I woke up in a bed I did not know, under a ceiling I did not know, and for a long time I did not know who I was.
The ceiling was stone, carved in a pattern of overlapping circles, lit by a single light-rune set into the wall. The air smelled of herbs and iron and something sharp, like vinegar. Somewhere far below, the Anvil was beating. Clang. A pause. Clang.
Then I remembered the dark, and the dust, and the weight.
I tried to sit up.
Nothing happened.
I do not mean that I was weak. I mean that I sent the order down to my body, the way you do a thousand times a day without thinking, and nothing answered. My legs did not move. My hips did not move. My back lay against the mattress like a slab of wood. Below my ribs there was nothing at all, only a dull gray blank, as if someone had painted over that part of me.
I looked down at my left arm. It lay on the blanket in a splint of wood and leather, wrapped from shoulder to wrist. I tried to move the fingers. They did not move.
I tried my right hand.
The fingers twitched. Barely. A slow, weak curl, like the legs of a dying beetle. I tried to make a fist, and could not. I tried to lift the hand off the blanket, and it rose half an inch and fell back.
I lay there looking at it for a long time.
It did not hurt. That was the strangest part. I could see the bruises on my arm, purple and yellow and green. I could see the splint. I knew my back had been crushed under a slab of stone the size of a cart. A man with injuries like mine should have been screaming. But I felt almost nothing. A dull pressure in my shoulders. A faint ache in my jaw. That was all.
I turned my head, very slowly, to the right.
Torvi was asleep in a chair beside the bed, with her chin on her chest and her beard spread over her coat. The gears in it had been cleaned. One of them was missing. In her lap, wrapped in a cloth, was Icarus.
I made a sound. I am not sure what it was. She woke at once.
They told me the truth on the third day. I think they waited until they were sure I would live.
There were three of them: Torvi, and Ragna Ironbraid, and an old Hold-dwarf with a white beard and a black apron who had been looking after me. He did not have a class I recognized. He was not a healer. There were no healers in the Hold.
I had not known that. I had never needed to.
"Human healers come with the caravans, sometimes," Ragna said. "With the guards. Clerics, hedge-healers. But they don't stay. Their prayers don't work on us. Nothing works on us, not magic, not miracles." She looked at me steadily. "There's no work for them here. There hasn't been a human healer in Khazrund since the spring fair. There won't be another until the next one."
"And you can't..."
"We set your arm," said the old dwarf in the black apron. "We cleaned you. We kept you from rotting." He shook his head. "Your back, lad. The bones in it are crushed. Whatever runs down the middle of them is broken too. We can't fix that. Nobody here can." He paused. "You'll heal, some. The bones will knit, the way bones do. But you'll not walk again. And your hands..." He looked at my right hand, lying on the blanket. "I'm sorry."
I looked at Torvi. She was looking at the floor.
"Your vitality kept you alive," Ragna said. "No fever. No rot. Any other human would've died in that tunnel, or in this bed. You didn't." She stood. "Be glad of that, Kenji. It's more than most get."
They left. Torvi stayed.
I lay there and looked at the ceiling, at the circles carved into the stone, one inside another inside another, and I did not say anything for a very long time.
The weeks after that ran together, gray and slow.
I did not get out of bed. I could not. Dwarves carried me, washed me, fed me with a spoon. I let them. I did not talk to them. I did not talk to anyone.
I did not write in my ledger. It sat on the table beside the bed, with the charcoal beside it, and I could not have held the charcoal even if I had wanted to.
I had spent my whole life in my hands. In two worlds. Every good thing I had ever done, I had done with them. Building Gundams. Painting miniatures. Mending a doll's hip. Carving a face. Stringing a marionette. Rosamund. The dragon. Icarus. And now the last things I would ever have worked with lay on the blanket like two dead things, and I could not even scratch my own nose.
I asked Torvi to bring Clara and Icarus, and to put them on the table where I could see them. She did. Clara sat against the wall, serene as ever. Icarus lay beside her, his loose arm tied back on with a bit of string.
