The Formless Forge

Chapter 13: The Bill

Cal kept his hands on the sphere.

It had gone warm under his palms, warmer than his hands, and in the last few seconds he had decided that as long as he didn't move them, nothing worse could come out of the light.

"A grafted aspect comes out of the forge at the fourth tier at best," his father said. "That isn't us being careful with you. That's everyone. Four is where you start, and four is the ceiling."

Cal took his hands off the sphere.

Tier Four. He turned the number over the way he turned over a charge he hadn't seen coming. Nadia was a nine. She had been a nine since she was sixteen, and the family had stopped saying it out loud because there was nothing left to add to it. He had spent two years learning what nine looked like from the far end of a dinner table. Nine didn't hurry. Nine didn't explain itself. Nine could stand in the middle of a courtyard and let the world come to it.

At four — even at four, with two aspects to her one — he would still be the one walking.

There were eleven small punctures across his palms where the sphere had taken what it wanted. He closed his fingers over them.

"All right," he said. "It's not nothing. A year ago I'd have taken four and thanked the man who handed it to me."

"It doesn't stay at four," his mother said.

"It goes up."

"It goes up." She let a beat pass. "You know how."

"Refiners," Cal said. "Prism water."

"Refiners make prism water. It's the only thing anybody's found that pushes an aspect higher once the aspect is already in you. You buy it, you take it, you climb. The good merchants sell out of every batch before it's cool."

"How far does it go?"

"One tier. Two, if the blood's good and the money's better." Her hands stayed in her pockets. "That's what people mean when they tell you a thing can't be bought past a certain point."

"Because of the grit," Cal said.

"Because every well has a shape, and the grit doesn't match it. Water, iron, wind — a born aspect is a shaped thing. The water comes in clean and it still comes in carrying, and what it carries settles at the bottom, and one day there's no room in the well for anything. Not water. Not a forge. Not the best refiner on the coast with a knife at his own throat. It closes because it's refusing things."

Cal did the sum.

Four, plus two, is six.

"Six," he said.

"Six if you start at four," his mother said. "It's the same two tiers wherever you start from."

"The blank doesn't refuse anything," Cal said.

"The blank has nothing to refuse anything with." She looked straight out of the light at him. "Nothing in it, and nothing to refuse with. It takes every batch, at every tier, as far up as you're willing to work for it. It gets harder. It doesn't stop."

His father said, "Your mother wanted this next part to be hers."

"Because it's the good part," his mother said. "Cal. Your father told you that being born blank is the strongest constitution he's ever seen. He wasn't being kind. He doesn't have it in him to be kind about a thing like that, and he's right. You aren't missing a constitution. You're missing a key. We found the key. It's in the room with you."

Cal's eyes stung. He turned his head and put his forearm across them and held it there a second longer than the gesture needed, and the light went on being gentle with him from three feet away.

"It's dusty down here," he said into his sleeve.

"Now," his father said. "Before your mother takes the rest of my material—"

"Dorian."

"—there's a thing I want on the record."

"Dorian." A pause. "You've got your speech face on."

"I'm not afraid of your mother," his father said, to Cal. "I want that on the record before we go on. This is not fear. This is respect with a long history behind it."

Cal looked at the bruise. It was coming up under his father's left eye, yellow-green at the edge, the kind you got from a knuckle and not from a doorframe. Wherever his parents were — and Cal had spent two years not finishing that sentence — his father had still stood in front of a camera with a fresh one, for his son.

"First rule of this house," his father said. "You stand with your own. Whatever it costs. If your mother and I ever disagree in front of you, note the disagreement, and then stand with your mother."

"That isn't what the rule says," Cal said. He was grinning, and he didn't stop.

"It's what the rule means." The grin came back and took ten years off him. "You'll want it, later. When you and Nadia are together, you'll want it. She isn't going to be the easy one."

Cal let that go by.

His mother had done more of the raising of Nadia than anyone alive, and what came out of it was a person with his mother's temper and none of her patience, who had been hitting him — with a practice sword, with the flat of her hand, with one flat look that could take the skin off a man — since he was nine. Someday he would tell her about this conversation.

He filed it with the things he was never going to do.

"The first one's already forged," his mother said. "Your blood. A thread of your soul. We took what we needed before we left, and it's inside the sphere with the Forge. The Forge will teach you the rest when you're strong enough to hold it."

Cal put his hand out toward the light. It was a useless thing to do and he did it anyway.

