CHAPTER FIFTEEN
?
LUCA
“Luca.”
Adrian put chest behind it to get over the blower, and I still did not look up.
I had a bar of flat iron lying in the coke at orange heat and a chalk line already drawn the length of the fence out on the wet concrete, post to post. I rolled the bar a quarter turn with the tongs.
The tail of it carried the mark I cut cold last night, LUCA MOREAU in letters the size of my thumbnail, punched deep enough to outlive me.
Four strikes. That was what he got.
I pulled the bar, laid it on the horn, and hit it four times with the little cross-peen, and the fourth one came back dull because I had let the color fall past orange. My fault, not his. I put it back in the fire and pumped the crank twice.
“I hear you. Hold on.”
“The fence,” he said.
“I know what the fence is.” I banked coke over the bar with the rake, which is a stupid way to do it and the way I have always done it. “I walked it at first light. Soapstone in my teeth, peen in my right hand, every post from the gate around to the drum shed.”
The yard was standing water out to the van and the air had gone cool for the first time in a week. Steam came off the forge roof in a sheet. Everything smelled like hot iron and wet ash and, under that, salt.
“A live post rings,” I said. “Tap it under the cap and it answers you back up your wrist, like a tuning fork somebody left in a bucket. Dead iron just thuds. Anybody can hear it. Bex can hear it.”
I picked up the soapstone off the anvil face and turned it in my fingers. It had worn down to a nub in one morning.
“Four posts are dead. West, north, northeast, and the one by the drum shed.”
Adrian stayed out where the rain was. Then he came all the way in under the roof, and the light off the fire got at the gray in his hair.
“Fix them.”
“That’s not a small ask.” I wiped my palm down my thigh and left a gray stripe on the denim. “Four blanks is four heats and four names, and I only get one set of hands.”
“Fix them.”
“You want to hear the part where I tell you how, or do you want to keep saying that?”
He shifted his weight to his back foot, which on him is a whole speech.
“Both.”
I set the soapstone down. My left shoulder came up slow, stopped short of my ear, and stayed there arguing with me, so I brought my right hand over instead and dragged the tongs off the hook.
“Here’s where you and me are going to have a conversation,” I said.
“I can weld a plate on every one of those posts before noon and you’d never get through it with a torch.
That’s not warding. That’s a fence. If I set a ward I can’t take off, and it goes bad, and it goes bad with her inside it, then I built the box she dies in. ”
Nothing off him. The man can stand still like furniture.
“I don’t make a ward I can’t unmake. Never have. Not starting now.”
“Then unmake them fast.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the same job, boss.”
I went out into the wet with him because the next part he had to see, not hear.
The Crane Meridian van had been standing in our yard since twenty to eight last night with both back doors open, and I had walked a ring of rock salt around it at dawn, wide, a good hand’s width, poured off a coffee can.
The rain had quit by then. The ring was there.
Every grain exactly where I laid it, not smeared, not kicked, not one dog’s worth of a gap anywhere in the circle.
I stepped over it, careful not to scuff the grains, and pressed the back of my knuckles to the driver’s seat.
Warm. Body warm. Warm the way a chair is when somebody stands up.
I got no scent off that seat at all, not sweat, not skin, not fear, nothing — the way an empty room has no smell but is still a room.
“Seat’s warm and the salt’s not broken,” I said. “Both of those are true, so don’t make me pick one.”
Adrian looked at the ring a long time.
“Somebody stepped over it.”
“No hollow does. A person can. There’s no person’s scent in here.”
“Then somebody sat in that seat without crossing the yard.”
“Now you’re getting it,” I said. “Feels great, doesn’t it.”
I pushed the seat with the end of the rake. The cushion did not give. The rake went through it.
A beat later the whole van went thin, white panels turning to the color of the yard behind them. I was standing in a perfect salt circle with nothing inside it but my own boots.
“Not a crossing,” Adrian said.
