“Wait,” Josef said. “So you’re saying fire doesn’t see water?”
“No,” Slorn shook his head. “I’m saying that, since deep, standing water is generally not a threat to fire spirits, they are almost universally uninterested in it, and so feel no need to illuminate it.” He gave Josef an amused look. “Why do you think lakes look so black at night?”
“Clever,” Eli said, letting the sleeve fall back to its position. “Very, very clever. So we’ve got a coat that is almost invisible in firelight. That will be very useful in our line of work.”
“Doesn’t work in sunlight, though,” Slorn said, frowning. “The sun’s a different matter entirely, so don’t get overconfident.”
“No worries,” Eli said. “I’m confident in my confidence. What else did you put in?”
Slorn shook his head and turned back to the coat. “It’s a vast improvement over the previous coat. It’s stronger and more flexible, though still thick enough to keep even the most persistent spirits from seeing what’s inside, not that they would know to try. To the spirit world, this coat and anything it hides are just a blank, no more interesting than a sleeping nest of small water spirits or a pile of finely ground sand. Plus, the needles are putting a hood in as we speak, so there won’t be the problem of losing the hat anymore, though she will look a little out of place in warmer climates.”
“She’ll look a little out of place anywhere besides a cultist convention.” Eli grinned. “Fortunately, we’re not concerned with appearances.” He looked over at Nico. “What do you think?”
Nico’s eyes were wide. “I want to try it.”
“Go ahead,” Slorn said, stepping aside.
The needles finished the last stitches on the hood as Nico stepped forward. She reached out, almost hesitantly, and took hold of the coat by the collar, gently sliding it off the dummy’s shoulder and onto her own. It fell around her like a cloak, seemingly far too big, and yet her hands peeked out perfectly from the long sleeves while the hem ended just below her knees. She gave it an experimental shake, and the coat swirled around her like a current.
“Well?” Josef said.
Nico held out her arms. “It’s heavy,” she said, surprised.
“Not nearly as heavy as it should be,” Slorn said, “considering what’s in it. That coat contains almost a hundred feet of cloth, all folded and crunched around itself to give the spirit an actual size and power much greater than its form would suggest. There’s wool and silk and steel in the weave, all picked for their complementary personalities and strong sense of duty. Out of that mesh of spirits, I have imprinted a new soul with properties greater than its component parts.” Slorn ran his fingers over the smooth, black fabric. “This cloth will stop arrows, knives, and even a sword thrust from anything except an awakened blade. On your shoulders, it’s better than any normal armor ever could be, because all the pieces of this coat, the thread, the cloth, the buttons, are part of one awakened spirit given a single purpose: to protect the spirit world from panic and destruction by concealing the demon and protecting the demon’s prison”—he nodded at Nico—“you. If you are the strongbox that holds the demon, they are the vault around you, or that’s how the spirit sees itself.” Slorn smiled. “I made it rather zealous, so you’ll have to be careful. The coat will follow you as its captain and obey any orders you give so long as they do not contradict the purpose I used as the foundation of its creation—preventing the demonseed from escaping into the world.”
“Wait,” Eli said. “Follow her orders? How? Nico’s not a wizard.”
Slorn looked at him, astonished. “Of course she’s a wizard. Only wizards can become demonseeds. Normal human souls are far too flimsy to contain a demonseed to maturity.”
A stab of betrayal hit Eli in the gut as he turned to Nico. “You were a wizard all this time? Why didn’t you tell me?”
For the first time since he’d know her, Nico looked hurt. “You didn’t ask,” she said softly. “And it didn’t seem important. Besides, it’s not like I can talk to spirits casually, being what I am.”
Eli opened his mouth to ask more questions, but the murderous look he was getting from Josef was enough to make him close it again. Fortunately, Slorn took that moment to change the subject altogether.
“Now that you’ve seen the work,” he said, “it’s time to talk about the price.”
“I was wondering when we’d get to that.” Eli sighed. “Well, never let it be said that I am a man who doesn’t pay his bills. What can we do for you?”
Slorn sat down on the edge of his wooden table. “Have you heard of the Fenzetti blades?”
