On my first morning in the Ticking Hall, Torvi handed me a broom.
"Floors," she said.
I looked at the floors. But? "They were stone, and they were already clean. I said."
"They're clean because someone sweeps them," Torvi said. "Yesterday it was me. Today it's you." She pointed at the far end of the hall, where a long shelf of brass birds caught the rune-light. "Start there. Work toward the door. Don't touch the clocks. Don't touch the birds. If the crow pecks you, it's because you deserved it."
I swept. The crow watched me with one bright glass eye the entire time. It did not peck me. I chose to take this as a compliment.
When I finished, Torvi inspected the floor on her hands and knees, running a thumb along the joints between the stones, and held it up to show me a single gray thread of dust.
"Again," she said.
I swept it again. I want to be honest about how I felt. I was forty-four years old. I had survived a year and a half alone in a monster-haunted forest. And here I was, sweeping a floor twice for a bearded woman, a head and a half shorter than me, because of one thread of dust.
I was very happy.
I do not know how to explain that to someone who has not spent their life wishing someone would teach them properly. It is a strange relief to be at the bottom of something. To have someone above you who knows more. To not have to work everything out alone.
I swept it a third time, without being asked. Torvi watched me do it and said nothing at all. But that afternoon, she showed me how to sharpen a chisel.
The dwarven way to sharpen a chisel takes eleven steps and three stones and most of a day.
I will not describe them all. I will say only that by the end of the first afternoon I had learned that everything I knew about sharpening was a crime against steel, and that by the end of the first week I could shave the hair off my forearm with a carving gouge, But Torvi still looked at my edges and sighed.
"Better," she said, on the seventh day. It was the first time she had said it. I went to bed that night feeling as though I had been knighted.
The days took a shape. I woke on my cot between the moon clock and the brass birds, to the sound of a hundred clocks striking six at almost but not quite the same moment. I washed in a basin of water warmed by a little stone set into its rim, carved with a single glowing line. I ate in the long hall on the second gallery with forty dwarves who argued about beer and ore and whose uncle had insulted whose cousin's beard. Then I swept, and sharpened, and carried, and watched.
I watched Torvi most of all. I watched her assemble the works of a clock with tweezers so fine I could barely see them, building a whole small universe of gears inside a case no larger than a walnut. I watched her solder, and file, and test, and pull it all apart and start again because one tooth on one wheel was a hair too long. I watched her face when the clock finally ticked: not a smile, never that, but a small, satisfied loosening around the eyes.
I recognized that look. I had seen it in the mirror, in another world, over a doll's mended hip.
On the ninth day, she let me try a rune.
It was a light-rune, the simplest one there is, the one that lit every lamp in the Hold. She set a smooth gray stone in front of me, about the size of a hen's egg, and gave me a tool I had never seen before: a slim, steel graver with a point no wider than a hair, and a handle wrapped in something that felt like sharkskin.
"One line," she said. "From here to here. One stroke, without lifting. The depth must be the same the whole way, and the curve must be true. If you stop, it's ruined. If you wobble, it's ruined. If you breathe wrong, it's ruined."
"How do I breathe right?"
"Don't."
I picked up the graver. I looked at the stone. I thought about the eleven steps, and the three stones, and my forearm with the hair shaved off. And I held my breath and cut.
It was ruined. Of course it was. The line wobbled near the end, where my hand had trembled. Torvi took the stone and turned it in the light and set it aside without a word, and gave me another.
I ruined forty-one stones in eleven days.
On the forty-second, the line came out clean. One stroke, the same depth from end to end, curving exactly where the pattern said it should curve. I set down the graver and stared at it, and Torvi picked it up and looked at it for a long time. Her gears clicked.
"Good line," she said.
It did not light.
I looked at her. She did not look surprised.
"A rune is two things," she said. "A shape, and what fills it. You've made the shape. That's the part a human can do. The other part...
