First, the
naginata,
then the pack. He stared at her weapon.
Her
weapon now, no doubt about it. She’d killed some time with it, double meaning, trimming the rough cuts he’d made in the forest and smoothing a bevel on edges of the remaining bark, replacing his bark-strip lashing with cord. Looked like silk or maybe nylon, tan but glossier than hemp, and more of it for long wrapped handgrips on the shaft. It wasn’t
kumihimo,
more like the tight twine “serving” a mariner would wrap on a ship’s wheel for grip.
It fit the rustic flavor of the weapon and turned it into intentional design. Not makeshift any more. He touched it, running fingers over the sheath. His blade felt comfortable there. It had found a new home.
She looked a question at him, had she pushed too far? Taken a gift where none was intended? He nodded acceptance.
There’s the difference between her and Mother. Mother wouldn’t have asked. Would never have
thought
of asking. Anything she wanted, was already hers.
And then, the Seal. She pulled it out of the pack, wrapped in plastic again, and he saw she was wearing gloves. Even gods are pain-averse.
He felt the whine. She stepped back, waving a gesture that said she wasn’t gonna touch
that
thing again.
All yours, Maestro . . .
He unwrapped the pieces. They looked like they had when he picked them up in front of Fafnir’s cave. Two pieces of old gray wrought iron, five points of the Star of David and a separate full triangle, ragged edges at two angles where Mother broke it off.
He floated his right palm over each piece, trying to make sense of what he felt. Stared off into space. Vibrations, strings of molecules twisting into spaghetti, like one of those microchip computer circuits . . .
She didn’t ask, but he could see the question hanging in the air above her head, like a cartoon.
“It isn’t dying. It isn’t working, either. The smaller piece feels like the larger, sort of like when you break a bar magnet, it doesn’t stop being a magnet. Instead, you get
two
bar magnets. Just, smaller.”
But it wasn’t doing what Solomon had intended. Mother’s plan had worked that far. But she hadn’t killed her enemy.
The Seal knew him. He touched it and it didn’t bite. He picked up the pieces, one in each hand, and tried to add their weight and temperature and molecular vibration to their story. He tried fitting the broken pieces together.
They repelled each other. Magnet analogy, again, as if each jagged jigsaw piece was trying to fit “north” to “north” against the will of physics. He studied the broken faces, making sure he was matching the correct ends with each other.
He was, no question. They hadn’t broken clean. One ragged corner of the triangle had a dent that matched a outcrop on the main body. The curve followed those internal lines he sensed.
But the piece didn’t want to go back there. He set the main body flat on the floor and tried to drop the triangle into place. It flipped over.
Out of curiosity, not really thinking it would help him find a solution, but . . . she’d dumped his keys and wallet back in his pants pocket after washing. He’d felt the weight. He pulled out his keys. Most were brass, but some of the old locks took old keys, skeleton keys, cast steel keys. He dangled one next to the main piece of the Seal, and then the detached triangle.
No attraction—not magnetic.
He looked up at Mel again. Again, unspoken questions hovered around her head.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, no. Not a clue. But I’m glad Solomon didn’t use magnetism as part of his working. Forge heat will destroy a magnet. Lets the lines of force escape, the molecules turn out of alignment. Or something.”
And I don’t need any further complications.
Albert squinted at the flat gray sky.
Not
raining. No thunder and lightning providing theatrical backlights for the mad scientist’s ruined castle silhouetted on the ridge overhead. No typhoons or tornados, either. Not even snowing or sleeting or hailing or dropping a plague of frogs on him. He distrusted that. How can you have a proper apocalypse without storms?
Still, the sky offered at least a
threat
of storm. Of proper drama. Gusty winds, puddles dotting normal dirty stinky city streets, enough lingering damp chill that he needed his jacket. His nose had forgotten diesel soot and dogshit and overflowing dumpsters and just too damn many jostling-elbows people in the last few weeks. Forests smelled better.
But apparently the Powers That Be weren’t throwing a fit about them walking to his forge. That probably meant there was no way in hell he’d be able to fix the Seal. Jehovah’s apocalypse didn’t need to rush to beat the deadline. It could keep its own schedule.
