The Dragon Emperor of Another World: Awakening of a Legend

CHAPTER 5: Master Eileen

The forest took four days and the Amber Sands took five more, and by the end of the sands Ethan had learned what his armor was like at noon with no shade for a day in any direction, and had stopped complaining about it, because complaining used water. On the evening of the ninth day they came up over a last long dune crusted with sand fused into glass, and stopped.

Dasi lay below them in a bowl of red rock, and it was lit up like a switchboard.

Towers of blackstone and brass. Lights of every color climbing their sides. Lines of blue-white brilliance running between the rooftops that he took for washing lines until one pulsed, and a spark ran down it like a bead on a string. The sky over the city was orange going to violet, and the smoke from a hundred chimneys stood up into it and leaned all one way. After Feya, it looked like somewhere from another century.

"She really lives down there?" Celestia said, in the voice of someone determined not to be impressed. Her eyes were wide.

"That's what the stories say." He was working to sound casual himself. "Supposedly she made a shield once that stopped a dragon's breath dead. And something that explodes if the wrong person picks it up."

"Sounds trustworthy." But her tail had begun to swing.

The streets were paved with stone that thrummed faintly underfoot, as if the whole city had a pulse. Golems of brass and crystal rolled down the middle of the avenues hauling crates along rails made of light; stalls sold rings that glowed from the inside and lamps that lit when you frowned at them; little birds made of glass and wire flicked from gutter to gutter overhead, and every one of them seemed to be carrying something. Everything hammered, hissed, crackled, clanged. A gnome in a leather apron with seven pencils behind one ear gave them directions to the eastern quarter at tremendous length and with diagrams, and then walked them half the way there himself because he'd thought of something else he wanted to tell them.

Eileen's forge took up most of a city block. The walls were black glass-smooth stone, the chimneys breathed smoke with a purple tint to it, and a pair of gargoyles crouched either side of the door with eyes that flickered and followed. Around the whole building the air had a faint warp in it, like heat over a road. When Ethan got close, the skin on his arms prickled.

"This has to be it," he said.

Celestia cracked her knuckles. "Let's hope she's home."

They pushed the bronze doors open, and the heat came out to meet them.

The inside was one enormous room, part smithy and part something he didn't have a word for. Runes glowed on every surface. Tools hung in the air waiting to be called for—a pair of tongs, a file, a set of calipers turning slowly on nothing. Half-built things lay everywhere: an arm of articulated steel on a bench, a helmet with too many eyeholes, a lantern with legs. The air tasted of hot metal and the sharp tang that comes before a storm.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

In the middle of it all, in the orange mouth of an open furnace, a woman was working at an anvil.

She was tall, and built like someone who hit things for a living. A sleeveless leather smith's tunic, arms glossy with sweat and with something else, a faint shimmer that came and went. Copper-colored hair dragged back into a braid that had given up in several places. Goggles pushed up on her forehead, with more lenses than goggles strictly need. The hammer in her fist was etched with runes that lit on each blow.

"Hello?" Ethan stepped over a snarl of tubing on the floor.

The smith didn't look up. Something else did: on a rafter overhead, a clockwork owl swiveled its head all the way around to look at them and let out a single, rusty hoot.

"Busy!" the woman shouted without turning. Clang. "Unless the city's on fire, take a flyer off the board by the door and come back tomorrow!"

Celestia's chin came up. She had not, Ethan suspected, been told to come back tomorrow often in her life. "We have urgent business."

The hammer stopped halfway up.

The woman lowered it, and turned, and plunged the glowing bar in her tongs into a trough of water that shrieked and threw up a cloud of steam. When the steam cleared she was looking at them. Her eyes were amber, sharp, and they went over Ethan the way the gnome had gone over his diagrams—the armor first, then the hilt over his shoulder. Then down, to his left hand, where the ring's stone had begun to glow in the heat of the forge, a slow violet throb.

"Void-cleaving essence," she said, half to herself. "And amethyst resonance."

She crossed the floor in two strides and stood in front of him. She was nearly his height. He took a half-step back without meaning to.

"Did the gods send you to ruin my peace?" she said, but one side of her mouth was going up.

Ethan found he was grinning back. "Not on purpose. Trouble just finds me."

Celestia stepped into the space between them without any appearance of having moved. "Keep your eyes on the artifacts, craftswoman."

The smith looked at her—at the horns, the wings, the set of her—and laughed out loud, a warm, surprisingly musical sound. "A protective partner! How interesting."

"More like a territorial bodyguard," said Ethan, and received an elbow in the ribs that made him cough.

The cough ran on a beat longer than an elbow could account for. Celestia's hand had come up, not to strike again, and her lips were moving. One, two, three. When it stopped, she stopped, and the hand went behind her back as if it had never left it.

"What my friend means," he managed, "is that we've come a long way for your help. I'm Ethan. This is Celestia. You're Master Eileen?"

