The next day, in between his official duties, he set about further extracting the pure silver from the reduced ore by amalgamating it with quicksilver, a subtle but hazardous process. Only after there was no further chance of fumes could he bolt the doors of his forge and lay out his prizes upon a scrubbed clean workbench, guarding against the least draught that might snatch them away. For a while he toyed with them, setting the lock of hair and the feather together in various ways till he had an arrangement that pleased him; he chalked a quick sketch of it upon a slate, multiplied it to form a frieze, then drew the frieze in various perspectives, in circles, rings, spirals. And it was as he completed' the spiral design that he found himself humming again, those first faint serpentine phrases of the new song, ever more clearly. A spiral… He took up the shape he had already made. A flowing spiral of feathers interwoven with locks of hair, winding forever onward… but winding about a torus, and so coming forever back upon itself. Free, yet unchanging, forever fleeing yet forever returning… He nodded to himself. It would take great care, but it could be done. He scrubbed his crude sketch from the slate, took up ink and parchment pieces, and set to work constructing a large and intricate version of the design. It took him many hours, and several false starts, and all the while singing softly to himself. The floor around him was littered with discarded sheets, and when he had at last finished he was careful to gather these and thrust them into the forge. The parchments curled and whined and sizzled like living things upon the hot coals, but he scarcely noticed; his hands were already upon the wax, probing its smooth contours with a burin finer than the finest of the hairs it would portray.
By now it was late at night, but for all his distrust of wearied mind and hands, he laboured on, driven as he had not been since his youth, singing still under his breath, hardly aware of it. It was not easy work, for the glabrous wax was not parchment to be inscribed, nor wood to be chiselled clean. Any mark caused its surface to swell and change; it might flake away where it was too brittle, or ooze where it was soft. Every stroke had to be incised with care and foresight, its shavings minutely cleaned away before the next. Flat lines had to be translated into incised channels or raised ridges, and the tapering of the hairs, the fine fluff at the feather's bases, represented; even the dark stain on the quill he sought to match by subtle texture. It was master's work, and in the mere precision of its detail it was fair. "As if already there is something of her in it," he thought, and was pleased; yet that pleasure only sharpened the spurs of fear. On and on he laboured, till he found the delicate tools slipping between fingers sweating or numbed; many times he managed to avoid damaging the work only at the cost of cuts and punctures, and it was his own blood made them slippery then. When at last some shred of sane caution told him to lay down the thing he held, to get it free of his trembling fingers before he ruined it, he felt almost sick with frustration. Only little by little did reason reassert itself as he hobbled back up towards the palace under skies whose stars were already beginning to pale; he told himself angrily that it was too easy to become obsessed with lonely work like this, easier still to ruin it with impatience. Yet he still could not be sure he would find Kara there awaiting him, that he would not find the chest broken, the cloak gone, and nothing save perhaps a black quill left him as a token. Along high stair and vaulted passage his thoughts haunted him; and though his relief at finding her curled beneath the covers, her hair a dark corona amid the white pillows, was great enough, it barely lasted him into sleep, and fled with waking.
On the next day he hurried through his duties in the shipyards like a man possessed; that carving haunted him like a persistent irritation, an itch in the mind. Even when he found himself dangling head down from a masthead to free a salt-encrusted block, rather than reeve a whole new set of tackle, he could not stop running over and over the patterns in his mind until they made him dizzy. He swung himself upright on the little platform, and to avoid looking straight down to the deck he glanced out across the harbour, enjoying the cool breeze and the look of the town in late afternoon. Down here, walls were mostly half-timbered and limewashed, or timbers laid clinker-fashion and painted very much like those of his childhood village. Many had been repainted after the ravages of winter, and garlanded with flowers in hanging baskets and window shelves; they looked bright as toys clustered around the feet of the more august buildings of the upper town, in their rich shades of red and yellow stone. But inevitably, somehow, his glance was drawn across the lower rooftops again, towards the dark bulk, itself a little like a louring anvil, that was the hall of his guild; his sight seemed to pierce through those walls and down, down towards those half-formed secrets they held. He cursed; the joy had gone out of the scene for him, the irritation had infected it too. He hated what he was doing, yet it would not let him be. Moodily he lobbed the useless block into a cluster of seagulls bobbing on the harbour waters, and watched them explode upwards, cursing and squalling just as he wanted to. Then he shrugged guiltily. It would not have amused Kara, that; one of them might even have
been
Kara, if he had not… Very slowly he inched out along the shrouds and slid down with gloved hands. His duty was done for the moment; he could get back to his carving once more.