After two days, I asked her to turn them to face the wall.
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she did it, without a word.
She came every day.
She did not try to cheer me up. Torvi does not cheer people up. She brought her work with her, a clock or a music box, and sat in the chair beside my bed and worked on it, the way she had worked beside me in the Ticking Hall. Sometimes she talked. Usually she did not. The gears in her beard clicked. The Anvil beat, far below. The light-rune glowed.
One evening, about a month after the collapse, she set down her tools.
"Kenji," she said.
I did not answer.
"Look at me."
I looked at her.
"You pulled me out from under a mountain," she said. "Do you understand that? I was on my knees at that seam with my hands full of moon-silver, and the pillar went, and you grabbed me and threw me clear, and the ceiling came down on you instead." Her jaw was very tight. "Then you lay in the dark for three days with your back broken and kept the four of us breathing with a wooden doll the size of my hand."
"Puppet," I said. My voice was rough from not using it.
"Puppet," Torvi agreed. "I owe you my life, lad. Dwarves don't forget a debt like that. Not ever." She leaned forward. "So I'll tell you how it's going to be. You're my apprentice, and you'll stay my apprentice. You'll live in the Ticking Hall, and I'll look after you. For the rest of your life, however long it is, and whatever you can or can't do with it. That's not charity. That's what's owed."
I looked away. My eyes were stinging.
"I don't want to be looked after," I said. "I want to work."
"The spring fair," I said. "The caravans bring human healers. Ragna said so. When they come..."
Torvi was already shaking her head.
"I've watched human healers work, lad. At the fairs, on the guards." She turned a tiny gear over in her fingers. "Their miracles don't turn back time. They can't undo a thing that's been done. All they do is make the body heal faster, the way it would have healed anyway, given long enough." She looked at my back under the blanket. "Your body's already healing. Crooked. A healer would only make it heal crooked quicker."
"There must be someone stronger."
"The Pope, maybe." She snorted. "They say his miracles can lift a dying man out of his bed. But His Radiance isn't climbing four thousand steps to a dwarf hold for one human apprentice with a broken back. Not this year. Not ever."
I closed my eyes.
She was quiet for a while. Then, slowly, she said, "But there might be another way."
She told me about Boneforging.
She told it carefully, the way she tells a customer about a clock that might not be worth fixing. All the facts, good and bad, laid out on the bench.
There was a craft, she said, older than the Hold itself. It had been invented by Durgrim Ashhand, the oldest runesmith in the world, the founder of Khazrund, whose face was carved on the mountain. Not to heal the sick. To make dwarves stronger. The craftsmen who practiced it were called Runic Bonesmiths, and they were more smith than doctor. They opened the body. They set the bones like metal on an anvil. They fixed them with plates and pins of a pale metal called ossium, which the body would accept, and into every plate they carved runes, laid with ether and sealed, so that the bone would grow into the metal and knit stronger than it had ever been.
"They do it to themselves, mostly," Torvi said. "Cut themselves open and put runes in their own bones, to be stronger, harder to break. Which tells you what sort of dwarf becomes a Bonesmith." She tapped the side of her head. "Cracked. Every one of them. But they're the only doctors we've got. Healing magic doesn't work on dwarves. When one of us breaks something badly, a Bonesmith is the only thing that'll fix it."
"Could they fix me?"
She did not answer right away.
"Maybe," she said at last. "Maybe they could put your back together. Get you walking. Get your hands working again. Maybe." She looked at me very steadily. "Or it could kill you."
"Why?"
"Ether." She held up her own bare hand. "Runes need ether. Inside a dwarf, it's nothing. We don't feel it. But you're human, lad. You know what ether does to you. You've felt it in the box. Sealed inside your own bones, it'll leak, just a little, for the rest of your life. Most humans, that would kill in a month." She paused. "You've got a strong body. Six vitality. Maybe it won't kill you. Maybe it'll only hurt."
