Blackbrook Gorge, despite its name, held almost no sound of water.
The rainy season had passed and the brook had laid its bed bare; between the black pebbles ran water only two finger-joints deep. The east side of the gorge was a cliff that looked cut and stood on end, and on the western slope thornbrush and stunted pines clung tangled together. The only road a cart could pass was the single line between them.
Kang Mujin set his palm against the middle of the cliff face.
Beyond the cold stone he felt metal. Iron sand mixed into the grit, pyrite wedged in the seams of the rock, even an arrowhead snapped off long ago and buried in the dirt, each catching quietly at his fingertips, every one a different size and depth.
Among them, the twelve iron wedges he had driven in with Doria stood out sharp and clear.
Kang Mujin checked them one by one. The tips of the wedges had bitten in exactly along the grain of the bedrock. Driven too deep, the whole cliff would come down; too shallow, and they would not stop even the lead cart. What he needed was not a rockfall that came down on people, but a collapse just wide enough to cut the road.
“The third one has lifted about half an inch.”
From behind a boulder below, Doria snorted.
“Hrm. You can feel that from up there?”
“The hammering was rough.”
“And who kept me from sleeping a wink since last night?”
Grumbling all the while, Doria struck the third wedge again. Short, heavy blows rang through the rock and pushed the iron tip deeper into the bedrock, and the faint tremor that had snagged at Kang Mujin’s fingertips vanished.
“That’s it.”
“You know your iron.”
Doria slung the hammer over one shoulder, stone dust settled pale through his beard.
From above the gorge came a birdcall, three times.
The signal Silvana had chosen.
The enemy was in sight.
Kang Mujin went down the slope. Rakan was crouched inside the dry streambed, gripping hard the short blade that had been repaired for him, though his injured leg still would not straighten all the way.
“The two at the rear are mine.”
Rakan said.
“Take only one.”
“Why?”
“Because you have to leave yourself legs to come back on.”
Rakan’s ears flattened back, but the mouth that had opened to argue closed again.
A little way off, Rosen waited. The sword that had cracked was now a handspan shorter. Kang Mujin had cut the flaw out and set in a core of low-carbon iron brought from the mine; since the work had been hurried, he had given up hardness in the edge so that it would not snap under a blow.
Rosen drew the sword and checked the edge one last time.
“I’ll cut the prisoner carts loose first.”
“Don’t come out before the signal.”
“Understood.”
His answer was clean, with none of the hesitation that had still been there the day before.
Hoofbeats came into the gorge.
The first to appear were four riders in black armor. Behind them came twelve spearmen and eight carts caged in iron bars, and between the carts walked prisoners bound in chains. At the tail of the column, more spearmen and riders again.
More than twice the usual escort.
Kang Mujin lowered his breathing and read the movement of metal.
Thirty-six blades. Twenty-three spears. Six crossbows. Twelve throwing needles hidden inside armor. The cart axles were reinforced with demon-realm steel, full of impurities but evenly heat-treated, unlike the weapons the low-ranking soldiers at the mine had carried.
At the center of the column there was a different presence.
One great demon sat astride a black horse. Between its horns it wore a helm banded with silver, and on its chest was carved the emblem of a red eye split down the middle. It was the mark of Grimoire Vargas that Rosen had spoken of.
The demon rider raised a hand and the column stopped.
Too early. The lead cart was still twenty paces short of the wedges.
“Search the left slope.”
The rider’s voice rang through the gorge.
Six soldiers raised shields and spread out. Two toward the dry brook, four toward the slope where Kang Mujin was hidden. They had not spotted the ambush with their eyes. The whole column had been halted on suspicion alone.
That was a commander of elite troops.
Kang Mujin measured again the position of the wedges and the spacing of the enemy. Bring the cliff down now and only the vanguard would be cut off; wait, and the searchers would likely find Rakan first.
The sound of dry gravel underfoot came closer.
Rakan lowered his body, but the point of his blade did not waver.
A pine branch up the slope tilted, barely. Silvana was drawing the bowstring.
Kang Mujin closed his fist.
The twelve wedges in the cliff trembled all at once.
Forcing the grain of iron to twist was nothing like hammering. With no brace and no anvil, Kang Mujin set his force on the soft core of each wedge and pushed against the hard surface as against a lever. Handling twelve at once made his temples throb, and hot needles seemed to burrow between the bones of his fingers.
Even so, the direction had to be exact.
Not at the people. At the road.
Kang Mujin opened his hand and the iron wedges each turned half an inch.
A dull rupture sounded inside the bedrock.