“No. An appearance.” I looked toward the Sable Room. “Something in our paperwork is letting him pretend he belongs here.”
He did not answer that. He went across the yard toward the shop without a word, boots throwing water, and I stood inside a perfect circle with my hand still out like an idiot.
?
Bex came out with the coal hod on her hip and dumped it in the bin, and I went back to the fire because standing around wondering is not a trade.
This building was the brass foundry’s annealing shed before it was mine.
Brick floor, a roof I re-tinned myself, and a firepot the club has kept lit longer than I have been in it.
Men drive down from Boston with a trunk full of gate hardware and stand in the yard with their hats in their hands, and I make them wait, because I can.
Every other man in the Hades Riders is faster than me or meaner than me or both. Neither one of those ever appealed to me. I wanted to be the one they cannot do without, and I got it, and it fits.
I cut the blank, brought it up orange, and upset the end where the name would sit. My right hand drove the hammer. The left held the tongs low, where the shoulder could bear it.
The forge’s heart plate carried my name too. It was the first piece I had ever signed. Every ward I made borrowed its heat.
Bex watched me check that plate twice. “And if he gets through the new ones?”
“Then there’s one thing left. Break the forge and give the heart away.”
“Give it to who?”
“Whoever needs the wall more than I need my trade.”
She stopped leaning on the bin. “Meaning?”
“My bare hands carry it. The name takes the hands with it. No more wards after.”
“No,” Bex said.
“Good. Now you know how bad it has to get before I do.”
Victoria came through the rear passage carrying a mug. At the table she reached for the sugar bowl out of habit, found the empty place, and stopped. Then she picked up the second mug and crossed the yard toward me.
I said nothing.
“Black, right?” she said, holding one out.
“Yeah. You remembered.”
She had both hands wrapped around her mug by the time I got mine set down on the quench tub, and I watched her do it. The thin white line across her left palm went pink in the cold. Her thumb rode the rim. She blew across the top of it, and her mouth did the shape mouths do.
I lost ten seconds of my life standing there with a hammer in my hand and my mouth open like the fire had gone out.
I told myself I was watching her hands. A man who works iron watches hands. I have said that to apprentices and meant it. It was not her hands.
“Uh huh,” Bex said at my elbow, quiet, delighted. “Big scary bear.”
“Go get coal.”
“Got coal.”
“Get more.” I did not look at her. “Get so much coal.”
She went, eventually, and she took her time about it, and I heard her laughing at me all the way to the bin.
Victoria came in under the roof where it was warm and stood with her back to the doorpost, out of the water, watching the fire eat.
“It’s louder than I thought,” she said. “I could hear it from the kitchen all night.”
“That’s the blower. The fire itself doesn’t make any noise. That’s how I know a post is dead — I put my ear on it and there’s nothing in there.”
“Nothing sounds like what?”
“Like a pipe.”
“Stand there where I can see you,” I said. “I work better.”
She did not say anything to that, but her chin came up half an inch and stayed there, and she kept her back against the doorpost, and I turned back to the anvil before my face said something my mouth had not agreed to.
“Come here,” I said. “Hands.”
She set her mug on the tub next to mine and came. I put the four-pound in her hands, haft first, and closed her fingers on it, and she took the weight and dropped about two inches before she caught it.
“God,” she said. “How is it that heavy?”
“It isn’t. You are small.” I got her in front of the anvil and stood in behind her, close enough that the heat off the fire was hitting us both as one shape, and I set my hands on her forearms and turned them where they belonged.
“Bar’s at orange. That means we’ve got about a count of ten before it goes stupid, so listen. Let it fall. Don’t drive it.”
“Am I holding this wrong?”
“You’re holding it fine. Elbow in.”
I moved her elbow with two fingers, a half inch, no more, and her whole back went stiff against my chest and then let go, and neither one of us said a word about it.
She hit it. The hammer came down on the fat end of that blank and the anvil rang up through both of us, and a spark came off and landed in her hair, orange, sitting there.