"How much?"
"I don't know." Her voice was very quiet. " I don't think It's ever been tried on a human. I don't know if it'll save you or kill you, Kenji. I won't lie to you about that."
"Do it," I said.
"You should think about it."
"I've thought about it," I said. "Do it."
There were no Bonesmiths in Khazrund. The last one had died seventy years ago, and nobody had taken his place. It was a rare trade, even among dwarves. Torvi said it took a truly mad dwarf to cut himself open just to be stronger, and that there were not many dwarves that mad, even in the deep holds.
So she went to the Rune-Mother.
I did not see that conversation. Torvi never told me what she said. But two days later, Brunhild Stonebraid came to my bedside.
She was smaller than I remembered, and older, and she did not sit. She stood at the end of the bed and looked at me with her milky eyes for a long time: at my splinted arm, at my still legs under the blanket, at my right hand lying on the cover.
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"Greymantle tells me you held up a mountain with a doll," she said.
"A puppet," I said.
"A puppet." Something moved at the corner of her mouth. "Made of elderheart, she says. With gloomweaver strings. And you moved it with your mana, three days in the dark, with your back broken." She was quiet for a moment. "I have lived a long time, lad. I have not heard of that before."
I did not know what to say.
"Durgrim's Bonesmiths are all in his hold," she said. "Far east, deep in the range. He trained every one of them himself. He's been meaning to send one here ever since old Haldor died." She turned toward the door. "I'll send word. It's a long way, and Durgrim is slow to decide anything. But he'll send someone."
She left without saying goodbye. Torvi, standing in the doorway, let out a breath she seemed to have been holding for a week.
It took a year.
It was the worst year of my life so far. Worse than the forest. In the forest I had been alone, and afraid, and starving, but I had had my hands.
The message went east down the Deep Road. Durgrim considered it. Durgrim considered it for a long time. A reply came back in the winter, very short, saying that a Bonesmith would be sent in the spring. Spring came, and the Bonesmith did not. The Deep Road was flooded in two places, and there were things in the lower tunnels that the escort did not like the look of. Summer came. Then autumn.
And all that time, my bones were healing.
That was the cruelest part. They healed the way the old dwarf had said they would: slowly, naturally, and wrong. I could feel it, even through the numbness. My back stiffened into a shape that was not quite straight. My left arm, when the splint came off, was bent a little below the elbow, and the fingers on that hand curled in like claws and would not open. My body was fixing itself, the way bodies do, without asking me how.
Torvi brought me my meals and her work, and sat with me, and I lived.
Days Later I found I could still reach my mana.
It was there, in my palms, the same small warmth as always. Fifteen points of it. The collapse had broken my body, but not that. One night, lying awake, I asked Torvi to turn Icarus around and lay his threads across my right hand.
I could barely close my fingers on them. But I did not need to. I found the warmth. I led it down the silk. And Icarus stood up on the table, and looked at me with his half-closed eyes.
I pushed my mana a little further, into the elderheart. The gray world opened behind my eyes. And I saw the room from the table, from the height of a hand: the bed, the lamp, Torvi asleep in her chair, and a thin, gaunt, bearded man lying under a blanket, looking back at me.
I did not recognize him at first.
The next morning, when the old dwarf in the black apron came in with my porridge, I asked him to set the bowl on the table and leave it.
He looked at me. He looked at Icarus. He set it down and went out, shaking his head.
I made Icarus walk to the bowl. I made him take hold of the spoon, which was nearly as long as he was, and dip it, and lift it. Then I made him carry the bowl itself, both small arms wrapped around its rim, to the edge of the table beside my head, and climb up onto my pillow, and hold the spoon to my mouth.
It took a long time. I spilled porridge in my beard, on the pillow, down my neck. Icarus was strong enough, easily. The bowl was nothing to him. The hard part was me: steering him with one barely-working hand, looking out of two pairs of eyes at once, trying to bring a spoon to a mouth I could see from the outside.
