Noble V: Greylancer (22 page)

As I looked down at the tiny items on the tray, I heard Shwann ask from behind, “What
do you think they are?”

“I haven’t a clue,” I answered. In all my years as master craftsman, never had I seen
anything that was so outside my realm of knowledge and experience.

Two objects, no more than two centimeters long, with pointed ends. What in the world
could they be?

“Find out how these two might best be fitted,” I said, offering what I thought to
be the next plausible step.

“Might I employ the services of a metal burnisher first?”

“Yes, all right.” I nodded, trying to conceal my embarrassment. It had completely
slipped my mind! Once cast into shape, the metals had to be carefully polished by
the hand of an expert. The god of smithing would never forgive me for such an elementary
lapse in logic.

Ever since I had chosen the path of craftsman, my metal burnisher had always been
Shwalde, a woman from the Yufu district, where the rowhouses stretched ten kilometers
like dominoes.

The combustible engine popped and wheezed as the steam car carried us to a street
lined with brick tenement houses.

The old woman, who was over three hundred years old, welcomed us into her cramped
apartment home on the top floor of one of the tenements.

“Now, what are these odd things you’ve brought me?” Shwalde asked suspiciously. Cité’s
most skilled burnisher took the deadly weapons in her hands and examined them, squinting
beneath the colored light streaming in through the stained glass skylight in the ceiling.

“Any idea what they are?” I asked as if we’d met for the first time.

“I seem to recall a very long time ago…” Shwalde shook her head. “No, perhaps not.
I’ve become forgetful in my old age. Still…”

“Still?”

“I can’t shake this feeling that they’re very dangerous. I’ll take extra care in polishing
them.”

“I shall be most grateful.”

After Shwalde promised to finish the job within three days, I stood from my chair
to part ways.

But the old woman did not follow. Her head bobbed against her chin first and then
the rest of her body fell forward onto the table without a sound.

The poor woman was as light in my arms as if she were made of tinfoil, as Shwann helped
me carry her to her bed. Thankfully, she came to before we had to give her water and
medicine, which was a great relief to us.

“It’s my lungs,” Shwalde explained. “But don’t you worry, I’ll finish the job as promised.”

“Can we find you some medicine?”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried already? Never mind that, would you mind bringing them
over here, lad?”

Shwann grabbed the weapons from the table and placed them in her wrinkled hands.

Saying nothing, I watched her fingers slowly close around them.

“I am at peace,” Shwalde said, as if in a dream. By the looks of her, it appeared
to be a good dream. “What we have here seems to be very dangerous and precious at
the same time. Why do they calm me so? Now how much longer are you going to stare
at me in my sorry state? Go on home.”

†

Upon receiving word on the morning of the appointed day, Shwann headed out for the
old woman’s home.

When my assistant returned several hours later, I was studying the liquid metal bubbling
from the window of the smelting furnace, pleased with the exceptional quality of the
coal and iron he’d procured this year.

“Shwalde has been taken to the hospital,” Shwann informed me upon his return. Holding
a small package with both hands in my direction, he continued, “She gave this to me
at the hospital. She was clutching it in her arms and did not let go until she saw
me.”

I took the package and asked, “What do you think it is?” despite knowing the answer.
I felt a desperate need to achieve some modicum of mutual understanding.

I set the package on the worktable and opened it. The tiny lethal weapons glinted
inside. Was the fact that I had not yet reached Shwalde’s age the reason why the burnished
items did not appear any more sinister?

I refrained from asking Shwann’s opinion.

“I believe I know how they are fitted,” my assistant said a bit bashfully.

“Oh? And?”

“I made a model out of clay and plaster. May I show it to you?”

“Of course.”

As Shwann turned on his heels to retrieve the item, the doorbell jangled violently.

I hurried to the several dozen speaking tubes sticking out of the wall, removed the
lid covering the cone and tube connected to the entrance, and asked, “Who’s there?”