By late evening it was complete, carved surfaces more detailed and more delicate than any he had ever made till now. The living lock and feather he took and set among the patterns, and save for the hues of life they were matched to perfection. He laid them apart, then swiftly turned to preparing the moulds, lest in the warmth of the forge the wax should soften further and lose some tiny point of definition. By that much might its power be lessened; by so much might he lose what he fought to preserve.
It was with the gentleness of love that his practised fingers worked a soft slip of burnt and powdered chalk about the delicate shapes he had made, to take the finest possible impress of the pattern. Over that he smoothed layer upon layer of clay, gradually firmer, till at last the prepared shapes could be manoeuvered gently into position in his moulding flasks, sprues carefully aligned with the openings, then encased and set to dry well away from forge-hearth and furnace, lest the sudden heat should crack them. Now he brought the water thundering down, washed the clay from his stinging cuts and set the bellows-wheel spinning till the breath of the bellows roared through the coals like buried dragons. Then with long tongs he set the crucible of purified silver among them, and several of other rare metals for his chosen alloy. He sat by the maw of the furnace, humming idly under his breath and watching its dulled surface gradually shiver with remembered heat and change into a flowing mirror. He remembered his tumbledown smithy among the Saltmarshes, these ten years behind him and the breadth of a land away, and the silver wires he had worked there for a swordhilt. Believing his craft lost to him, he had not sought to set within them any virtues; and yet they had absorbed something of his essential self and shown it him as an image of the Marshland skies, a rushing of grey clouds, a sweep of rain and storm. Now he must make this silver do likewise; save that now he would determine the image, and the essence would not be his own.
He began to sing to himself quietly, vague snatches of that new song, wordless still or with only a single word, yet heavy with a meaning that was growing continually clearer. Firing the moulds, he felt a chain of words take shape in his mind as the wax rushed molten from the sprueholes, spitting and flaming onto the coals, and after it the boiling water to clean them. He set them at the edge of the fire, and took a deep breath; then he lifted the glowing crucible to the furnace door, and one by one, in careful order, tipped in the lesser metals. Some were to make the silver harder and more durable, some to add slight spring to it; but others, added in merest traces, were to bear special virtues of their own. The heavy liquid hissed and seethed sluggishly as he stirred it with a long rod of steel, and all the while, listening carefully to the thin high note of the coals, he sang the chant that had come to him. That swirling rythm went well with the stirring, and the coils it awoke in the crucible's heart.
In silver the shaping, enclosing, embracing In silver a shield-ring of signs interlacing Set firm within silver the circle shall close.
In silver the melting in silver the blending
As ramparts of steel shot with moonlight defending
No call from without them may pass what they hold.
Tiny droplets of metal spattered his hand, the rod grew hot through the rag he held it by, the furnace heat drew the skin taut over his cheekbones, cracked his lips, stung his eyes, yet still he sang, dry-tongued, till the last part of the alloy was added and the blend complete.
As freely you flow now a form shall enfold you,
In cooling, coalescing, a pattern shall hold you,
In shaping in firming, grow strong yet grow fair.
What now I trust to you, embrace it, enfold it,
Against yearning for change, against wandering hold it,
Encase as in armour the heart that is torn.