But I ate. By myself. For the first time since the mountain fell.
Torvi came in halfway through and stopped in the doorway. She watched for a long moment. Then she went to her chair, sat down, picked up her clock, and did not say a word. But she did not look at her clock much, either.
By then, the dwarves had carried my bed down to the Ticking Hall, to my old corner between the moon clock and the brass birds. After that, I used Icarus for everything.
Icarus fed me, three times a day. He fetched water. He turned the pages of books when I wanted to read That i could not hold. He handed Torvi tools from her bench when she was working beside me, and she started asking him for them by name. He fetched a lost gear from under the cot, and a dropped pen from under the table, and once, after a long, careful climb, a moth that had been bothering me from the top of the lamp.
When my mana ran out, I waited, and when it came back, I sent him out again.
And slowly, I started living through him.
I do not know how else to put it. My own body lay in the bed, gray and still. But through Icarus I could walk. I could climb. I could cross the room, and look under things, and pick things up. I spent hours every day in the gray world behind my eyes, seeing the room from the height of a hand, feeling the floor under his small wooden feet.
I got better at it. The double vision stopped making me sick. I learned to let my own eyes close while I worked him, so there was only one world, the gray one. I learned how much mana each kind of task cost, how far I could send him before the threads ran out, how to keep him going for an hour, then two, then most of an afternoon.
In the middle of the night, when I woke, I did not reach for anything with my own hand anymore. I reached for the warmth in my palm, and for the silk, and opened my eyes behind my eyes.
Some nights I sent him to sit on the shelf beside Clara and look out over the dark Ticking Hall, with all its clocks, just for the company.
It was a little like the collapse. Only slower, and much longer. And I was not sure, some days, which of us was really lying in the bed.
The Bonesmith came at the very end of autumn, a full year after the mountain fell.
I heard him before I saw him. Everyone did. A voice was coming down the corridor outside my room, cheerful and loud and slightly cracked, saying, "No, no, set it down there, by the light, I need the light, mind the brazier, mind the brazier, Durgrim's beard, you'll set the Hold on fire."
Then he came through the door, and I understood what Torvi had meant about Bonesmiths.
He was a dwarf, middle-aged as dwarves go, broad and wiry at once, with a short, singed red beard and very bright eyes. He wore a leather apron covered in old burns. And under the skin of his forearms, of his neck, of one side of his face, I could see thin lines of light. Runes. Dozens of them, glowing very faintly, like veins of pale fire just beneath the surface. When he flexed his hand, they shifted.
Dwarf Lv. 33 Runic Bonesmith
"Ulfar," he said, beaming at me. "Of Emberdeep. Apprentice to the Ashhand himself." He clapped his hands together, and the runes in them flickered. "So you're the human! The one with the doll!"
"Puppet," said Torvi, from the doorway.
"Puppet. Puppet, of course. My apologies." He came to the bed and leaned over me, very close, peering at my face, my arm, my hands. Then, without asking, he pulled back the blanket and pressed his fingers into my back along the spine, hard, one vertebra at a time. I felt it only as pressure. He hummed to himself. "Oh, dear. Oh, dear, dear. Healed crooked. Healed crooked and healed hard." He looked up at Torvi with great cheerfulness. "I'll have to break it all again, you know."
Torvi's face went very still.
"Break it," I said.
"Oh, yes. All of it. Back, arm, the lot." He patted my shoulder, as though he were telling me the weather. "Can't put a bone right on top of a bone that's wrong. You have to crack the wrong out first. Like a badly cast iron skillet. Melt it down, pour it again." He grinned. "Don't worry. I've done it to myself four times."
I looked at the runes glowing under his skin.
"Yes," I said. "I can see that."
They did it two days later, in a stone room on the third gallery with a forge-brazier in the corner and a long table of black stone in the middle, worn smooth by centuries.
