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  Irrational, maybe, but that’s what you got when you brought an old mind into the modern world.

  He still twitched when one of those new electrics or hybrids whispered up behind him, not just horseless but without the rumble and whine of an engine to warn you it was coming. He didn’t have a phone, either, or a computer or a lot of other modern magic. Airplanes? He still remembered the first one that droned over his head, a kite of sticks and wire and cloth and an engine reeking of burned castor oil. You couldn’t make him fly in one for his weight in gold.

  He walked in and out of the pools of light, through the reek of humans and their lives, past whores and street-side drug peddlers offering strange deaths. As always, he saw the city as the outsider he was, wondering why laws forced a man or woman into the risk of buying and selling on the street, the traders of flesh or chemicals working corners and alleys rather than a licensed house. He shuddered, remembering some of the published lab tests on street drugs, some of the rates of blood-borne and venereal disease in street whores of either sex. Make prostitution legal, allow it in designated areas, and neighborhoods wouldn’t be plagued with the crime. The sex workers would be safer, healthier, and so would their clients. Make drugs legal, they would cost maybe one percent of the black market price and wouldn’t kill the users anywhere near as fast. No legal house would risk its reputation on the psychos currently running the business.

  Sanction and license the drug house across the street from his apartment, you’d pay a lot less and get exactly what you paid for. Content and dosage certified by independent lab. If you wanted to fry your brain, at least that way you fried it the way you wanted and sank into oblivion or hallucinations with a sober guard covering your ass.

  But then the criminals and the cops and the politicians wouldn’t get rich off the transactions. Albert had grown cynical with age.

  Flesh and drugs didn’t tempt him. Maybe that was part of not being human. Temptation did reach out and try to grab him by the ears, a whiskey-rough blues voice wafting down a side street from a bar he sometimes visited. Two blocks further on, a snatch of saxophone reached out to him, first clear and then fading back to a whisper even to his ears as a door opened and closed, split-note and trill followed by a smoky sultry glissando, and he froze in his tracks. He knew that sax, a tone and style unique to one blind jazz genius escaped from the slums of São Paulo, but the short phrase wasn’t on any recording or broadcast he’d ever heard . . .

  He’d never seen Lula perform live, hadn’t known he was in town. The jazzman never booked gigs. He just showed up sometimes at a bottle-club door for a one-night stand, no publicity, take it or leave it, and word spread like wildfire among the fans. Live music was so much better than any recording, almost a different species. It was, well, it was live.

  By whatever God you recognize, he was tempted. Another night he would have followed that sound, his own peculiar vice. He stopped and listened for a few minutes, there in the electric darkness, even turned. The demon’s chore could wait. Then he thought about what he knew of demons. Odds were, Legion wouldn’t just kill him, it would burn down the whole block with Lula and the audience and a hundred random strangers added to the toll. Sodom. Gomorrah. Pillars of salt optional.

  Or maybe not. Never trust a demon.

  Albert winced, remembering his apartment and the flames of hell, remembering the sudden searing heat and his flesh turning black in front of his eyes. He walked on.

  That same hell kept his appointment book, and he had already decided he didn’t want to die just yet. Add that missed jam-session to the “bad” side of Legion’s karma account.

  Did demons have karma? Damned if he knew. Maybe literally.

  First a whiff, then stronger—cold char rode the evening air, not smoke but the memory of a fire not long dead. Not the resin smell of wood in a fireplace or stove, not sulfurous coal or greasy sooty oil, not the burned-rope of hemp smoke—a dead building. Most humans couldn’t tell the difference, but Albert could. A stench of death hung over and after a building fire, a mix of smoldering wood and cloth and plastic and tar and hot metal, all quenched by the fire-company’s cold hoses. He could have followed his nose to find it, rather than searching for the address Legion had given him.

