“I really can’t believe you all put up with those two,” I complain to Nthazes. “I know we’re short on dwarfpower down here, but is it really impossible to replace them?”
“It is, I’m afraid. There are very few who’ll take this job.”
“Some do, though."
"Not enough. Recruiting is a real problem for us."
"You must manage somehow."
“We barely manage. About half are born down here, that is to say at the trading post, from unofficial wives which Runethane Yurok turns a blind eye to. Even so, it's still frowned upon. I was one of those, although my father’s dead now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s fine, the memories are faded now. The other half are poor types—miners and whatnot—who decide they’d like to have a go at being a runeknight no matter how frightening the conditions.”
“I’d have thought there’d be a fair few of those. I used to be one.”
He shakes his head. “No. Even the most desperate are reluctant: we’re bound to Runethane Yurok personally, and only very rarely are we allowed to leave. Guarding against the deep darkness is a service of eternal blackness, cold, and very little freedom. That’s how most up there see it.”
“You think he’ll let you go, though? To journey with me?”
Nthazes’ pale face looks pensive in the forge-light. “Maybe,” he says eventually. “As long as I give my word to return.” He pauses, deep in thought. “It’s a dream, at least.”
“I hope he does.”
“I do as well.”
“But then if Fjalar and Galar are bound to the runethane personally,” I say, “Why won’t he punish them?”
“No idea. Runethane Yurok is an... interesting dwarf. Comes up with funny ideas on occasion, like allowing a human down here. Allowing you to stay down here as well. And the twins are always coming up with funny ideas. Maybe he's taken a liking to them.”
“He may like them, but Commander Cathez certainly doesn’t. To say nothing of Hraroth, and Hothuk, and Yathak.”
“Well, we’ll see how it plays out. Who knows? Maybe they’ll mature.”
“They better.”
"Anyway," says Nthazes. "What they do can't be helped but either of us."
"That's true. Shall we begin?"
We're not down here in the forging pits to chat about Galar and Fjalar. I’ve asked him to come down so he can teach me another lesson. Not about how to forge my new titanium armor, which I'm confident I can handle on my own, but about how to manufacture something even more important. Something that every runeknight must craft if he is to continue his forging, and his life.
An amulet of unaging.
I don’t have the materials for it yet, of course. There's a reason runeknights who get stalled at the lower degrees die of old age—the gems required are extremely rare and expensive. Not just any stone will do. It must be flawless. Light must be able to refract off it in a rainbow of total clarity and beauty; only then can it be guaranteed that the runic power will flow through the facets unimpeded.
Only the very best gem cutters—the most respected of the common professions by a long way—can provide jewels of such quality, and they charge dearly for them.
But I have asked Nthazes to at least tell me the basics of how they work, so I can start thinking up designs for my own one.
“So,” he says. “Amulets of unaging."
"Yes."
"Have you ever seen one?"
“I have. My guildmaster’s.”
He nods. “Good. What did it look like?”
I try to remember. “It was diamond, in a gold setting I think. And the runes seemed to be inside the gem itself, though maybe that was just a trick of the light.”
Nthazes grins. “Ah, I don’t think that was just a trick of the light. Amulets of unaging are considered hard to create for a reason, Zathar. Take a look at mine.”
He reaches into his shirt and pulls out his amulet. Its design is markedly different to Wharoth’s: it’s made up of three gemstones, a central pink diamond and two hexagonal rods of red beryl above and below it, all encased in a dark stone I do not recognize.
“No metal for the setting?” I ask.
“The enruned gems are the important part. The casing is only there to keep everything steady against your skin—though of course the choice of material is still important. There must be some resonance with the runic flow. Mine is darkslate—a kind of stone only found some way down the Shaft.”
I have heard the Shaft spoken of often. It's where the deep darkness lies.
“I see,” I say. “And the runes in the gemstones? I can’t see them.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
He rotates the amulet back and forth. Long spirals of runes flash on its surface—no, are they slightly below the surface? I lean forward to get a better look, and my eyes widen in amazement. The runes are indeed carved below the polished facets of the gemstones. Nthazes grins.
“How?” I ask, utterly astounded. “How is that possible? Some special chisel?”
“No,” he laughs. “There’s no such chisel. Take a closer read of the runes and see if you can figure it out.”
I mouth the runes silently as I read. The poems are what I expected: elaborate metaphors about strength of heart and mind, and stories and analogies about time and its power. Yet there is a subtext. The theme of each runic poem is dual, with a main idea and a subliminal idea. The subliminal idea is the same for each: that the power of what lies within is greater than what lies without.
This shocks me. Us dwarves, and runeknights especially, are all about what lies around us—we value wealth and beautiful crafts. We are judged on our armor, something we literally wear over our skin. Valuing what lies within our hearts? Sounds suspiciously elvish.
I tell Nthazes this and he shakes his head.
“What lies within is just as important, Zathar. That’s where the power to forge comes from, doesn’t it? Not from metal and gem.”
“Metal and gems are also needed. And knowledge from without too. Runes don’t come from within.”
“They did originally. From the Runeforger.”