"She opened a small lead box on the bench, and inside, nested in gray wool, was a chip of violet crystal no bigger than a grain of rice, cold and clear and faintly, horribly beautiful. Even sitting three feet from it, I felt something prickle down the back of my neck.
"Ether," I said.
"Ether." She tipped the chip into a small stone mortar, bare-handed, without hesitation, and ground it with a pestle until it was a pinch of glittering violet grit. Then she took a tiny bone spoon and, working along my groove from end to end, laid the grit into the line, tapping it down with a flat steel tamper until the whole cut was filled level with violet. Last of all she took up a slim soldering iron, heated its tip in the lamp flame until it glowed, and touched it to a stick of pale silver metal, a dwarven sealing solder she called runeseal. She drew a thin, bright bead of it along the line, then smoothed it flush with the flat of the iron until the solder lay level with the stone.
The line lit.
It did not flicker on. It simply was lit, all at once, a soft, steady white glow that ran from one end of my cut to the other and stayed there. It made no heat and no sound. It was the most ordinary magic in the Hold, the thing every dwarf child grew up taking for granted, and I sat there looking at it with my mouth open like a fish.
"Carve, lay, seal," said Torvi. "That's every rune ever made, from this one to the ones on the Hold-masters' doors. The carving's the shape. The ether's the life. The seal keeps the life in, and keeps it off your skin.
"She held up her bare thumb, faintly violet at the tip, and wiped it on her apron. "I can do that because I'm a dwarf. If you'd touched that grit the way I just did, it'd have put you in your grave in a month."
"Could I put one in a puppet?" I asked. I was already thinking of the little pine man with the slime core in his chest.
"Not in pine." Torvi shook her head. "A rune wants stone or metal, lad. Nothing else will hold the ether. It's all metal in the making, too: the graver, the tamper, the solder. Put a rune in ordinary wood and the ether eats it from the inside, and you've got a smoking stick.
"She paused. "Unless the wood's magical in its own right. Elderheart, say. That'll take a rune. But you'd want to be very, very good before you cut a rune into elderheart."
I looked at my hands.
"Not bare, anyway," she said. She went to a hook by the door and came back with a pair of gloves and a long apron, both made of a dull gray leather stitched with tiny silver runes along every seam. They smelled faintly of smoke and something sharp, like lightning.
"Warded hide. Proofed against magic. The human apprentices in the Hold wear these, the few there are. With these on, you can lay ether for a few minutes at a time, if you're careful and quick and don't breathe the dust.
"She hung them back on the hook. "Not yet. Not till your lines stop wobbling. But you will."
She set the lit stone on the bench between us. "Keep that one. A man ought to keep his first."
I kept it. That night I set it on the shelf above my cot, beside Clara, and lay awake watching it glow.
In the third week, Torvi sat me down at the bench after supper and said, "Now. Money."
I had been waiting for this.
"You eat at the Hold's table and you sleep in my hall," she said. "That's an apprentice's due, and nobody grudges it. But everything else, you earn. Your boots. Your coat. Your tools, once you've learned which ones are worth having. A dwarf who doesn't work doesn't eat. That's the oldest law in the Hold." She folded her hands. "Humans have a similar one, I'm told? Even if they don't mean it."
"I can do the trading house's books," I said.
"You will. A few hours a week, for Oskar's friends up here. They'll pay. But that's not your trade." She nodded at the corner where Clara sat. "That is."
I looked at Clara.
"Make things," said Torvi. "Dolls. Puppets. The little marionettes you did for the caravan lads. Whatever you can make well, make it, and I'll sell it under the hall's name to the human merchants who come up the mountain. I'll take one part in ten, for the bench and the name and the selling. The rest is yours."
"Under your name?"
"Under the hall's name. Greymantle's. It's how it's done. An apprentice doesn't hang out his own sign." She shrugged. "Besides. Half the buyers who come here would sooner choke than pay gold for something a human made. Let them think a dwarf did it, and take their money."
