The day after his return, Ezril, took permission from Father Talod and made for the smithy of the seminary. It lay far to the west of the compound as a boundary between the grey towers and those not just brothers of the seminary but brothers of the church. On the outside it was made of stone like the towers and buildings in the compound. Its insides, however, reminded Ezril of the seminary vaults beneath the keep.
Father Nemael asked no questions when Ezril entered the smithy. The room proved hotter than that of Tandal’s in the Elken forests and the priest put him to work on the forges almost immediately. When Ezril had worked with Tandal, he had been sloppy and disorganized. He was better now
“Been in a forge before, have you?” Nemael asked him after a moment of observation.
“Yes, Father.”
The priest scratched his jaw. “I see.”
Ezril made certain not to reveal any information of his time in the Elken forest, remembering the Monsignor’s instruction to keep it a secret. He wasn’t certain how many of the priests in the seminary knew of it, or even how many outside the seminary knew of it. After all, one of the secrets not meant to have left the Monsignor’s room had been used against him in the test of self by people who had not been in the room at the time he’d told it.
Ezril labored under the task of setting the forge and choosing the metals for melding. First, Nemael taught him how to make a sword, having him aid him in the creation of one, and Ezril found the Elken blacksmith was right: he had no place in the smithy.
As they worked, Ezril wondered at a closed room in the smithy. Something about it rubbed him the wrong way but, like Tandal, Nemael spoke vary little, and somehow Ezril knew he would get no answer from the man if he asked questions about the room.
The forging of a sword was not so different from a bow, but where the hammer hit the metal upon the anvil with a ting and a care in the forging of Ezril’s bow, for the sword, Nemael seemed to put all his might into each blow. The sound was a constant boom in the smithy.
Ezril spent three days in the smithy making his first sword. He left only for his meals and his sleep. He also left for an hour of practice with the sword with Father Talod. He attended these practices he attended using the swords his mates had made him. It was necessary because his brothers had since discarded the use of wooden weapons. Most of the training was taken up with learning how best to strap the sword to himself and how best to unsheathe it without delay.
“This is not a quiver, Vi Antari.” Talod smacked him across the head with his cane. “You don’t just pick at it and expect it to come loose. You pull it.”
It took a while but Ezril learned what the priest had to teach him. In his third day he could draw his swords, smoothly thumbing the straps of leather that held them in their scabbards with ease and pulling the blade free without cutting himself or snagging it. His skill proved mediocre but at least Talod stopped punishing him for his clumsiness and now punished him for his speed, or lack thereof.
“How would you like your blade?” Father Nemael asked Ezril one afternoon after they had polished the first sword he’d helped the priest make.
Ezril thought for a while, gauging his response. He was not certain how to describe what he wanted, and knowing his best option, he asked the priest, “Can I carve it from a piece of wood?”
The priest looked at him, puzzled, then answered easily. “No. Whatever it is you want, we will shape it while beating the metal.” Preparing the forge, the priest added, “And you will aid in its creation.”
Ezril manned the bellows, pumping constant life into the forge as Nemael hammered the metals. After the smith was done, he retrieved two other metals from a stack at one end of the smithy. He lifted them in display, inviting Ezril to choose, but he dared not leave the forge unattended. Ezril chose one with lengths three-fourth of a yard and the other quite shorter, perhaps two-third of the former. Unlike the first metal which had been grey, these bore an uneven black. Ezril knew what they were at a glance.
Asmidian ore.
“Heave,” Nemael grumbled, and Ezril returned to the laboring task of pumping the bellows in earnest, Nemael pounding away at the two metals in turn. The smith pounded for what seemed hours unending and Ezril sweated so much that he feared when he finally escaped the confines of the smithy he would be dry as hay.
Nemael pounded, paused, then returned the metals to the forge before retrieving it for another round. This was an action he repeated a number of times before setting down the hammer.
“Can the edges be curved, Father?” Ezril dared to ask.
