The Formless Forge

Chapter 12: Standing on Nothing

The vault was two floors down, at the end of a corridor that had been dug for storage and never for people. The lights came on ahead of him in a line, and the room at the end held everything the family could not afford to lose and had no reason to look at: deeds in flat boxes, survey maps in tubes, ore samples in trays with typed labels, and a steel table with a lamp bolted over it.

Cal set the case on the table.

He was due at the front door at seven. The car, the four pages he had not read, the four names he had not read, and at nine the man who meant to walk into this house and count what was in it. That left six hours, and he was spending the first of them down here, which he was aware was not the arithmetic of a sensible person.

The latches came up. Inside, in foam cut to the shape of it, was a sphere of black crystal a little bigger than a softball. The lamp above it lit nothing inside it. What came back was the room, and him in the room, small and warped along the curve.

He wiped his palms on his jeans, one and then the other, and put both hands flat on the sphere.

The hum reached him through the table before it reached him through his hands. On the steel by his wrists, a line of filings and dust slid sideways, all of it the same way, and the lamp stuttered once and came back. Then the surface gave. It did not c***k. It ran, black and thin as oil, up over the backs of his hands, and where it touched him it went in.

Needles. Cold, and not deep, and a great many of them; and then the blood went out of him after them, a slow pull from the middle of his palms that his fingers had nothing to do with. He counted, because counting was what he did with things he could not do anything about. He got to eleven.

The black let go of him. It drew back into the sphere, and the sphere went hard again, and light came up out of the top of it in threads.

The threads hung where they were for a moment, going nowhere. Then they found each other.

Two figures stood on nothing above the table. Not ghosts; they had edges. His father in a white shirt, hands loose at his sides, weight even, spine doing all the work. His mother in a dark purple coat, hair pinned up, hands in her pockets, wearing the face she saved for the last word of other people's sentences.

Cal's nose stung. He pushed it down.

"Dad," he said. Then, quieter, "Mom."

They looked at the place where a person would be standing, which was where he was standing. They did not look at him. He had known that, and it was worse than knowing it.

"If you're watching this," his father said, "you're seventeen."

Eighteen. Cal kept his hands flat on the table and did not say it out loud. He was not sure yet what you said to a recording.

"Which means we're not with you," his father went on, easy as anything. "Either that, or we're with you and being polite about it. I'd bet on the first one."

"Don't bet the house," his mother said.

"I'd bet a small part of the house." His father's smile widened by a fraction. "You should be taller. There had better be some height on you, because your mother's family is not going to give it to you and I've done what I can."

His mother leaned in slightly. "Is anyone chasing you? At school. Tell me there's someone at that school with taste."

"Your son," Cal said, to the two of them standing on nothing, "has a good face and nothing else. So no."

"— and now you're standing in a basement feeling sorry for yourself," his father said.

Cal's hands came off the table.

He had said the first half of that out loud. The second half he had not said to anybody — not to Benny, not to the case, not to the two empty hooks up in the east corridor. He stood still and waited for the light to jump ahead, the way it would if he had talked over it.

It didn't jump. His father's smile sat at the same half inch above the same nothing, his mother's hands stayed in her pockets, the table hummed its one note under his palms, and nothing in the room had changed at all.

He put it away where he kept things he could not price yet, and set his hands back flat on the sphere. The eleven places the needles had gone in stung under his weight.

"Or is it the blank?" his mother said. "If it were me, that's the thing I'd want settled first."

The lamp buzzed. Cal's ears did something with it — a small narrowing, all the sound in the room pulled to a point.

His wells had come in after they left. Nobody had found anything in him worth testing before that, and when the tests came back, they came back the same three times over: three wells, and nothing in any of them.

They had not been there for that. They could not have known.

"Before your wells came in," his mother said, "we looked. There are methods, Calder. They are not in the school library and they are not comfortable, and we used them a long time before we were sure."

"Three wells," his father said. "We counted them before you did."

The question was out of him before he had agreed to ask it. "Is that why you're gone?"

Nothing in the light changed. His father's face went on smiling at the same half inch of air, and his mother's hands stayed where they were, and Cal counted three seconds, then five, and the light went on waiting for the script.

"Here's the thing I want in your head before anything else," his father said. "Being born blank is not a defect. In my opinion it is the strongest constitution a person can be born with, and I have met a great many people with opinions about it."

"You don't have to sell it that hard, Dad."

"You can't pull anything out of the air," his mother said. "That's real. It isn't a small thing, and we are not going to make it small."

"But a problem isn't a wall," his father said. "Every problem has a shape, and a shape can be worked."

"If it's empty," his mother said, "put something in it."

Cal looked at the two of them standing on nothing in a basement at one in the morning, and what he felt was not hope. It was the specific irritation of being handled.

Grafting an aspect onto a person after birth was a thing said at parties, by people who had never tried it. He had tried it, at thirteen, with a book and a bad idea and more of his own blood than he intended to admit to anybody. It had not worked. Nothing had worked. Every test anybody had run on him since he was twelve had come back the same answer in different handwriting.

"The day we knew what you were, we started looking," his father said. "Years before you could read."

"Years," his mother said. "Mountains of paper. Your father read things that put him to sleep sitting up."

"That happened once."

"It happened in the kitchen and you hit the table with your head."

"We found it." His father's voice changed on the two words. "It's called the Formless Forge."

Cal's hands were flat on the sphere and he had stopped breathing. He made himself start again.

"It forges an aspect," his father said. "You put yourself into it. Blood — the deep kind, not what a cut gives you — and a thread of soul along with it. What comes out will go into a well and stay there. Not sit on top of you and fade. Stay."

"Element, if you want element," his father said. "Beasts, if you want—"

"Give me the rest of it," his mother said.

His father gave up the floor at once. "Sorry. Yes. Your mother's turn."

"It isn't one thing," his mother said. "Two properties. One leads, one follows. Pick a pair that feeds each other and it does more than the sum of the two."

"— beasts, if you want beasts," his father said.

"Get all three feeding each other," his mother said, "and it is not the same order of thing at all."

"Three wells, three of them," his father said. "Nobody in this city has ever had that, Cal. Nobody in this city has ever been able to pick."

Cal's eyes moved, unfocused, over the light.

Fire that could also arc. Every exchange would be two exchanges. Every man who closed on him would be closing on both at once. He was aware that he was grinning at a lamp in a vault at one in the morning, and that he had not grinned at anything in a while.

He was already spending it. He caught himself at it — a ledger opening in his head, columns and margins, him putting names in the columns. He did not stop.

"Nothing's perfect," his father said.

He cleared his throat.

The smile came off his face the way a coat comes off, and Cal could not remember ever having watched his father take that long to find the next thing.

"There's one flaw."