“Don’t move. There’s a spark in your hair and I’m getting it, and then I’m putting my hand back where it was.”
I got it out with my thumb and forefinger. It was nothing, it was already dead, and my hand was shaking, which is a hell of a thing at my age.
Then I took the hammer back out of her hands, because the color was gone and because I wanted to want it a while longer than I got to.
She looked at her palms. Coal black, both of them, right across the pads.
“Am I supposed to wash that off?”
“Not on my account.”
She turned her hands over and looked at them like they had come off somebody else’s wrists.
“Whose name goes on them? The posts.”
“Mine.” I tipped the blank up so she could see the tail of it, still black-hot and reading back at her. “Every one, all the way around. The iron doesn’t care who I like. It cares who signed for it.”
“That’s a lot to put your name on.”
“Seventeen guys and a gate,” I said. “I’ve signed for worse and I’ve slept fine.”
She had been watching my hands the whole time and not my face, and I kept talking so she would keep doing it. That is the truth and I am not proud of it.
Bex came back with the hod and stood in the doorway with her hip out.
“So it’s a fence with a witch’s spell—”
“It’s a fence with a name on it. Not the same thing, and don’t say spell.”
“Iron’s iron, Luca. My grandmother’s skillet is iron. That thing has never warded anything but eggs.”
I got the blank back in the fire and gave the crank a turn so I would not have to look at her while she was right about the easy part.
“Your grandmother never cut a name in it.”
“So a name stops a man?” Bex asked.
“A bound thing. Not a human. Don’t mix those up.”
I pointed at her boot. She was about to drag gravel through the salt line.
She stepped back. “I saw it.”
“You didn’t.”
“I was going to.”
Victoria laughed once into her coffee. I would have stood there all day to hear it again. Instead I picked up the tongs.
“The new west post goes in first,” I said. “She crosses that corner twice a day. I’d rather she crossed it inside something.”
Victoria had gone very still by the doorpost.
“Bex,” she said. “He said four posts are dead.”
Bex stopped talking. That is the fastest I have ever seen it happen.
Somebody blipped a throttle at the gate. Adrian came back across the yard then, and my hands kept moving and my mouth quit entirely.
I put the blank in the fire. I set the tongs down square on the tub rail. I dressed the chisel edge on the stone, and I did all of it without one word, and I felt him standing there behind my right shoulder the whole time, big and quiet, waiting to be talked to like a dog at a table.
Early yesterday in the truck he told me a thing that was not true and I watched him do it in the mirror. Trust is the one thing he has never had to work for with me. He is not going to like the price on it now.
“Luca.”
I picked the blank out of the fire and turned my back the rest of the way.
“Eleven years, and not one time have I had to wonder what you meant. Fix that.”
Nothing. Then his boots going, and the smell of him going with it — wolf and wet leather and under it the bond I was done pretending not to feel.
I carried the blank out to the west post and set it while it still had heat, wrapped the strap iron, drove the wedge, and put a fistful of salt into the socket where nobody would ever see it.
Then the chisel. Shallow first, then back through deep, and the second stroke has to land before the iron drops out of black-hot or the letter closes up behind the edge like water.
I cut the first letter and it took. It took beautifully, the metal opening under my hands and staying open, and for about four seconds I was the happiest man in Maryland.
Then the yard put her back in my head, the way it has all week. Trouble in a doorway with coal on both hands. I cut the second letter angry and it came out clean anyway.
I stood up and stretched my back and looked down the chalk line at the northeast post, the one I had been hammering on yesterday morning, and I walked over with the chisel still in my fist.
The name was gone off the northeast post. Fresh grinding dust lay in the bracket on the yard side, protected from the rain. Whoever had done it had worked inside our fence.
Caught under the lower bolt was a strip of blue abrasive cloth. Sykes had used that brand at my bench for six years. I knew the pattern before I knew what to do with the knowing.
Something savage came up in me and I let it stand, and I worked out in order what I would do to the hands that did that.