"Ethan… Lockwood." Recognition. She pointed with the hammer at a board by the door, pinned thick with notices, and there among them was a broadsheet with a crude woodcut of a man in rune-covered armor and the headline MYSTERIOUS CHAMPION OF FEYA. "News moves quickly across the sands. Word is you gave that arena something to talk about."

He hadn't imagined for a moment that anybody this far away would have heard of him. It sat oddly in his stomach, both good and not.

"Well, Champion." Eileen folded her arms. "What is it you want badly enough to cross the Amber Sands and walk in here without knocking?"

He'd rehearsed this. He unhooked the satchel from his belt and held it out, and the speech he'd rehearsed went somewhere.

"I want it to be faster than me," he said.

It was not what he'd meant to say. Eileen's eyes came up from the satchel to his face and stayed there a moment, and he had the uncomfortable feeling she'd heard exactly what he meant, and that it was more than he'd said.

She took the satchel. She pulled one of the lenses on her goggles down over her right eye and turned the satchel slowly in the furnace light, then held it up to her ear like a shell.

"Dimensional storage, near enough four cubic yards of it. Basic defensive enchantment, reflex-triggered. It's fired recently—once, lightning, from the scorching here in the stitching." She glanced at him. "That's why you're alive, I take it."

"Yes."

"Decent work. Nothing special." She handed it back and looked at the ring instead, without touching it, leaning close. "This, though. That's a piece of an Arcane Godslayer set."

"The Amethyst Spirit Ring."

"And the sword?"

He drew it, and the long blade came out of the scabbard whispering. "The Void-Cleaving Blade."

Eileen's lips parted. She looked, for a second, exactly like a child at a toyshop window. "Oh," she said softly. "It's been a very long time since anybody walked in here with toys like these."

She went back to the ring, though. She looked at it for longer than she had at anything else, and a line came between her eyebrows.

"Somebody tuned this to a person," she said.

"What does that mean?"

"It isn't listening for a hand. Rings like this usually take whoever's wearing them—it's how thieves stay in business. This one's listening for you." She tapped the lens down over her eye and back up again. "I'd love to know who did that work."

Beside him, Celestia's hand had gone to the ruby at her throat and closed around it. "Can you change it?"

It came out quickly. Eileen glanced at her, surprised. "Why would I? It's the finest thing in the set."

Celestia let go of the pendant. "Can you do what he's asking," she said, in a flatter voice. "Improve the satchel. Make it work with everything else. Yes or no."

Eileen flicked her braid over her shoulder and walked away to a huge worktable scored all over with channels and runes. "Of course I can. It won't be simple. And it won't be free."

They followed her. She drew her palm across the table and the runes in it woke, and out of the furnace smoke above it a shape assembled itself in lines of light: the satchel, the ring, the sword, the armor, hanging in the air in outline, each one webbed to the others by thin bright threads.

"I can re-forge the satchel and bind the rest to it," she said, drawing a finger along one of the threads so that it brightened. "A single system. The ring, the blade, the armor, the storage—all of it working in concert instead of four separate things you happen to be carrying. Weapons in your hand the moment you want them. Defenses that answer before you know you need them. You think it, it happens."

Ethan and Celestia looked at each other.

"But." Eileen snapped her fingers and the diagram collapsed into sparks. "To do that I need more than your permission. I need materials. You're asking me to push these things past what they were made to do, which means taking them apart where they don't want to come apart. For that I need things you can't buy."

She pulled a sheet of parchment out of a drawer and began to write on it at a speed that made Ethan's eyes water—runes, symbols, words, a sketch, more words.

Celestia leaned over the page. "What sort of things? Dragon scales? Because I could spare a few—"

"Nothing so ordinary."

Celestia straightened up slowly and looked at Eileen in a way that would have made a less busy woman nervous.

Eileen spun the parchment around to face them. It was divided into three, each with a name and a quick, clever sketch:

Star Metal Shards — Rare meteorite fragments that resonate with Void-element essence. Location: the crater fields of Norvahn, far to the north—the place old maps name the Crater of Fallen Stars. Currently overrun by sandstalker wyrms that nest around the meteor fragments.

Night-Lily Petals — Lunar-reactive flowers found only in the highest ruins of the Skyreach Mountains. The petals, when distilled into ink, can inscribe ethereal runes that 'flex' between dimensions. Location: ancient altars in the Skyreach peaks, guarded by who-knows-what after centuries of abandonment.

Thunder Drake Whiskers — The long, silvery filament whiskers from an elder Thunder Drake. They conduct magical energy like nothing else, perfect for channeling power through the upgraded system. Location: the storm-wracked canyons of Arask in the east, where adult storm drakes make their lairs amid perpetual lightning.

Celestia read it all the way down and let out a low whistle. "Simple," she said. "Survive a crater full of monsters, rob a cursed mountaintop, and pull the whiskers out of a lightning dragon's face."

