A Cane Conduit

The back room of Orev's father's forge was not a place either of them was supposed to be.

It smelled of hot metal and oil. It was dark in the particular way workshops always are when the forgemaster is out. One small window let in a slant of grey afternoon light that fell across the workbench in a single dusty column. Everything else was but a shadow.

"This is a terrible idea now that I’m actually doing it," Orev said, holding the lantern aloft.

"All my best ideas are terrible. It's a mark of quality!" Velena was already halfway to the bench.

"Is it?"

"I've decided it is. That's how quality works!"

"The quality of this idea is nonexistent-"

"Hush. I'm concentrating."

The cane lay across a length of oilcloth near the back of the bench. Unfinished but close. The metal of its shaft was dark and faintly warm to the touch even from a foot away. It looked slim and elegant, like an item a gentleman might carry and a duelist might kill with. The etchings along its length were only half-complete, the fine looping script of tempering grooves still raw in places, the resonance channels yet to be sealed.

Velena reached toward it but stopped. Her fingers hovered a half-inch from the metal.

"Orev," she said, and her voice had gone quiet in a way it hadn't been all afternoon. "It's singing."

"What?"

"Listen."

He did, or tried to, but whatever she was hearing wasn't a sound in the ordinary sense. The cane was humming, faint and unsteady, like a plucked string that hadn't decided yet whether the note was finished.

"That means it's still open," Orev said. "Da says an untempered conduit'll bond to anyone who touches it. You're not supposed to touch it. That's the one rule."

"I know."

"Velena. You're doing the thing."

"I'm not doing any thing. I am standing here, with my hands, which are attached to my body, and not touching anything at all."

"I bet you're planning to touch it in your head."

"My head is also attached to my body! Where else would it be? On the floor?"

Maya watched the whole exchange with her arms crossed. Her expression was the very specific expression of an elf who had lived six centuries and was seriously considering whether her seventh was going to be worth the trouble.

"Young miss," she said. The title was deliberate, not to use the word princess. "You are not going to touch the untempered conduit."

"I haven't touched anything!"

"You were about to touch it intentionally. That's worse."

"That's not a real crime! ‘Intention-touching’ isn't in any legal code I've ever heard of."

"It will be when I explain it to your mother."

Velena withdrew her hand. "Fine. Fine! I am appreciating it. From a distance. With enormous respect. Mountains of respect even! Respect piled up to the ceiling!"

"Your respect is an inch from the metal."

"Respect is often very close. That's just where respect lives."

Orev glanced between the two of them. He caught something in the way Maya spoke and the watchfulness that went beyond ordinary chaperonage. Whoever Velena's family was, they clearly had money. The coat, the boots, and the maid who moved like a duelist and looked at street boys like they were problems to be solved. He knew that she was a noble of some kind, probably a minor house.

He was smart enough not to ask about the six years they’d known each other. He met her when she fell from a tree while collecting an apple near his house. The girl never changed. Velena was Velena. The rest of it didn't matter right now. What mattered right now was the cane, the humming, and the way the air in the room felt slightly too thick.

"Maybe we should just go get more pastries outside like yesterday," he said. "Pastries are still the main quest. In fact, pastries are the whole reason we're here!"

"Pastries are paramount," Velena agreed. "This is purely supplementary."

"You said that earlier, and then we broke into my da's workshop!"

"We didn't break in! You had a key."

"That's worse! Legally worse! I'm an accomplice to myself!" He put his hand on his chest in exasperation.

"And yet here you are. Still accomplising."

"That's not a word."

"Well, it should be."

And then everything went wrong.

The lantern in the boy's hand flickered. The glass gave a single sharp hum, similar to a sound of a wine glass that was struck too hard from across a room. The cane on the bench rang out in answer. What came out was not a sound, but a resonance. Velena felt a sudden pound hit her chest all at once.

"Orev," she said. "Did you-"

"I didn't do anything! I'm just holding the lantern! The lantern is not a conduit, it's a lantern! Lanterns don't do magic!"

"You're doing something now!"

"I'm standing here! Standing is also not magic!"

He was standing perfectly still, the lantern shaking slightly in his grip, and yet the resonance was building, spilling out of them in waves he clearly couldn't feel and certainly couldn't control.

She could hear the Key Tone from earlier, the bell that wouldn't stop ringing. The sound bled into the air like heat from an open furnace.

The cane was listening.

The tempering grooves along its length began to glow. Faintly at first, then brighter. The raw channels drinking in the ambient resonance like dry earth drinking rain. The humming rose to a whine, high and thin.

"Young miss, get back!" Maya lunged forward. Her conduit ring turned into a large Chakram with blades flared to life. She used her conduit to create a pulse of controlled force meant to knock the cane off the bench, away from both of them. The resonance was building toward something catastrophic.

She was half a second too slow to react properly.

The cane activated. Not the way a properly bonded conduit would; it was akin to a blade shaped by the caster's intent. A scream of light and force erupted from the tip in a jagged, unstable arc.

It was a detonation.

The light hit Velena with full force.

She didn't scream. There wasn't enough time for her to do so.

One moment the world was grey afternoon light and dusty shadows and the glow of an unfinished conduit finding a voice it wasn't meant to have. The next moment the world was white.

Then it was nothing at all.

The force threw her backward. It struck her head on the edge of the workbench. She heard Maya distantly shouting something in Elvish, the language she only used when something had gone catastrophically wrong. She heard Orev's voice crack on her name, terrified, a child's voice, not the showman's voice he'd been using all afternoon.

“…Velena? VELENA!"

She tried to open her eyes.

Her world stayed black.

"...oh," she said. "That's not right."

And then she let the darkness take her.