anticipate sometimes even make possible the practical applications of a discovery.' Since iron fallen from the sky was transcendent, so was iron mined and smelted on earth. This awe soon extended to every aspect of metallurgy.
But iron's occult power can act for either good or ill. It can ward off demons, spells, poisons, curses, sickness, or bad weather. Faerie folk cannot bear the touch of it nor enter a place protected by it: Cold Iron can inhibit magic. However, iron is also the symbol of war and the agent of violence. Many primitive cultures — especially those oppressed by better-armed foes — fear iron and all who work in it. (The Masai purify all new iron objects to remove the taint of the smith's hand.)
Thus, to some, supernatural smiths may be wise, civilizing gods, adept at song, dance, poetry, and healing. (The wondersmiths of the Kalevala excel in each of these areas.) But to others, they may be the gods' vicious foes — dwarves, giants, demons, or Satan himself. (Norse sagas and fairytales abound in examples.) Human smiths display the same ambivalence. As Eliade observes, 'The art of creating tools is essentially superhuman — either divine or demoniac (for the smith also forges murderous weapons).' A spiritual aura clings to the act of making, whether homo faber be godlike or devilish.
The smith, like the shaman, is pre-eminently a master of fire. Fire was primitive Man's earliest instrument for controlling the cosmos. As the initial means of accelerating natural processes, it commenced the conquest of time, a campaign technology has continued ever since. By the hand or through the spirit, initiates into the mysteries of fire can break the bonds confining other beings to win mastery of their environment.
Note that Vulcan's first act in the opening line of this volume is to grope for fire. His erupting volcano glows on the game board's eastern edge like a signal lamp. The smith god represents the power to shape inorganic matter but the BeastLord personifies organic matter's potential for growth. Unharmed by fire, Draffut can quicken Vulcan's molten lava to momentary life. Yet Draffut's confrontation with the upstart gods is only one episode in the contest that begins, proceeds, and will end via Vulcan's swords.
The gods call the game their own, but is it? Their pretentions to divinity ring hollow yet they are clearly more than human. Given the subtle hint in the Prologue that Vulcan has been 'programmed' for his task, are they perhaps some magical equivalent of the huge robotic god-figures in Berserker's Planet? They could be automata animated by quasimaterial beings such as djinni.
Overshadowing these meddlesome, amoral gods are the images of Ardneh and the masked figure known as the Dark King. The Demon-Slayer and Hospitaller has become more of an Apollo than an Indra, a patron of humane technology opposed to Vulcan's brutal methods. Unlike Orcus, the Dark King is suave and manlike but his title would be a suitable alias for Hell's overlord. (By an irony of history, their common antagonist Ominor has been transformed from a mirthless, plodding tyrant to a legendary buffoon.) But why are they here at all, since god and demon presumably destroyed each other in Empire? (The question puzzles theologically aware Sir Andrew.) Did the quasimaterial beings prove immortal after all? Or are these identities, like the names of the gods, idiosyncratic choices of the games ultimate players?
Revelation of these and other enigmas must await publication of the second and third volumes of The Book of Swords. But a few observations about Mark are possible even at this early stage in the contest. His very name is packed with allusion — is he a piece of labeled property or a symbolic witness? Like Berserker Man's Michael, he is.a Child-Hero begotten under mysterious circumstances and born into a web of contradictory influences which will surely confound the evil forces that plan to make use of him. Lake Empire's Rolf, young Mark is sent off into epic adventures where he will confound both chance and fate, to learn through passages of sword-play that mastery of self is the kind most worth striving for.