At the instant the rider lifted his head, the lower face of the cliff poured down onto the road. Boulders the size of a man’s head struck between the lead rider and the carts, the horses reared, and the spearmen raised their shields. Dust swallowed the gorge.
Silvana’s arrow flew.
The first pierced a rear rider between shoulder and neck. The second lodged in the back of a crossbowman’s hand and stopped the shot. The third cut the whip of the man driving a cart.
“Ambush!”
Rakan burst out of the dry brook. Dragging his injured leg, his first step was still fast. When a searcher’s spear thrust toward him, Rakan half turned his body, trapped the shaft under his arm, and pulled. As the soldier pitched forward, the short blade slid in between helmet and breastplate.
He did not throw himself at the second soldier.
Keeping to what Kang Mujin had said, he seized the fallen man’s shield, set a knee, and held.
A crossbow sang.
Three black bolts poured down on Rakan.
Kang Mujin stretched his hand into empty air. The iron of the arrowheads tugged at his fingers, but he had neither the force nor the distance to stop their flight head-on. He pushed the three points sideways.
One struck the shield; the other two grazed Rakan’s shoulder and buried themselves in the gravel.
Rakan bared his teeth.
“This one doesn’t count as a debt!”
“Suit yourself.”
Kang Mujin leapt down onto the road.
Doria’s hammer struck armor before he landed. With a dull sound, a demon spearman went flying sideways.
“Hrm! This armor’s nothing but thick!”
“The right joint is thin.”
“You could have said so sooner!”
Doria dropped low and two spears grazed over his helmet; the hammer surged up from below and caught a soldier’s elbow. The arm guard crumpled and the spear fell.
Kang Mujin stepped on the fallen spear.
Under his foot he felt the grain of the steel. The heat treatment was good, but phosphorus had gathered where the blade met the tang, forming a cold and brittle line.
He pushed force through the tip of his foot and the spearhead came away from the wooden shaft.
Kang Mujin did not pick it up with his hand. He turned his palm and the iron head skated across the ground, driving in between the soldiers’ ankles, and three of them lost their footing.
“Now!”
Rosen came out from behind the rock. He stepped over a fallen soldier and ran for the carts, and the shortened sword was faster, not slower, in the narrow spaces between them. He blocked once, turned his wrist to slide a spear shaft away, then shouldered the enemy back.
Silvana dropped down onto a cart.
When the elf’s hand touched the iron bars, a faint green light spread from the fingertips, and the vines along the road grew up and wound around the cart wheels. The driver started to bring his blade down, but an arrow pierced the hilt.
“Move back inside the cart.”
Silvana spoke to the prisoners.
Kang Mujin felt the lock on the first cart. Its inner structure, three catches and a single rotating plate, was as clear as if it lay in his palm. Torn open by force without a key, the iron bars themselves would bend and injure the people inside.
He narrowed the gap between forefinger and thumb, and the plate inside the lock turned.
Clack.
The door opened.
But the prisoners in the cart did not move. They looked at the iron rings on their necks and the chains on the floor and only huddled smaller. Their eyes could not believe being told to run.
Kang Mujin opened the next lock.
“Come out. We’ll hold the road.”
At that, the rider in black armor spurred his horse.
Instead of fleeing, he charged straight at Kang Mujin, his long blade splitting the dust. Kang Mujin slipped aside and drew the sword at his waist.
The two blades met.
The weight was different.
The shock climbed his wrist to his shoulder. His opponent’s blade was demon-realm steel, impure iron folded over and over until its weak points were scattered thin. Crude, but made to endure a long time on a battlefield.
The rider wheeled his horse.
“Target confirmed. The human who deforms metal.”
There was no surprise in his tone. He sounded like a man checking something already reported against what stood before him.
“General Grimoire has ordered you taken alive.”
Kang Mujin brought his sword low.
“So he didn’t come himself.”
“The general is less concerned with the loss of a single consumable than with an anomaly in the production system. You could become a useful variable.”
He had called people consumables.
Kang Mujin’s eyes ran over the rider’s armor. The breastplate was thick, but beneath the left armpit there was a sign of repair. A plate of a different alloy laid over the gap and fixed with three rivets, a hasty job. If a shock were concentrated on one side, the rivets would go first.
Kang Mujin’s words grew few.
“People are not material.”
He took a step forward.
The rider’s blade swung in from the side, and Kang Mujin caught it on the back of his sword and let it slide off. Sparks burst before his eyes, and in the same moment his left hand opened.
The three repair rivets in the armor sprang outward.
The breastplate gaped.
Kang Mujin drew his blade in close to his body and thrust short, and the point passed through the opening. The rider’s body went rigid.
“Capture alive… was an efficient offer.”
Even as he fell, he did not raise his voice.
