The Formless Forge

Chapter 15: Tier Four

His mother's mouth was open. His father got there first.

"So," Dorian said.

The word arrived at chest height, at the volume of a man standing three feet away. Cal had heard that voice in this room a hundred times. It had never once been aimed at him.

"So you opened it." His father didn't move. The collar sat exactly as it had sat, and the rolled cuffs, and the hands at his sides, and none of it was breath. "As your father I'd tell you to put it back. Shut the case, go up the stairs, be a rich i***t for sixty years." The pause was exactly as long as a recorded pause could be. "From a man's side of it, I'm proud of you. That's not the whole of it, and I'm not going to pretend it is."

Cal had something in his throat. He looked at the bruise instead and let it alone. There were a fixed number of minutes in this, cut into a sphere by two people who were not standing in this room, and he was not going to spend one of them on his father's eye.

His mother's eyes were wet. She let them be wet. She did not look at the sphere, and she did not say one word about putting anything back.

"Cal," she said. "You've chosen. So I'll tell you what we made you."

"Tell me."

"A grafted aspect. Tier Four. Water at the front, light behind it."

"Water," Cal said.

"Yes," his mother said. "Water."

"Fire ends a fight. Lightning. Steel. One of the good ones." He heard his own voice getting younger and could not stop it. "Water's the one they call soft."

"Water loses the first exchange," his father said. "It wins the fourth. Fire's over in three seconds one way or the other, and it burns a man out inside ten years, and every boy your age wants it anyway."

"And it isn't water by itself." Ines turned her hand over, palm up, as if the thing on the table were already lying in it. "Light behind it. The two of them working together will do things my best work never did. Your father and I ran that pairing through a crucible more times than I'll admit to, and it held every time."

Cal put his palm flat on the table and left a smear on the metal.

"The graft takes blood," his mother said. "A great deal of it. The years it costs come off the end, and the damage from that doesn't show in a mirror for a while. Water closes a wound. Light closes it again from the inside, slower and further down. The two of them will be working on you the whole time, whether you're awake for it or not."

"And we want you in a trade," his father said. "Refiners need water or light. One or the other is the floor of it, and for most people it's the ceiling too. Forty licensed men and women in this city, and thirty of them do a competent job and nothing past it."

"You have both," his mother said.

"You have both, and you're blank. A blank can work a batch without pushing any of himself into the material. No residue, no waste, no ceiling, the same forty times over, and the well doesn't drop. And a blank's own wells don't take up what he refines. Everybody else's silt up and stop taking anything new by the time they're forty. Yours won't. You could put a crate of prism water into yourself and none of it would come back out of you as junk."

Cal looked at the edges of them, where the light was thinnest. Nothing had changed yet that he could point to.

"Two purifications in one body and no license," his father said. "That isn't modesty. That's waste. What comes out of your hands will be cleaner than what comes out of theirs, and the people who buy it can tell inside a week."

Ines's mouth curved. "And if you run the house into the ground, you'll still have a trade. You can be broke anywhere in the country and still eat."

Cal laughed. It surprised him and it hurt somewhere under the ribs, and he had to look at the table for a second.

"The slate holds the Formless Forge," his father said. "It'll make you the second aspect. Only the second. The third one's a different animal, and it isn't in this house."

"Where is it?"

"Not in this city. The method's written down. The place is written down, and the name that goes with the place, and all of it's in the slate with the rest."

"You're not going to tell me."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you'd go." His father shifted his weight, and the image repeated the movement exactly, the way nothing living ever does twice. "Tomorrow, probably. A slate you can't read, a second aspect you can't hold, one straight line in your head from here to us. You'd get as far as the first man who wanted something from you."

Cal said nothing.

"Wait until you're a Channeler before you touch the second one," his father said. "Not a Marked. A Channeler. You'll want to do it the week you wake up from this one. Don't."

"All right."

"Say it back."

"Channeler," Cal said. "I'll wait."

"Good."

The cuffs of his father's sleeves had gone soft at the edge, the way paper goes soft where a hand has held it.

"And one more thing," his mother said, "and then it's finished. Cal. Whatever you hear, and you'll hear things, most of them lies and some of them not — don't come looking for us. Not until you're a Sovereign."

His hand came off the table. "That's the whole of it. Five years is the whole of it, you said so yourself, and now you want me to spend it not—"

"Then it's five years."

"Dad."

"Nothing's going to happen to us before we see you again," his father said. "We've got too much left to argue about."

Cal laughed again, one short breath of it, and it came out wrong, and his eyes were hot, and he tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling of the vault until the heat went out of them.

Then the thinning got serious.

It started at the edges of them, at the cuffs and the collars and the outside line of a shoulder, and it went through the middle of them last, and Cal said, "Wait," and then, "Hold on," and neither of those had ever worked on anything.

His hand was already out. It went through his mother's sleeve, through the shoulder under it, through the space where her coat kept the shape of a coat, and there was nothing there to touch. Not cold, not warm, not resistance. The air of a basement with a dead furnace in it.

Then the two of them were gone and the room was dark the way it had been dark before he pressed his hand into the sphere.

He kept his arm out in the empty air for longer than there was any point to. Then he brought it down.

The halves of the sphere still hung at either side of the table, still lit, still holding their old curve. Between them the black slate drifted with its worn edge, and beside it the blue thing turned, unhurried, the way a plant turns, and the white threads in it came and went.

The furnace ticked. Somewhere above him, in the house, a pipe knocked twice and settled.