With frantic speed he threw his weight upon the great forge bellows, pumping them faster than could the waterwheel, till the hill of coals glowed searing white at its summit, as if earthfires fed it indeed. Urgently he heaved out the crucible in the long tongs, whitehot metal slopping and sizzling against its flanks, and whirled it across from furnace to forge; it seemed to leave a trail like a falling starstone in the heavy air, and hissed onto the angry coals. The lock of hair and the feather he caught up, raised them to his lips a moment, then reached out over the fire to the crucible and dropped them in. A light plume of flame danced up, ghostlike, and they were gone.
Gathering his strength, he took up the crucible once more, swung it around to the moulds waiting on the forge-rim… then cursed himself luridly. Fool that he was to try such a task without one forgehand at least, to steady the mould, to correct his aim, to vibrate out airlocks and bubbles, to warn him when it was almost full… Hideous difficulties loomed over him; one mistake, one only… But there was no help for it now; delay would only cool the silver further, make it harder to pour. He would have to reheat it, risk dissipating what he had set within it… and would he ever dare to replace it? Better at all events to have no forgehand hear what he must sing now. Gritting tooth on tooth he tilted the heavy thing, saw a swelling of red at its rim, a fine thread falling… Straight into the mouth of the mould. Steam whistled from the other spruehole; he breathed again, and on that note he sang, clear and fierce, that older song his memory had taught him. Yet the words were new; and as he sang his hand never trembled, the thread of falling silver never wavered.
Sheltered in silver
By craft and by flame
Be no more now drawn from me
And captive again - As once you chose,
Choose to remain!
Your own self shall enclose you,
More firmly than fetter or chain!
Silver sprang and spat, and he swung the crucible away. But was the mould full, or was it only an airlock which would leave a damaging flaw? Too late to tell; already the mirrored meniscus was dimming, he must pour the other quickly before the silver cooled. This was worse, his arms aching with cramp, his fingers trembling with weakness. His head swam, but he sang the words clearly through the smoky air. A long age it seemed before the silver leaped and spattered down the flanks of the second mould, and so great was his relief that he all but dropped the crucible, and had to set it down at an awkward angle on the rim before coaxing the moulds gently out of the coals; even unshaped, that silver could be potent stuff. He would be safest making some other work of it as soon as possible, set with different virtues. Meanwhile… He left the moulds on top of the coals, to cool slowly as they did; that helped lessen stresses within the metal. Exhaustion burned in his back and arms, and suddenly the air choked him; he flung the air-vents wide and collapsed by the forge, listening to the wind sigh in the passages of the stone. His head drooped on his breast, he jerked upright once, and then it no longer seemed worth the effort; his eyes were hot and sore, his head…
Thunder crashed around him; suddenly he was in many places, on a storm-wreathed tower-top, a grim and night-bound forest, by a forge in a marshland hovel
-
or was it in the mountains of the north
… Then he knew where he was, shivering by a stone-cold hearth, with pounding, pounding upon his doors. Speechless he stumbled up, his throat ashen as the forge. Something in his dreaming, a memory of other such summons, filled that sound with dread, made his hands clumsy on the heavy bolt. For a moment the figure that stood there in the shadowy corridor, cloaked and hooded, seemed ominous; but he was shorter than Elof, short and rotund, and from beneath the travel-stained hood blazed a mane of red hair. Elof forgot all his alarm and seized the proffered hand. "Roc my lad! So you're back, then!"
"Sort of looks that way, don't it?" grunted Roc gracelessly. Elof looked at him narrowly; though Roc was nominally a Guildsman, he was seldom seen in the Halls. There was no mystery about that. In the Southlands he had been a respected master of his art; but what status had a smith here, skilled as he might be in the mechanics of his trade, who lacked the least trace of true smithcraft? The short man grimaced. "You're the only waking soul in the place! And here's me just in the gate, all the hostelries still shut up snug for the dawn, and me too dry with the dust of twenty roads to make the climb up to the palace -"