The Hidden Realm: Book 04 - Ennodius (28 page)

THE FORGE

 When Elerian entered the room behind Ascilius, he saw that it was quite small, barely ten feet wide and eight feet deep. The ceiling was low, giving him barely enough room to stand erect. The dim rays of their mage lights illuminated every corner of the room, revealing that it was empty except for several large wooden chests lined up neatly along the far wall. The room had likely remained sealed since Ascilius’s capture by the Goblins twenty years ago, for Elerian noted that the chests were covered with a thick layer of dust.

“At least my storeroom has remained undiscovered,” said Ascilius in a relieved voice as he pulled one of the chests away from the others. It was made of age-darkened oak bound with ornate silver brackets, now dull and tarnished by time, at the corners. When Ascilius threw back the heavy cover, Elerian expected to see treasure inside, but there were only a number of bundles wrapped in dark, oiled leather which Ascilius set on the floor around him. Opening the first bundle, he revealed a gleaming steel hammer that was inlaid with twisting threads of argentum that shone brightly in the glow of his mage light. One by one, Ascilius unwrapped the other bundles, exposing a pair of tongs as well as a variety of other metal working tools, all of them inlaid with twisting silver threads like the hammer.

“If all else fails, I will sell these tools in the Dwarf cities to the north to make up your bride price,” said Ascilius to Elerian. “Each of them is worth the price of a fine jewel.”

Before Elerian could protest his generous offer, Ascilius stooped and uncovered the final bundle, revealing a thick piece of polished rowan inlaid with silver threads.

“This is how we Dwarves magically harden stone,” said Ascilius, picking up the staff with his right hand. “The charm is embedded in the argentum so that even someone without mage powers can pick this up and use it. A staff like this allows everyone to help in hardening a project, allowing the work to go on much faster than if it was left only to a few mages.”

While Elerian examined the staff, Ascilius opened a much smaller chest, this one containing several scrolls made of thin parchment. When the Dwarf partially unrolled one of them, Elerian saw that it was covered with small script of a dark black hue in a language he did not recognize.

“These are the spells we will need to make our weapons,” said Ascilius. “They are written in a secret language known to only a few. Dwarves seldom write their spells down, relying instead on our superior memories, but these spells are too dangerous to trust to remembrance alone. The smallest mistake in casting them could have disastrous results,” explained Ascilius to Elerian. 

After tucking the scrolls in his belt, Ascilius opened a third chest, removing two small bars of raw silver from its interior. A layer of black tarnish covered both of them.

“We will need these to make argentum,” said Ascilius to Elerian.

“Are you finally trusting me with the secret?” Elerian could not help asking with a half smile on his lips.

“The Dwarves first learned to make argentum from the Elves,” replied Ascilius. “By teaching you the process, I am merely returning the favor. You must promise, however, never to give up the secret to the Goblins, even if they torture you,” he said seriously.

“I will guard it with my life,” replied Elerian, equally serious.

With Elerian’s help, Ascilius carried the silver, the tools, the staff, and two heavy leather aprons into the forge room.

“I wish now that I had kept some of my treasure in this room, too,” said Ascilius regretfully to Elerian, “but at the time there seemed to be no need, for in my darkest dreams, I never imagined that dragons would someday set foot in Ennodius.” Setting his tools down on the stone steps behind him, he turned and surveyed his ruined workshop. “Let us begin by straightening out this room, so that we can begin our task,” he said to Elerian.

Together, they righted the heavy anvil, setting it close to the forge before cleaning the furnace and clearing the floor of the room. Any ruined items they found were tossed into a corner of the room, but any pieces of metal that Ascilius wanted to keep; they stacked neatly against the walls. Tonare soon grew bored watching them, curling up instead by the back door to sleep.

As he searched through the debris lying on the floor, Elerian came across a half dozen iron bars about four feet long and three inches thick, rough surfaced and fairly round. Ascilius gave a glad cry when he saw them, stacking all of them except one in a corner of the room.

