Beneath the black flag, spearpoints rose.
Twelve horsemen, and perhaps thirty foot soldiers. Judging by the width of the gorge, three horses abreast was the most that could charge at once; both walls were steep, and the floor was strewn with carts and chains broken in an earlier fight.
Kang Mujin did not look back.
When he traced the movement of metal, he could tell how far the others had gone. A cartwheel’s axle drew slowly away into the forest path, and the waist-irons and buttons of those carrying the wounded followed after it.
Not far enough yet.
“Rakan.”
“I’m listening.”
“Keep to the left wall. We only need to let the first rider through.”
Rakan moved without asking. Even dragging that wounded leg, the angle of the raised shield never wavered.
Silvana scanned the upper reaches of the gorge.
“Eleven arrows.”
“Do not shoot the horses. Aim for the lead rider’s shoulder.”
“May I ask why?”
“If a horse falls, the road opens. If a rider falls, the horse takes fright.”
Silvana nodded once and drew the string. Wind swept down the gorge wall and stirred the fletching.
Doria tapped a hammer against an axle pried off a cart.
“Rotten through. It’ll stop one charge and that’s the end of it.”
“One is enough.”
“You know the taste of iron.”
The place where Doria propped the axle at a slant was between two broken carts. Set low, it sat at a height a charging horse’s eye would not easily catch.
The enemy cavalry picked up speed.
Each time a horseshoe struck the ground, Kang Mujin’s fingertips prickled. One nail in the lead horse’s right hind hoof was loose; the second horse’s bit was soft with too much copper; and on the third rider’s breastplate, the rivet beneath the left armpit had not been driven home.
He lowered his sword.
Thirty paces.
Twenty.
Fifteen.
“Now.”
The string sang, and the arrow lodged in the lead rider’s right shoulder. The rider snapped backward and lost the reins; the startled horse twisted its head, and the horse just behind, swerving to avoid it, trod on the axle.
The axle Doria had set bent.
The iron held, once.
Two horses collided, and the head of the column tangled in the gorge. Kang Mujin went into the gap, struck the first rider’s jaw with the back of his blade and knocked him from the saddle, then turned and seized the second horse’s bit.
Soft copper bent at the touch of his sense.
As the bit folded to one side the horse flung its head up, and in the moment the rider lost balance Rakan rushed in and drove the shield’s edge into the rider’s flank. The rider struck the wall and rolled down.
“Third one!”
At Rakan’s shout a spear came flying.
Kang Mujin raised his sword and let the spearhead slide off. While his wrist rang heavily, the demon soldier tried to draw the spear back from the saddle.
Kang Mujin reached the breastplate’s rivets first.
Three iron pins, each protruding by a hair, pulled free at once; the left plate of the breastplate sprang open, and the gap bit into the rider’s arm. Silvana’s second arrow grazed between helmet and shoulder, the rider ducked low, and in that instant Doria’s hammer blocked the horse’s path.
“Get down here!”
The hammer smashed the saddle’s pommel, and the rider fell to the ground.
The infantry coming behind halted before the fallen horses and the wreckage of carts. The demon holding the black flag shouted for the ranks to re-form, but a horse still alive and thrashing blocked the narrow road completely.
Kang Mujin stepped back without sheathing his sword.
“We’re going.”
When Rakan reached for the fallen rider’s sword, Kang Mujin shook his head.
“It is heavy and badly balanced.”
“Better than an empty hand.”
“Your blade is on the cart.”
Rakan’s ears flattened back, then stood again.
“You knew about that?”
“Where would iron go?”
While Doria let out a snort of laughter, Silvana loosed one last arrow. It struck the pole and broke the black flag, and the four of them turned onto the forest path.
The sound of demon infantry clearing the wreckage came after them. Kang Mujin spread his hand as he entered the mouth of the forest, and the fragments of chain scattered across the gorge floor trembled all at once.
There was not much he could move at one time. Rusted iron, moreover, was full of fine cracks within, and would snap if pulled by force.
Kang Mujin meshed the pieces along their grain.
The chain crawled over the ground like a snake, wound around broken wheels and axles, and tangled among the fallen horses; the demons, belatedly forcing a way through, shouted.
Veins rose on the back of Kang Mujin’s hand.
Feeling metal and moving it were different things. The greater the weight, the further a pain spread inside his joints, as though iron weights hung there, but he set his teeth and folded his fingers.
As the chain drew tight for the last time, the wreckage at the gorge mouth became one mass.
