The ingot lay on the master anvil, a black, rough-looking hunk that still retained a faint lingering of last night's impossible heat. Shankara simply passed it for the first hour, a suspicious old wolf around a new, strange kill. And then he started working on it. Not with the big sledgehammer, but with a small, sharp-headed hammer and a chisel. He peeled off the hard, black slag from its surface, revealing the steel beneath. It wasn't gleaming. It was a dull, dead grey, but as his trained eyes swept over the surface, he saw no imperfections. None.
He grasped the small hammer again. The forge was silent, his apprentices waiting with bated breath. He did not return it. He just raised it an inch and dropped it onto the middle of the ingot.
Ting.
The sound was small, but it echoed through the entire workshop. It was not a hollow thud. It was one note, pure and intact, that held its shape in the air, a clean, resonant sound that would never deteriorate. The sound of whole metal, absolutely and impeccably. Shankara closed his eyes. In the single, pure note, he heard the killing of the word 'impossible.' In his mind, the sword which he would forge out of this was already a myth.
He was already confused in the echo of the note when the silhouette of the boy descended upon him.
Aditya stood there, holding a rolled parchment. He passed a momentary, disdainful flicker of the eye in the direction of the ingot on the anvil, as if it were done, a matter already decided. He slapped the parchment down on the workbench. It unrolled with a dry rasp.
Shankara scowled down. His vision of his mythic, curved sword was lost to a chill rage. The thing on paper was an insult. A graceless, clumsy spike of a spiked sword, more a sharpened stick of wood than a sword. It was ugly. It was an insult to the perfect steel that it was meant to be engraved upon.
"This is a butcher's tool," Shankara snarled, his voice little above a whisper.
"It is what it needs to be," Aditya declared, his tone flat.
"It has no life!" Shankara's tone rose, his control slipping. He was aware of the stare of his apprentices on him. "A sword must be curved to slash, heavy to be an extension of a man's arm! This is… a nail."
"Right," Aditya assented, and the bald declaration was more infuriating than any argument. "A nail to hold a man's life to earth. We are not making art. We are making a thousand of them. All the same."
The word hung in the air—a thousand.
Shankara experienced a vile wave of vertigo. He'd brought his folk here for this? Abetting their trade? Turning into a factory for ugly, soulless weapons? "The smith's hand is not a machine! Each blade is unique!"
"Then your hands are faulty," Aditya retorted, with a murderous irritability in his tone. "Uniqueness is a flaw. A variable. It must and will be eliminated.".
The work was torture, silent and remorseless. Aditya built charts for gigantic iron jigs that clamped themselves onto the anvils, shaping each blow of the hammer in a set direction. He designed tables which stipulated exactly what colour the flame should be, exactly how many seconds to quench. He reduced the ancient, intuitive magic of the forge to a sequence of cold, unforgiving recipes.
Shankara watched his apprentices and sons, their frustrated and sweaty faces, as they fought against their muscle memory. A sword would come out of the fire, and by reflex, the smith's wrist would twist, giving it an infinitesimal, beautiful curve. And it would be wrong. It would add to the increasing pile of rejects in the corner, proof of their failure to become machines.
The forge, once a hot, creative chaos of flame, now stood as a resentful, strained silence, broken only by the boy's gentle, accusatory corrections.
Finally, after seven days of failure, they forged one. One sword that precisely corresponded to the sketch. It was heavy, straight, and utterly without personality. Shankara took hold of it. The feel in his hand was off. It was dead.
Aditya took it from him, his expression unreadable. "Bhaskar," he said.
The captain entered the forge. Aditya handed the sword to him. Bhaskar took it, his forehead furrowing as he tried out its unfamiliar weight.
"Come," Aditya said.
Shankara followed them out into the training area. He had a sick feeling, as if a father was being forced to see his crippled child led before the world. There was a battered suit of armour over a wooden beam.
"Try a thrust," Aditya instructed Bhaskar. "From the hip. Don't think of it as a sword. Think of it as the tip of a spear."
Bhaskar stood, his agitation clear. He struck.
A wet slap of noise.
No fight. The edge of the blade ran through the mail, cut the leather underneath, and seated itself hard in the wood of the post. It was ominously quiet. Effortless.
Bhaskar pulled out the blade. There was a tidy, round, killing hole in the armour. The sword did not tarnish.
Shankara looked at that hole. He looked at the ugly, brutally efficient sword in Bhaskar's hand. All his words about art, about soul, about a millennium of heritage, all died in his throat, strangled by this one stark truth.
The boy was not a swordsmith. He was the creator of a new and evil kind of geometry. A geometry of death.
Shankara looked down at his own calloused and powerful hands. Master artist's hands. And he could feel the new, unfamiliar weight of his new vocation. He was no longer a weaver of legends. He was a creator of nails for the coffins of the enemies of an empire.