"Exactly." Eileen met sarcasm with a perfectly straight face. "No trouble at all."

Ethan was reading the list a second time. He knew, distantly, that he ought to be daunted. What he felt was the old click behind his breastbone—three objectives, three zones, a turn-in at the end. "If that's what it takes," he said, "we'll do it. But when we get back—how do we know it's worth it?"

The grin came back to Eileen's face at full strength. "Oh, it'll be worth it. Bring me all three and I won't just fix your satchel. I'll rework the lot." She pointed her pen at his chest, his sword, his ring, one after another. "Draw a blade mid-dodge? It'll be in your hand before you've finished the thought. Somebody tries to put a knife in you in the dark? The shield will be up before your heart has time to skip. And more."

He thought of green light crawling up a man's fingers, and his own arms over his face.

Never caught like that again.

He held out his hand. "Deal."

Eileen took his forearm in a hard, hot grip, and something snapped between their palms—an actual spark, a tiny sting of static. "Good. Don't worry. I've never had a client fail to come back." She let go. "Mainly because I only take the ones who can. You two look scrappy enough."

"We're touched by your confidence," Celestia said dryly. "Any advice? You seem to know these places."

"Better than advice." Eileen was already sweeping things off shelves into a satchel of her own. "I'm going to give you every advantage I can think of."

---

For the next few hours the forge rang with talk instead of hammers.

Eileen unrolled maps across the worktable, old and cracked and weighted at the corners with whatever came to hand. One showed the crater fields of Norvahn, with crosses where shards had been found before. One showed the Skyreach ruins, with notes crowded around the altars where the Night-Lilies were said to bloom under a full moon. One showed the storm canyons of Arask, drawn in a hand that had clearly been shaking, with warning marks all over it.

She fetched containers. A heavy lined canister for the star metal—"It's unstable; it'll do things if you let it rattle around." A case with a pressure seal for the petals. A silver tube with runes chased along its length, for a whisker, that would keep the charge in. And then, almost as an afterthought, she began pressing other things into their hands: a clarity charm to steady the senses against illusion; half a dozen throwing daggers whose blades held a pale stored light; a short rod that unfolded, when she flicked a catch, into the ribs of a dome, like an umbrella made of iron wire.

"Storm-dome," she said. "Keeps off a strike or two. These are a loan, mind. Bring back whatever you don't use."

Celestia committed all of it to memory, running her eyes over each map and then closing them and moving her lips, and then looking again. She was plainly enjoying herself. Ethan asked the occasional question and spent a good deal of the time just looking around the forge at the tools hanging in the air, feeling the ground shift under his life again: a day ago they'd been running from assassins with no idea where to go, and now there was a quest log.

"Remember," Eileen said, rolling up the last map. "Getting the materials is half of it. What state they arrive in is the other half. I need them whole. Don't drop the star metal in any old bag—it goes in the canister. Don't crush the flowers. Pick them at midnight, with the moon on them, when they're strongest. And for the love of everything, try not to cook yourselves getting those whiskers. Pin the drake down somehow. Or find one asleep and be very, very careful. You'll work it out."

Ethan laughed a bit shakily. "Sure. Just pull the whiskers off a sleeping dragon. What could go wrong?"

Celestia nudged him. "We'll manage."

---

When it was all packed, Eileen took them up a spiral stair to a balcony on the forge roof. It was full dark now. Dasi glittered below them in every direction, and the lines of light between the rooftops pulsed like veins.

In the quiet, Celestia said: "Why are you helping us? Really. You don't know us."

Eileen leaned her forearms on the railing and looked out over her city. "Call it professional curiosity. What you're carrying—what could be done with it—I'd never forgive myself for saying no. And besides…"

She glanced sideways at Ethan, and a look went across her face that he couldn't read at all, and she didn't finish.

"Whatever the reason," Ethan said, "thank you. We won't let you down."

She waved that away. "See that you don't. I've a feeling about you two. Either you'll come back with everything on that list, or you won't come back at all." A shrug. "And frankly I'd rather have the materials than not."

"We're quite motivated to come back," said Celestia.

Eileen saw them out herself. At the bronze doors she said, not smiling now: "Be clever. Stay alive. I want you back here in one piece. Both pieces."

The night air of Dasi smelled of hot iron and rain that hadn't fallen yet. They'd gone half a street before Celestia said, low, "Do you trust her?"

He thought about it properly. Eileen was strange and probably dangerous and wanted things for her own reasons. But she hadn't lied to them about anything, and when she'd looked at the sword her face had been completely unguarded. "I trust what she wants to build," he said.

Celestia nodded, and didn't say what she thought.

At the corner he looked back. Eileen was still on the roof, a tall shape against the glow of the chimneys, not waving. The clockwork owl had come down and settled on her shoulder, and the two of them were watching the street where Ethan and Celestia had gone.