I thought about that. I thought about my old life, where my name had been on nothing but invoices. I found, to my surprise, that I did not mind at all.
"One part in ten," I said. "That's very generous."
Torvi narrowed her eyes. "Don't you dare count it," she said. "I know you're counting it."
I was. It was very generous. I did not say anything else about it.
That night, I began a doll.
I did not know how long it would take, or whether anyone would want it. I only knew that I had a master's bench, and a master's tools, and a block of pale linden wood as smooth and close-grained as a bar of soap, and that for the first time in this world I could make something the way I had always wanted to.
I drew her face first, in charcoal, on a sheet of paper. A gentle oval. A small, rounded chin. The corners of the mouth turned up very slightly, as though she had just heard good news and was too polite to laugh. Read this novel at novelping(.)com for the best experience.
Clara watched me from the corner. The clockwork crow watched Clara.
In the fourth week, I asked Torvi about stats.
We were sitting at the bench late, with the clocks ticking around us and the Anvil beating somewhere far below, and I was sanding the curve of a cheek. I asked it carelessly. I did not know then that there was any other way to ask.
The chapter was taken from the author's publication without permission; reading it on the official page supports the person who wrote it.
"Torvi. Can I ask you about stats?"
She stopped. Her hands, which had been threading a mainspring into a barrel the size of a thimble, went perfectly still.
"You can ask," she said slowly. "I'll tell you the general of it. But don't ask me mine, and don't ask anybody else theirs. Not ever. Not unless you'd trust them with your life."
I set down my sanding block. "I didn't know," I said. "I'm sorry."
"You didn't know a lot of things, coming out of those woods." She went back to the mainspring, but more slowly. "Your race, your class, your level, everybody can read. That's on your head for all to see. But your stats are yours. They're the measure of you, not what you've done. You show them to your mother, maybe. Your husband or wife. Your master, if you're lucky in your master.
"She did not look at me as she said it. "Folk who go around telling their stats end up with knives in them, or end up used as one."
She told me the general of it.
"Five is the mortal limit," she said. "That's as high as a body can climb on its own. Train all your life, and you might get your strength to five, or your endurance, or your hands. Most don't. Most top out at three, or four, and then they spend their points. When the Registry gives you one, every five levels, you put it where it'll do the most good."
She tightened the mainspring with a tiny click. "That's how a smith with four strength becomes a smith with six."
I stared at her. "Five?" I said. "Five is the limit? For anyone?"
"For a body on its own, aye. Why?"
"Because I've got four strength!" I said, before I could think better of it, "I have never once in my life felt strong! I couldn't drag a log a teenager could carry! And I've got six vitality Too! I still wake up every morning feeling like a old man! My knee sounds like a cart wheel..."
Torvi looked at me for a long moment.
Then she laughed. It was the big, rough, delighted laugh from the ravine, and it went on so long that the clockwork crow ruffled its brass feathers in protest and two of the birds on the shelf started chirping.
"Lad," she said, wiping her eyes. "How else do you think you survived in them woods?"
I opened my mouth.
"Four strength in a human who's never swung a pick in his life is a strong back," she said. "Most humans are twos.
You only think it's weak because you've been hauling logs alone with nobody to compare yourself to. And whose logs were they? The Forbidden Woods. That's no mortal wood out there, lad. Those trees have been drinking mana for longer than there have been kingdoms, and it's packed into the grain. A log of it weighs twice what a pine log does, maybe three times. A teenager couldn't have dragged it either.
"She jabbed a thick finger at my chest. "And vitality doesn't make you younger! It makes you hard to kill. Six vitality, and no mortal poison will kill you, and food poisoning can't touch you at all. You ate goblin cooking for a year, didn't you?"
"Some of it?," I said. .... "Well Most of it...." I was starving.