“We made your acquaintance at the scrap metal yard up north a week ago,” answered
a clarion voice. An image of the ladies in their long white gloves and elegant dresses
floated into my mind. The high-rise district, from which they came, held lavish balls
every night.

After waving Shwann off, I said into the speaking tube, “Forgive me, but I have nothing
to offer you in exchange for the woman. You’ll have to wait another week.”

“I’m afraid that won’t do.”

Several seconds later, the building was rocked by a loud explosion. The heavy thud
of the outer door falling inward shook the speaking tube in my hand. The outer door
was made of iron. Just how had the young ladies gotten their hands, so delicate that
they might break, on such a large quantity of high explosives?

The door separating the workshop from the residence was three times thicker than the
outer door. I undid the lock and waited for Shwann.

Boom! The door shook.

The door buckled inward, as cracks formed around the hinges and streaked across the
wall. Boom!

The door fell with a dull thud.

A woman made of steel stepped over the rusty fallen door and rushed into the workshop
first. She was a meticulous female recreation down to every last eyelash and strand
of fluttering hair. The workmanship on her jet-black skin, despite paling in comparison
to Shwalde’s technique, was extraordinary.

“Whose creation is this?” I asked the shadows in flowing dresses standing behind the
steel woman.

“A craftsman who works for me,” answered an exceedingly beautiful girl. I was blinded
by the brilliant glare of the stone hanging from her necklace. It was not an adamantine
spar, but a gem. “Now how about returning the other woman to me?”

“I haven’t finished examining her yet.”

“That’s a matter of your convenience. I insist you honor our agreement.”

“According to our agreement, I still have another week.”

“I’m afraid you will have to accommodate our schedule. The woman is being sold earlier
than expected.”

“What am I to do?” I cried out, gripped by a sudden worry over the girl’s future.
“Now look, it’s not too late. There’s still time for anyone who wants to leave. You
must understand you are about to rob a craftsman.”

A wave of unrest stirred among the young women.

A diminutive shadow quietly crept back toward the doorway. It was a girl wearing a
red jewel at her chest.

“Traitor! Turncoat!” cried a chorus of shrill voices.

“We let you into our group, you ungrateful wench. You lower district girls are rotten
beyond saving!”

Tears rolled down the girls’ faces.

“Get her!”

The steel woman lunged at the traitorous girl. As the girl tried to escape, the android
grabbed her arms with one hand, pulled her close, and wrung her neck.

The red jewel from dead girl’s chest clattered on the ground.

“We wept for her,” the girls turned to me and said as if in defense of their friend’s
cruel end. Then with the steel woman leading the way, one by one, they stepped across
the fallen door and entered the workshop. When the last of the intruders cleared the
door, I raised my hand.

The door was lifted upright and back in its original position.

As the girls cried out in disbelief, I heard Shwann call to me from behind.

“What is it?” I asked without turning around.

“According to my calculations, this.”

I felt something heavy being placed in my outstretched hand.

The girls’ whispers turned to gasps as I watched their elegant silhouettes dance like
a mirage. Suddenly, the look in their eyes wavered from menace to terror and another
emotion.

One of the girls cried out, prompting the steel woman to march toward me.

My only worry was that the furnace door would not open on command, but my invention
worked like a charm.

I pressed the button on the remote control handed to me by Shwann and watched the
molten metal pour down from the smelting furnace and over the steel woman. The red
heat spread across her black skin. Her hand, dripping steel like blood, reached out
and came within a finger-length of my chest before receding along with the rest of
her melting body into the cascade of liquid metal. Within seconds, she disappeared
into the orange-colored current flowing toward the door. For many years, the cement
floor of the workshop had been severely slanted toward the entrance and was badly
in need of repair. So terrified was I by my own prospect of death that I did not notice
the shrieks of the girls being burned and swallowed by the lava flow that swept them
screaming out of my workshop.

“Such a cruel turn…” Shwann muttered.

Though I might have ignored him, I asked, “Do you think so?” curious about how he
might answer.

