073 – Seniority

***

“Strythe. Where have you been?” Hwilla asked.

“I’ve been on a camping trip with a bunch of hairy monsters. How did you forget that?”

The long adventure had ripped up my traveling cloak and crumpled my brimmed hat. I was muddy, ragged, and worn. I plodded into the workshop and dumped my bags on the counter. The slave raid to the north was long and grueling, but at least I didn’t come away empty handed. My bags were stuffed with weird materials from the valley. A handful of spirit cells held prisoner the tiny daemons from the magic garden. The agate spheres would be useful for my later projects.

“Things here at home aren’t much better. I’ve had an awful time while you were away.”

“Please. Let me sleep.” I tossed aside my skull mask and laid down on a bench. “Wake me up in a few days.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”

“Absolutely not.”

“It’s the junior disciples. The rotten devils won’t listen to me at all.” She smacked her fist into her palm for emphasis.

“Yeah, that’s a real… Wait a minute. I’m the junior disciple.”

“That’s what changed. While you were gone, three more joined the cult. They enkindled after we did, which makes them our juniors. Yet the brats refuse to recognize my authority or call me senior. It’s insubordination.”

I closed my eyes and pulled up my cloak like a blanket. “Then complain to Fightmaster Putrizio about it.”

“I did. He told me it was my duty to look out for the younger students and guide them to the right path. He said it would be a nice challenge for me and a good learning experience.”

“That sounds like him,” I said. “Why don’t you get Yurk and Zambulon to help you? They’ve got loads of experience kicking the stuffing out of their juniors.”

“Those two have gone to Sandgrave on a mission,” she said. “I’m all alone. The only way to do this is by myself. And that means you have to help me.”

“How does that make sense?”

“Because you’re technically their senior as well. We share this responsibility. We have to reestablish the proper a hierarchy by beating them into submission.”

“Sorry. I’m already beaten. I’ve spent over a week wrangling a bunch of grumpy ogres. I’m operating on a major sleep deficit. Not to mention a mana and food and bathing deficit.”

“Then you’d better rest up quickly, junior. Because we’re in for a serious fight.” Hwilla slammed the front door as she exited the workshop.

The last thing I needed was to get roped into a schoolyard brawl, another distraction from my own training and projects. The resources gathered from the valley greatly expanded the possibilities for studying aetherics. The only components missing were time and peace; I could never gather enough of those.

With great effort, I lifted myself from the bench. Sleep would have to wait a bit longer.

From my luggage, I removed five bottles of clear glass. Four of them contained spring water from the magic garden. The essences at that sacred site had transformed this pure water into an elixir of life. Its healing virtues had saved the hart wounded by my arrow. While it could be consumed as a potion, it was more valuable to me as a specimen for study. I could analyze it, deduce its properties, create a recipe, and reproduce it in the lab.

I set down the fifth bottle next to the others. This one did not contain a liquid. Instead, a shining beetle with a jewel like carapace crawled up a budding stick. I put my face close to the glass prison.

“Tell me your secrets, sparkles…”

***

My workshop had more or less become my new home after I installed a bed and a kitchen, but it didn’t have a bath. I practically crawled back the Hall of Discipline to launder my filthy clothing and soak in a tub. I needed to wash away the residual taint of nature.

Inside the hall, three young men swatted at each other with the wooden swords. I’d never seen them before. These youths didn’t wear masks or the standard uniforms for Faceless minions. They had overturned the furniture and, for some reason, dressed up the practice dummies in real clothes. Equipment was scattered everywhere. A pile of dirty dishes covered Putrizio’s desk.

“Who are you?” one of the vandals asked me.

“Who am I? You’re the ones destroying my house. Who are you?”

“Oh ho. So then you must be the other senior disciple, the one called Strythe.” The vandal had hair so blonde it was almost white and a very smug expression. He seemed to be the leader of the group. Two other boys served as his flunkies.

“Yes. That’s me.”

“I’m Groskip of Vrinellia, the great grandson of Grotrok the Reaver,” he stated proudly. They group looked at me, as though expecting me to recognize those names and react accordingly. I shrugged.

“Huh. Nice to meet you, Skip. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got laundry to do.”

I walked past them to the baths. These annoying children were Hwilla’s problem. They could turn the Hall of Discipline into a clubhouse if they liked. I wouldn’t complain if they burnt the place down.