Nemael let out a grunt Ezril interpreted as a sign of affirmation, then frowned, and Ezril believed the priest had an idea of what he wanted. A few more strikes and time in the furnace had both rods bending. Beating the initial grey metal, Nemael shaped it to the length of the dark metals, slanting it at its end so one point rose to the height of one while the other descended to the other.
Nemael melded all metals together in silence, offering Ezril no word of explanation. Ezril found himself wondering if the priest had trained his brothers in the same silence. As he worked Ezril found the sparks that grew as hammer met anvil a hypnotic thing and marveled at it. He watched the three rods fuse together with each blow. In truth, it looked more like the dark rods met, swallowing the grey previously encased between them.
Nemael deemed the beating enough and Ezril, knowing from his time with Tandal, presented a bucket of brine from one end of the smithy, earning himself a raised brow of minute surprise from Nemael while he stood back.
Holding the tang at the base of the blade Nemael plunged it into the bucket and Ezril watched the water boil. A splash caught the priest in the face. The pain from the impact should have stung but the priest’s lack of reaction could’ve fooled the sharpest of eyes into believing it was nothing more than simple water of middling temperature. As the steam escaped the bucket, the fused metal rods cooled.
Ezril wasn’t sure if the man’s lack of response was because he was Hallowed or because pain from his craft no longer held sway over him.
Nemael, never addressed Ezril by name. ‘Boy’, it seemed, was the only title befitting for him and Ezril found he preferred it to his own name in the mouth of other priests. At least there was neither concealed hate or disgust in Nemael’s words. It was clear that most of the priests respected his title of adoption more than the name that adopted him. The title ‘Vi’ couldn’t have sounded any more important than ‘Antari’ even if the title was dipped in mud.
Nemael inspected the blade when it cooled. The metal was joined to form a single one. It was unlike the ones Ezril had found in Teneri’s study when he was littler. This one was tempered and forged, but quite boorish to the sight and, Ezril believed, worse to the touch.
Nemael frowned at the sight of the form he had beaten the metal into. “Good,” he said, then kept it aside.
They repeated the process again, making a twin for the first. This time Ezril paid the priest little attention while he beat the blade into shape, listening only to the boom of hammer on metal, noting how the frown never left Nemael’s lips as if the priest hated the duty.
“Now we will finish your weapon, boy,” Nemael told him, the frown still on his lips, “whatever it is meant to be.”
The metals were the right length and width but they proved too thin. However, Nemael seemed satisfied with its thickness, or lack thereof. He motioned into the room Ezril had been curious of from the moment he stepped into the smithy, and they moved to it.
Inside, the room possessed a chill in perfect contrast to the rest of the smithy, and Nemael closed them in it, banishing the heat from the main smithy. It left them in an eerily familiar chill. Ezril knew the chill well and knew what this room housed.
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“In this room,” Nemael said, his expression grave, “we will risk our lives to forge your Sunders.”
Ezril had since learned that Sunders were the swords of priests. They were given the name, according to the stories, because it didn’t just severe a man’s life but sundered the soul. Whatever that meant. Perhaps, here he would learn what made them truly special.
The walls of the room were adorned in animal parts, from skin to various organs Ezril could not recognize. However, one organ told him what animals the parts belonged to. A jar resting on a table was clean save the red stains inside of it as the organ within beat in a steady rhythm, pumping blood that flowed from a tube at the bottom into a bucket.
“This,” Nemael spread his hands in pride, encompassing the entirety of the room, “is the secret of the seminary. This is what makes the weapons we wield the Sunders that they are. Not the Asmidian ore.”
Ezril was certain he’d heard contempt in the man’s voice, perhaps directed at the ore for reasons Ezril could not understand.
For a moment the man’s contempt reminded Ezril of Dodorin, a boy who’d always looked at everyone in contempt in the underbelly back home. The boy had bullied him quite often, whenever he saw the chance. It was not that the boy hated Ezril, it was merely that the boy bullied any and every child he could. So most of the children simply avoided him.
