Sword of Destiny

Chapter 7: Purpose

15 years ago

And he did grow to love the work. It suited his curious side and it fanned the child in him. He had spent all of his youth playing the adult; hiding from the bullies and hiding from his family. Here though, he was his father's son. Here he was a young smith hoping to inherit a great trade. Here he found happiness. Genuine happiness.

And he found purpose too. He rarely even read Delfin's book, and he hoped it could last. By the Father of Paths, he hoped it would last.

His brothers refused to work Mandari steel. They considered it a terribly poor substitute, and he quickly learned that it was. The Mandari did not have easy access to the great iron ore supplies of the Gorfinian Black Mountains, nor the Dead Sentinels even further into the desolate North. They would not even have much access to that immaculate steel imported from the southern continent, though no doubt they caught some. No. The Mandari were mineral poor, and as a consequence, their steel blooms – being formed of iron dust at best – were patchy and sub-standard. Yet somehow, they made the finest weapons in the known world. How?

It was something his brothers had no time for. They were too busy rushing through trade, drinking, whoring, and every now and then visiting their wives. They helped their father when he insisted, but it was always begrudging. They would not learn, and so the Mandari ways stayed without their grasp.

But he was hungry where his brothers weren't, and he absorbed the lessons like a sponge. Each meticulous stage was a miracle, because what the Mandari did with the steel was incredible. Beauty from a beastly mass of ore. There was magic in the act.

First the char-poor steel was worked through an unrelenting process. It took an age to bash that piece of metal until it was near enough a quarter of its original size, but it was essential, because with the heating and hammering, impurities were ejected and faults were closed up. The steel was made strong and complete, the heart of a weapon, and because this was char-poor, the steel was remarkably flexible.

And then the real work began.

The other two steel compounds, char-rich and char-neutral, were heated and layered, bashed also, but folded over one another. Then they were reheated and forge-welded into a single piece of gleaming steel, and the folding created an impossible balance between deadly hardness, but subtle flexibility. And then, because the folding was done in perpendicular layers, the toughness of the resulting steel was – according to his father at least – unrivalled.

In this exercise he was ignorant, but he hungered for the knowledge, and that was what differentiated him. He drank the knowledge and digested it in his sleep. The whole process consumed him.

After ten days and nights, and from an eye-watering volume of base metal, they had forged a single edged sabre of exceptional quality. And looking back, it had been manufactured from materials that should not have been usable. That was astonishing. And with each passing day, his brothers' smirks slid into something else entirely. He liked to think it was jealousy, and in fact, he had adopted a smirk himself which he often wore when his father stood beside him. He enjoyed wearing his pride. It was still a novel experience.

This was one of those moments. It was late evening, the smithy was illuminated by torches, and a cold wind brought bumps to his skin. His brothers were staring upon what he'd forged, and his father spoke with a mischievous quality.

"Go fetch some rusty old steel, will you Joss."

Oh the gift! Oh the bloody gift. He walked right across the forge-room and picked up a bland looking broadsword that Jeb had only recently finished. "Will this do?"