Okay, things just got weirder, and it wasn’t often that a beautiful lady left me speechless. She started laughing but she wasn’t mocking me because her laughing seemed very genuine.
“I understand now. Okay, I think I like you.”
I confess that a part of me got excited when she told me that she liked me, but dad always said that when a strange woman said something like that to a man, she also had an agenda that didn't necessarily include him in her future.
“Please don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not making any moves on you.”
“Why would you buy that for me, it isn’t as if I need it?”
“Call it a feeling.”
“Feeling? I'm sorry but I can't accept it. Please excuse me.”
I was sorry that I had to be so firm with the lady, I thought it the best part of valour to leave the shop as fast as possible and briskly walked out. I quickly turned left past a clothing or tailor's shop, and only then started slowing down. I’m not sure why I reacted like that. Was it my imagination or was that town full of eccentric people? Did that include me I wondered?
On the eastern side of town, I discovered a quaint small alleyway with a sign on the side of the alleyway had a logo of an anvil crossed with a hammer and sword and the words “The Dryad” underneath. Just as Grenfell mentioned, and with nothing better to do I decided to inspect my future workplace. Following the narrow alleyway to the Dryad led me deep between rows of houses. Something about the air encouraged me to breathe deeply, filling my lungs with invigoration at each breath. Green Mondo type grass filled the gaps between the light brown coloured cobblestones. The green alleyway seemed out of place in that dusty town. Palisade fencing lined the sides of the alleyway interspersed with houses that backed onto the alleyway. There were no back doors to any of the houses on the alleyway. Some houses had closed windows that were either made of misted glass or others that had windows covered up from the inside. At one house I thought I heard someone talking from inside the house and I stopped and listened closely. I could hear indistinct conversations and laughing through the house walls. I tried to look over the palisade fence once or twice, but it seemed a little too high and covered with a lot of small light green and copper coloured ivy. The creeper made it impossible to see through any gaps in the fences.
Walking for a while, I came to a dead end and the walls opened into a small, secluded square, about twenty-by-twenty meters and paved with a lovely brown brick. It reminded me of a small private Italian trattoria square where people sat to eat. On the far end of the square, the only shop, a single-storey large open shop door and multi-paned window where I could see the wares displayed on the inside. What surprised me was seeing the first clear glass-paned window in Obon. The blacksmith logo repeated on a sign above the door to the left of the windows, so I confirmed I was in the correct place. That was the only building in the secluded area as if it were the only shop in its own little world.
It was most definitely a blacksmith, although it seemed to be a more of a weaponsmith judging by the various swords, knives, bucklers, axes, bows, and shields displayed in the front window. My curiosity of the weapons piqued again so I couldn’t stop myself. The door was already open just in front of me was a counter that divided the shop, keeping customers on the door side of the shop. An elderly man with white hair and a neatly trimmed beard lay gently snoring on the counter. Grenfell looked far more relaxed than when working in the woodcutter's camp, business must have been good that he could afford to snooze while he’s supposed to be working which meant he was making expensive weapons for a specific clientele.
The swords on display in the window drew my attention. They were all mounted by the handles with their blades pointing down. The first sword grabbed my attention. A medium-length double-edged sword, slender with a slight bulge at the end. That end-feature was probably added to provide some weight to the end of the swing arc of the sword, a requirement for hacking power. That sword differed from the others I observed in the adventurer’s supply shop in that its inlay design was far more intricate and the sword itself seemed sharper than a surgical scalpel. I resisted the temptation to test the sharpness lest I lose my digits. I noticed that the line patterns on the sword seemed to be emitting a strange green hue when Grenfell awoke, wiping the drool off his mouth.
“Ah, Shane. My apologies I seem to have nodded off.”
I got the feeling it wasn’t the first time. You should work harder!
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you, I was just browsing and admiring your wares.”
I hope I don’t get into trouble if he thinks I was planning something dishonest.
“No, problem. Please continue looking. As you probably figured out, customers with specific tastes are my forte.”
“Thank you. These swords are beautiful, and they intrigue me.”
Since I was being honest, I might as well continue with the praise. My father used to say that if you shower a shop owner with praise, they will shower you with discounts. Personally, I can’t remember ever getting a discount.
“Ah, you can appreciate the workmanship. I noticed you were admiring that sword, what do you think of it?”
“This one?”
I wasn’t too sure what to say to him that he didn’t already know, but I think I would at least give him an honest appraisal.
“Judging by the other swords here I would say it is one of the better crafted ones, designed mainly for hacking. It has other characteristics I cannot seem to understand, would you mind if I handle the sword?”
“No, feel free to hold it.”
I picked up the sword, and it felt heavy and yet easy to move. It was the first time I had ever held a sword like that in my life.
“It has an exceptional grip.”