"Thank you," he said. "Both of you. For the paper, and the mountains, and whatever it cost that you're not going to tell me about." His voice came out steadier than he expected. "All right. I'm ready. Give it to me."

His father didn't answer.

The pause went on long enough that Cal looked up from the sphere. Dorian Vane stood with his hands at his sides, and his jaw worked once, the way a jaw works when a man has been arguing with himself and has lost.

"There's one more thing," he said, "and then it's yours. It has to come in this order or you won't hear it."

"Say it."

"Fusion isn't something you unwrap. The aspect takes blood going in. The deep kind. The kind a body can't spare and can't get back with a meal. That's why we set this for your seventeenth birthday. At seventeen a body can just barely stand to lose that much and close the wound behind it."

"I'm eighteen," Cal said, to the light.

The record had been cut for a boy of seventeen. It had sat in the vault for a year, and he had turned eighteen that morning, and his father's mouth was already shaped for the next sentence, and the next sentence came out of it, and Cal stood there holding the year like something he'd dropped in front of witnesses.

"Blood's the small part," his father said. "A graft pulls years. From the moment it goes in, you have five. Not five and then whatever's left over — five is the whole of it, unless you reach Sovereign inside them. Sovereign isn't a rank you wear on a collar. It changes what you are at the root, and a body that's been changed that way isn't on a clock anymore. If you don't reach it, there's no sixth year. There isn't a sixth of anything."

Cal heard himself breathing.

"Your mother and I argued about this for a long time," his father said. "We're still arguing about it, in a way. It went on long enough that we understood we weren't going to win the argument on your behalf, so we stopped trying to. Here's what we set up instead.

"If you want the safe life, close the sphere. Everything in it burns when you do. The aspect, the Forge, the notes, all of it. You go upstairs and you're rich and careful, and you live to be eighty, and nobody in this city says one word against you.

"If you want the other thing, put your hand in. It'll take what it takes, and you'll wake up with a well that works, and you'll have five years to make something out of them.

"And whichever you pick, we're with you. That part was never conditional. That part we'd have said to your face."

The light held.

Neither of them said anything after that. They stood in the air above the sphere with their hands at their sides and in their pockets, faces turned toward the place where the camera had been, smiling, and the smile didn't change, and it wasn't going to change, and it went on being aimed at the same half-inch of empty air for as long as he wanted to stand there and watch it.

Cal sat down.

The floor was cold through his jeans. The light went up over his head and climbed the cabinet doors behind him, and from where he sat he could see the shadow of his own skull thrown wide in it, twice the size of a head.

One thousand eight hundred and twenty-six days. He did it twice out of habit and got the same number both times, because he'd allowed for the leap years on the first pass. He'd be twenty-three, if the arithmetic held, and the arithmetic usually held. Nadia would be twenty-four.

Then the four rungs. Marked, then Channeler, then Warden, then High Warden, and then Sovereign, which was less another rung than the door at the top of the stairs. Somewhere in this city there was a boy his age with a working well and a father who had put him on the ladder at twelve, and that boy would take eleven years to climb four rungs, and the whole city would call it fast.

Cal had five years and not one rung of it. The blank had seen to that. What he had was a well with nothing in it, a forge he couldn't reach until he was strong enough to hold it, and a ceiling that had just been lifted off him.

Then the money.

He knew what the house brought in. Everyone in the family knew, the way a family knows a smell. It had stopped being enough two years ago, and the list of things it was no longer enough for had gotten longer every month since. He didn't know what a vial of prism water cost. The recording hadn't said, and the accounts were two floors up, and he was not going up there tonight. He knew the good merchants sold out before a batch cooled, and a thing that sold out before it existed was never cheap.

Which meant he needed a price. Not tonight. But he was not going to put his hand into that sphere until he knew what a vial cost and how many vials a tier was, because a number he didn't know was a number somebody else got to set for him.

He put his head back against the cabinet and looked at the two of them standing in the light, being patient the way recordings are patient.

Then he stood up.

His knees were stiff. He crossed the vault past the map tubes and the crate and put his hand on the inner bolt of the door. Cold, oiled, the same bolt Benny had fixed that afternoon. He stood there with his hand on it long enough to hear the house above him doing nothing at all.

Then he came back.

He set his palm flat on the metal table, two inches from the sphere, and left it there. The table was cold. The sphere was not. Its light ran up over his knuckles and onto the steel, and the dried blood in the creases of his hand showed black in it, and the two of them in the light had stopped talking, and would be patient all night, and he stood there with his hand on the metal and did not put it in.