“No.” His unmitigated response was filled with a greater brutality than I possessed.
It was in this moment that I intuited this city would in time become home to the greatest
craftsman in history.

†

Soon, a rumor floated around the city that investigators had taken up the case of
the disappearance of the young women. The rumor was probably true. I didn’t give a
damn. After being swept up in the molten flow and into the drainage pipes, their skin
and bones should have ended up in the “roving lake” that is said to exist somewhere
belowground.

From the time the sun rose in the violet smoke-filled sky to sundown, I spent my days
staring, with unflagging fascination, at Shwann’s creation.

One day I asked, “What do you think they are?”

“I believe they’re teeth,” was Shwann’s answer. The two pointed objects that had so
beautifully left their mark on the woman’s throat were fitted on either side of a
steel model of a dental arch.

“I believe you’re right. But have you ever seen such vicious bestial fangs in your
life?”

“No.” Shwann’s green eyes were lit with curiosity. “But there is no mistaking. These
are what left the marks on this woman here.”

“Exactly. By God, I am stumped. No human that I know has fangs like these. Which is
why I am thinking about creating a human that might rightly wield these teeth.”

My young assistant was struck speechless, but only for a moment. “That’s—that’s incredible,
Master Monde. I hadn’t even considered such an idea. But you will be bringing into
existence a being not of this world, an act Lord Voyevoda strictly forbids.”

“Again with Lord Voyevoda. In the past, thousands of craftsmen died by the guillotine
for resisting the edicts of a certain higher noble—beheaded for refusing to aid House
Voyevoda’s effort in the Million Year War against an indeterminate enemy. I refuse
to cower against such tyranny. On my name and honor, I will neither cower nor back
down. Shwann, if you do not feel likewise, I bid you leave now.”

The young man took one step back and bowed his head deeply. The invincible smile that
came across his face was the only answer I needed.

From that day began what I recognized as the challenge of a lifetime.

Two teeth must form the basis of an entire being.

From the shape of the lower and upper jaws, facial form to the size of the nasal and
ocular cavities—we could not be even one millimeter off.

Holing myself up in the musty library, I pored over tomes written by the sages of
antiquity and, using a calculator and protractor that were heretofore of little use
me, extrapolated the exact measurements of each of the required parts.

On the eve of our appointed day to begin casting, Shwann and I sat at the table and
stared in silence at the teeth.

As the sky turned from violet to blue, the black teeth gleamed in the moonbeams filtering
in from the skylight. What the girls must have felt when they’d first discovered them!

Suddenly, Shwann snatched the black teeth off the table and shot a piercing gaze at
the fangs. He was not yet a full-fledged craftsman. I caught his hand trying to sink
the teeth into his own neck and slapped him across the face. When I slapped him for
a seventh time, Shwann came back to himself.

“What…what did I do?” he groaned, to which I shook him by the shoulders and said,
“Don’t. You must never repeat what you just attempted. Only the creature that wields
these teeth is permitted such a violent act.”

“Yes, I understand now.”

I stroked the boy’s hair, pushing my fingers through his gold locks like a hydraulic
tank mowing down reeds.

“Perhaps it would have been kinder to send you back to your family,” I muttered, looking
up at the purple constellations through the skylight in the bedroom. “But no. I don’t
know where your parents are. I’m not even certain you have parents. In the first place,
the very concept of parents is foreign to me. I was a test tube baby, you see. Though
I do not know the female and male donors, I harbor no resentment. At least, they had
talents worthy of passing on to me.” Whether Shwann understood or even heard me at
all was a mystery. When I turned back from my soliloquy, the lad had bundled himself
in blankets next to me and was sound asleep as if he were not even breathing.

†

The next three months of suffering to complete the face is certainly worth chronicling
here.

When it came time to mold the facial skeleton, I began to doubt my own talents. If
my measurements and imagination proved accurate, the completed face should look exactly
like the drawing before me. But was I skilled enough to carve these same lips, nasal
bridge, eyes, and above all these very pupils into steel?