The Formless Forge

Chapter 16: First Payment

The furnace ticked twice more before he moved.

He dried his eyes on his cuff, one side and then the other, and looked at what came off on the cloth. Blood, from the cut on his left cheekbone. Nothing else.

"Thanks," he said. "Both of you. For all of it."

The room did not answer. He had not expected it to.

The black slate came away from the air with no more resistance than a book off a shelf. It was cold, colder than the basement, and the cold climbed up through the bones of his fingers and stopped at the wrist. A flat black rectangle about the size of his hand, and it weighed like a brick. Along one edge the stone was worn down and slightly hollowed, the way a thing gets worn when the same pair of hands has held it for years.

He turned it over. Nothing on either face. No writing, no carving.

It went inside his jacket, against his ribs. The cold of it came through the shirt. He left it there.

The blue was still turning. While he had been busy with the slate it had come around to face him, unhurried, the way a plant leans toward a window, and the white threads inside it lit and went out, lit and went out.

A question arrived. He let it go.

He flexed his right hand. The palm was stiff and tacky, and there were more holes in it than there had been that morning, and the fingers would not close all the way. Later was starting to look like a long list.

"From today," he said, "I've got an aspect too."

He said it flat. Then he reached out and took hold of it.

Cold came first, up through the palm and into the wrist, the same deep cold as the slate, and then it went past the wrist and kept going, which was not how cold worked.

Then the pain.

It did not begin in his hand. It began somewhere under his left ribs and went through him in every direction at once, and it did not stop at the skin. It took the strength out of his knees before he knew they had gone. His left hand went out for the table and got the floor.

The last thing he saw was the ceiling. Above him the halves of the sphere burned at either side of the metal, split open, and the light of them lay flat across the boards and across his hand.

The slate lay cold inside his jacket, printing its shape into his side.