“Years ago,” said the Dwarf, “while I was traveling through Tarsius, a falling star struck the plains ahead of me with a thunderous noise and great flash of fire. When I approached it, all that was left was a lump of pitted iron. After it cooled, I carried it home with me, turning it into these bars which I set aside for the day when I might need them. The day is now come, for nothing else will do for the weapons I intend to make. I will need your aid Elerian, but before you commit to helping me, you should know that if we fail in the execution of the spells written on my scrolls, it may mean both our deaths. The forces which we will unleash will suffice to destroy this room and a good bit of the city around it.”

“My old mentor Tullius once told me that there are good mages and evil mages, but there are no cowardly mages,” replied Elerian. “I am not afraid of magic, but what about you?” he asked curiously. “If we fail, you might be throwing away centuries of life.”

 “I will not huddle in some safe place hoarding the hours of my life like some miser telling his gold, afraid to dare a worthwhile risk,” said Ascilius firmly, his dark eyes flashing. “We must have proper weapons if we are to have any chance of leaving Ennodius, therefore I will dare to speak the spells which no other has dared to cast for hundreds of years.”

 Without anymore talk, Ascilius put on one of the heavy leather aprons he had brought from the hidden room. As carefully as if he was going into battle, he braided his hair and beard, tucking his precious beard behind his apron when he was done. A leather cap taken from an apron pocket went over his head, and heavy leather gloves taken from another pocket protected his hands. Elerian donned his own apron. Like Ascilius, he covered his hair, which was already tied back, with a leather cap, but being an Elf, he had no beard to worry about.

“We look like corsairs from the southern seas,” thought Elerian to himself as Ascilius lit a red mage fire in the empty forge with a wave of his right hand, the flames bathing the shop with a flickering, ruddy light.

Ascilius put the silver bars in the forge first, adding a third gleaming bar to them which he had recovered earlier from the floor of his shop. The three bars sat untouched in the flames as Ascilius held back the heat of the fire from the metal.

“Pay attention to the proportions,” he said to Elerian. “You must use two parts silver to one part khroma. This will keep the silver from tarnishing with time. This much of the process of making argentum is known even to the Goblins, but they still do not possess the spell which transforms the metals and melds them together. Even among the Dwarves, few know it.”

Ascilius now allowed the heat of the red flames to enter the two different metals, which immediately pooled together, the khroma forming bright, swirling streaks through the silver. Carefully, Ascilius read a spell from one of his scrolls. When the Dwarf raised his right hand, Elerian saw a small golden orb leap from his fingers, striking the small pool of bright metal in the forge. When the light from the orb faded away, the metal was all of a uniform silver color.

“The meld of metal of metal in the furnace is argentum, now, with all the properties of that metal,” said Ascilius to Elerian. “Call your spell book and I will recite the charm for you in the common tongue.”

Removing his heavy leather gloves, Elerian called his spell book, writing the transformation spell on a blank page as Ascilius carefully repeated it. After Elerian sent away his spell book, Ascilius withdrew the heat of the flames from the argentum, removing the cooled, silvery metal from the flames with his gloved right hand before setting it aside on the floor next to the forge.

Picking up one of the bars of sky iron with his right hand, Ascilius thrust the other end into the red flames burning in the forge. At once, the lower two thirds of the bar turned a deep orange color. An acrid smell filled the air as the thick tarnish the iron had gathered over the years burned off. Thick blue smoke drifted up from the bar to the ceiling where it vanished, carried off by vents above the forge. As his nostrils filled with the unpleasant odor of hot iron, Tonare raised his head and blew vigorously through his nostrils. Throwing a disgusted look at Ascilius, he walked over to the stairs and climbed to the apartment above the forge room where the air was fresher.

Ascilius ignored the dentire, continuing to hold the bar in the fire with his gloved hand. From past experience, Elerian knew Ascilius’s control of the magical fire was keeping the heat confined to lower part of the bar. With a skill garnered through years of practice, the Dwarf next laid the glowing metal on the anvil and began to shape it with his inlaid hammer. At each stroke of the sledge, there was a faint silvery flash, and the clear, sharp ring of steel on iron filled the room.