They laid me on my face on the table and strapped me down: across the shoulders, across the hips, across the legs, my left arm stretched out to one side on a separate board. Fenna stood by my legs. Sigrun stood by the brazier, feeding it coal. Torvi stood by my head, where I could see her.
Ulfar gave me a cup of something clear. I drank it. It burned all the way down and kept burning, and for a moment the room swam.
"Dwarven spirit," he said cheerfully. "Strong enough to blind a horse. Not for the pain, mind. You won't feel most of this. It's for the courage." He considered. "And for the arm. You'll feel the arm."
He was right about the arm.
He started with the charcoal.
He went over my back with his fingers, slowly, and marked every place where the bone had knit wrong: a long line down the middle of my spine, two crosses lower down, a ring around my left forearm. Then he picked up a chisel. A small one, steel, with a blunt, wedge-shaped tip. And a hammer, no bigger than the one Brunhild used.
"Breathe out," he said.
I breathed out.
I did not feel the chisel go into my back. I heard it. A dull, wet knock, then a crack like a green branch splitting under a boot. Then another. And another. I could feel the force of it, the jolt of each blow running through the table into my chest. But the pain stayed far away, behind the gray blank where my body used to be.
Then he moved to my arm. Find the original chapter at g.com.
I felt that.
Not the way I should have. Not the full, white, screaming way that a whole man would have felt it. Even there, the pain came to me dulled and late, like a sound through a wall. But it came. The chisel found the false knit in my forearm, and the hammer came down, and the bone broke again with a sound I could not stop hearing for days afterward, and something hot and sick and enormous rolled up my arm into my shoulder and my throat.
I did not scream. I think I wanted to. I think I did not have the breath.
Torvi's hand was on my head. I held on to the feeling of it.
"There," said Ulfar. "That's the worst of it. Now the fun part."
He opened me.
I could not see it, lying on my face, but I could hear it, and I could feel the pressure, and I could see Torvi's face. That was enough.
He cut along my spine with a blade of starsteel thin as a leaf. I felt a long, cool line drawn down my back, from between my shoulder blades almost to my hips. Then hooks. Small iron hooks, set into the edges of the cut and drawn back, one by one, and pinned to rings on the table. I felt my own back open like a book. The air of the room touched places inside me that air had never touched.
Fenna, by my legs, went the color of old cheese, and looked very hard at the far wall.
Ulfar leaned in close, humming.
"Oh, look at that," he said, delighted. "Look at the mess. Torvi, come look."
"I'll take your word for it," said Torvi.
He cleaned it first. I heard the small scrape of a file, the click of tweezers, the soft tink of something hard dropping into a metal dish, over and over. Splinters of my own bone. He worked the way Torvi works on a clock with a bent wheel: patiently, picking out every burr, every fragment, every piece that did not belong.
Then he set it.
He used levers. I felt them go in, under the bones, and felt him lean on them, and felt my whole body shift on the table as the bones of my back were pried apart and pushed, one by one, back into the line they were meant to keep. Fenna leaned on my legs with all her weight. Something in my spine grated, and grated, and clicked. Ulfar hummed louder. Sigrun, at the brazier, said something under her breath that might have been a prayer.
It went on for a long time.
Then the ossium.
Ulfar had brought the plates with him, already cut and carved, wrapped in leather in a box. Pale, soft-looking strips of metal, faintly warm, like a stone that had been sitting in the sun. Every one of them was covered in tiny runes.
He held each one in tongs over the brazier until it glowed a dull, deep rose. Then he took it out, and bent it with his bare, rune-lit hands, as easily as I would bend wire, shaping it to the curve of my bones. Then he laid it in.
I felt the warmth of it against my spine, like a hand pressed there.
Then the pins. A little hand-drill with a crank, and a box of short ossium pins with threaded shanks. Crank, crank, crank. I felt each one go in as a deep, grinding pressure, like someone leaning on a door. Eleven of them, down my back. Four more in my arm, through the plate he laid along the broken bone, and those I felt as fire.
And then the ether.