“Will it hold long?”
Silvana asked.
“An hour.”
Kang Mujin steadied his breath, then went on.
“Two, if it goes well.”
“That is enough.”
Silvana took the lead, and branches bent low at the motion of her hand, and the traces left by the wounded were hidden under the leaves.
That night, the company reached an abandoned village to the northeast.
Only three things there could be called houses. Half the roofs had fallen in and the well was choked with dead leaves, but a stone wall broke the wind, and a shallow stream ran behind.
Rosen divided the arrivals among the empty houses and a barn. Silvana washed the wounds and then gathered herbs from the forest; Rakan, the hurt leg bound up, set the watch rotation first of all.
Doria tore apart the hearth of a ruined house.
“The stone’s usable. The flue is hopeless.”
Kang Mujin took the chain down from the cart. There was no charcoal to make a fire and no proper bellows, so he chose the thinnest link and set it on stone.
Aisha squatted down beside him.
An iron tag with a new name carved into it hung at the child’s neck, and the crushed collar was still in the child’s hand.
“Are you going to keep holding that?”
“You said you’d change it.”
Kang Mujin looked at the child’s hand. Red marks remained on the palm that gripped the iron ring.
“Have you decided what to change it into?”
Aisha pointed to one side of the village. The field was thick with nothing but weeds, and a hoe with a rotted handle leaned against the wall.
“That.”
“A hoe?”
“It makes food.”
Kang Mujin looked down at the ring a moment.
“Good.”
Doria’s head came out from inside the collapsed hearth.
“You mean to make a hoe out of that iron? Ahem. Half of it will have to be stripped away.”
“Half will remain.”
“Charcoal?”
“I will burn some tomorrow.”
“Bellows?”
“Cart leather will serve.”
Doria stroked the beard downward, wearing the face of someone hunting for an argument, and in the end went back inside the hearth.
“The flue first. Fire dies if it can’t breathe.”
Aisha looked from one to the other.
“Do I do it too?”
“Carry the charcoal.”
“And after that?”
“You must learn fire.”
“And after that?”
Kang Mujin set the ring down beside the hearth.
“If the iron waits for you.”
Only then did Aisha nod.
Over the three days in the abandoned village, the chain became nails, clamps, and a hoe blade. While Kang Mujin and Doria skimmed off the impurities, the freed people mended roofs and the well; Rakan taught them how to hold a spear, and Silvana taught road-marks that anyone could read. Before they quite noticed, the people who had been hiding began to speak of houses and fields to carry them through winter.
But Rosen’s conclusion, unfolding the map night after night, was always the same. Water or not, an abandoned village with no sightlines and no line of retreat could not be held long. The elven forest would not take in every race, and the western domain would demand another kind of bondage as the price of protection.
The last place he set his finger on was the Blackback Plain, not even three days from the rift. There was an abandoned beacon tower, a river, and hills on which to raise a rampart, but any enemy coming out into the continent would have to pass its southern road.
“Madness.” Doria looked down at the map. “That’s right in front of the demons’ throat.”
“Which is why it is empty,” Rosen said. “As a place to live it is the most dangerous. As a place to hold, it is the land needed first.”
Kang Mujin looked around the village. Aisha was turning soil with the hoe made from the melted collar, and the beastfolk who had been learning the spear were picking stones out of the ground beside the child. Those still hiding did not lift their heads, but those who had begun to work were different.
“I will go and see.”
“You are looking for a settlement?”
“We have already found a place to hide.”
Kang Mujin’s finger stopped on the Blackback Plain.
“I am looking for a place to hold.”
Rosen folded the map first. Rakan insisted on coming, limping leg and all; Doria said to leave the fighting to those in one piece and pointed at the cart. Silvana took up her bow, saying that if they set their ground on the Blackback Plain, the elven forest too would have its warnings sooner.
“Are you going to ask the Council of Elders for permission?” When Kang Mujin asked, Silvana was silent a moment.
“No. I am going to tell them what we intend to do.”
She handed the map back.
“I will go with you.”
Three days later, the company left the abandoned village.
Those who could not walk were moved first to a temporary camp in the northern forest. Silvana had chosen the place, and they left food and herbs enough to last until an elven rescue party came. Of the freed people, thirteen adults and four children who chose to settle would take charge of the wounded and the stores there first and join once the ground was made ready; only six, Kang Mujin and Rakan and Doria and Silvana and Rosen and Aisha, pulled a single cart ahead to survey the Blackback Plain.
