Corseque
Wordcount: 4475
This takes place immediately prior to the Anguis Trigon PMs.
"You're going to get sick," Nyct insisted, perched on a stool watching as Keydis dug through her pile of vitatium. She hadn't been able to find any forge-ready ingots available at a reasonable price, so she had accumulated a variety of smaller pieces, including the thin and flat sheet the size of a playing card given (sold) to her by her new enlil apprentice.
"If you don't think I know what I'm doing, you can go find another teacher," Keydis replied. Satisfied, she dumped all of the green metal into a crucible made of dense clay mixed with sand. "Weigh that for me, would you?"
Nyct grumbled and emptied the crucible out onto the counter, instead. The young enlil had a pair of oversized work gloves with a variety of gadgets built in. With a few tweaks and knob-turns, one of the gauges dropped to zero. Nyct picked up the empty crucible, causing the needle to raise, then repeated the motions to zero it out again. Gingerly, Nyct picked up each piece of the toxic, heavy metal and dropped them in. "One point five three seven kilograms. That's not a lot."
"Plenty," Keydis retorted. The pair stood in the bed of her truck which doubled as her smithy workshop and store. The side of the dark grey vehicle was painted with the name, Ore Else. Keydis took back the crucible and quickly rearranged the metal bits the same way she had them before. From a drawer under one work surface, Keydis pulled out some white flower petals and crushed them between her fingers, rubbing the oils over her skin. Nyct was overly paranoid but vitatium was toxic, so it was only practical to keep some folio on hand. "What is... three percent of that? No, two and a half percent."
"Thirty-eight point four two five grams," Nyct replied immediately.
Keydis paused to look at the kid, considering asking if that was a guess, but then she shrugged. Tugging a glove on, Keydis reached into a second drawer, pulling out a tin and opening it to reveal more white flowers, similar to roses. She plucked out four flower heads and handed them over. "Keep the gloves on, see if you can get thirty-eight or forty grams out of those. Add them to the crucible."
Nyct looked confused but did as requested, using most of what Keydis had handed over. At the smith's direction, the remaining petals were tossed into the forge. Keydis had discarded her own glove and brought over a bottle of water, dumping it over Nyct's gloves. "What are you doing?" the enlil asked.
"Stuff's poisonous. I thought you were worried about that," Keydis explained with a smirk. Nyct squawked and then grabbed a rag from nearby to more thoroughly wipe down the gloves, flashing their 'master' a glare the whole time. Keydis smirked and set the bottle down on a counter. Then she smashed it with a hammer.
"What the hell are you doing now?" Nyct asked, exasperated.
Keydis continued smashing the bottle fragments. "Toss a good handful of flux into the crucible."
With a wordless cry of frustration, Nyct did as asked, and then Keydis snatched up the crucible, bringing it up next to the counter and brushing all the glass shards into it. "Explain something, you're supposed to be teaching me!" For a moment longer, Keydis ignored the pleas, instead brushing a thick layer of prepared plaster cement over the top of the crucible. The forge was already heated and the smith shoved the little urn-shaped container into it, closing the door.
"Crucible forging," Keydis finally explained, brushing the remaining mortar off of her hands. "The metal we have is not... great. Different purities, different compositions. The coins have a coating around them, too, to make them less harmful to hold. A lot of it has been worked to a point where there's no carbon content left, and that's going to mean it won't harden the way I want it to. Some of it is rich in latent energy, some of it is nearly depleted. As you so furiously pointed out before, my forge isn't set up to handle a proper ingot of vitatium, but I made sure the pieces with a lower melting point were surrounding the ones with higher. Within that crucible, the outer layers will turn molten and that'll help heat the deeper layers to forging temperature, hopefully even turning molten themselves."
Nyct frowned and looked at the forge, thinking. One thing Keydis could say for sure, her apprentice was smart. "Are you trying to melt everything together? The flowers are the missing carbon?"
"You got it," Keydis confirmed.
"Isn't two point five too much carbon?"