For a moment Ezril found himself wondering what Dodorin’s fate had been—where the boy was now. The boy had always bragged about how he would join the king’s guard when he was older and no one had possessed the confidence to inform the boy that he had to be Hallowed first.
Nemael dipped the metal rods in a bucket of Titan blood as Ezril’s thoughts came back to the present. Ezril noted the care with which Nemael handled the bucket with gloved hands before pulling the metals from it with a tong. The smith made certain not to spill the blood on himself. It was an odd act and Ezril could not understand the reason for Nemael’s extreme care.
It was just Titan blood, after all. Him and Urden had their hands deep in it at the beginning of their journey.
“Put on a glove, boy, and help me open the furnace.”
Ezril moved diligently, putting on the gloves he found on one of the counters and made his way to the furnace where Nemael stood holding the blood soaked metals away from his body. Ezril reached for the metal door blocking the furnace and it seemed the priest had no intentions of making him light this one as he had done the one in the heart of the smithy.
Ezril opened the door to the furnace and froze at the sight before him.
“Move, dammit!” Nemael bellowed, suddenly absent of all the patience he had displayed through the forging. Ezril moved, startled, and the priest dumped the blades into the flame unceremoniously, blood and all, before setting the tong aside.
There had been no heat from the furnace when Ezril had opened it, only a familiar chill he knew all too well. He understood now what made the priest’s weapons so special. Not only were they made of Asmidian ore, they were forged in shadow fire.
“It is a thing of import to take any measure of care possible when dealing with Titan blood,” Nemael said randomly. The man sounded almost too relieved to be free of the weapons and away from the blood.
Titan blood? Ezril wondered, hoping he hid his confusion well, not shadow fire?
The priest continued, ignorant of Ezril’s confusion or simply uncaring of it, “If it gets on you, it can rot the skin in a matter of seconds and, if it gets in you, it’s like poison to the blood. The rain won’t be able to save you. Not even shadow water will.”
How long did I stand? Ezril wondered, his mind casting back to the early days of his journey with Urden, to the time he’d held the heart of a Titan Boar in his hands.
Ezril and Nemael stood for minutes before the priest pulled out a different bucket made of iron and filled with water from a part of the room.
“Shadow water,” he informed Ezril. “Gotten when Titan organs are burned in shadow flame. Rarer, even, than the fire itself.”
The words pulled to mind the story of Father Aldazar. He had been the one to discover shadow water for the seminary. He had been a healer who’d come across it when he cooked Titan organs in shadow fire. The bladder and the liver, to be precise.
Father Nemael opened the furnace door and retrieved the blades from the fire. They seemed to swell, coming out fatter than when they had gone in. Black as the night skies, they were covered in soot, showing only a slight red-orange glow between cracks—as wide as a boy’s smallest finger—in the blade. Nemael returned them to the furnace.
As they waited a second time, Ezril wondered how often the seminary ate Titan meat in the dining hall, if they ever did.
Curious, he asked, “How often do we eat it in the dining hall?”
“Eat what?” Nemael asked.
“Titan meat.”
The smith regarded him curiously. “No one eats Titan meat, boy,” he said, as if it was the dumbest question a person could ask. “They are rare animals. Their skin makes for strong leather, and their flesh and organs make for better elixir, but,” the priest shook his head, “their meat is poison.”
Ezril had a feeling the man would have loved to have a taste of the animal. The fact that it was poison seemed to fill the man with sadness.
…………………………..
When the blades came out a second time, they were a deep black, dark as night, like that of his brothers and Urden’s. It was a comparison Ezril made having not seen any other priest’s weapon since entering the seminary.
Father Nemael took the blades and dipped them in shadow water. Unlike salt water, the liquid did not boil. It let out a sizzle and only when it ceased did the smith retrieve the weapons from the bucket. He took them to a table at the far end of the room and laid them on a bench beside a large pedal-driven grindstone as black as the blades.
“A Sunder pulled from shadow fire is only half ready,” he told Ezril. “Like every other blade, it must be sharpened, polished, and honed.”