“Of course,” Eli said. “I’m a thief. I’ve heard of everything you can put a price on, and the price on a Fenzetti is higher than most. There are, what, five total in the world? All held by collectors who won’t sell them for love or money.”
“There are ten, actually,” Josef said, “including the half-finished piece Fenzetti was working on when he died.” He raised his eyebrows at Eli’s incredulous expression. “What? I’m a swordsman. Fenzetti blades are famous swords. It’s not hard to see the connection. What I want to know,” he said, shifting his gaze to Slorn, “is why does the world’s greatest awakened swordsmith want one? Fenzettis are novelty items, prized for their supposed indestructibility, but they’re hardly great works of sword making. Any swordsman, wizard or not, would gladly trade a Fenzetti for one of Heinricht Slorn’s blades.”
Slorn’s mouth twitched. “It’s not supposed indestructibility. The swords made by Fenzetti are impossible to break by any known means. Fenzetti was a Shaper wizard, you see. This was hundreds of years ago, far before my time, but he was legendary as one of our most creative craftsmen and guild masters, presiding over an uncommonly experimental and productive period of Shaper history. Now, traditionally, Shapers keep a large stockpile of rare materials for their work, including materials no one else really knows about—things the spirits bring them, oddities, stuff no one else understands. The objects we call Fenzetti blades are made of such a substance. The Shapers named it bone metal, for its off-white color, and for a while it was a subject of great interest among the Shaper crafters. It’s not often you get your hands on an indestructible substance. Unfortunately, this indestructibility also made the bone metal completely unworkable. You can’t melt it or scratch it, can’t crush it or hammer it, and no one has ever successfully woken a bone metal spirit. After a few years of frenzied study, most Shapers wrote bone metal off as an interesting but useless substance. What good is a material that can’t be turned into anything?”
“Fascinating history lesson,” Eli said. “But when does Fenzetti come in?”
“I was getting to that,” Slorn said crossly. “Of all the Shapers, Fenzetti was the only one who ever figured out how to work bone metal. Over a twenty-year span, he made a series of unbreakable swords from the material. Still, even the great Fenzetti could do only crude work with bone metal, and I’ve heard that even the few pieces he considered his masterworks aren’t much to look at. But then”—Slorn grinned—“I’m not exactly looking to hang one on my wall. I want the metal.”
“Well, in that case,” Eli said, “why not just buy bone metal? Why go through the trouble of stealing a Fenzetti?”
“Because bone metal is so rare in nature it might as well not exist,” Slorn said, annoyed. “What bone metal there is, the Shapers keep in their storehouses under their mountain. As I think should be abundantly clear by this point, they’re not just going to sell the stuff to me, and I don’t think you want to try robbing the Shaper mountain again.”
“No,” Eli said, laughing. “Once was enough for me, thanks. I guess Fenzetti blades it is. Do you want any one in particular?”
“A large one would be preferable,” Slorn said thoughtfully. “But I don’t have a particular blade in mind. Whatever you can get quickly will be fine.”
“Quickly may be relative,” Eli said. “But a deal is a deal, and you certainly did come through on your end.”
“Are we settled then?” Slorn said.
“Yes.” Eli grinned and stuck out his hand. “One coat for one bone metal blade, even trade.”
Slorn shook his hand firmly and then shuffled them out of his workroom, Nico still happily swirling her coat. As they filed out into the main room, they found Pele there waiting for them. Her face was pale and anxious, and her hair was windswept and wild, as if she’d been standing in a gale, though the trees outside were perfectly still.
“Slorn,” she said quietly. “The weather’s changing.”
Eli gave her an odd look. Weather talk wasn’t usually something Pele mentioned with that kind of gravity. Slorn, however, stopped midstep and pricked up his round ears, listening.
“You’re right,” he said, at once as serious as she was. “The pressure is changing.” He looked to Eli. “You’ve got the coat, so you’d best be leaving now. The weather changes quickly here. We need to move the house.”
“If you say so.” Eli felt uncomfortably like he had just missed something very important. “Wasn’t like we had much left to do, anyway.”