I shoveled some coal into the water boiler and sparked the fire. I filled up one tub for my dirty clothing and one for myself. The faint stench of ogres still clung to me. A long, hot bath would help wash away the weariness of the camping trip. Steam rose from the surface as I crawled in the hot water.

Of course, our short introduction didn’t satisfy the three new disciple. The boys followed me into the bath and stood menacingly above my wooden tub.

“You dared to turn your back on a noble of Vrinellia. And now you’ve discarded your sword and left yourself defenseless and nude. Madness. Are you daft?”

“Yes, I am.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Wha? What?” he stuttered.

“Daft. I’ve recently suffered serious brain damage. From a blast to the head. The accident scrambled my wits and erased my memories.” I tapped the side of my head. “As a result, I know there are many things I don’t know now, because I don’t now know the things that I didn’t not know then. Your illustrious family must be one of them. Never heard of you, Skip.”

“It’s Groskip. And everyone’s heard of my father Grotrok. He’s the general of the monster armies, second in command of the Void Phantoms!”

“Ooh. Sounds nice.” I leaned back and stuck my feet over the edge of the tub.

“He’s not nice at all. He’s a fearsome warrior who strikes terror into his enemies. And I am his apprentice.” Groskip pointed at his chest. “There is no way that a person of my noble lineage would follow the orders of a commoner such as Hwilla. Or a buffoon such as you. I reject your claims of being my seniors.”

“Okay. That’s reasonable. If you’re already an apprentice to a swordsman, then you don’t need instruction from me. Sounds as though you’ve got it all squared away. Could you hand me that bar of soap there, Skip? Next to your elbow.”

“My name is not Skip. It’s Groskip of Vrinellia,” he spat. “As the scion of a noble house, I expect a commoner such as you to address me with respect.”

I stared blankly at him. “I’ve got a question for you. Maybe you can explain it to me, seeing as how you’re a noble. I don’t understand these things, on account of my scrambled brains. A swordsman becomes a noble by enkindling their flame. Correct? All swordsmen are thus nobles. And that lofty status is passed down to their offspring to the the third degree: children, grandchildren, and then great grandchildren. Then it peters out. The fourth generation cannot claim to be nobles or carry blades beyond a length proscribed by law. Is that the gist of it?”

“Yes. Of course. Any child knows that.”

“Hmm. Then how can a swordsman—here’s the part that confuses me—how can any swordsman be a commoner? When they are, by definition, the source of nobility?”

“It’s because you come from a common family. You have a humble background.”

“Yes. But doesn’t that mean you also came from a humble background? It’s just a ground a few steps further back than my own.”

“I’m from a long line of nobility. I can trace my pedigree to six dozen famous swordsmen, both from the western and eastern islands, going back thousands of years. My family maintains an antique martial tradition and bestows upon its members a strict education in manners. We are born to rule and to fight.”

“Ah. So like purebred horses then?”

“Exactly.”

I had meant to annoy him by comparing him to a domestic animal but missed the mark. He took my words as a compliment. I should have known. The only thing nobles loved as much as swords were their horses.

“It’s beneath my honor to take orders from a washerwoman and a town fool.” He kicked over my tub of laundry. The soapy water spilled across the floor. “The two of you will bow down to your betters.”

The trio of young lordlings exited the bath room. I could now see why Hwilla had so much trouble with them.

I had met plenty of egotistical people in my former life. The Community of Scholars attracted many brilliant students who, on becoming part of the metropolis’s scholarly elite, grew prideful of their own gigantic brains. But at least everyone there understood snobbery to be a character flaw. The Community would even expel those who failed to maintain a minimum degree of professional courtesy.

Conversely, the modern nobility cultivated arrogance by design. Egoism was a virtue. The entire social system reinforced this. The aristocrats kept themselves separate from the lower classes, only coming into contact with their own household servants. Nobles refused to do any kind of useful work for themselves. Manual labor was abhorrent. They also claimed a host of strange privileges. Sumptuary laws prevented the lower classes from wearing certain clothing, jewelry, colors, hats, signs, or decorations reserved for the nobility. Nobles could abuse commoners without consequence, but the reverse, a common person striking a noble, brought savage punishments. Even an accidental bump against a lord could get a person whipped raw and pilloried.

I would have expected that swordsmen from the lower classes, on being raised in status to the nobility, would work to temper this bad behavior. After all, they knew what life was like at the bottom of the social hierarchy. But that was not so. They were even worse. In attempt to distance themselves from their humble origins, they would adopt all the nobles’ arrogance and more. Skip’s two flunkies were examples of that. By associating with the pedigreed aristocrat, they could better puff themselves up as ‘real’ nobles too. Arrogance through association.