“I’m not the Runeforger though. Neither are you.”
“Well, true. But think about it like this—the runes, metal, and gems come from without, but the strength and intelligence to put them together comes from our brains and hearts. It’s not an elvish idea at all.”
I frown. “Maybe I can understand that,” I say reluctantly.
“So that’s why we make amulets to keep our bodies strong and our brains sharp and in their prime.”
“I’ll think on it.”
“You still don’t sound totally convinced.”
I scratch my head. “No, I think I understand. I’ve always said to myself that forging is in my blood. That’s from within, I guess.”
Power from within...
I recall my conversation from ten years ago with Guildmaster Wharoth. About my halat rune not being halat at all, but something original, and about how the runes I created down with the river trolls, which adorn my armor even now, are each subtly warped, subtly new.
My skin prickles suddenly. The terror of the dragon and the shock of losing ten years had pushed all that to the back of my mind, but now for the first time since coming here I truly reflect on what it could mean: power from within. The same power, perhaps, as that of the Runeforger, or at least some shadow of it. I shiver.
“Are you all right?” Nthazes asks. “You’ve gone pale.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Just thinking too hard. So you're saying that the subtext of the poems physically pushes the runes below the surface of the gems?”
"That's one way to think of it. Some say the gems themselves understand the poem, and pull them in."
"I imagine that you have to choose the runes very carefully, though."
"Of course. So you've made a good choice in deciding to start thinking about them now."
"Thank you," I say. "And thank you for teaching me.”
He puts his amulet back around his neck and tucks it into his shirt. The runes flash in the forge-glow before vanishing underneath the fabric.
“No problem," he says. "But I desire an equal exchange.” He grins. “There’s something that’s been intriguing me lately: is it true that there are beasts that fly through the air in the upper caves? And above the surface too?”
“Hundreds,” I begin, smiling, glad to take my mind off serious matters. “In the stalagmite forest there were bats that...”
----------------------------------------
After roughly an hour of telling him about every single flying creature I have seen or read about—excluding dragons, which I tell him I would prefer not to discuss for fear of ruining the good mood—he says goodbye and leaves me to start work on my new boots.
Being the slowest dwarf in the hunting party was not exactly to my liking. If something worse than the dithyok showed up, and I have been told there are such creatures, and we’d had to abandon the dead gelthob and flee, I'd have been the first in the predator’s sights. Or scents or hearings, as it were.
No, being slow does not agree with me at all. Some purists might say this is undwarvish, and that a runeknight should trust in the strength of his armor and stand firm against his foe, but I doubt they have looked death in its gaping maw before.
So boots it is. The honor I won for stabbing the dithyok in the side and saving Galar from its onslaught was enough to get me two square feet of five millimeter thick titanium. It won’t make for the thickest plates, but titanium is incredibly strong for its weight, and I don’t want my boots to be too heavy.
I clip out a small section with a diamond-edge cutter, then quickly realize that I’m totally unprepared for just how difficult titanium is to work with.
Firstly, hot titanium cannot be allowed to come into contact with steel. If there is even a single spot of rust, it can react to create a small blast and cause terrible scarring to the craft. Cold hammering seems the obvious solution: after all, I am not forging a sword where I need to flatten out a thick bar, just shaping a small plate into a toecap.
However even cold hammering on a steel anvil could result in iron oxide getting scraped onto the titanium to later explode in the furnace. So the anvil must be draped in a specially manufactured sheet of woven glass, which despite my best efforts to secure it firmly, shifts slightly with each blow of my hammer.
And because I cannot use a steel hammer, this one is lead encircled with silver runes of hardness. Its head is small to prevent it being too heavy, and I find it very awkward to use. I can’t determine how hard I need to make my blows, and titanium’s natural flexibility compared to steel compounds this issue.
It takes me a very long time to get the toecap into the exact form I want. And I still have to tap out all the imperfections. My hand is shaking from exhaustion and stress by the time the curve is smooth enough to meet my standards.
I pause. Is it really good enough yet? I hold it to my ear and tap it with a chiming rod. The ring is pure but not quite pure enough. There are still imperfections.
Another long stretch of gentle tapping commences.
Now for the heat treating. This particular alloy of titanium must be heated in two stages. Once to white heat, then it must be cooled to yellow heat and kept there for ‘a while’—of course no one can tell me the specific length of time.
I turn the furnace up as high as it can go and place the toecap right at the back. I wait until it’s glowing white hot then wait some more. No one can tell me exactly how long it has to stay at this stage either. I will have to use my dwarven instinct. When it tells me its time, I pull the toecap to the front of the forge and turn the heat down.
The white fades to yellow. I wait some more, again trusting my dwarven instinct. Then I pull it out and place it on the anvil to cool
By the time it's red, I can already tell I’ve misjudged the timings. The metal has expanded too much and warped—the corners are upturned.
My instinct has failed me.
I suppress the urge to scream in rage and dash the hot metal against the floor, and take some deep breaths. I sigh. This was no more than I expected: I’ve been told multiple times that forging titanium takes a great deal of practice to get used to.
Heart heavy with disappointment, I clip out another small plate and start the process anew.