The general store took the four kiteshields and the med helm before the farm was even awake. The shopkeeper paid ninety-six coins for the four shields and nine for the helm, and wrote it all in his little book without a word. Tam spent one coin on a chisel.
"You've stopped asking," said Tam.
"I've stopped wanting to know," said the shopkeeper.
Tam walked back over the bridge with one thousand, two hundred and forty-four coins in his inventory, and mucked out the cow shed with his own spade.
All day he thought about the teleport.
* * *
He cast it from the loft that evening, after the castle round, with the hatch down and the farm hands still at supper.
He opened the Grouping panel, put his finger on the line that said Giants' Foundry, and cast. Fourteen seconds. The loft went grey and thin around him. The smell of hay faded, and something else came up through his feet: heat, stored in rock.
He was standing on a high, flat plain of red stone.
The sun had just gone down. The sky was purple, going on black in the east, and the first stars were out. A warm wind blew across the rock, smelling of dust. Far off to the west, small and gold, were the lamps of Al Kharid. To the north and east the plain ran out into darkness and low hills.
It worked, he thought.
And right in front of him, so close that he could have hit it with a stone, was a giant.
* * *
It was standing beside a cave mouth in the side of a low ridge, and it was enormous. It was three times his height or more, with arms like tree trunks and a chest like a barrel. It had a great slab of a face and a wide, flat nose, and small, deep-set eyes. Its skin was a dull, pinkish grey, rough as bark. It wore a ragged hide wrapped around its middle and nothing else. Beside it stood an anvil the size of a cart, black and pitted with age.
Hill giant, thought Tam, and his hand went to the scimitar at his side before he knew he'd moved.
In the game, hill giants were level 28. They hit for up to four, and they attacked anyone weaker than they were. His own combat level was nineteen. He knew exactly how this went, and it went badly.
The giant looked down at him. It didn't reach for anything. It lifted both its huge hands, open, palms out.
"Wait," it said.
Its voice was deep and slow, like a cart going over a wooden bridge.
"Do not attack."
Tam froze, half crouched, with the scimitar half drawn.
It talks, he thought. It talks. Oh, I know you.
In the game, this giant had stood right here. If you tried to attack him, he asked you to stop. If you examined him, the game said only: A distinct looking giant.
"Do..." said the giant. It frowned, as if the words were heavy things it had to lift one at a time. "Do not... flig... fight."
Tam slid the scimitar back into its place at his side. Slowly. His hands were shaking a little.
"I won't," he said. "I won't fight. Sorry. Habit."
The giant let out a long breath that smelled of smoke and something like wet dog. It lowered its hands.
"Need," it said. "Need... your help."
* * *
His name was Kovac. He said it twice, carefully, as if he wasn't sure Tam would remember it.
"Tam," said Tam, pointing at himself.
"Tam," said Kovac, and seemed pleased with it. "Small one. Follow."
He turned and went into the cave, ducking his great head under the rock. Tam hesitated for one second at the mouth. If he eats me, he thought, chat is never going to let me hear the end of it. Then he followed.
The cave went down and opened out. Tam stopped dead.
It was a forge built for people three times his size.
A stone crucible as big as a cottage hung on great chains over a river of lava, with a ledge of rock beside it. A long table of rock was carved with hollows for moulds. The lava glowed orange and slow in its channel, and a waterfall poured down one wall. A great hammer on a wooden arm hung over a block of stone. A grindstone as tall as a man stood on its edge in a frame, and next to it a wheel. Everything was huge and old. Everything was broken.
"Ancestors," said Kovac, behind him. "Giants... build this. Long ago."
"Giants built this?" said Tam. He was thinking about the game, where this exact cave had been a minigame with a reward shop. He had made hundreds of swords in here, for numbers, without wondering who had built it.
"Yes." Kovac looked around at it, and his slab of a face did something slow and sad. "Before... giants different. Make things. Now..."
He didn't finish.