"A man with three in his vitality would be dead of that stew. You'd have died of the first bowl." She shook her head. "Old knees are old knees. Vitality keeps you breathing. It doesn't keep you pretty."
Then a slow grin spread under her beard.
"If it's youth you want? There's only one cure for it in this world. Get to Level twenty-five!
"She held up a finger. "Cross the wall and the Registry tightens a human up a bit. Your span stretches out to a hundred and fifty or so years, and your body knows it. You'll feel ten years younger the morning after. Maybe twenty!"
She leaned over and rapped her knuckles on my bad knee, hard, like a woman testing a melon. "And I promise you, lad, on my beard and my mother's beard: that knee will stop popping."
"You can't promise that!"
"I just did. Dwarves an don't break beard-promises!" She went back to her mainspring, looking extremely pleased with herself. "So you'd best get to twenty-five, or you'll make a liar of me."
I sat with that. I thought about the Redthorn paste, and how my fingers had gone numb, and tingled, and then simply stopped. I thought about the mushroom stew that had nearly taken the top of my head off, and the roast with too many legs. I had thought I was lucky. It had not occurred to me, not once, that the Registry had been quietly keeping me alive the whole time.
It was a very strange thing to learn about yourself, at forty-four.
"Six," Torvi said then, more slowly, and her laughter had gone. "You'd have had to put a points into it, to get six."
"One. After a boar nearly killed me."
She nodded, in approval. And looked at me a moment longer than she needed to, and went on.
"And above five?"
"Above five is points, and only points. And here's the thing, lad, the thing that matters." She looked up at last, and her gray eyes were very serious. "Once a stat hits six, it never goes down. Never. A man with five strength gets old, and his arms go thin, and one day he can't lift his own hammer. A man with six strength swings it on his deathbed.
A woman with six in her head never goes soft in it, never forgets her children's names, never wanders out in the snow in her nightgown...
" She looked away.
"My grandmother was a fool with her points. A dwarf lives long enough to get any stat she likes to six, if she's sensible. Gran wasn't. She threw her early points into strength and endurance, for the mines, because she was young and thought she'd live forever. By the time she started putting points into her head, she was old, and it had already started slipping. Five went to four, and four to three.
" Torvi turned the mainspring barrel over in her fingers. "Every time she earned a point and put it in, she'd lost another one by the time the next came. She was always one step behind. She never got it to six. At the end she didn't know my name, or her own, and she'd stand at the mouth of the Hold in her nightgown, waiting for a husband who'd been dead two hundred years." Her mouth tightened. "I remember the end of it."
I thought about my own grandmother, in another world, at the end. I did not say anything.
"All of it except attunement," Torvi went on. "Attunement's different. It's not of the body. It's the world's magic, grown into you. Magic doesn't rot and it doesn't break, so attunement never fades, whatever it is. Born with three, die with three." She snorted. "Not that we'd know. Dwarves haven't got any. Not even a zero. There's no line for it on a dwarf's stats at all, so there's nothing to put a point into, not ever. That's why we can't cast and why Magic slides off us like rain."
"And humans?"
"Born with zero. But at least they've got the line, so they can buy into it."
She considered. Well? "There are bloodlines, a few old human families, where the children come out with some. One, Two, three, at the very most. Sorcerers, they call them. Born with magic in their hands. Rare as hen's teeth, and the Church likes to keep an eye on them. Oh And elves, of course. Every elf comes into the world with five. That's half of why humans think they're holy."
I sat with that for a while. The clocks ticked.
Then, because I trusted her, and because I had never in my life had anyone to tell, I said: "Do you want to see all of them?"
Torvi set the mainspring down very carefully on the bench.
"Only if you want to Show me," she said.
I Showed her.
VIT 6 END 4 STR 4 DEX 7 INT 9 ATT 1
She did not say anything at first. She looked at the bench. She looked at my hands. Then she looked at me with an expression I had not seen on her face before, and it took me a moment to recognize it as something very close to alarm.
