The Dragon Emperor of Another World: Awakening of a Legend

CHAPTER 7: Night of Forging

Eileen talked the whole time she worked.

Ethan had not expected that. He'd pictured some silent, sweating ritual; what he got was three days of lecture delivered to him, to the clockwork owl, to the furnace, to nobody, without a pause, while her hands never stopped. He sat on a stool at the edge of the heat because she'd told him to stay where she could shout at him, and she shouted.

Binding agents. Why two materials that each did nothing at all on their own could do a great deal together, and why you never found out which pairs until you'd tried the wrong ones. The difference between a reagent and a catalyst—"One of them goes into the thing and one of them makes the thing happen and walks away clean, and if you mistake one for the other, you end up with an apprentice's eyebrows on the ceiling." How star metal wanted to be somewhere else all the time, and how the only way to keep it still was to give it a job.

He understood perhaps a third of it. But he found, uneasily, that he recognized almost all of it—that he'd spent years of his life picking apart crafting systems built on exactly these principles, boiled down into menus and tooltips, and that the shape of what she was saying fitted into holes in his head that had been waiting for it.

Celestia slept for most of the first day and a good part of the second, curled on a pile of sacking in the cool corner of the forge with her burned wing folded carefully over herself. On the second evening Eileen went over to her with a knotted length of cord and began, without asking, to measure her—around the ribs, shoulder to shoulder, from collarbone to hip. Celestia allowed it with an expression of enormous suspicion and did not ask what for. Eileen did not say.

On the third evening, the bells started.

They began in a tower across the city and spread from roof to roof, a deep iron clamor, and all over Dasi the runes on the high walls turned from blue to crimson, one after another, like a fever running through a body.

The gnome with seven pencils arrived at the forge door out of breath. There were men at the south gate, he said, in dark cloaks, asking after a champion in rune-cut midnight plate. Three watchmen were dead at the gate. The watch had shut the city.

Eileen didn't stop working. She said, to the anvil, "If they're coming for you, you'd better be at full strength when you meet them." Then she turned around and looked at them both. "And I need this room empty of anything that thinks for the last binding. Go and spend some of that prize money. Stay where it's crowded. Those people don't like witnesses."

---

The Arcane Quarter was a riot of light. Lanterns floated above the stalls with no strings to hold them, and the stalls sold everything—potion-grenades in wax-stoppered globes, quivers with runes cut into them that would lend an arrow fire or frost, scrolls that promised to call down lightning, or open any lock, or make someone fall asleep, depending on which you unrolled.

"It's like walking through a spellbook," Ethan muttered.

Celestia wasn't listening. She'd seen a shop tucked under a small dome of moonstone, with a sign in fine silver script—Lunessence Jewels, for the Enchanted Soul—and she was already walking toward it with the air of someone keeping an appointment.

"You're kidding," said Ethan.

"I'm not," she said, and went in.

Inside it was quiet and dim and cool. Crystals hung in the air lighting rows of rings and earrings and circlets on dark cloth. A tall elf woman behind the counter inclined her head.

"I'm looking for something moon-aligned," said Celestia.

"For battle or for ceremony?"

"Both." A pause. "But mostly… beautiful."

The elf laid out a tray. Celestia tried the rings on one at a time, slowly, turning her hand in the light. At one point she asked—politely, for her—whether she might test one, and when the elf nodded she cupped her palm and breathed into it. A small flame stood up in her hand, black, and at the very heart of it, for an instant, there was some other color. Then she closed her fingers over it. The flame was gone. "Not that one," she said, and took the ring off.

She settled on a black opal set in a slim crescent of white gold, with runes running around the band that brightened when she put it on.

"It strengthens moon-aligned fire," said the elf. "And it may respond to draconic blood."

Celestia cupped her palm again and breathed. The flame that rose out of it was black, and wound through the black, pale and cold as frost, were threads of moonlight.

She let her breath out. Her shoulders came down a whole inch.

"It fits," she said, rather quietly. "Perfectly."

She caught Ethan's reflection watching her in a mirrored panel behind the counter. "Well?"

"You look," he said, "devastating."

"Good." Her mouth curved. "I intend to be."

He reached for his purse. She put her hand over his.

"Not this one," she said, and paid for it out of a purse of her own that he hadn't known she had, counting out the coins on the counter one by one.

---

In the Tinkers' Hall, a great echoing barn of a market full of things that ticked, Ethan bought three new fittings for the satchel—a magnetic scroll chamber, a rotating trap node, and a shield launcher that folded down to the size of a biscuit—because Eileen had sent him with a list, and because buying things made him feel less like prey. Celestia wandered along a booth of little golems. One of them, an armored lizard no longer than her hand, climbed onto her shoulder without being asked and sat there chirping.

"No," she said, and put it back.

"But it likes you," said Ethan.

"I already have a partner."

He blinked. Then he grinned at the back of her head for the whole length of the Tinkers' Hall.

---

By the time they got back to the forge the furnace had died down to a dull red, and Eileen was sitting on the edge of her anvil with her braid soaked dark with sweat and a fine grey ash of spent mana all over her arms. By the look of her she'd been in a fight. By the look of her she'd won it.

"Just in time," she said, and got up. "Come and see."

On the worktable, on a cloth stitched with runes to keep things from wandering off, lay the satchel.

It was the same size. It was not the same thing. Its leather had darkened almost to black, and threaded all through it in a fine amethyst wire ran a lacework of runes that pulsed—slowly, evenly, like something asleep and breathing.