  This neighborhood was bad. Albert stopped and scanned the shadows, weighing dangers. He lived in a slum, yes, but borderline in the many grades of slum. Now he’d walked through three, maybe four levels straight down in the economic strata. Gaps opened out along the street, places that had burned out or just lost their battle with gravity and weren’t worth repair. He passed under dead streetlights, saw candles flickering behind broken windows patched with cardboard or plastic sheets, smelled drifts of trash and burned-out cars and moldy mattresses in the weeds of vacant lots.

  He hadn’t walked this neighborhood in maybe twenty years. Too dangerous. But Legion said to go there, so he went.

  And then Albert stood in front of it, a burned-out shell with blackened ragged holes for windows and door, an old ill-kept frame building surrounded by fresh yellow plastic “Fire Line” tape. He searched his memory. Paired six-pointed stars flanked the gaping doors. He remembered plain-dressed gray-haired men with beards and black hats or yarmulkes, Orthodox Jews long ago. A synagogue.

  He smelled something faint within the char—a whiff of sandalwood, almost a trace of incense. His nose pulled him along those drifting traces, past the yellow tape and inside. Salamander? That made no sense, no sense at all. The Star of David, Solomon’s Seal on the doors, should have kept it out.

  He thought about the decaying, no, decayed neighborhood. He thought about the peeling paint and cracked clapboards even where the fire hadn’t touched. Had they abandoned the building when they couldn’t raise a minyan? Without the living faith, the stars would not have guarded. He smelled something else, something of worked iron there, old and beyond old, heated and broken by the fire or by something else. It had a touch of Other about it . . .

  White light blazed in his face, sudden pain behind his eyes. He struck at it without thinking. His cane rang on metal and sent the light spinning, sparking, into darkness. Another swing, shaft thudding on flesh-padded bone, crook of cane grabbing, pulling, a thrust into body and grunt of breath; upward jab and switched grip and clunk of shaft on skull; rustle of falling cloth, silence.

  He spun away, staggering toward the faint light of the door, heard movement and muttered oaths behind him. Light flared again, searching, stabbing, light that missed him as he dodged. Light that found him, followed him.

  “Halt! Police!”

  A snarling voice, female but no way feminine.

  He ducked and turned a corner. Bullets whined off brick and stone, followed by echoing booming gunshots.

  Running now, panting, he grabbed at another corner, winding deeper into the labyrinth of alleys and courtyards, hoping against dead ends. Each turn blocked sightlines, trajectories from that gun . . .

  He’d just attacked a policeman, maybe killed him. At least one cop still lived back there, a cop who had seen Albert’s face. Up close and well-lit. Defy a demon and follow up with that?

  Albert had had better days.

  III

  The way the rest of the night worked out, maybe he should have just trotted straight back to that bottle club where he’d heard Lula’s sax. Sure, Legion might have killed him. He’d have died a happy man. Instead, he stumbled into night-hidden alley potholes and around stinking garbage bins, past lunging snarling shadowy dogs maybe chained or behind fences, maybe not. He stopped, listened, waited, darted through pools of light, sorting through memories twenty years, fifty years old for the alleys and mews and stairs up hillsides too steep for streets and other back ways of a person on foot and hunted.

  All this while twitching at the echo of every footstep within three blocks, every whiff of fresh human sweat. All this while his shoulder blades cringed away from that bullet without warning—“hot pursuit” and legal. He couldn’t shake the fear, eve
n though he didn’t hear or see anyone following him through all the twists and turns and doubling back. That included crossing the river twice, long open stretches of bridge where he had clear views ahead and behind under the streetlights.

  Some people have always been the sort who cops call “sir,” but those people never have been hunted. Albert had been down a lot more than he’d been up and knew cops from the underside. Most cops were okay, no worse than the average human. But attack, maybe kill, one of their own, and they turned mean. Suspects had a way of getting killed while resisting arrest or attempting to escape.

  And he was carrying a cane with stuff smeared on it, blood and hair and skin cells for sure, maybe a dab of brain tissue, maybe not. He almost threw it in the river, both times crossing, except he couldn’t count on it staying there. A simple magnetic drag would probably catch it—a finding spell certainly would. Wiping it down wouldn’t help—even a bleach bath. Physical evidence might be erased, but the cane’s aura would still match the dent he’d left in that shadow’s skull. They also knew each other—easy enough to detect.