The moment he opened the lead box, I knew. I did not need to see it. My mana sense felt it at once, across the room: the crawling, prickling, restless presence I had felt in Torvi's workshop, magnified a hundred times, like a nest of ants waking in the dark.
Ulfar did not grind it. He had ground it already, a pinch of violet grit for every rune on every plate. He took up a bone spoon. Then, bending over my open back, humming, he laid it in. Rune by rune. Plate by plate. Inside me.
I felt every grain.
It was not pain. Nothing so simple. It was the feeling of something alive moving into my bones. Something restless and bright and wrong, settling into the grooves he had carved in the metal, crawling, prickling, sinking down into the bone underneath like water into sand. My mana flinched away from it. My whole body, the parts I could feel and the parts I could not, seemed to recoil.
He sealed each rune with runeseal from a hot iron. I smelled it. Silver solder, and something burning, which I realized after a moment was me.
"Nearly there," said Ulfar, softly now. Not cheerful. Concentrating. "Nearly there, lad. Hold on."
I held on to Torvi's hand.
He sewed me shut with gut thread, the muscle first and then the skin, with small, neat, even stitches, exactly the way I would have sewn the seam of a doll's dress. Then he packed the long wound with a salve that smelled of tar and iron and something green, and bound it.
Then he stepped back from the table, and wiped his hands on his apron, and the runes under his skin glowed faintly in the forge-light.
"That's that," he said. "Now we find out if you live."
The fever came that night.
I do not remember most of it. I remember heat. I remember the ether, crawling in my bones like something trying to get out. I remember dreams: the forest, the skeleton walking past, the wall of my apartment opening like a seam. I remember a voice I did not know, a woman's voice, very calm and very far away, saying something about thread.
I remember Torvi, every time I opened my eyes.
The fever lasted nine days. Ulfar said afterward that any other human would have been dead by the third. He said it with great admiration, the way a smith talks about a blade that did not shatter when it should have.
On the tenth day, I woke up, and something hurt.
It was not in my arm. Not in my shoulder or my jaw. It was in my back. Low in my back, below my ribs, in the gray blank where there had been nothing at all for more than a year. A burning, grinding ache along my spine, as though someone had laid a line of hot coals under my skin and left them there.
I lay very still, afraid to breathe, afraid it would go away.
It did not go away.
"Torvi," I said.
She was in the chair beside the bed. She looked up.
"It hurts," I said. "My back. Below my ribs. It hurts."
She stared at me. Then she stood up so fast that the chair went over behind her, and she went to the door and shouted for Ulfar, and her voice cracked in the middle of his name.
Ulfar came. He pressed his hands to my back, along the stitches, and hummed. Then he laughed: a big, delighted, cracked laugh that went on and on.
"That's the nerves," he said. "That's the nerves waking up. They're knitting." He grinned at me, his runes glowing. "And that's the ether, too, mind. You'll have that one forever. It won't stop. A little leak, every day, for as long as you live." He shrugged cheerfully. "But you're feeling it. Which means you're there to feel it."
I lay in the bed with the hot coals along my spine and wept.
I wept for a long time. Torvi sat on the edge of the bed and held my right hand, my good hand, and when I squeezed back, I felt my fingers close around hers. Not a twitch. A grip.
It hurt. Everything hurt.
I have never in my life been so grateful for anything.
That night, for the first time in more than a year, I asked for my ledger.
Torvi brought it. She brought the charcoal. She propped me up on pillows, and held the book open, and I took the charcoal in my right hand. It shook. The letters came out crooked and too large, like a child's. But they came.
Day 1,567.
Boneforged. Ulfar, of Emberdeep.
Eleven pins in my back. Four in my arm.
Fever, nine days.
It hurts.
I looked at the last line for a long time. Then I asked Torvi to turn Clara and Icarus around, so that they faced the room again.
She did. Clara looked at me with her serene glass eyes. Icarus sat beside her, his string-tied arm across his knees.
"There," I said. "That's better."