The handle to stuck to my hand like gaffer tape. When I looked closer, I noticed the grip had minute Velcro like spikes that gripped my skin like the suckers of an octopus.
“This grip is fascinating; it has spikes that can hold onto someone’s skin which would be good in wet weather or with sweaty hands.”
I then closed my eyes and ran my finger along the flat shaft of the blade feeling the subducted patterns. I could sense a remarkably familiar feeling like the green brooch in the shop, there was a lot of emotion attached to that sword. The maker’s intent, his desire and his will were all encompassed into the etched patterns.
“I can sense this sword is ancient. Is it an elvish sword?”
I realised using Ara was a bit of a cheat, but I needed to impress my boss.
“Well, well, well…”
Grenfell first looked strangely at Shane but eventually couldn’t stop laughing. He wasn’t mocking Shane, rather it was surprise at how someone with so little experience could make such an exact evaluation. He already knew Shane had an appraisal skill, but it still tended to catch him off guard.
“That elven sword is over five hundred summer seasons old, made in a time when things were quite different. But it’s the first time I heard someone giving it an appraisal like that.”
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The swords were great, but the old man probably noticed I couldn’t hold my curiosity in anymore, so he showed me around his workshop. Fifteen minutes later and I was sitting at a work bench with a rusty bust-up knife in my left hand and a rust removal scrubbing tool in my right. Somehow, I wasn’t expecting to start work that specific day and perhaps a little more of a job induction would have been nice. The old man showed me the workbench, gave me the knife and the cleaning tools, saying I could clean anything in the workshop that looked so much as rusty or dusty. He said if I cleaned something making it look worthwhile, he would consider selling it. Anything I cleaned that we managed to sell, I would get a cut of the sales. After he introduced me to the workshop and dumped the work on me, the old man said he was going to be out for a while and walked out of the shop and then it was just me and the rusty knife I had to clean.
On a positive note, it gave me the opportunity to get a better look at the place. The workshop had the tools, workbenches, and the front desk in it. The workshop acted as the hub of the building with three rooms that connected to it. The first room belonged to the ablution facilities, gratefully he didn’t show me that because the toilets in Obon were either pit toilets or buckets and none of them were nice places to see or use. The second room was a massive storeroom at the back, and I mean it was massive. When the old man took me there, I swear that I couldn’t see the back end of the place. The storage racks were three levels high and continued into the distance for as far as I could see. Even a Boeing hanger couldn't hold a candle next to it. Something was frankly weird about the place because the hanger alone would have swallowed up the entire town. The final door he said I shouldn’t open and didn’t say anything more. How was someone like me not supposed open that door after a half mystical explanation like that? It was the first door I opened as soon as he walked out the shop, besides, he didn’t even lock the mystery door.
I looked at a jungle about fifty meters away. I wasn't talking about an untidy back garden. It was a veritable jungle with all its strange hooting and screaming noises along with the smell of damp earth, green plants, and the hot humid air. But the door seemed suspended in the air, just above the ground to the side of a large meadow. On the far side of the meadow lay a small hill around everything, an impermeable jungle. I couldn’t help but notice that the building I stood in looked totally invisible from the outside. Any fantastical thought I fostered about going for a casual walk on the grassy area was countered by the fear that if the door closed behind me, I may never find the building again. I had enough trouble dealing with one fantasy world, I had no appetite for dealing with another, so I carefully closed the door and pretended that I didn’t see anything.
But back to the blade I held, it desperately needed sharpening and a good clean. I held the knife up with one finger on the tip and the other hand’s finger on the hilt and took a long look at it, trying to decide where I would start. When I was cleaning it, I could sense minute details about the knife. The blade's defects seemed to stand out to me like a red wine stain on a white tablecloth making it easy for me to correct them. I also replaced the stiches in the leather handle with leather strips I found in the workshop. Within fifteen minutes I finished the knife, my speedy completion mostly due to the transmutation practice I received at the woodcutter's camp. The old man said I should keep myself busy and I had no intention of sitting down and doing nothing, so I looked around to find something to keep myself occupied. I got excited when my eye fell on a box under the wooden workbench because it was full of various knives, although they were in just as terrible shape as the first knife.
When the old man eventually returned, the first thing he asked me was,
“Were you able to sort out the knife I gave you?”
I felt a bit anxious as I handed him the first knife I restored.
“Eh, this is a new knife?”
“Yeah, all I did was clean it, and well I did use some license to sharpen it with the grinder tool over there but most of the time I simply used the cleaning scraper tool to clean the blade and a bit of that solvent over there to clean the leather?”
Grenfell looked perplexed because he never expected me to repair the knife let alone renew it to a whole new level.