  He didn’t want to throw away that blade, either. It carried part of his soul, from the forging.

  He made it home un-challenged and un-shot. After a long twitchy wait in the shadows, watching for trackers while sweat chilled on his back, he unlocked a cellar door off the back alley and made damn sure he locked it behind him, setting a bar across it before climbing down through gloom into dark stone-smell and into darker shadows, placing another bar across the second door at the bottom of the cellar stairs.

  He kept his forge in the cellar. Less noise to disturb the neighbors that way, no windows for snoops to look in on his work, and besides, he’d like to watch some random stranger drag a two-hundredweight anvil up three long straight flights of stairs. Follow that with about five more trips each for the fire-pit and the bellows. This way, the anvil block sat firm on an honest sandstone ledge rather than perching on some floor joists of questionable virtue spaced too far apart thirty feet above street level.

  Underground seemed more fit for his kind of working, anyway. Even if he wasn’t a dwarf. He’d hung a light over the anvil and a few other spots where he needed to see fine detail. Most of the rest lay in shadow where he could best judge the fire’s heat and the glow of metal.

  With doors locked and barred behind him, he felt tension leaking out of his shoulders and back. If someone or something tried to come down those stairs, he had ways out that his family set up long ago. Not that those would help with Legion or any of that kind. But he had entered his heart, the place of his power. If he had any.

  He switched on the lights. Forging. He needed to reset his brain from flight to forging. He took three deep breaths and closed his eyes, letting his thoughts settle into the steel of his cane, thinking air and fire and iron and anvil and wakening new life. How to change that cane so that even a wizard wouldn’t feel its past in his hands? Couldn’t trace it and find it from the wounds it’d left in the shadowed ruins of the synagogue? Trace it, and through it find the hands that carried it?

  Things once connected always stay connected. The shaft and grip were the heart of tracing, the parts that had struck his enemy. Not the blade lurking inside—that hadn’t tasted flesh and blood, he wouldn’t need to change it . . .

  He laid a charcoal fire in his forge—he’d never been comfortable using coal or coke to heat and work his iron. He felt a touch of memory of the wood in charcoal, of the tree and soil, rain and sunlight, something alive that made the fire listen to his needs. Coal and coke might have been alive once, but that was far too long ago for them to remember. They felt like stone now to him, not something he could talk to, listen to.

  This working wanted a long fire, to heat the whole shaft at once, change the whole shaft at once, not doing things by pieces. He kindled shavings and splints at one end until the charcoal caught, pumped the leather bellows with foot-lever and spring-pole—blowing fire through the length of the bed of coals, waking sparks, waking blue jets and miniature orange demons in the glowing heart of heat, again the old ways of working metal as he’d learned them in a past turned to mist and dust and vague shadows.

  Letting the fire-bed grow and settle, he prepared for working. He had his rituals, setting out tools and stock and plans just like a normal smith. He chose a light hammer for more control than force—talk to the steel, discuss rather than argue with it—and a two-faced swage for grooving. Then it was time to loose the blade from its sheath inside the cane’s heart, unpin blade from the grip. Lay the cane shaft and grip in the fire. Check slack-tub, brine quench, oil quench. Free the vise and set it again just as he wanted it and waiting, with brass jaw-faces that wouldn’t bite his iron.

  Feel the iron, smell the iron, hot in the coals. Read the temperature by eye. No welding here, no blazing white sparks flying from each strike of hammer on hot metal. Uniform red heat, a human would just see it as a glow, he saw something more—he saw iron willing to change in certain ways. Tongs came to his hand as if he’d called them, griping, setting the glowing cane shaft between the jaws of the swage, tapping rather than pounding, matching rounded grooves along both sides of the shaft, up the length and then back down again, to taper out a couple of inches from each end, up and back, widening, deepening, then back into the fire, judge the glow, up and down the shaft again, smoothing, fire again, swage again. Turn a quarter in his tongs, a second set of grooves, four total as he saw the finished work in his head.

