Chapter 19

“The whole thing started with me trying to figure out how Gefor made this damned mountain.”

Gefor was the elf who blew himself up trying to dig a hole. Ironic, that. It was usually dwarves who delved too deep. Elves thought themselves above pawing around in the dirt.

“Master Taor didn’t know much about what happened, just that it was supposed to involve a new phase of mana. So, I got to work trying to manifest the stuff. Not easy, lemme tell you. Mana’s ethereal, you see. You can feel it with your mind, but touching it? It takes something that’s the opposite of ethereal as a catalyst, something so dense and real that it can balance out the formula. Ever heard of iridium?”

“Pen nubs,” Kaze said, frowning. “Very expensive, but Lady Flir swore by them. She said nothing writes smoother or lasts longer.”

“She’s not wrong about that. It has another useful property: it’s so dense and inert, it damn near condenses mana just by existing. There’s only one metal more dense. Too volatile for what I had in mind, and toxic as all hell. Iridium had to be the catalyst. I had to buy enough to make a fine mesh screen about twenty meters to a side and build the whole enchantment around it. That got me to liquid mana, which was a start. You want to talk about unstable? Hah! Liquid mana flat doesn’t want to exist. A single drop has as much explosive potential as a kilogram of the hottest blasting powder, and it goes off if you so much as think too hard about it. If that wasn’t bad enough, a speck the size of a grain of sand on your skin is enough to trigger mana toxicity. Instant conflagration.”

“Good gods. Why on earth would you want something so obviously hostile to your existence?”

“Bite your tongue, girl. Ignimancy means never asking ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ The answer is usually ‘painful, messy death’. After a certain point, it’s all just a matter of degrees. When you look at it like that, you’d rather go big. Less likely to feel it.”

“A point to consider.”

“Early and often. Now, I had the liquid stuff, but it was still a few orders of magnitude off from whatever Gefor cooked up to raise this mountain. So I thought to myself ‘what if I concentrated it?’ That’s when I set about making my diamond forge.”

“Diamonds are made by heat and pressure,” I explained. “They take millions of years to form under normal circumstances. Dwarves figured out how to speed up the process.”

“I see. And you reasoned the same process would work with liquid mana?”

“Less the heat. Keeping it supercooled was the only way to stop it exploding. Otherwise, it’s the same principle. Add some gelling agent, in this case fine iridium powder, and crush it down. What’s left is a cubic centimeter of sintered iridium with about 1% crystallized mana suspended within it. Useless as an explosive. Far too stable. If anything, the crystallized mana only enhanced the realness of the iridium. Enough of it stacked together acts on mana like gravity does to us. Thus, keystones were born.”

“You’d be amazed at how many of his inventions started off as failed bombs,” I said.

“‘Failed’ is not the word I would use. There’s enough energy in any given keystone to blast a hole down to the bedrock, if only you can tap it. The big anchor stones could damn well raise a mountain. I figure that’s what happened to Gefor. He stumbled across keystones but mucked something up along the way.”

“Would Lady Flir know any of this?” Kaze asked.

“Aye, she would. Not how to blow them, mind. That’s a secret I’ve kept to myself. At a guess, she waited so long to make her move because that’s how long it took her to figure it out.”

“Or she’s hoping she can figure it out along the way,” I said. “Which I’m sure she will.”

“Too clever by half,” the old man grumbled.

“I suppose that confirms our theory,” Kaze said. “If she knows of the keystones, it’s not likely a coincidence that she’s snapping up cities with major ones.”

“Hell, she can test on the minor ones she runs across,” I said. “They’re not as common after the Taming, but they’re out there.”

“I’ve still got the manifests for the orders,” the old man said. “When your three days are up, we’ll go over them. That’ll point you to the places she has to hit.”

The whole time we spoke, Kaze’s knife never stopped orbiting the center point. She summoned it back to her hand with a burst of will, along with the one stuck in the rock.

“Back to training, I suppose. What’s next?”

“Your combustion is still shit,” the old man said. “I was hoping that explaining the principles would help you understand what you were trying to accomplish before we got sidetracked. Back at it, girl. Boy, you’re with me.”

I passed Kaze a pistol and a powder horn. She sat down on the sunwarmed rock and started loading, her expression blank, movements mechanical. She’d repeated the exercise so many times over the last day and a half, it was automatic at this point.

Her combustion wasn’t as bad as the old man made it out to be. As she cocked the hammer back and fired the blank charge at nothing in particular, I noted the quality of the smoke. It was more grayish than white, and smelled more like burning saltpeter than sulfur. She was on the right track. She just needed that final shift of perspective to push her over the line.

The next shot was already an improvement. She’d have it down by supper time.

I followed the old man into the house.

“Now, I know you won’t take a repeater,” he began.

“Damn right.”

“You’re a fool, but I knew that,” he continued. “And a fool who’s mastered a trick isn’t likely to pick up a new one. Be like asking a dragon to swim.”

Never question a dwarf’s idioms, even when they’re blatantly wrong. We both knew coastal dragons hunted whales, and they didn’t do it from the air.

I bit my tongue and let him get to his point.

He handed me a barreled action from atop his workbench. No stock yet. That would be my job.

“The hell’s this action?” I asked.

There was a hammer, but no obvious frizzen. It was mounted centerline too, like Kaze’s repeater. Below it was a teardrop-shaped lever with a tail about 5 centimeters long.

“To the right.”

I obliged and twisted the lever to the right. The barrel swung down on a cleverly concealed hinge. As it dropped, a crescent-shaped protrusion, presumably meant to capture the rim of a cartridge and extract it from the chamber, extended a couple of centimeters. When I closed the action, it slid back into place, and the hammer remained in the cocked position. Trapping it with my thumb, I gave the trigger an experimental squeeze. It was light, the break as crisp as a glass rod snapping.

“She’s smooth.”

“Damn well better be. Takes a thirteen millimeter conical projectile, twenty grams for armor piercing, twenty-five grams for standard, and thirty grams for explosive. The casings are reloadable, so you can futz with the charge as you please. I’ll send plans so you can have more made if you need.”

“I’m still not sure-“

“I’ll stop you right there, boy. I know why you’ve held onto that old antique. I can’t even really say I blame you. You were happy together. That was probably the last time you were.”

I swallowed against the sudden lump in my throat.

“Aye, I know what it’s like to have that kind of happiness stolen,” he continued, “and I still carry the scars. I’m the last person to judge you for hanging onto the memory as best you can.”

“But?”

“Son, if you face off against the woman who made you that musket with it, it’ll be your undoing. Maybe not physically, since your body can’t die, but your soul? That’s another story altogether. It’s time to admit the woman you loved isn’t coming back.”

“I know that,” I said. “I aim to kill her, Pa. I know she’s gone too far. It’s just…”

“Leave it with me, son. When the job’s done and you get the chance to finally grieve, we’ll make it into a memorial for the woman she was. That’s all we can do for her.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I guess I should probably start on the stock for this one.”

“There are some seasoned blanks down in the basement. You remember where I keep the tools?”

“I do.”

“Then you best get started. I need to get back to bullying your friend.”