The sound was wrong.
A dry pop, like a knee joint giving way. Not a ring. Not a clang. Bhaskar's arm, braced for the familiar shock of steel on shield, instead flew through empty air. The hilt in his fist felt hollowed out, a dead weight.
He stumbled. The world narrowed to the sight of his own feet scrambling for purchase in the slick mud.
Silence pressed in. A thick, breathless pause. The sound of rain dripping from the workshop eaves seemed loud. He looked up. The young guard, Kavi, stood frozen, his shield held high, his eyes wide. Between them, half-buried in the muck, was the rest of Bhaskar's sword.
Shame was a hot, physical thing, crawling up his neck. He, the captain. In front of them all. His blade, the very extension of his will, lay broken and useless. He could feel their eyes on him, the unspoken question hanging in the cold air: what if that had been my sword? What if that had been a real fight?
He forced his legs to move, knelt, and his fingers closed around the jagged, broken steel. It was cold. Wrong. He didn't remember returning to his quarters. He just remembered the weight of the two useless pieces in his hands.
Later, he stood before the prince. The chamber was cold, lit by a single candle that threw long, dancing shadows. Aditya didn't look at him. He held the two pieces of the sword, turning them over and over, his brow furrowed. The silence stretched, filled only by the low hum coming from the boy's throat. A tuneless, distracting sound.
"Impure," Aditya muttered, speaking to the steel, not to Bhaskar. He ran a fingertip over the sharp, crystalline edge of the break. "The ore was poor. The heat… uneven. The quench was sloppy."
Each word was a judgment. Not on Bhaskar, but on his world. On the sword he had carried and trusted.
Bhaskar's jaw tightened. A defensive anger began to smoulder in his gut. "It was a good blade."
Aditya finally looked up, and his eyes were distant, as if looking at a problem far beyond the walls of the small room. "No," he said, his voice flat. "It was a risk. All of this," he gestured vaguely, "all our blades. They are liabilities. Variables in an equation that must be solved. They will fail." He tossed the pieces onto the table. The clatter was unnervingly loud.
"I need better," Aditya said, more to himself than to Bhaskar. He began to pace, a caged energy in his small frame. "A different kind of fire. A cleaner process." He stopped, his gaze snapping back to Bhaskar as if just noticing him again. "The old empire had masters. Men who understood heat, whose families had worked the forges for generations. They are out there now. Beggars."
The sudden shift was jarring. Bhaskar struggled to follow. "You want…smiths?"
Aditya made a sharp, impatient gesture. "I want a solution. I want the variable removed. You. Your men trust you. You will go out and find one for me. An old one. One who remembers what true steel feels like."
"My lord, the world outside… it is chaos. To find one man…"
"Then be clever about it!" Aditya's voice was suddenly sharp, the voice of a frustrated master to a slow apprentice. "Don't look for a smith. They are all smiths now, hammering bent nails for a bowl of rice. Don't ask questions. Listen." He leaned forward, his eyes burning with a strange light. "Pride. That is what you listen for. A master cannot abide shoddy work. It offends his soul. Find the man who is not weeping over his lost home, but is enraged by a poorly balanced axe. Find the man who complains about the crack in a cooking pot. That is your man."
He turned away, his mind already moving on. "Take the silver from Tannur. Promise him whatever you must."
Bhaskar stood rooted to the spot, a feeling of deep dislocation washing over him. The orders were not orders. They were riddles. The logic was not the logic of a commander, but of something else entirely.
He looked at Aditya's back. He was loyal to this boy. He had seen him conjure food from nothing and win battles against impossible odds. But he did not understand him. He felt like a hound being given a scent, expected to follow it through a storm.
"What do I show him?" Bhaskar asked, his voice rough. "What proof do I offer that we are anything more than bandits with a pouch of silver?"
Aditya turned, and for a moment, the mask of the strategist fell away, revealing the terrifying, arrogant certainty beneath. "You will show him the pieces of your broken sword," he said. "And you will tell him you serve a prince who knows why it failed, and who has a design for one that won't. Tell him his life's work has been practice. Tell him I am offering him the chance to create his masterpiece."