The road grew more desolate as they went.
Foundation stones of burned farmhouses remained among the weeds, and the roadside markers had been hacked with blades until the letters were gone. A door on iron hinges lay sunk in a puddle far from any house.
Even on land that people had abandoned, the iron remained.
With every step Kang Mujin felt nails in the soil, broken sickles, arrowheads, fragments of armor that had lost their owners. The iron near the surface was mostly deep in rust, spilled in battles long ago.
The Blackback Plain came into sight as the sun caught on the western hills.
A river flowing down from the north curled around the edge of the plain, a collapsed beacon tower stood at its center, and to the south a low slope ran on and on. Beyond it the sky was ash-gray.
It was not cloud.
The power leaking from the demon-realm rift was staining the far sky in a thin wash.
Rakan’s nose twitched.
“There’s a smell.”
“Demons?”
“Old blood and burned stone. The smell of living ones is still far off.”
Silvana climbed the highest hill and studied the southeast, Doria knocked on the beacon tower’s stones one by one, and Rosen began pacing out the distance between the river and the slope.
Kang Mujin stood in the middle of the plain, closed his eyes, and laid his hand on the ground.
At first the scraps of iron scattered through the soil met him. It was a shallow, coarse sensation, broken arrowheads and horseshoes and rusted blades spread out like points.
He lowered his sense beneath them.
The blessing did not run straight like sight; it spread from his fingertips the way ripples widen. The farther it passed through soil and bedrock the more it blurred, so Kang Mujin let the odds and ends of iron slip by one at a time and searched for the steady grain deeper down.
Under the western riverbank lay a thin bed of iron-bearing sand. Easy to gather, but little of it.
The northern hills were different.
A heavy resonance came back out of the bedrock. The magnetite was uneven in purity and shot through with sulfur, so used as it was the iron would crumble red, but the vein ran broad. Sorted and roasted several times over, it could be used.
Deeper still, the grain of another metal was faintly mixed in.
When Kang Mujin lifted his hand there was soil on his fingertips, and the inside of his wrist prickled from tracing a distant vein so long.
Doria came over.
“Anything?”
“There is iron.”
“How much?”
“Enough to be left over after we have hammered until we are old.”
Doria raised an eyebrow.
“I’m a dwarf. I live longer than humans.”
“Then keep hammering after I am dead.”
“Ahem.”
Doria looked toward the northern hills and lifted one corner of a mouth beneath the beard.
“Land with some taste of iron to it.”
Rosen found the old flagpole socket beside the beacon tower.
“The rampart can run along the southern slope. The eastern road can be narrowed and gated, and a bridge can be laid over the western river later. The problem is the first building. We must decide whether quarters or a storehouse goes up first.”
“The forge first.”
Kang Mujin said.
Rosen did not argue at once. He looked between the plain and the people, then offered two proposals.
“There is a way to raise a small forge and a common lodging at the same time. Or we could put every hand on the rampart and make only the ironwork we need at an open-air hearth.”
“We build a proper forge.”
“May I ask why?”
“A house built without a single nail will not last. Without shovels we cannot dig a ditch, and without axes we cannot raise a palisade.”
Kang Mujin pointed to the northern hills.
“If we draw that iron out, we can make the next thing.”
Rosen nodded slowly.
“The smithy comes first, then.”
“If people are to stay, there must be fire.”
Aisha climbed down from the back of the cart. The collar the child had not let go of for days was gone, and the hoe made from melting it lay on the cart.
The child looked once around the plain.
“Do we live here?”
“That is the intention.”
“What if they come after us?”
Kang Mujin looked at the ash-gray sky to the south.
The rift was not visible, and he could not feel the iron there either. A few arrowheads and a rusted blade buried at the foot of the southern slope were as far as his sense reached.
“We hold.”
“What if a lot of them come?”
“We hold harder.”
Aisha thought a moment, then picked a fist-sized stone off the ground.
“Then use this.”
Kang Mujin took the stone. It was hard, with volcanic rock mixed in, but too small to serve as a cornerstone.
“Where shall I put it?”
The child pointed in front of the collapsed beacon tower.
“At the beginning.”
Kang Mujin went there.
While Doria cleared away the soil, Rakan dug at the ground with an old sword, and Silvana moved the roots aside with the arts of the spirits. Rosen checked the watercourse and the footing, then shifted the spot half a step north.
A shallow pit took shape.
