ka-KLANG! ka-KLANG! ka-KLANG!
This smith wore only a leather apron and thick cloth pants. No gloves to protect his hands, no shoes or boots upon his feet. As they reached the anvil, the smith looked up, and Qarakh found himself staring at his mirror image.
“Welcome, Qarakh of Mongolia, my good and faithful son.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The voice was Qarakh’s as well, though the words and manner were not.
“Why do you wear my shape?”
“Because I do not have one of my own? Because I prefer to put my guests at ease by showing them a visage they find comforting? Or perhaps I wish instead to unsettle them. Choose whichever answer you like. All are equally valid.”
“Valid, perhaps. But are they all correct?”
The smith smiled but did not answer. He returned to pounding a lump of metal he held with a pair of iron tongs. The lump was beginning to take form, but Qarakh didn’t recognize what it was in the process of becoming.
The smith frowned then. “This one is being stubborn.”
He picked up the shapeless lump and thrust the tongs into the fire. A tiny shriek of agony came from within the flames, and the smith withdrew the metal, which now glowed orange-red, though it had been inside the fire for only a moment. The smith then placed the lump back on the anvil.
“He still has a little bit of life left inside him, I think.” The smith lifted his hammer high and brought it down swiftly. This time the metal screamed when the hammer struck it, and a thin stream of crimson shot forth from one end, bringing the scent of blood to Qarakh’s nostrils. The blood ran along almost imperceptible furrows in the surface of the anvil—furrows that either Qarakh hadn’t noticed before or which had only just appeared. The blood trickled over the side and fell through the air like a small red waterfall, only to vanish down a hole dug into the earth (into the skin, and it wasn’t a hole, but rather an orifice) next to the anvil.
“Where does the blood go?” Qarakh asked. The scent of blood didn’t stir any appetite within him, but that was because here, if only in this place, he was not a Cainite, but only Qarakh.
“Out to the ocean, of course,” the smith said, and then continued hammering the metal.
Qarakh heard the shush of waves, and for some reason, he envisioned a vast sea of blood.
The metal made no more sounds now, which seemed to please the smith. “Much better!” He worked the metal more easily, and soon a definite shape began to take form: a leaf.
The smith smiled and held it up for their inspection. “How does it look?”
“Like all the others,” Qarakh said.
The smith grinned with Qarakh’s mouth. “Excellent!” He relaxed his grip on the tongs and released the metal leaf, but instead of falling, it was taken by a sudden gust of wind and borne away, tumbling end over end into the darkness, presumably to end up on one of the trees here in the Grove of Shadows.
“I hope you don’t mind if I continue to work as we speak,” the smith said.
On top of the anvil—which had been empty a moment ago—now rested a small, naked man, no more than a foot long. He was alive, and he looked around in terror and confusion. The homunculus tried to sit up, but before he could, the smith grabbed him with the tongs, crushing the tiny man’s rib cage, and plunged him into the fire. The man screamed and screamed and when the smith removed the tongs from the flames, they now held a hot piece of metal ready to be shaped. The smith put the metal on the anvil and began pounding on it, steaming blood squirting out with each hammer blow, running along the furrows and falling into the orifice below.
Qarakh turned to Deverra for guidance, but though she gave him a sympathetic look, she said nothing. He sensed that she was restraining herself from saying anything—perhaps because she was not permitted to.
Qarakh was on his own, so he asked the next logical question. “Who are you?”
The smith continued to work the once human metal as he answered. “I have been known by many names in the past and will doubtless be known by many more in the future, but that hardly answers your question, does it? In Livonia, I am known as Telyavel, Protector of the Dead as well as the Maker of Things.”
Qarakh was not certain that he believed he was truly speaking with a god, though whatever the smith was, he was obviously a being of great power. “I do not see how the two go together.”
The smith finished the new leaf and released it to the air. Another homunculus appeared on the anvil, this one a naked obese woman, and he snatched her up with the tongs. She screamed as she went into the fire, and the process continued as before.
“Why not?” the smith said as he worked. “Life and death, creation and destruction have always been linked. Without Making, there can be no Unmaking, and therefore no Re making. You surely understand this.”
Qarakh wasn’t certain, but he thought he did. Mongols believed that the body contained three souls: the suld soul, which merged with nature after death, the ami soul and the suns soul, both of which reincarnated into a new human form. If Qarakh understood the smith correctly, he was reincarnating the souls of the dead, using them as raw material to create the metallic leaves, whatever they were.
“Why do you wish to help me defeat Alexander?”
The smith looked up from his work and smiled. “Because it is well past time to Unmake that one. Besides which, he threatens my children, and what father can stand by when his offspring are in danger?”
“What must I do?”
The smith finished his latest leaf and gave it to the wind to carry away. The