Mel was doing her cop thing, striding along in her starched-uniform official aura that flowed out fifty yards and owned the street, making half of the scattered pedestrians look like they had something to hide. The ones that hadn’t seen her first that is, and vanished before he ever noticed them.
He glanced over at her. “Look, I don’t know whether I can fix this thing or not. But it’s not just a technical question. Beyond that, should I even try? Actions have consequences. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom. Let a hundred gods contend.’ Why should I cut off my own arm to make Solomon’s Yahweh supreme?”
“You’re misquoting Chairman Mao. Besides, he just used that as a trick to smoke out troublemakers so he could spot them, nab them, and send them to camps for reeducation. Cultural Revolution. Dude, I was
there.
It wasn’t fun.”
He grimaced. “You know, sometimes we sound like we’re singing a ‘bragging song’—built the Garden of Eden and the pyramids, told Wellington how to win at Waterloo, all that stuff. Been everywhere, man. Done everything, man. Some of my blades fought in the Battle of Hastings, on both sides . . . ”
She glanced over at him and then went back to scanning the sidewalks and streets and the roof parapets overhead. Restless eyes. “You made Excalibur?”
“No. Some other guy. My blades aren’t magic and they aren’t fancy. They just do a damned good job of cutting things, and don’t break unless you really,
really
try. Besides, it was the scabbard that made Caliburn special.”
“How much of
that
story is true?”
Albert thought for a minute as they walked. He’d known people, who knew people, who . . . “About the usual one percent, I’d guess. Arthur lived. He tried. And failed and died. No, I don’t know whether Merlin was a demon or a god like us or just a clever man. About five minutes after Arthur died, the lies and mixed-in bits of other stories started piling up . . . ”
Then, “You dodged my question.”
She smiled. “Yes.”
Another couple of minutes, walking in silence, and she stopped and turned to him. “Look, I got along okay with what we had. I could take care of my people. That’s all I really need. From what I’ve seen, you could still work miracles with iron.
In
iron. As for memories, well, I’d managed to forget Hani. And a bunch of other things I’d rather not talk about. Some of them worse. My take on all this boils down to: This world doesn’t need more gods. Hell, I don’t think it needs the ones it
has.
If I held Shiva’s trident, I’d be tempted to melt Rome and Jerusalem and Mecca down to radioactive glaze, three birds with one stone . . . ”
Okay, back to Kali for a reference point.
“So yeah, if you figure out a way, go for it. Fix the damned thing. And modify the spells to include Bilqis while you’re at it. We wouldn’t be in this shit if Suleiman bin Dauod hadn’t tried to slip one past her.”
Then that quick grin of hers that verged on a leer. “Or slip one
to
her, as the case may be.”
Back to Durga.
They walked on. He felt his forge looming in front of him, his power,
his
altar, like golden warmth spreading from his
hara
to all his other
chakras.
Just to mix theologies and languages all to hell.
That’s the problem with long life. It melts together. Interferes with “Be here now.”
And then, as she points out, there are the memories you’d rather forget.
Remembrance of things past.
“Now that we have our memories back, what’s your real name? The original? I mean, Legion called you Noshaq or some such thing.”
“It called you Simon Lahti. If you start believing demons, God knows where you’ll end up. No, my name is Mel. Always has been. Damned if I remember what language it started out in, or what it means or who first called me that. That’s
way
too far back. But ‘Melissa’ and ‘Melanie’ and the other names, I just take those to fit the changing world. Noshaq is the tallest mountain near where we lived for some centuries. My people sometimes call me ‘Goddess
of
Noshaq.’ I’m betting you lived in Lahti for a long, long time. I’m sure people called you ‘The Smith of Lahti.’ ”
True, that. “What about the ‘el Hajj’ part? You ever make the pilgrimage, or is that just sticking plumes on the donkey?”
“So I’m an ass, now?” She wiggled her hips at him. Didn’t really fit her cop persona. “No, I made the pilgrimage. Long ago. Wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Stoned the devil and walked seven times widdershins around the Kaaba and kissed the Black Stone and all the rest. Talked to a few mullahs and sheiks who didn’t tack ancient tribalism onto the good parts of the Prophet’s advice. Came away knowing nothing that I hadn’t known before. Served me right.”
