Chapter 41-The Steel Axe(1)

Chapter 41: 41-The Steel Axe(1)

The taller guard looked at Valera first, taking in the ragged cloth tied over her nose and mouth, and the long piece of ripped sack-cloth she had wrapped over her forearms to hide the expensive Night-iron gauntlets and then stopped dead when he looked at Sol.

Sol was walking through mountain wind in nothing but a sleeveless, blood-stained linen undershirt and muddy boots.

Every inch of his exposed arms, shoulders, and neck was covered in a terrifying roadmap of dense scars, whip-lines, blade-slashes, fire-cracks, and the fresh, angry red acid-pits from the Peak centipede an hour ago.

And under his dark hair, his blind eyes weren’t covered by a bandage.

They were glowing with a faint, steady ember of orange heat that made the snow falling around his boots melt before it touched his skin.

The two Low-Stage guards slowly raised the tips of their boar-spears an inch higher, their heartbeats kicking up to a nervous trot in Sol’s vision.

"Hold it right there, scar-boy," the taller guard rasped, spitting into the snow to hide the fact that his hands were sweating on his spear shaft.

"Entry fee’s one Low-Stage chip for the day, two if you want to sleep by the fires till morning. And no fighting inside the logs, or Old Marrow throws you off the back cliff."

Sol didn’t reach for a weapon, he didn’t have one and he didn’t flare his aura to scare them.

He just reached into the leather pouch at his hip, pulled out a tiny, chipped Low-Stage shard they had taken off a mutated crow two days ago, and tossed it casually onto the snow between the guard’s boots.

"We’re not sleeping here," Sol said, his deep voice calm and flat.

"I need a blacksmith."

The shorter guard bent down, snatched the crow shard out of the snow, and bit it to make sure it wasn’t glass. He glanced up at his partner and nodded once, pulling his boar-spear back.

"Back shack," the tall guard grunted, stepping aside to give Sol’s bare, steaming shoulders a wide berth. "Don’t touch the hides on the racks, and keep your hands off the soup pots."

Sol and Valera walked through the gap into the packed-mud compound.

As they passed the central wood fires, the baseline scavengers and Low-Stage trappers went quiet, pulling their children and their skinning knives back out of the way.

Out here in the small holds, nobody cared about noble names, bust everyone knew how to read a cultivator.

A man who walked around the Wastes without a coat and didn’t even shiver while carrying fresh acid-burns on his wrist was a man who had gone through a lot.

They walked straight across the mud to the iron-like shack propped against the back boulder.

Under a lean-to roof outside the shack sat a small forge built out of salvaged fire-bricks, pumped by a leather bellows made from an old pair of lungs stitched to wood paddles.

Standing over a battered iron anvil, which was really just a two-foot section of pre-collapse railroad track bolted to a tree stump was one Medium-Stage cultivators in the camp.

He was an old man, bald on top with a braid of gray hair hanging down his back, missing three fingers on his left hand and wearing a leather apron stiff with decades of dried grease and iron scale.

Spread out on a plank table beside his railroad-track anvil was his inventory: three rusted bear-traps, a dozen crude iron spearheads, two skinning knives ground down from old truck leaf-springs, and a few wood-chopping axes.

"Looking for spear-tips or traps?" the old blacksmith asked without looking up from the iron horseshoe nail he was flattening with a small hammer. "If you want silver-steel, turn around and walk back to Hearth City. I only work scrap."

"I don’t want silver," Sol said, stopping beside the plank table. "Silver melts too easy."

The old man stopped hammering. He looked up, his milky-blue Medium-Stage eyes narrowing as he took in Sol’s blind, glowing orange eyes and the dense, High-Stage muscle packed onto his scarred frame.

"Yeah, I bet it does, with a core running that hot, you are an anomaly!" the old smith grunted, setting his hammer down on the railroad track and wiping his three-fingered hand on his apron. "They call me Marrow. What are you looking for, boy?"

Sol didn’t look at the table with normal sight; he pushed a concentrated pulse of thermal vision straight into the metal tools lying on the planks, examining how the cold mountain air moved through the grain of the steel.

The spearheads were garbage, full of air pockets and brittle slag that would snap the first time he swung them at a High-Stage beast. The leaf-spring knives were too thin.

Then Sol’s eyes stopped on a tool sitting at the far end of the plank, half-buried under an oily rag.

It wasn’t a battle-axe, and it wasn’t as huge as the thirty-pound two-handed splitter he had lost in the river.

It was a heavy, one-handed industrial rigging hatchet from before the collapse, forged from a single, solid piece of three-quarter-inch drop-forged high-carbon tool steel, with a wide, bearded five-inch cutting edge on the front, a heavy square hammer-poll on the back for driving iron spikes, and a full-tang steel handle wrapped in thick slabs of riveted raw-hide.

Sol reached out, pushed the oily rag aside, and picked the hatchet up in his right hand.

It weighed nearly six pounds, way too heavy for a normal man to swing comfortably with one arm, which was probably why none of the Low-Stage trappers in the camp had bought it.

In Sol’s High-Stage hand, the balance was dead center, right behind the bearded head.

He squeezed the raw-hide handle and pushed a tiny, test-pulse of Sun’s Believer fire down his wrist into the full-tang steel.

The old drop-forged carbon steel didn’t whine. It didn’t vibrate or fight his energy like the noble silver blades did.

The thick, solid slab of pre-collapse iron drank the heat right down into the heavy hammer-poll and along the five-inch beard, holding the temperature like a cast-iron skillet without expanding or softening a fraction of an inch.