"The Voidborne Pouch," said Eileen. "It answers to intent now. You don't rummage anymore. You think of what you want and reach, and it'll be in your hand—halfway through the reach, if you're quick about it." She tapped the side of it and a pattern of hexagons flared blue across the leather. "And this. Defensive reflex. If something comes at you fast—an arrow, a spell, a fist—it decides what to do about it on its own. A shield. A counterburst. A decoy, if it thinks that'll serve. No more of that timid little bubble."

Ethan reached out and touched it. It was warm. Under his fingers the runes quickened, as if it had noticed him.

"It's alive," he said.

"Close enough."

"And the rest?"

"All the rest." She took his wrist and put his hand on the pommel of the greatsword on his back. "Now. Think it away."

He looked at her. She looked back. He thought, feeling ridiculous, about the sword not being there—and the weight left his back all at once, and the pouch at his hip gave a soft pulse like a swallow.

"Now think it back."

It was in his hand. He hadn't reached. It was simply there, the grip in his palm, the full weight of it hanging off his wrist. It might never have been anywhere else.

"Blade, ring, armor, storage. Three days and three impossible ingredients." Eileen let go of his wrist. "One system now. The whole set folds down into that pouch if you need it to, and comes out again faster than you can get your boots on. The ring's the heart of it. I didn't touch whatever that fellow did to the ring. I only listened to it and built the rest around what it said."

Ethan turned the sword over. Violet light moved slowly along its fuller and went out.

"On the balcony," he said. "Before we left. You said and besides—and then you didn't finish."

Eileen was quiet for a moment.

"And besides," she said, "nobody has brought me anything I couldn't make in eleven years." She shrugged, looking at the pouch rather than at him. "You brought me three."

Then she turned to Celestia, and something changed in her face. It became briskly, suspiciously businesslike.

"That old cuirass of yours," she said, "was fit to boil soup in. So."

She pulled a cloth off a stand in the corner.

Under it was armor. A breastplate and back of some dark metal so smooth it looked wet, shaped close, with a high collar, and across the back of it, in fine silver inlay, ran a script of moon-sigils that seemed to move if you didn't look straight at them. It had been cut, Ethan saw, to leave room for her wings—and on the left side the collar came up higher and the plate came around further, over the place where the lightning had gone through.

Celestia didn't move.

"Darkmoon," said Eileen. "If you're hurt, the back will throw out a ward shaped like a pair of wings—shadow, not flesh, but it'll turn a blade. There's a lattice under the breastplate that'll let you push your fire down your arms and out as an edge. Try not to test that indoors."

"I didn't ask you for this," Celestia said.

"No," Eileen agreed. "Arms up."

Celestia put her arms up. The armor went on over her head and settled onto her, and it moved when she moved, closer than leather, lighter than the weight of it should have allowed. She turned her hands over and looked at them, palms and backs, and flexed the fingers once.

"The ring," said Eileen. She had plainly known about the ring before anyone told her.

Celestia touched the black opal to the breastplate. A ripple of cold light went over her from collar to hip like moonlight moving over water; her eyes glowed faintly, and when she breathed out, her breath came as a pale mist in the warm forge air. Black fire rose along her fingers—and wound through it, cold and bright, were the silver threads.

"It's syncing with her," Eileen said softly, and for once she sounded awed by her own work.

Celestia opened and closed her hand. "I feel invincible."

"You're not," said Eileen. "Close, though."

"What do I owe you for it?"

Eileen looked at the wall above the anvil. Ethan followed her eyes. There, hung on a nail at the height where a lesser smith might have hung a guild diploma, was a fist-sized knot of fused iron that had once been a storm-dome.

"You put your wing between my loan and a Thunder Drake," Eileen said. "I'd call us square."

---

They stood on the forge roof in the wind while the city rang below them.

The bells hadn't stopped. Every wall in Dasi burned crimson now. Two streets away, torches were moving in a line from door to door, and Ethan could see, even from here, how people opened their doors a crack and then shut them fast.

"They'll come here," he said. "By morning. Everybody in the Tinkers' Hall saw us come back to this street."

"I have wards," said Eileen.

"You have neighbors."

She looked at him for a long moment in the red light. Then she looked at the torches, and at the roofs between the torches and her forge, all of them with people under them.

"There's a freight tunnel," she said at last. "Under the building. The golems use it to haul ore in from the jungle road. It comes up past the wall, a mile south." A pause. "It's dark and it smells of oil and there's no reason at all for anyone to be in it at night."

"That sounds perfect," said Ethan.

Celestia said nothing. She was watching him with an expression he couldn't put a name to.

They went down into the tunnel an hour before dawn with the pouch at Ethan's hip and the new armor on Celestia's back, and the rails ran away in front of them into the dark, humming faintly. Eileen stood at the top of the ramp with a lamp.

"Come back," she said, "and tell me what it does in the field. I want notes."

They had gone perhaps half a mile, in silence, with nothing but the lamp and the humming rails and the smell of oil, when the pouch at Ethan's hip went cold.

He stopped. He didn't know how he knew what it was telling him; he just knew. He turned his head and looked back the way they'd come, into black nothing.

Three of them. Far back. Walking softly on the sleepers.

"They found the tunnel," he whispered.

"Good," said Celestia, just as softly. She was smiling in the dark. "Then they're not in her street."