"For steel, absolutely. Glad you've been paying attention. Vit takes a bit more, according to the velen who showed me how to work with the stuff." For a moment Keydis just basked in the warmth of the forge, thinking back on the rough smith, wishing she had stayed a little longer to pick his brain for more knowledge. "We've got a few hours to kill while that heats up, Eventually, it'll get hot enough to melt that glass. The molten glass will draw out some impurities while the flux helps the metals bond together.
"The flowers are purple hemlock. They'll add in the carbon, sure, but the flower's toxicity will actually alter the metal's toxicity. Instead of causing severe internal damage, like raw vitatium, it'll slowly inflict paralysis, as if you got a dose of the flowers themselves."
Nyct pointedly started wiping down the gloves again. "Doesn't seem like your style."
"The weapon I'm making isn't for me. Going for something... less lethal, you could say. Just for the future, if you want to minimize the metal's toxicity, gotta use--"
"Folio, obviously," Nyct replied. The two plants were almost identical, except that the hemlock had thorns while folio did not. They counteracted one another, and folio -- or healing leaf -- was good for a variety of other minor ailments.
"Obviously." Keydis sighed. "We're going to have to keep this forge burning overnight." She dropped a small handful of bigats into the enlil's hand. "Go grab us some food and drinks, your pick. I'll take the first shift." The long, slow process would turn their mess of different grades of vitatium into one consistent ingot, hopefully something suitable for making a proper weapon. If everything went well, the carbon content and latent energy would level out.
Propped up in one corner was a pole, waiting to be attached. The shape of the weapon's head was firm in her mind, had been for a long while. Too long.
Keydis and Nyct sat by the forge, eating dumplings and drinking ale. For being so scrawny, the enlil had a strong stomach for the alcohol. Not for the first time, Keydis wondered how old the kid was, but she didn't bother to ask. As far as she knew, Nyct had no home in Terminus. With Nyct's impressive knowledge in engineering, though, it was hard to believe the smug little thing couldn't find work.
"What's your interest in vita, kid?" Keydis asked, popping the cap off another bottle and topping off Nyct's glass before bringing it to her lips. "In smithing?"
"My da left some to me," Nyct answered, surprisingly forthright. "He and I didn't always see eye to eye, for a few reasons. I thought he had written me off." Nyct had a far-off look, pausing to take a few sips. "It's been, I don't know, about two years now since he passed away. Just got sick one winter and never got better. We hadn't been talking a lot, before then, but then he wanted to make everything right."
Keydis thought of her own parents, memories fuzzy and hazy, but warm. She reached out to give Nyct a squeeze on the shoulder. "That's rough, kid."
Nyct smiled faintly and looked up. "He knew I was studying to be an engineer, and... well... I guess he thought too much of me. While I thought he wanted nothing to do with me, he scraped and saved and got every scrap of vitatium he could get his hands on. Because, you know, that's what you see being used in all the fancy things like those speculum screens."
"Thought the world of you," Keydis surmised, eating another dumpling. The large, doughy wrapping surrounded spiced laniger meat in a white gravy, perfect complement to the cold weather and the warmth of the forge. "Just didn't know how to show it."
"Yeah," Nyct agreed, again smiling the tiniest bit. "I miss him. Wish I had spent more time with him when I had the chance. Thought the next best thing would be living up to his expectations."
Keydis smiled back and nodded, leaning back on her stool. "No worries there. You might be garbage as a smith, but you're a real whiz with the gadgets." Nyct snarled and kicked at Keydis's shins. "Hey! That was a compliment!"
"A garbage one!"
Laughing, Keydis shook her head. "I'm serious! You'll probably pick this shit up, you're smart enough and stubborn enough. You're never going to be a blacksmith, though. You'll be a gearhead who knows how to move metal."
Nyct grumbled, cheeks coloring awkwardly. "Thanks."
"If you happen to want to sell any more of that vitatium..."
"You wish! I've got plans for it, all of it." Nyct chomped into a dumpling. Despite the heaviness of the conversation, the enlil seemed in unusually high spirits.