Societies rules did not apply within the Void Cult. We were an evil cult of heretics, blasphemers, and subversives. We broke sacred laws and taboos. Our very existence was a crime. The only thing that mattered here was the will of the dark lord, and Hrolzek rewarded his officers, not for their inherited status, but for their abilities. So it was inevitable that anyone who clung to those incongruous beliefs, such as Skip, would cause serious friction. He didn’t fit in.

I held my breath and sunk under the water.

***

The time had come to retire my sword. Its blade was too delicate for me. My fights against the belching boar and the ogres almost snapped it in half. The dress sword was meant for a sophisticated courtier, not a monster hunter. Only a strong fire projected down the length of the blade could keep such a delicate blade intact in a serious fight. I preferred something more substantial.

I would forge its replacement myself.

Smithing wasn’t my specialty, but at the end of the day, a sword was just a strip of metal, not an airship or a golem. I felt smithing was within my power.

Before starting the project, I consulted with the citadel’s workers. The crew of ‘Wheel Eyes’ had constructed a large forge on level negative one. They labored in intense heat near the coal burning furnaces, banging out rough equipment for the War Creeps. The monster army needed weapons and armor, so the Wheel Eyes approximated something like an assembly line to meet those demands. An initial group did nothing but smelt the iron. Sweating men worked bellows and stirred the huge crucibles of molten metal. They scraped off chunks of worthless slag and poured the liquid into casts to form ingots.

Journeymen smiths banged the chunks of metal into workpieces. The best pieces became blanks for swords or spearheads. The second best were pounded into flatter sheets for making armor. Inferior chunks of metal became tools, nails, and horseshoes.

At the next stage, the senior smiths shaped and tempered the blades. They sharpened the edges on spinning grindstones. With the demanding rate of production, no effort went into beautifying these tools of wars. Practicality was the highest concern. A group of dirty apprentices added the finishing touches by dipping the armor pieces into a vat of black liquid and hanging them to dry. The War Creeps could not be trusted to maintain their own equipment, so the armor needed a thin coat of rubber to protect from rust. This resulted in matte black gear, totally unlike the shining armor of the Sandgrave knights.

The Wheel Eyes were not master bladesmiths. They didn’t forge high quality weapons. The officers of the cult obtained their swords elsewhere. But the soot covered workers willingly shared all they knew with me, the basics of modern metalworking. I would supplement their craft with my own Ancient science.

Over the eons since the great disaster, humans had devised countless variations of the giant murder-knife. There were war swords, dress swords, straight swords, knight swords, cavalry sabers, sea sabers, blood spades, shearbacks, swindleknicks, dog teeth, demon choppers, moon blades, seven handed swords, headsman’s swords, death brands, horse cutters, and thousands of others. I couldn’t keep them all straight. This was made worse by the fact that different nations all produced their own versions of these designs. So a straight sword in Sandgrave was much different than one in Gargléon. Other times they applied local names to a common pattern. A horse cutter in Nettlewreath was called a two-man paddle in Skarve. There was no standard taxonomy.

Then of course, some people armed themselves with unique weapons specially made to fit their personal style. Logrev had a trick sword for cutting throats. Iiyluzh’s namesake blade was a one of kind creation. His dress sword had a blunt ricasso extending up two thirds of the blade to a sharp tip, like a dagger at the end of an iron bar. Because he only needed to make small cuts to deliver a dose of poison, Iiyluzh could fight with what was more or less a giant needle. Zambulon used a typical dress sword but one with so many quillions, guards, bows, rings, and sweepings that it looked as though he stuck his right hand in a bird cage.

Overcome with so many exotic choices, I instinctively withdrew to the most simple and ubiquitous design; my first attempt would be a straight sword. It had an arm length blade, three fingerwidths at the base and narrowing to two fingers at the point. The grip measured three palms long, allowing for use with one or both hands. Traditionally, the grip ended in a ring shaped pommel. The Wheel Eyes claimed that Sailors would run cords through ring so as not to lose hold of their weapons on a ship’s heaving decks or high rigging.

Strythe’s initial training as a spark had covered a wide range of weapons with no emphasis on any particular kind of sword. So there was no problem switching away from my current weapon. It could be retired. I would return it to Malisent to be less indebted to the witch.

From here on, I’d use my own sword and my own swordcraft.