“I selected this knife as your first job because in terms of condition it was one of the worst knives I have in my collection. I wanted to check your level of skill without my interference. It would have taken me a day to do what you did in half an hour. This blade had deep scratches I couldn’t buff out without making the blade too thin as to become useless. It had to be re-forged, and I certainly didn’t expect you to spend all your time fully restoring it.”
“Actually, that’s not all I did.”
I handed a box full of knives to the old man, it was better than trying to explain it.
“Eh? You restored all of these?”
“Well, I had nothing better to do. The first knife I finished off quickly. Then I started to look around for more things to clean.”
I enjoyed looking at all the old knives, tools and spares laying around. I even looked in the store in the back but lost my way for an hour while trying to find my way back. If it weren’t for my lack of direction, I could have cleaned more items. At the time, when I looked closer at the blade, I realised the scratches on the blade had filled in. I didn’t question it further at the time because I lacked the experience to know better.
“Show me the scraper tool that you used on this knife.”
I gave him the metal scraper.
“As I thought. Look, the metal from the tool is missing.”
“What?”
So focused was I on the task, I didn’t notice anything strange. The tool was about a third less of its original size and I realised it was because the scraper was passing on its iron to the knives.
“Come to think of it, that happened with the copper plating of the workbench in the woodcutter’s camp, didn’t it?”
I nodded. Although I knew that the work bench copper cover plate melted into the knife when I used transmutation, something transferred the copper to the knife, it was the first time I confirmed it was possible to transfer metals using transmutation and not by some sort of fluke. The mechanical engineer in me celebrated at all the possible metal creation opportunities. I felt excited and compelled to explore the transmutation world further, to discover its nuances and dead ends. I just knew deep inside me there was so much more to find. I knew for instance that using different strengths of metals in a blade could improve a sword’s performance. Creating anodised coatings could improve the performance of a sword without much cost, even better than galvanising.
“I can imagine that there would be a few merchants out there that would love to get you on their company books. If you ever decided to look at another career, trading could be a lucrative option.”
It seemed that transmutation and appraisal were highly sought-after skills in that kingdom, any merchant would give their eye teeth to team up with a someone that could properly appraise items, especially where inopportune purchasing of fake goods could cost a merchant a lot of money and even worse, reputation. For the moment, my main concern were the five silvers laying in my hand at the end of the day. Although I had enough money for now, catching up with living expenses would quickly absorb that. Trading was a possibility, but I'd have to tie it in with something else to add value to it. Just like there wasn’t enough interest in Obon to justify only making weapons, perhaps I could make weapons or other objects and then sell them in Shimmerstal. That way I would cut out the middleman. I would have to get a cart with horses for myself and then only could I think of trading. I wasn’t sure just how much it would cost to buy a cart, but I could start with a smaller one and build my way up. I would give it some thought.
“You’ve done far better than I expected, I can sell these knives now rather than scrapping them as I originally planned. However, evening has already arrived and it’s dark outside. You should go back to the inn and come again in the morning just after first light. Oh, by the way, before I forget you improved transmutation performance was related to your practice with the iron spheres?”
I nodded at Grenfell’s question.
“Well then, it's probably time to up-the-ante a little. Here, play around with spheres using this metal.”
He tossed a square block of gold coloured metal, about the size of my palm, over to me. A look of puzzlement came over me as he explained further for my benefit.
“That's called Orichalcum. It's one of the strongest metals used in making weapons. It has a high melting point which makes it difficult to work with, only the best blacksmiths in the kingdom can work with it and I happen to be one of them. Don't lose that block its plenty expensive.”
I started to pour energy into the metal block to try and shape it into a sphere. Although the metal readily absorbed the energy poured into it, it felt as if I was filling a large empty drum having little or no effect on the metal. It took me three times longer to get the same heating effect and when I tried using transmutation the response was sluggish, almost like syrup. With more heat in the metal came more pain in my hand as I rushed to increase the cooling effect on my skin. I'd have to be more careful in future because the wider tolerances required more vigilance. A polite cough from the old man reminded me that it was probably not the time to start with transmutation practice, I could do it later. He surprised me by paying me, five silvers for my work that afternoon. Although I had only put in half a day's work, he still paid me for a full days' salary. He made sure however to mention that he was paying me part of my wages in advance and would dock me the equivalent when the time came for me to leave. Sheesh, he was a real Scrooge. Thanking him for the Orichalcum and the five silvers, I said my goodbye and headed back to the Screaming Banshee.
It was dark by then, and the twin moons hadn’t risen yet, so I battled to feel my way on the road through the dark. Was Obon so badly off that they couldn’t afford some street lighting? Only the faint starlight helped to a small degree as I kept slipping over wagon ruts on the dirt road, hurting my ankle in the process. I could only make my way by slowly feeling the way ahead with my toes like testing the water of a hot bath. Suddenly, I stopped moving because a large monster stood facing me in the road just ahead of me.