  His world focused on the steel. Nothing else existed. Talk to the steel, talk to the fire, listen to the steel, listen to the fire. Smell them, taste them, feel them, discuss, agree. Heat to red again, one particular shade of red, clench the tip in vise jaws, twist free end turning grooves into matched spirals, two full turns in the cane’s length. Judge by eye, close to the glowing steel, heat baking tears to steam and singing eyebrows. Back to anvil and tap here, tap there, smoothing the flow of iron. Heat again. Mandrel for the sheath, the blade. Drive mandrel into red glowing heart of cane. Judge shaft again, swage again, mandrel again.

  Quench the steel’s heat. Polish, first grit and then rouge-wheel, foot-treadle power for the feel, banish scale and scars of forging. Reheat gently to draw the temper, anneal, judge colors flowing and swirling across the shiny cooked steel, working by eye and ear and nose. Let cool just enough and quench again, from the lesser heat. Tough, strong, not brittle.

  Again for the handle, change the shape, change the grip from molded rubber—now purged to untraceable ash and smoke sent up the flue—replace with diamond-checkering in the steel itself, change the soul so none could read it.

  Metal hot to the touch, still expanded, set and pin blade before grip cools and shrinks, slide into now-cold sheath with a sliding rasp and snick, test the fit and release. Set blade aside. Heat a brass ferule instead of rubber for the shaft’s tip, slip over cold end, quench to shrink and clench around the steel. Same for knurled brass ring to hide the joining between grip and shaft for hidden blade.

  Done. Breathe deep, step back from forge, step back from anvil. A new thing lay on the anvil face, shaft of blue and purple swirls, black grip, old blade in new setting. No connection to the shadows and soot, the blood, the crime. He wiped gritty sweat from his face and looked upon his work and called it good.

  “Now what in the name of Allah’s eight million afreets are you?”

  The voice came out of the shadows on the far side of his forge. He jerked and blinked and tried to shake himself out of the trance of working iron. He got involved in metal. When he was at the anvil, the world could end with trumpets and earthquakes and the unfurling of the last scroll and he wouldn’t notice. Not until he finished his forging.

  She had a welt across her left temple, and blood-matted black hair above her left ear—injuries that looked too much like the work of his cane. She kept her left hand tucked into a pocket in her coveralls, some kind of working uniform with lettering and patches he couldn’t read in the gloom. S
he had a gun in her right hand, pointed at him.

  He wasn’t an expert on guns—some large blued-steel automatic that meant business. The muzzle on the thing looked big enough to shove his thumb down it. He didn’t feel like arguing. He lifted his hands.

  “I’m Albert Johansson.” His current name, matched the license and all. Johansson went with the eyes and hair, and, well, nobody ever took an Albert seriously.

  The apparition shook her head. “I didn’t ask who, I asked what.”

  She shouldn’t have been there. Yeah, he got involved, wouldn’t notice things. But he’d locked and barred those doors, and his cellar forge didn’t have any windows. She must have climbed down a chimney flue. With a broken wrist, it looked like.

  “I’m a man, just like any other.”

  “Pig farts. I’m the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, heir to the Woman of Shamlegh. I’ve Seen the Hidden People, but I’ve never seen your kind before. Neither man nor gnome; not troll, not djinn, not dwarf under the mountain. I’ve watched dwarves at the forge. They’re good, but they can’t talk to steel that way.”

  He knew he talked when he worked. He’d never recorded what he said, couldn’t remember afterwards, couldn’t even tell you for sure what language he spoke when he and iron got together for a little chat. For damn sure, he never let anyone watch and listen. All he knew was, it worked. He and iron understood each other.

  She waved the gun, moving him away from his anvil and fire and bellows, away from the finished cane shaft and the blade still showing bare steel. She limped forward into more light, and he could see her jaw muscles clenched. He’d hurt more than just her head and wrist, in that scuffle in the dark.