Kang Mujin pulled the blade free.
“Refused.”
A horn sounded at the rear, and the two remaining riders pulled the ranks back together. The spearmen gathered not around the carts but around the line of retreat. Rather than recover the prisoners, they were moving to preserve the surviving strength and what they knew.
In that moment, the emblem on the fallen rider’s chest glowed red.
Kang Mujin raised his sword.
The plate set into the armor was holding heat. He could not feel magic itself, but he could tell that the temperature inside the metal was rising in an even circle.
Above the red eye, a half-transparent figure rose.
Angular horns, black hair combed back, armor as neat as a uniform. The figure stood a full head taller than Kang Mujin, and its eyes were dry, as though reading a ledger of figures rather than a battlefield.
“The 7th Transport Unit commander’s life signs have been lost.”
The demons throughout the gorge dropped to one knee as one.
“General Vargas.”
Grimoire Vargas’s gaze moved, then stopped on Kang Mujin. At least, that was how Kang Mujin felt it.
“It matches the report. Unauthorized metal-manipulating specimen. Human, male.”
Grimoire seemed to take in the opened carts, the collapsed cliff, and the fallen soldiers in turn.
“Recovery of the transport is unlikely. Remaining forces, withdraw with the records.”
Sobbing came from inside a cart, but Grimoire did not so much as turn that way.
“Dispose of the loaded resources.”
The remaining demons drew black spheres from their belts. The same metal devices were fixed to the oil casks beneath the carts. Kang Mujin read the structure at once. Inside a thin iron membrane, mineral powders that caught fire on contact were held apart by a partition.
They meant to burn the prisoners too.
“Doria! Under the carts!”
“I see them!”
While Doria’s hammer sent the first oil cask flying out from under a cart, Silvana moved the vines to drag the second down into the brook, and Rosen threw himself under the third.
A demon soldier smashed his sphere down.
Kang Mujin clenched both hands.
The iron membranes under all eight carts crumpled at once, and the partitions dividing the mineral powders pressed shut against each other. His head rang and something hot ran from his nose, but if he lost hold of even one, a cart would burn.
The eighth membrane held.
The thickness was different.
Kang Mujin set his teeth and twisted his wrist. He found the softest grain in the membrane and pushed force into it, and with a short rupture the device dropped to the ground.
Nothing caught fire.
Rakan shoved the soldier holding a sphere down with his shield. Rosen crawled out from under the cart and raised his sword, and when Silvana’s arrow struck the rock along the retreat line, the wind of the spirits rolled the dust up into the air.
The surviving demons did not fight on. They turned into the dust and withdrew toward the south end of the gorge.
Grimoire’s figure remained to the last.
“Do you claim ownership of the resources?”
He asked it of Kang Mujin.
Kang Mujin wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand.
“They belong to no one.”
“An inefficient notion. Because of your action, border transport volume will decrease temporarily. I will calculate an alternate route.”
“Send it again and I’ll cut it again.”
Grimoire’s figure paused for a moment, but the expression did not change.
“Then I will classify you not as a variable but as an obstacle.”
The red light went out.
In the gorge there remained only the groaning of the wounded and the ragged breathing inside the carts.
Kang Mujin sheathed his sword and went to the nearest cart. People with iron rings at their throats drew back from his hand. There were humans, and an elf whose pointed ears had been cut, and a beastkin whose pelt had been stripped away in patches.
Far at the back, one small child sat huddled.
Short, round ears rose through grey-brown hair, but there was no telling which people the child came from. The child looked not at Kang Mujin but back and forth between his belt and his hands, checking first whether he carried a weapon, whether he held anything to strike with.
Kang Mujin set his sword down outside the cart and showed his empty hands.
“You can come out.”
The child did not move.
Without pressing, Kang Mujin opened the locks and released the iron collars one by one. Each time he tipped back a latch tongue there was a clack, and each time, the prisoners flinched.
Last of all came the child’s turn.
The ring was too small, and where it had cut into the growing neck the skin was red and swollen. Kang Mujin studied the thickness of the metal, then cupped the ring in both hands.
“It’s cold.”
The child whispered.
It was the first time the voice had been heard.
“It will be over soon.”
He did not raise the temperature of the ring. Forcing it open would tear the skin. Instead he softened only the small spring inside the latch, but the iron was sweat-soaked and stiff with rust. Kang Mujin lifted the rust away along the grain and slid the catch slowly.
Clack.
The ring opened.
The child held the bared throat and looked up at Kang Mujin.
“Again?”
“What do you mean?”
“Will you put it back on?”
Kang Mujin laid the iron ring on the ground and stepped on it. The ring flattened under his foot.
