Isolation & Fear (Damned of the 2/19th Book Seven)

Asleep

GPS ERROR - OUT OF RANGE
The Mountain, Home, Upper Range
TIME/DATE STAMP ERROR
Long Night, Second Wake

I quenched the steel in the barrel of water, lifting it out and plunging it in again, steam hissing up from when the red-hot metal dipped into it. I repeated the motion, pulling it out and putting it back in. It left a wavy pattern on the metal as I brought it back to the forge and began heating it again. The iron had been good, but it had taken me hours to crush the rock surrounding it, then to heat it and add the components for good solid steel. I'd added nickle to it to help with the stresses of the cold, and that's what was waking longer to work it.

I was building a fighting knife of my own design.

Once it was heated I set it back down on my "anvil" and began working again. Slamming the hammer I'd made into the heated metal, turning the metal, and slamming the hammer back down. It was more precise work than it looked, required more practice that someone looking on would see. I had to pound out the imperfections, the bulges, crush the components together in the plasticized metal.

Quench, air, quench, air, forge, hammer.

The blade was going to be nearly a foot long and two inches wide and a half inch thick across the back. A blood groove all the way through on the forward end. Serrated teeth across the back toward the hilt. Drop point. Wider in the middle than at the hilt. A ten degree twist to the blade at the hilt.

A cruel and lethal weapon made of high carbon content nickle-steel alloy.

My shoulder ached, but that was to be expected. It had been hurt badly when I had dreamed of... something. I had dreamed I was something else.

I could not remember.

I could only remember the eyes of the women unless I gazed upon their visages.

I ignored the discomfort, both physical and emotional, and pushed it away, concentrating on the stark simplistic beauty of my work.

When the Longnight was over, and I had rested, I would strap the knife to my hip and begin searching for trails that were safe to take Downside. The unmen had been herding me Upside, trying to herd me toward the Sunsetface.

Why?

I could kill them, but they would simply reform.

I could not kill their God.

I was a man. A God was, well, a god.

But I could kill its servants. Kill its worshippers. Destroy its temples and idols. Leave it howling along and forgotten.

Unless it was old enough it had no need for worship.

I idly wondered what the God of the unmen was.

I was a man. I had no need of Gods, and they had abandoned my kind before I was born.

The blade shaped, I quenched it and set it in oil I had made from the fats of wargs and a white hind, and moved away.

I was hungry.

Thick slab of deer meat, rolled in spices and soaked in blood with alcohol, with herbs and berry seeds. I put it in a pan I'd made with the sand table, full of black sand taken from one of the small creeks still unfrozen, and put it over the fire.

I didn't know if I was going to be here long enough to bother making a stove.

The unmen had herded me out of two excellent lairs, driven me further Upside. Through twisted and crooked paths full of ice and snow, the cold getting more and more bitter as I traveled.