The Hammer of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

nearby, then stopped. The fewer hands that mingled in this work, the better, for many reasons. With all his strength he heaved the first pannier from the ground and began to tip the ore into the crushing trough. When all was done he spun a heavy bar pivoted in the stone wall, and water came gushing from a metal chute above, swirling the loose dirt from the chunks and herding them slowly down the trough towards the iron block at the end. As the flow quickened he lowered into it a tall flanged wheel set in a framework among levers, and two heavy shafts tipped at their end with iron blocks as big as his head, shaped to bite against the iron below; the levers worked as the wheel spun, lifting and letting fall the shafts, catching and crushing the ore between iron and iron, the shattered pieces ground to finer fragments as they passed beneath the centre of the wheel, a hub of hard stone.
    Retreating from the noise, Elof smiled in satisfaction. He had adapted this engine from those in the forge of the Mastersmith Mylio, and if it was smaller, driven by Morvanhal's ducted water supply and not a mountain torrent, it was also subtler and less cumbersome. One day, perhaps, if he needed more power he might harness the pounding of the waves below, or, as some smiths had of old, the contained and perilous force of heated steam. But not even that could match the blast of the earthfires by which the Mastersmith's furnaces were fed, and which, at times, he missed most sorely in his work. The duergar might have helped him harness them, but there were simply no such fires near enough the surface in this rolling seacoast region. Smithlore had taught him that nature held many other sources of great heat, from the sun's gathered light to the inner turbulence of certain metals subtly purified, but also how hard they were to tap, and how perilous. For one brief minute of wonder and terror he had trapped the lightning in his fist, and seen how small man stood against the compass of such forces. To draw upon the least of them would require long study, and though he had bent some time to his researches, always some matter of greater urgency had intervened; and always there was Kara. He had ideas; but as yet he was far from any answer. He rose, and busied himself about his furnace.
    Water drove the bellows; behind the panel of sooty mica in the door their glow changed from red to glaring yellow in the blast, and thence to a core of dazzling white about the foot of the crucible he had thrust in.
    The coals sizzled and sang, and as he watched the little pyramid of crushed ore slump and trickle inward he caught the note of the singing, rising and falling, and found within it, as visions are seen in hearthfires, the music of songs. One, ringing and compulsive, he knew well, though from where he could not say. The other was something new, quite new, a slower, lilting, flowing phrase that seemed to lead him on to others. That was good, that the songs sung over this work should arise out of it, one upon another, phrases that grew and burgeoned like twining flowers. Should flowers also be the starting point of the pattern he must set upon his work? But there might be something better; something closer… He ran his fingers idly over the blocks of fine beeswax he had set out, humming vague snatches of tunes, seeking for the shape they suggested within the amber depths of the wax; after a moment, forgetting the array of knives and carving tools beside it, he plucked up a long thin block, and, warming it at the furnace wall, began to work it between his fingers. It flowed and responded under his powerful grasp. "Even so," he muttered. "Even this… you learn well what you must do. Your proper pattern you shall have!"
    And that night, as the stars wheeled beyond their balcony and Kara tensed and flowed beneath him amid the tangle of their sheets, he ran his hands through her crisp hair, forcing her head back to kiss her fluttering throat; he had meant to grip