That brought them to the turn into his alley, the back alley of his apartment. He half expected to find Mother waiting, holding a flaming sword to bar him from returning to Eden. She’d been in front of them and waiting at every step of this personal Hajj. Everyone hates a know-it-all.
But the alley stood empty except for the pizza joint’s Dumpster and some other trash, and a mangy-furred yellow dog that took one look at them and slunk away into the shadows and vanished into a slot between brick walls too narrow for most people to follow. Judging by the trash spilling out of the dumpster, it must be Thursday—regular pickups were Friday and Monday mornings, early, and stores had been open on their walk, so it wasn’t Sunday.
He hadn’t asked Mel what day it was . . .
He hadn’t asked how much spoiled food she’d had to toss when they got back either. Gone three weeks, he expected his own kitchen now harbored an advanced ecosystem in the breadbox and the refrigerator. Maybe the penicillin mold would fight back the salmonella. Or maybe the hobs and brownies and house-elves had feasted behind his back. He
had
invited them past the door of his house and then went away.
His cellar door stood closed, just as he’d left it that dawn long weeks back. There too, he’d half expected Mother to have interfered. But she’d never liked entering his forge. Temple of another god, perhaps, and it felt chill and unwelcoming to her?
And then there was the iron. She’d never liked iron. Came after her time, probably.
Anyway, he locked the door behind them, barred it, and stood sniffing for a minute before he switched on the lights. Nothing out of the ordinary, no smell of anyone passing the door since he’d locked it—cool dry dust and darkness, old brick and wood and stone, the memory of charcoal fires and hot iron and bitter sparks. Normal. He led Mel down the stairs to the second door and locked and barred that behind them too. After all, Mel was on the inside. Nobody else could get past those locks just by talking to them.
Except Mother wouldn’t need to use those doors to get inside. She knew the hidden ways. He switched on every light he had and poked into dark corners, looking and sniffing, just in case. No Mother.
At last, he took the pieces of the Seal out of his pockets—separate pockets because they didn’t seem to like each other now—laid them on his largest anvil, and stared at them. What did they want him to do? Forge them, that was obvious. They asked for heat and hammer and anvil. And magic of some kind, the touch of a forge god. Which wasn’t the same as the touch of a wizard-king . . .
How could he fix it?
What did it want to be?
Would forge-heat and hammer make the two pieces one again? Flow metal together in alliance, bring those strings of spell-iron into a working circuit? Did
Mother
do something in the breaking that caused the matched edges to repel?
His mind turned back to how Mother didn’t like iron and steel all that much. Maybe it tied into the myths that the Old Ones, the fairy people, feared cold iron. Used copper and bronze and flint in their weapons, rather than steel. The stories said humans had driven them from the world with iron. Solomon had used iron for his Seal, to drain power from competing gods. That meant something—normal people didn’t use iron to decorate their god’s temple. Iron was too utilitarian. It wasn’t rich and rare and pretty.
He stared at the pieces of the Seal. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m just going to start doing it. The iron wants heat. Maybe once it’s hot, it will tell me the next thing and the next.”
He looked up. Mel just nodded, no words. This wasn’t her department.
So. Charcoal. A wide bed this time, not long like he’d made for his cane. Deep around the tuyere, and he checked to make sure he had plenty of charcoal in reserve. The iron was asking for a
lot
of heat. Something beyond normal—beyond forging, beyond welding, into the range of casting or the transformation that was smelting from the native ore. The magic thing again. Or maybe it was the salamander’s soul, looking for escape and rebirth on some kind of elemental’s Great Wheel. He kindled the fire with shavings and wood splits, and checked tools and quench tubs and room to work while the coal took fire.
All was as he’d left it, where he could find things without thinking. Of course. But he kept expecting to find some sabotage, some further trap Mother had set in advance in case she hadn’t blocked him before this point. A bomb camouflaged as a lump of charcoal, a flaw hidden in hammer or anvil that would shatter like glass under impact. Plots within plots within plots. She’d
intended
him to get his hands on the Seal, but too late to save it . . .