"Now they hit things," said Tam. Get faster updates on g.com.
"Now forget," said Kovac. He pointed one enormous finger at the broken machines. "Kovac want... help giants remember. Not just... killers." The finger came around, slowly, and pointed at Tam. "Help fix?"
This chapter (and the rest of the story) is published on NovelPhoenix; the copy you're reading was made without permission.
A little scroll unrolled at the edge of Tam's sight, and a new line wrote itself in his quest list.
Sleeping Giants.
* * *
Afterwards he thought that the repairs were the strangest part. They weren't hard. They just felt strange, like fixing something he had only clicked on.
The trip hammer's wooden arm had split along its length. It needed an oak log and five nails. He had them, and a hammer. Kovac held the great arm steady while Tam fitted the oak alongside the split and nailed it home.
No number rose. Only the sword would count. He nailed it with his tongue between his teeth. The fourth nail bent. He pulled it out with the claw of the hammer, straightened it and drove it again.
Kovac watched with enormous patience.
"You not know how," Kovac said, after a while.
"Nope."
"Kovac not know how either." Kovac considered this. "Kovac begin... understand. Watching."
The grindstone had lost its teeth. It needed a chisel and a long time cutting new grooves into the stone. Sweat ran into his eyes. The polishing wheel needed its soft edge back. That took two oak logs for a rim, five more nails, and Fred's fleece, wrapped around and pinned.
The game had said a ball of wool wouldn't do. It had to be a raw fleece. Looking at it now, wrapped around the wheel, Tam thought a ball of wool would have done perfectly well, in a real world. He had brought the fleece anyway.
"Not my best work," he said, standing back.
"Hmm," said Kovac. He walked all the way around the wheel, slowly, and spun it with one finger. It turned true. "Kovac agree. Is good."
* * *
Then the crate.
In the game, Kovac's crate had a pile of old bronze and iron in it for the crucible: bars and old weapons. To take them, you needed twenty empty squares in your inventory, all at once. An ultimate ironman had to drop half of what he carried on the floor, take the metal, feed it in, and pick everything back up before it was gone. Tam had done it on his second account. He'd sweated through it on stream.
He had sixteen empty squares. The crate needed twenty.
So he did what he'd done before. He laid his spade on the floor. Then the needle, the thread and the tinderbox, in a neat row on the rock, counting under his breath. Three minutes. He turned for the crate.
Kovac was already there.
Kovac bent down, put his arms around the crate, and lifted it. The whole crate, bars and broken swords and all. He carried it out along the ledge over the lava, and tipped it into the crucible. Metal clanged and thundered down inside like a landslide.
Then he put the crate down and looked at Tam, a little puzzled.
"Why you put things on floor?" said Kovac.
Tam looked at his neat row on the floor. He looked at the empty crate.
"Habit," he said faintly.
He picked everything back up, quickly, before the three minutes were out. He had never felt so stupid in his life. And he had once died crossing a road while reading his phone.
The game made you do it in squares, he thought. Kovac's a giant. He just picks up the box.
Kovac, Tam was starting to understand, thought about one thing at a time, and took his time over it.
* * *
The sword took most of the night.
An old friend had asked Kovac for a broad, flat blade. They set the mould on the long stone table together. It came in three pieces: the end by the grip, the middle of the blade, and the tip. The crate's old metal ran out of the crucible in a glowing orange stream, so hot that Tam's face felt tight from across the cave.
When the metal had run into the mould, he put his scimitar and shield away so his hands were free. A bucket stood on a pile of old ones by the polishing wheel. He filled it at the waterfall and poured it over the mould. The steam went up in a roar.
And then his hands knew what to do.
They had known nothing about the repairs. They knew this. The rough shape of a sword, longer than he was tall, lay in its cradle. He heated it in the lava until it glowed red. Then he swung it under the trip hammer. The waterfall turned the wheel and raised the hammer, and the hammer fell, boom, and boom.
