from too much of it.”

“You do remember, then,” said Lord Ermenwyr.

“And he … well, he fell in love,” said Smith reluctantly. “With the fire in his forge. But he knew the flames were only little images of True Fire. He watched her blaze across the sky every day, but she never noticed him. So he put on his sandals and his cloak and his hat and he walked in the World following after True Fire, always going west, hoping to get to the mountain where she slept every night.

“He took his iron staff with him and, uh, things happened like, when he walked through the Thousand Lake country near Konen Feyy the ground was muddy, and his staff end left holes in the ground that filled up with water, and that’s how the lakes got there. And up in a crater on top of a mountain he found True Fire at last.

“He courted her, and they became lovers. And they wanted to have children, but she—well, she was True Fire, see? So he made children for her, instead, out of red gold. And she touched them with holy fire and they became alive. Perfect mechanisms that could do anything other children could do, including grow up and have children themselves. And they were the ancestors.”