“It doesn’t go back on.”
The child stared a long while at the crushed iron, then climbed carefully down out of the cart. Bare feet touched the gravel and the small body swayed.
Kang Mujin held out a hand.
The child did not take it straight away, only looked back and forth between his palm and his face for a long moment, then hooked on with two fingers.
A small, cold hand.
Silvana tended the wounded in the other carts. The hand holding the bow was steady as always, but each time the sight came of an elf with a ring cut into the throat, the fingertips trembled faintly. Doria gathered the chains into one place without a word, and every time the hammer came down a link parted.
Rakan walked among the prisoners and stopped before a branded wolf beastkin. Without saying anything he showed the back of his own neck, and the other lifted their head; then Rakan handed them a waterskin.
Rosen counted the ones who had lived.
“Sixty-three. Seventeen who cannot walk, nine who need treatment urgently. We have to move before the enemy returns.”
“Is there a road?”
“There is a short road to the abandoned village northeast, and a safe road that goes around through the forest. With the wounded, we should take the short road, but we will need a rear guard to hold off pursuit.”
Kang Mujin nodded.
“I’ll stay.”
“I’m staying too.”
Rakan said it at once.
“Guard the wounded.”
“Somebody has to guard your flank as well.”
His injured leg was shaking, but Rakan did not give ground.
Kang Mujin pointed him toward the heap of broken chain.
“Load that onto a cart.”
“Why the chains?”
“I’m going to turn them into farm tools.”
Rakan shut his mouth, and Doria stroked his beard.
“The iron’s worth next to nothing. Plenty of rust, plenty of slag.”
“Fold it and the slag comes out.”
“That’ll take a lot of charcoal.”
“There are plenty of trees to cut.”
The corner of Doria’s mouth rose beneath the beard.
“Hrm. Then there’s no reason to throw it away.”
The child’s fingers slipped out of Kang Mujin’s hand. The child ran to the flattened collar and lifted it in both hands, but it was far too heavy for that small body, and the arms sagged down.
“This too.”
“You can leave that behind.”
The child shook their head.
“It was mine.”
To that, no one answered right away.
Kang Mujin bent one knee in front of the child.
“What’s your name?”
The child’s mouth closed. It was the face of someone who had never heard the question.
“There must have been something they called you.”
Silvana asked from a little way off.
The child scratched at the mark on the throat, then said briefly.
“Thirteen.”
An iron tag stamped with a number had fallen inside the cart. Thirteen. It was the tag that had hung from the child’s collar.
Kang Mujin picked up the tag and pressed it with his fingers. The grooves of the number, roughly punched, smeared flat. He took a small chisel from his belt.
“Let’s cut a new one.”
“A new what?”
Kang Mujin looked at the child a moment. A face smudged with charcoal dust, hands that would not let go of the severed iron ring, eyes that were frightened and still watching everything.
“A name you choose.”
For a while the child did not answer.
Far off at the south end of the gorge, a horn sounded again. The withdrawn troops were calling up the next unit; there was no staying long.
While Rosen got the people to their feet, Silvana opened the way through to the forest, and Doria checked the axles of the cart wheels. Rakan took one of the wounded onto his back.
The child watched the people moving, then caught Kang Mujin’s sleeve.
“Aisha.”
“Who called you that?”
“I don’t know. I heard it in a dream.”
Formal speech and plain were mixed together, but the voice was clearer than before.
Kang Mujin set the chisel to the iron tag. With no hammer, he pressed each stroke in with the pommel of his sword.
Aisha.
The letters were clumsy, but they went deeper than the number had.
On one side of the tag Kang Mujin added a small mark shaped like a hammer and anvil. It was the mark he left on the things he forged.
“It’s yours now.”
Aisha took the tag and closed both hands around it.
“They can’t take it away?”
Kang Mujin looked toward the south end of the gorge.
Beyond the dust, a faint mass of metal was approaching. Spears and armor, and far more horseshoes than carts. It seemed the replacement force Grimoire had calculated was already moving.
Kang Mujin raised his sword.
“They can’t take it.”
He sent Aisha to Rosen. While Doria settled his grip on the hammer, Silvana counted the arrows that were left, and Rakan, after loading the wounded onto a cart, took his place at Kang Mujin’s right hand regardless.
The freed people began to move into the forest road.
Kang Mujin stayed in the middle of the road and stood on the broken chain.
Iron did not lie. Where this chain had been made, how many necks it had passed through, he could not know; but that if it were left as it was it would bind someone again, of that much he was certain.
Then it had to be melted down.
Not only the chain, but the order that took it for granted.
Beyond the gorge, a black banner came into view.
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