"Nine," she said.
"Yes."
"In your head."
"Yes."
"Kenji." Her voice was very quiet. "How many points have you put into it?"
"Don't lie to me."
"I'm not! I put one into vitality, after a boar nearly killed me. And one into attunement, at ten. I wanted to see what MP felt like." I spread my hands. "But It didn't feel like anything."
Torvi stared at me.
"You were born with nine?," she said.
"I suppose so?"
"You were born with nine?!" She sat back on her stool, slowly, as if someone had knocked the wind out of her. "Lad. Do you know what you are? A sharp human's a three. A lord's son, with tutors from the time he can walk, he's a five, and proud of it. The Archmage of Mirrin, the oldest human alive, and he's spent every point he ever earned, on nothing but his head and his attunement. And folk say his head's an eight! And you walked out of a goblin wood with nine, and no points in it! , You spend most of your time sanding. " She pressed both hands to her face, beard and all. "Gods under the mountain. "
She was not finished. She pointed at the numbers as if they had insulted her personally.
"And it's not just your head! Just look at the lot of it! You're level fourteen! you've spent two points! A human at fourteen ought to be sitting on twos and threes across the board, and grateful for them! You've got a seven in your hands. You've got a six that you only paid one point for." She shook her head slowly. "You've got too many stats for your level, lad. Far too many. I don't know where you came from, but it wasn't anywhere ordinary."
Then she sat back, and something in her face changed, as if a gear had dropped into place.
"Seven in your hands," she said. "No wonder you took to the rune-line so fast. Forty-two stones in eleven days." She snorted. "Do you know how long that takes most apprentices? A year. A dwarf apprentice. With dwarf hands. I thought you'd just got lucky, or you'd been hiding a talent from me." She shook her head. "Seven's very high, lad. Higher than most master crafters in this Hold. You'll never need to train your hands again. They're as good as hands get, without spending points."
She was quiet for a long while after that. When she spoke again, her voice was low.
"These numbers are impossible, Kenji. Not unlikely. Impossible. Nobody's born like this." She frowned at the table as if the answer might be written in the grain. "Unless... You lived a year and a half in the Forbidden Woods. Ate what you found there. Drank its water." Her gears clicked slowly. "There are things in those woods nobody's ever named. Fruit, roots, mushrooms, gods know what, soaked in a thousand years of mana. Maybe you ate something. Something that changed you." She shook her head. "I don't know. I'm a toymaker, not a sage. But that's the only way I can make sense of it."
Then she looked straight at me, and her face was harder than I had ever seen it.
"Listen to me. You will never show these numbers to anyone again. Not a friend. Not a lover. Not a priest. Not a Hold-master." She tapped the bench, once, hard. "Not even me. If I ask you, you tell me no. Do you understand?"
"Why?"
"Because a man with stats like that is either a miracle or a monster, and the Church doesn't keep miracles it can't explain." Her voice dropped further. "They'd want to know where you came from. And if they didn't like the answer, they'd want to know what you're made of. Swear it."
I swore it.
She nodded once, and the hardness went out of her face, and she was Torvi again. But she did not look at the numbers again, and I noticed that she did not repeat them, either.
I did not tell her where I really came from. I could not think of anything to say that would not lead somewhere I did not want to go.
I did not know what to say. I had no idea why my numbers was so high. The only explanation I could think of was that I had come from a place where people simply knew more things: equations from school, facts about the stars, ideas this world had not had yet.
I suppose, in a way, that is what I am. A man who knows more things than he should, in a world that has not had them yet.
"That's how you felt the elderheart," Torvi said at last, lowering her hands. "On the road. I wondered. Most humans can't feel a thing in it without a magic class, or twenty years of study. But a head like yours..." She shook her own. "You feel the weight of things. That's what intelligence does, at the top. It lets you feel what's there, even when you can't touch it."
