Book of Iron

Seven

They began to smell burning soon after. A dull glow crept around a curve ahead, limning the crooked edge of the stone. Bijou turned off the torch and they made their way forward on tiptoes, each one testing each step before committing his or her weight. Another few cramped strides brought her to the corner.

Mouse-soft, Bijou leaned around the edge and peered up a limestone dam almost as tall as she was to a great cavern that flickered with light and heat. The warmth of wet air made her realize suddenly how cold she was and had been. Skin that had long since stopped stinging and settled into the corrugations of gooseflesh burned anew.

The stream broke over the dam to her left, trickling down the surface in a series of rivulets in yellow and white limestone channels. Beyond that—beyond the limestone wall she faced—another small underground lake stretched to a stony bank beyond. It was from that bank that the light and the smells of burning emanated.

A woman bent over a great stone block, a stalagmite whose top had been sliced away to make a flat surface. A great black anvil was set upon it. Bijou the Artificer owned anvils of every shape and size, from a silver-working rig you could balance on the palm of your hand to a monster four men couldn’t lift. This was the largest she had seen.

The light and heat came from a forge nearby. As Bijou watched, aware of the rest of her group slinking up behind her, the woman—pale-skinned, stripped to the waist except for a leather apron, her long light hair twisted into a straggling knot at the nape of her neck—moved easily between one and the other, stirring coals and checking heat levels. Bijou noticed that there was no bellows and no smoke. A magical fire.

“The Forge Unquenchable,” Maledysaunte whispered.

Bijou gave her a sideways look and whispered back, “It’s in the book?”

Maledysaunte nodded. “It is where the Book was forged.”

Their voices should not have carried across the lake, but perhaps Bijou should have thought about whispering galleys and the acoustics of caves. Because the woman—Dr. Liebelos, of course—stood up from her forge with her fists in her back and stretched tiredly. Sweat gleamed on her face as she said, “Is that you, Wove? I’ve been expecting you.”

“Wove?” Kaulas asked.

But even as he spoke, Salamander moved forward. She set her eft down at the edge of the water and turned right, to clamber up the jumbled boulders that slumped there. They made a kind of awkward ramp or stair, and Salamander scrambled up it.

“Her cradle-name,” Maledysaunte said, already moving to follow. “Let’s not wait for an invitation.”

Riordan required an assist to get up the bank, but still they made it as a group, in seconds. Salamander had paused at the top, hanging back until they could join her. Now the seven moved forward as one, six following Salamander across a narrow stone bridge. Bijou was braced, Ambrosias clattering along beside her. If she were defending that forge, she would strike when her enemies were bottlenecked on the cane-width span.

But Liebelos just watched them come, her hands at her sides, until they reached the far bank and fanned out, three on each side of Salamander.

Bijou noticed that Maledysaunte kept the black-man construct close beside her. His presence—or lack thereof—still discomfited Bijou deeply. But Maledysaunte was right—bringing him along had been the best solution. What else could they have done? Try to fight him, when they were in a hurry, he’d done nothing to provoke them, and they knew nothing of his powers? Leave him behind, and have him following out of sight?

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, she told herself. It was good advice: and for now, the enemy was Dr. Liebelos.

Except Liebelos was tossing her round-headed hammer casually to the rock beside the anvil and wiping the sweat from her palms onto her leather apron as she came forward. “Darling,” she said, extending her hands to Salamander. “I knew you’d come around. And you’ve brought your friend…”

She didn’t acknowledge Riordan at all, and her eye only skipped appraisingly over Bijou, Kaulas, and Prince Salih. She did give the guardian a considering glance, though.

“Mom,” Salamander said, “I’ve come to talk you out of this madness.”

“It’s not madness,” Dr. Liebelos insisted. “This is necessary. I’m a precisian, Wove. A scholar of order. Trust me when I tell you that it is a ticking bomb to have the Book present in the world in a form as capable and enduring as Maledysaunte’s. It is a pattern that will remake all our world in its image, with the Hag of Wolf Wood its possessed and terrible demon-queen.”

Bijou was close enough to Prince Salih to see his eyebrows rise in the light of the smithy. “A precisian complains of an excess of order?”

“Just because I am a scholar of order,” Liebelos said, “does not mean I am always its partisan.”

With a shrug of dismissal, she turned back to the forge and anvil. From here, Bijou could see that what she had taken for coals were no such thing. Pellets of stone filled the Forge Unquenchable, as Maledysaunte had called it, glowing white-hot. The air above them shimmered with heat as Dr. Liebelos moved toward the forge.

She lifted a set of tongs from a rack and reached into the coals with them. As if miming, she drew the tongs back, holding nothing in the tines.

She laid the nothing on the anvil. Left-handed, she took her hammer up. She raised it high and struck a ringing blow, hammering air against forged steel. In the flickering red light of those coals that weren’t, Bijou saw something begin to shimmer into existence between anvil and hammer, in the grip of the tongs.