“This is the music of the Dwarves,” roared Ascilius happily as hot orange sparks flew into the air with each skillful, powerful stroke of his hammer. The incandescent particles sent up puffs of blue smoke whenever they struck the heavy aprons worn by Elerian and Ascilius, further fouling the air in the room with the smell of burning leather, but neither of the smiths noticed, for they were both intent on the bar that Ascilius was shaping. Slowly, under the assault of the Dwarf’s magical sledge, the heated part of the bar began to flatten out and lengthen. With barely a break in the rhythm of his hammer, Ascilius swiftly thrust the bar back into the mage fire whenever the bright orange glow of the metal began to fade, holding it there until its fiery color was renewed before returning it to the anvil.

Elerian quickly lost track of the time as he watched Ascilius’s deft strokes transform the bar of iron into the beginnings of a sword. The temperature in the room rose and beads of sweat gathered on the Dwarf’s forehead from the heat and his exertions. A pall of blue smoke hung under the ceiling beneath the vents by the time the bar had assumed the rough shape of a sword. Ascilius finally set aside the crudely formed weapon and turned to Elerian.

“That was a good beginning but it is time now to eat and then rest,” he said wearily.

After extinguishing the mage fire in the forge and divesting himself of his leather gear, Ascilius led the way up the stairs to the second floor of the workshop. At the top of the stairs, Elerian’s mage light revealed a sitting room that had two large windows which opened onto the boulevard that ran by the front of the shop. The glass was broken out of the frames, leaving jagged edges like snaggle teeth all around the wooden frames. The room itself was in disarray like every other room in the city that they had examined.

After Ascilius closed the wooden shutters that framed each window, Elerian hung a heavy blanket over each of them for good measure. He then followed Ascilius into the washroom at the back of the apartment where they ran clear water from a brass spigot set in one of the walls into a shallow stone basin. With soap that Ascilius recovered from the floor, they washed off the grime of their labors, drying themselves with towels which had been strewn on the floor of the washroom. Ascilius then had Elerian trim nearly an inch of uneven, singed hair off his beard and hair with a small scissors that he also recovered from the floor. The Dwarf was especially incensed about the damage Eboria had inflicted on his beard.

“It was bad enough that you burned a hole in it,” he complained to Elerian. “Now I am forced to shorten it from the length that I prefer. Someday Eboria will pay for this indignity as well as all the other wrongs she has inflicted on me,” he said angrily as he examined his shortened appendage.

“Be thankful that we sustained no worse damage than singed hair,” Elerian advised his companion as he recalled their narrow escapes from the dragon’s flames.

After they were done cleaning up, they toasted cheese, biscuits, and chestnuts over a small mage fire Ascilius lit in the fireplace in the sitting room. When the food was well heated, Ascilius set out a generous share of cheese and biscuits for Tonare, who wolfed his portion down and then curled up by the fire to sleep. Sitting on the hearth in front of the fire, Elerian and Ascilius ate their own meal, washing the food down with wine that Elerian made from clear water he obtained from the washroom.

“I had a dwelling on the top level of the city, but it was often easier to sleep here when I was tired,” said Ascilius as they sat drinking the last of their wine while basking in the heat of the fire. “It was a pleasant place back then, not the ruin you see before you now.” As he looked sadly around the damaged apartment, Ascilius suddenly yawned. “I must sleep for a time, Elerian,” he said tiredly as he set aside his empty glass. “When I awaken, we will continue the work we have begun.”

“Sleep then,” said Elerian. “I will clean up.”

Ascilius extinguished his mage fire before disappearing through a doorway to the right of the bathroom, which led to a small bedroom. Elerian quickly cleaned up the remnants of their meal and washed the utensils they had used. He was also tired, but felt no need of sleep. Righting an overturned, padded armchair that was badly slashed but still serviceable, he set it by the fireplace. After sitting and making himself comfortable in the chair, Elerian stripped away the illusion that concealed his ruby ring. For a time, he sat and watched the stone as it beat in cadence with Anthea’s heart.