A little number rose at the edge of his sight.
+4.5 Smithing.
He laughed out loud. Kovac looked at him.
"Good?"
"Good," said Tam.
When the blade cooled too far, he heated it again. When the hammering was done, he cooled the blade in the waterfall until it was only warm. He ground it on the grindstone. The stone threw sparks across the cave. He cooled it again, and polished it on the wheel with Fred's fleece. It was the game's dance: heat, cool, heat, cool. The small numbers rose one after another.
Kovac stood beside him the whole time, holding the end of the blade steady when it was too long for Tam to manage. Every so often he said, "Hmm," and once, "Kovac see now," and nodded to himself. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
Near the end, Tam realised Kovac's words were coming more easily. He wasn't stopping in the middle of them so often. As if the forge was reminding him how.
* * *
The sword lay on the long stone table when they were done. It was broad, flat and plain, longer than Tam was tall. The edge caught the lava light. It wasn't fancy, but it was well made.
Kovac looked at it.
"For old friend," he said. "Obor."
Tam kept his face still.
He knew Obor. In the game, Obor was a hill giant in a locked cave under Edgeville, far to the north. You needed a key to get in, and you went in to kill him, for a club and a chance at a rare drop. Tam had killed him more times than he could count.
"Your friend," he said carefully. "Does he live a long way off?"
"Far," said Kovac. "Under. Alone." He laid one huge hand on the flat of the blade. "Kovac think... Obor like sword. Remember what giants are."
"I hope he does," said Tam.
The words came then, unrolling in front of his eyes in the forge's red light.
You have completed Sleeping Giants!
You are awarded: 1 Quest Point. 6,000 Smithing experience. The Giants' Foundry. One giant, who remembers.
The experience came after it, all at once.
The heat was far stronger this time, as if he'd put both arms into the lava pool up to the shoulder. He staggered and caught himself on the edge of the stone table. The words kept coming. He read every one.
Congratulations, you just advanced a Smithing level. Your Smithing level is now 25.
Ten levels. Fifteen to twenty-five, in one breath.
He stood there with his hands flat on the table, breathing hard, while the heat drained out of his arms.
"Small one?" said Kovac. "You sick?"
"No," said Tam. "No. I'm very, very well."
* * *
Kovac walked him back up to the cave mouth. Outside, the night was full of stars, and the plain was dark and warm.
A short way north, Tam could make out a big table of stone, and on the ground beside it a squat black shape. An anvil. A real one, his size. Further off, past it, there was a tent, and a small fire, and a figure sitting by a hole in the ground.
And to the east, not far, he could see other shapes moving against the stars. Big, slow shapes, with hammers and blades.
"Those," said Kovac, following his look. "Not friends. Those forget." He put one finger gently on top of Tam's full helm. "Small one not go east."
"Small one won't go east," Tam agreed. Not yet. In the game they were the best training in the desert, once you could take them.
"You come back?" said Kovac.
"I'll come back. I've got a lot of iron to hit."
Kovac nodded slowly. "Kovac make more swords. Kovac remember more." He turned to go back into his cave, then stopped and turned back. "Tam," he said, carefully, as if to check he still had it.
"Kovac," said Tam.
The giant went back inside, ducking under the rock.
Tam put his scimitar back at his side and his shield on his back. Behind him, in the dark, the trip hammer's oak and his nails and Fred's fleece stayed where he'd put them. They were Kovac's now. He'd given them to the forge, and given things stayed given.
* * *
He cast Home Teleport from the dark plain, with the desert wind on his face. Fourteen seconds. Then the cool damp of the castle courtyard at night, and the fountains, and the night guard opening one eye.
"Sleepwalker. You're red."
"I've been standing next to a lava pool."
"Right," said the guard.
Tam walked home over the bridge. He kept thinking about the giant's finger resting on his helm, as gently as if Tam might break.
Hobart's friends want every monster dead, he thought. They've never met one.