Kang Mujin set the small stone Aisha had handed him at the bottom and laid over it a broad stone pried from the beacon tower. He did not cut away the cracked corner; he dressed flat only the face that would carry the weight.
There was no need for ornament.
It only had to not move.
When Doria held out the hammer, Kang Mujin struck the four corners of the stone in turn. A dull resonance spread down into the earth.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Even after the last blow the stone did not move.
“We will raise the forge here.”
Kang Mujin said.
Wind laid down the dry grass of the plain. The faces turned toward him were worn; among them were some whose wounds had not closed, and some with no home to return to.
Kang Mujin did not pick long words.
Even striking iron, one had to strike only as much as was needed. More hammering did not make a better thing.
“I will not stop anyone who leaves.”
No one moved.
“Anyone who stays must work. I will not ask your race, or what you were before. You eat as much as you work, and before danger we protect one another.”
Rakan drove a sword with a broken point into the ground.
“I’m staying. I haven’t paid my debt yet.”
“This is not a place built on debts.”
“I know.”
Rakan passed a hand once over the brand at that wrist.
“I’m staying anyway.”
Doria shouldered the hammer.
“You raise a forge and the smith is supposed to sit out? But at the fire I do things my way.”
“At my forge, things go my way.”
“Then we’ll have to build two.”
Silvana stood her bow upright and planted it in the ground.
“The Council of Elders will be wary of this decision. They may see it as one more fortress raised by humans.”
Kang Mujin looked at her.
“It is not a human fortress.”
Silvana’s gaze passed over Rakan, Doria, and Aisha in turn.
“I will confirm that for myself. For a long time.”
Rosen drew a small crest-plate from inside his worn coat. It was the mark of a fallen domain, but he did not place it beneath the cornerstone. He spoke with it held in his hand.
“Administration needs ledgers, and supply needs storehouses. You will come to need law, borders, and someone to negotiate with. Even if it begins with one smithy, the end of it will be larger than that.”
“I know.”
“And you will do it even so?”
Kang Mujin laid his hand on the cornerstone.
Beneath the cold stone, the heavy grain of the vein underground ran on. The iron of the north still slept inside the bedrock, and it would have to be dug out, broken, stripped of impurities, and hammered countless times before it became usable steel.
A place where people stayed was no different.
No country was solid from the start. He had not yet said he would found a country, and he had still less intention of becoming a king.
He intended only that here, no ring would ever again be fastened around a neck.
That was enough for a first blow of the hammer.
“We build.”
Kang Mujin said.
“We will hold here.”
After those words, the time of the plain stopped for a single beat.
The hammer came down in Doria’s hand, and even the sound of Silvana’s bowstring shivering in the wind grew distinct. Rakan, looking at the southern slope, drove the broken sword in deeper, and Rosen spread out again the map he had been about to fold and weighted it down beside the cornerstone. No one cheered. Instead, no one looked toward leaving.
For Kang Mujin, who had always looked first for the next road, this time there was no road left by which to fall back. What he chose for the first time was not a way to avoid, but a line the enemy could not cross.
Aisha sat down beside the cornerstone and took out the name tag. Fingering the small engraving that resembled a hammer and anvil, the child asked.
“Does this place have a name too?”
Rosen looked around the plain.
“For now it is called the Blackback Plain. But the place we make will need another name.”
Doria snorted.
“A name can wait until one wall is standing.”
“Quite so. The substance comes first.”
Kang Mujin did not answer.
When the sun went down, the cornerstone’s shadow stretched long. People took the tents off the cart and drew water from the river, and Rakan led the first watch toward the southern slope. Silvana tied warning knots into the trees on the hill, Doria was already muttering about the size of the forge, and Rosen wrote the number of people and the remaining food on the first page of a ledger.
Aisha picked up a small nail that had fallen beside the cornerstone.
It was a rusted nail.
The child set the nail on the stone and tapped it carefully with a pebble.
Tang.
A light sound rang.
Listening to it, Kang Mujin looked south.
Beyond the slope where darkness had fallen was where his sense did not reach. Neither the rift three days away nor the forces moving around it could he yet see or feel. To Grimoire Vargas, the stirrings on this plain would be no more than a trifling disturbance at the border.
Kang Mujin brushed the soil from his palm.
What iron a trifling spark could melt, they did not yet know.
Which slope the alternate route Grimoire Vargas had said he would calculate might come over, there was no knowing. Only this was certain: that road had to pass south of this plain.
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