It took them about five minutes to get everything assembled. The kitchen packed them a bag of sandwiches and fruit that Eli took with such effusive thanks, the counters were nearly quivering with happiness. Josef, meanwhile, packed up his knives suspiciously, keeping his eyes on Slorn and Pele as they went around closing cabinets and shuttering windows. Eli didn’t blame him. It was hard to feel the urgency for a storm when the sky was blue and bright.
But as they trundled down the stairs and out onto the dry stream bed, Eli began to feel it too. The pressure was falling, making his ears ache, and though the air was still and calm, he could smell rain. High overhead, the clouds were moving quickly.
Slorn and Pele saw them to the edge of the woods, but the moment Eli, Nico, and Josef stepped into the shade of the trees, their hosts turned and went back inside the house without looking back, as though they were deliberately trying not to see which way their guests left.
When the door shut behind them, the house shuddered. There was an enormous creak of bending wood, and the house’s foundations began to move. The four spindly legs straightened and stretched their chicken-feet talons, leaning forward, then backward, so that the house rocked like a ship at sea, and Eli felt sure he was going to be sick just watching. Then, when all the legs were stretched, the house shuddered and took a step forward. The wooden limbs rippled like muscle, and the house was off, walking in long strides down the dry streambed and disappearing into the woods with surprising speed, leaving only a thin line of chimney smoke behind it and no footprints at all.
Josef gave a low whistle as he watched the line of smoke vanish behind the trees. “No wonder the bastard was so hard to find.” He looked over at Eli. “So, you’re his friend; are the storms here that dangerous or was the bear man spinning a story to get rid of us?”
“I don’t think that’s the case,” Eli said quietly, looking south. There, barely visible over the treetops, the black smudge of a storm front was building on the horizon. That much wasn’t so unusual; the weather in the mountains was finicky, but something was off. The clouds around the storm front were drifting south, yet the dark thunderheads were plowing straight north against the wind, and moving fast.
“Come on,” Eli said. “I don’t think we want to be around when that hits.”
Josef nodded and they began to move east, following the streambed, walking as fast as they could go in the loose sand. Behind them, the storm rolled on, veering slightly west in the direction Slorn’s house had gone.
The walking house stopped on a rocky cliff at the edge of the Awakened Wood. It turned twice in a circle and then crouched on the cliff’s edge. As soon as the house stopped swaying, Slorn opened the door and stomped down the rickety steps, his bear face unreadable. Pele was right behind him, and they took their positions in the high, scrubby field that led up to the cliff.
The storm rolled over the forest, lit from within almost constantly by arcs of blue-white lightning. The treetops tossed sideways where it passed, yet no rain fell. Slorn and Pele hunched against the wind as it came, howling and heavy with the earsplitting pressure of the storm. The clouds flew overhead, blotting out the afternoon sun, and the cliff went as dark as rainy midnight. Slorn could feel Pele shivering next to him, and he put a hand on her shoulder, steadying her as they waited in the dark.
Lightning flashed all around them, jumping between the clouds in spidering arcs. Then, with a crack that split all hearing, a single tree-sized bolt struck the ground in front of Slorn, blinding what little night vision he had gained. But no light could blind the world Slorn saw through his spirit sight, and as the clap of thunder followed on the lightning’s heels, he saw it appear. A primordial storm, such as had not been seen in the world since creation, stood before them, an epic war of air and water spirits and the lightning spirits they birthed, embroiled in an endless conflict hundreds of miles across. Yet all of this was bound into the shape of a tall man in a black coat carrying a long sword, crushed together by the white mark Slorn dared not look at. The flash of the lightning faded, and Slorn let his normal eyes, the bear’s soft-focusing, near-sighted vision, take over. It was best not to look at the Lord of Storms as he truly was for too long.
For a long, awkward moment, no one spoke. Finally, Slorn took the initiative, lowering himself in a small bow. “Welcome, as always, my lord. What can we do for you?”
“Spare me the gracious-host routine,” the Lord of Storms said. His voice was impatient, and he was looking around, his flashing eyes seeing through everything. “I’m just here to get our new recruit his sword.”