K Parker: Colours in the Steel

‘No,’ the bald man said when he asked. ‘There’s water. What d’you want oil for?’

‘Oil,’ Temrai repeated. ‘If you have any. Or lard or butter if you don’t.’

The man shrugged and walked away, returning a few seconds later with a tall jar full of rancid butter. ‘Sure we use it for tempering,’ he said. ‘But water’s for cooling.’

‘No,’ Temrai replied, as kindly as he could. ‘Oil is best, but butter will do. Otherwise the blade cools too quick, and the joint is weak.’

The blade slid into the butter with a hiss and a curl of foul smoke. He left it there for the space of three invocations to the fire-genie, pulled it out and let it rest in the water bucket.

‘Done,’ he said.

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’ The bald man shrugged. ‘I thought there was more to it than that. I thought you people did magic and stuff.’

Temrai shook his head. ‘No magic,’ he replied. ‘Silver. And flux. And oil or lard is better than butter, if you could get some.’

He lifted the blade onto the anvil, praying that he’d done it right and that when he knocked the crust off there’d be a beautiful, straight, golden line with no holes or pockets. He wasn’t disappointed; it was a good job. He nipped off the wires, took a small file from the rack and wiped away the few little knobs of flash that stood up proud of the blade. Now all that remained was to heat the blade gently until it turned a dark straw colour and quench it in water (not oil, lard or butter, as the man had said; how come they didn’t know these things?), then polish it and grind the edges; simple work that anybody can do, a chore the master can safely leave to the boy. Strange, though, that here in the City of the Sword, where everything was decided by swords and good blades were valued above all else, they didn’t know the proper way to make things. And yet on the plains, where they had the skill and the knowledge, swords were largely an afterthought, little valued by a nation of archers. If you came close enough to the enemy to be able to use the sword, the chances were that someone had made a serious mistake.

The man looked at the blade, rubbing his chin. He inspected both sides, ran his fingertip up and down the seam a few times, then quite suddenly swung his arm over and brought the blade down with all his might on the beak of the anvil. There was a dreadful clang, the sword cut a gash the thickness of a bowstring in the metal of the anvil, bounced off, twisted out of the bald man’s hand and fell on the floor with a clatter.

‘You’re hired,’ the man said. ‘Five gold quarters a month. Be here an hour after dawn tomorrow.’ He rubbed the palm of his right hand with the thumb of his left. ‘I’ll get some oil,’ he added. ‘Olive do you?’

Temrai shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said ‘Where I come from we have purified fat. I expect your sort will do just as well.’

Five silver pennies bought him a corner of a room in an inn round the corner; the old, thin woman who ran the place had grumbled about something-or-other foreigners in her nice clean house (except that it wasn’t clean, and a man and a woman were making love noisily in the far corner and an old man was apparently dying in the bedspace next to his, and nobody but Temrai seemed to notice) and took pains to make sure he understood about no animals in the room and meals being extra. If the half-eaten messes on the various plates that lay about on the tables in the common room were anything to go by, Temrai reckoned he’d far rather get his own food. As for animals, he sold his horse later that evening and got two gold quarters for it. At home you could buy a string of good horses for two of the Emperor’s gold quarters, and have somewhere to ride them into the bargain.

So here he was, he reflected, as he squirmed his way into a comfortable part of the straw and pulled his coat under his head for a pillow. So far he’d done everything right, greatly to his own surprise. He would be able to learn what his father needed to know; where the walls were weak and how the sentries were organised, how many people lived here and who held the keys to the gate; how many arrowheads and spear blades the arsenal could produce in a day; at what times of day the tides were low in the estuary and whether the bridges could be cut in time to prevent an assault party gaining control of them.

If he did his work well, he might make it possible for his father to fulfil his oath and find peace when his time came to ride into the sky; and that would all be well and good. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help but wonder exactly why his father wanted this place. To burn it to the ground would be a waste, hateful to the gods. To sack it – but all the wagons of his clan couldn’t hold the wealth of this city, and none of it was anything anybody actually needed . And to drive the city people out and live here themselves; that was truly unthinkable, an abomination. There had to be some other reason why his father would shed so much of the blood of his archers in order to buy this strange thing; but for the life of him he couldn’t work out what it might be.

Which (he reflected, as he fell into a doze) is why I’m still not ready to be a clan chief. So that’s all right.

At the last moment, Loredan stepped into the other man’s lunge, turning his body sideways, and thrust out his right arm as far as he could. The other man’s blade scored a line across his chest an inch above his nipples; his own sword stuck neatly in the other man’s eye, killing him before he even had a chance to take the smug grin off his face. The usual dead-weight flump! as the body hit the floor; judgement for the plaintiff.

The usher waved languidly to the court surgeon, but Loredan shook his head; contrary to popular belief the official doctors didn’t kill quite as many people as the lawyers did, though not for want of trying. It didn’t hurt yet, though the blood was coming freely. Gingerly, Loredan picked the sodden cloth of his shirt away from the cut and shivered.

‘Come on,’ said Athli at his elbow. ‘That needs cleaning up. I really thought you’d had it then, you know.’

‘So did I,’ Loredan replied quietly. ‘I hate divorce work.’

‘You should have quit,’ Athli said, leading him by the sleeve. He was still holding his sword, and it was awkward threading a way through the milling crowd of spectators without accidently laying someone’s knee open. ‘He had you beaten from the start.’

Loredan shook his head. ‘Quitting’s for losers.’

‘That is the general idea, yes. But you’re allowed to lose in divorce, that’s the whole point. Gambling your life on a split-second reflex and winning by a thousandth of an inch – well, in this context it’s just plain silly .’

‘Thank you so much.’ Once they were outside, Loredan handed the sword over to Athli, who wiped it and put it away in the case. He felt weak, and sick, and rather as if he was the one who’d been killed but nobody else had noticed. ‘Drink?’

‘Forget it. Home.’

Loredan decided not to protest. ‘Your place or mine?’

‘I knew you’d say that to me one of these days. I think yours is nearer.’

Of course, Athli had never been to Loredan’s home; no reason to, after all. She knew roughly where it was, and guessed from the address that he lived in one of the ‘islands’, the tall, jerry-built apartment blocks that had sprung up in the circus district after the great fire a hundred years or so ago. Some of them, she knew, were better than others; some of them had clean water in the courtyard, hypocausts to provide heating in winter, walls that stayed put because of sound engineering rather than force of habit.