Powers Read Online Free PDF Page B

straight flights of stairs. Follow that with about five more trips each for the fire-pit and the bellows. This way, the anvil block sat firm on an honest sandstone ledge rather than perching on some floor joists of questionable virtue spaced too far apart thirty feet above street level.
    Underground seemed more fit for his kind of working, anyway. Even if he wasn’t a dwarf. He’d hung a light over the anvil and a few other spots where he needed to see fine detail. Most of the rest lay in shadow where he could best judge the fire’s heat and the glow of metal.
    With doors locked and barred behind him, he felt tension leaking out of his shoulders and back. If someone or some thing tried to come down those stairs, he had ways out that his family set up long ago. Not that those would help with Legion or any of that kind. But he had entered his heart, the place of his power. If he had any.
    He switched on the lights. Forging. He needed to reset his brain from flight to forging. He took three deep breaths and closed his eyes, letting his thoughts settle into the steel of his cane, thinking air and fire and iron and anvil and wakening new life. How to change that cane so that even a wizard wouldn’t feel its past in his hands? Couldn’t trace it and find it from the wounds it’d left in the shadowed ruins of the synagogue? Trace it, and through it find the hands that carried it?
    Things once connected always stay connected. The shaft and grip were the heart of tracing, the parts that had struck his enemy. Not the blade lurking inside—that hadn’t tasted flesh and blood, he wouldn’t need to change it  . . .
    He laid a charcoal fire in his forge—he’d never been comfortable using coal or coke to heat and work his iron. He felt a touch of memory of the wood in charcoal, of the tree and soil, rain and sunlight, something alive that made the fire listen to his needs. Coal and coke might have been alive once, but that was far too long ago for them to remember. They felt like stone now to him, not something he could talk to, listen to.
    This working wanted a long fire, to heat the whole shaft at once, change the whole shaft at once, not doing things by pieces. He kindled shavings and splints at one end until the charcoal caught, pumped the leather bellows with foot-lever and spring-pole—blowing fire through the length of the bed of coals, waking sparks, waking blue jets and miniature orange demons in the glowing heart of heat, again the old ways of working metal as he’d learned them in a past turned to mist and dust and vague shadows.
    Letting the fire-bed grow and settle, he prepared for working. He had his rituals, setting out tools and stock and plans just like a normal smith. He chose a light hammer for more control than force— talk to the steel, discuss rather than argue with it—and a two-faced swage for grooving. Then it was time to loose the blade from its sheath inside the cane’s heart, unpin blade from the grip. Lay the cane shaft and grip in the fire. Check slack-tub, brine quench, oil quench. Free the vise and set it again just as he wanted it and waiting, with brass jaw-faces that wouldn’t bite his iron.
    Feel the iron, smell the iron, hot in the coals. Read the temperature by eye. No welding here, no blazing white sparks flying from each strike of hammer on hot metal. Uniform red heat, a human would just see it as a glow, he saw something more—he saw iron willing to change in certain ways. Tongs came to his hand as if he’d called them, griping, setting the glowing cane shaft between the jaws of the swage, tapping rather than pounding, matching rounded grooves along both sides of the shaft, up the length and then back down again, to taper out a couple of inches from each end, up and back, widening, deepening, then back into the fire, judge the glow, up and down the shaft again, smoothing, fire again, swage again. Turn a quarter in his tongs, a second set of grooves, four total as he saw the