Next, he had Ezril watch as, setting the grindstone turning with its pedals, he put one of the blades to it. he filed the blade in a rhythm. He counted to two in the language the priests before taking the blade from the grindstone and placing it back. The language was one Ezril had heard on a few occasions in the seminary but he still didn’t know its name or how to speak it.
After a while, Nemael handed the task over to him.
As the blade met stone it let out black sparks the likes of which Ezril had never seen before, unsettling him at its appearance. He held his wits about him and kept at his task, moving the length of the blade at the correct angles under Nemael’s instructions, increasing and decreasing the speed of the stone through its pedals as per the smith’s command. In this way, the entire length of the blade was honed. Then Ezril performed the task on the other side. He did this for both blades for a while before calling an end to the day’s work.
The next day had them fitting the hilts. The hilts were made from oak, and seemed to have been recently fashioned. It was as though the priest had reached into Ezril’s mind to choose a design for them.
Nemael fitted them to the blades, keeping them in place. He hammered four nails through the tangs within the hilts and filed them down. Then he dipped the hilts in Titan blood, wrapping them in strips of skin he retrieved from somewhere Ezril didn’t know and tossed the weapons back in the shadow furnace, hilt and blade together. After what seemed like an hour, employing the tong, he retrieved them once more.
Finished, he polished the hilts with sandpaper. He inscribed something on them with a small blade, carving with the adeptness of an experienced sculptor. Upon his completion, Nemael ushered Ezril from the room and into the heat of the smithy where the blade glistened in their beautiful black. Ezril found himself wondering which of the two was the main forge.
A pattern ran along both sides of the blades’ lengths, mesmerizing Ezril as he traced them with his eyes, from the tip of the blades to the end where they began, sprouting from inside the hilt. The hilt that had once been the color of oak and wrapped in Titan skin was now a deep dark brown. On closer inspection Ezril realized these patterns he looked at had most likely been cracks in the blades. Flaws at some point in their making, seeming to complement each other
Flaws… He smiled at the thought as Urden’s words came to mind. There are no such things.
“Your Sunders are complete,” Nemael told him. “Use them well in your service to the Credo.”
The priest took the blades’ measurements, frowning the entire time. He mumbled no words, and took no notes. When he was done, he ushered Ezril out of the smithy with a frown, as if ridding himself of an enforced nuisance.
“Yours is different from your brothers,” he told Ezril. “Harder to make. Only made two like them since I began casting with shadows.” He moved to the door, where he stopped to spare Ezril a glance. “Stay away from smithies, boy,” he added, “you have no place in them.”
He retired into the smithy after that, grumbling words Ezril heard clearly.
“Foolish boy,” he said, “making weapons like his father.”
Ezril held both Sunders up. He admired them with nothing but the light from the moon. Somewhere in the smithy he had lost track of time and had missed dinner. He wondered if Father Talod would deem it fit to punish him if he saw him walking the seminary ground so late in the night. He didn’t doubt it was possible.
Shaking the thought from his mind, Ezril returned his attention to the Sunders. They were identical to Urden’s, the wide blades curved as scimitars, arched less. They proved slightly shorter than the priest’s, but Ezril was content. In simplicity, it simply possessed a curved blade. Where his mates’ met a rectangle as guards before their hilts, Ezril’s swords possessed no guard, the blades simply grew into the hilt.
Something itched at the back of his mind, and it took him a while to realize what it was. It was something he’d learned from Felvan during his training and had seen on the man on an occasion.
A falchion, he remembered, the memory of the weapon drawing into his mind. That was what his Sunders reminded him of.
However, where Felvan’s had been arguably the length of a long sword, Ezril’s held the length of a short sword and was wider. It also had no guard.
Ezril smiled, making his way to the tower. There was something ecstatic about having his own Sunders. It made him feel closer to the title of being a priest.
He retired to his room where he kept his veils against the wall, next to the Alduin swords his brothers had made.
Somehow—he noticed—he had escaped scarring from two smithies.