"So I could learn to use magical materials?"
"You could. You'll have to, for your twenty-five. But feeling the mana and moving it are two different things." She tapped the bench, hard. "That's attunement. And you've got one."
She leaned forward.
"So here's my advice, as your master, and you can take it or leave it. Your head's done. Nine. You'll never need another point in it as long as you live, and it'll never go soft. Your hands are done too, the rest are enough too. But if you really want? You can sweat for it! You'll hunt, but they'll come up on their own, slow." Get to five then put a point for six. But I doubt you'll want to swing a pick on your deathbed Or go without food nor water for a month.
Her gray eyes held mine. "But attunement? It can't be trained. Not ever. Not by anyone."
"Everything else," I said slowly, "I can sweat for."
"Everything else you can sweat for," Torvi agreed. "Attunement, you either buy, or you're born with. And you weren't born with it. So every point the Registry gives you from now on, lad, you put it there. Every one. Until you can feel the mana in a stone and make it listen."
I thought about it for a long time, sitting there in the lamplight with the clocks ticking.
Then I nodded.
On the last night of my first month, Ragna Ironbraid's runner came to the door of the Ticking Hall. He was a young dwarf with a beard like a wire brush, and he did not come in. He stood on the threshold and read from a slate.
"Apprentice Kenji, of the Ticking Hall, under Torvi Greymantle."
"Yes," I said.
"You're called to the hunt. Third gallery muster, the Bellows Gate, at the first bell. Bring your own blade and your own food."
He glanced up at me, at my coat, then to the dagger on my belt, the rusty one I had taken off a dead goblin a year and a half ago, and his eyebrows went up into his hairline. "And maybe a better blade."
He left. I stood in the doorway.
"The deep galleries," I said.
"The upper end of them," said Torvi, behind me. "It's a first hunt. They'll be easy on you." She paused. "Easy for dwarves."
"What lives down there?"
She did not answer right away. She went to a cupboard at the back of the hall, and unlocked it with a key from around her neck, and took out something long, wrapped in oiled cloth. She brought it to the bench and unwrapped it.
It was a short sword. Not much longer than my forearm, straight, single-edged, with a plain steel guard and a grip wrapped in dark leather. The blade had a faint, cold, starry shimmer in it, like frost on a window at night.
"Starsteel," Torvi said. "My first real piece. I made it before I decided smithin wasn't for me. It's too short for a dwarf and too plain for a lord, and it's sat in that cupboard for sixty years." She held it out, hilt first. "Call it a loan. You'll buy your own, when you've earned it."
I took it, and nearly dropped it. It was far heavier than it looked, heavier than any steel blade its size had any right to be, a dense, settled weight that pulled my wrist down.
"Starsteel's heavy," said Torvi, watching me. "Heavier than steel, and harder. "It doesn't bend and it doesn't chip, and it'll take a rune and never let go. You'll get used to the weight." I adjusted my grip, and after a moment the weight stopped fighting me and simply sat there, solid and certain, as if it had been waiting for my hand.
"Torvi." I said. "What lives down there?"
"All sorts," she said, and she went back to her clock.
I opened my ledger.
Day 565.
Level: 14. XP: about 8,400.
Skill: puppet craft Lv. 11. Floors: swept (three times). Chisels: sharpened, the dwarven way ("better").
Runes: one good line in forty-two. Carve, lay, seal. Torvi laid the ether. With warded gloves and apron, one day I can too.
Work: dolls and puppets, sold under Greymantle's. One part in ten to the hall. (Generous. Do not count it. She knows.)
Started: the linden doll.
Stats: private.
Never show them again.
Weapon: starsteel short sword. A loan.
Tomorrow: the hunt.
I looked at the page for a while. Then I set the lit stone on the shelf beside Clara, and the starsteel sword beside my cot, and lay down and listened to the clocks.
I did not sleep much. I kept thinking about "all sorts."