"Fine! Selfish brat! Good news is we should have a good block of material to work with soon. Then I get to see if this ring really does the trick or whether I need to hunt down that shifty chemist."
Here, Nyct frowned thoughtfully. "I hadn't thought about it, but how am I going to learn something that requires a magic ring I don't own?"
Keydis smirked. "Now see, we could talk about exchange rates, for ring time to raw material... Don't you kick me again, I'm only poking fun! Seriously, though, if the time comes and you don't have another option, I'll let you use my work space, including Calida. You're a long ways off from working in green, though. By the time you're ready, maybe you'll be able to afford a workplace of your own, or maybe I'll have something better with a fancy furnace that can crank out enough heat.
"Point is, you've got time, you've got options."
Nyct slyly noted, "And you get someone to watch the counter while you run off monster-slaying."
"Not a bad arrangement, right?" Keydis replied, laughing. "I'm also going to need some help holding this bastard straight while I hammer on it. Vitatium is a stubborn metal even with the heat to work it, and brittle up until a certain point. When I say you won't be ready for green for a while, that's because each of these metals needs to be treated differently. Being a wizard with auritium doesn't mean you can handle vitatium."
Nyct sighed and nodded. "I know. That's obvious."
Keydis laughed at the enlil's sullen expression and settled in to wait, enjoying the warm of the forge. In a way it reminded her of Aridus, which was a mixed bag of good and bad.
With a heavy crunch, the red-hot clay burst under the hammer strike, revealing the luminescent green metal inside. Keydis hammered again and again, knocking off sizable chunks of clay and glass. With the tongs, Nyct pulled the still-glowing metal free, and Keydis quickly brushed the debris out of the back of the work area (the truck). As it hit the ground, hisses and pops of steam sounded, causing people in the nearby street to jump and look around.
Keydis took the tongs from Nyct and looked over the puck of metal -- still not a proper ingot, yet -- and after careful scrutiny, gave a nod. "Keep the gloves on going forward," she remarked cautiously. Nyct chuffed in annoyance but nodded.
After allowing it to cool longer, Keydis knocked more glass off of the outside where it had fused with the metal. It was small, dense, rounded and slightly flared. Much too thick to reasonably try forging. Keydis used a rotating saw provided by Nyct to slowly, very slowly, cut the puck in half, horizontally, giving her a thick, flat disk of vitatium. The other half of the puck, she carefully locked away, wrapped in several layers of leather.
"See, plenty," Keydis remarked, a little breathless after the exertion of sawing for over an hour. "Even some left over, in case something goes wrong."
"What are you even making?" Nyct asked, picking up the disk to test the weight. "Not a halberd?" Nyct was conspicuously looking at the prepared pole in the corner.
Keydis shook her head. "A corseque. Winged spear." When Nyct still looked confused, Keydis grabbed a grease pencil and a loose piece of hide. She drew a simple spear with a broad tip, then at the base of the spearhead, two 'wings' sweeping back from either side.
"Ohh. Looks like a boar spear, but with blades instead of lugs."
With a nod, the blacksmith pointed out, "A corseque usually has the side blades pointing forward. In a war, you want to stop whatever's charging at you. This design is less common, but partly intended for counters and follow-ups. If you miss or are deflected, you can deal damage on the recovery. Or, the hooks can be used to disable or capture a fleeing target."
"And if the poison survives the forging process..."
"Then they won't be escaping easily." Keydis smiled. She picked up a heavy cross-pein hammer, giving it a quick toss and spin. "First step, we have to turn this puck into an ingot."
"I thought the crucible was turning it into an ingot!"
"Nope. This is why ingots are so damned expensive." Keydis carried the disk over to her anvil, settling it over one of the hardy holes. "What we're going to do is heat it up, drift a hole through the center, and then split it down one side."
Keydis focused on the ring on her finger, with her hand on the vitatium. She took it slow, gradually adding more and more heat. The ring could heat quite rapidly, she already knew, but she wanted to take it slow until they had a proper ingot. Once the green metal began glowing brightly, she waved Nyct over. Nyct held a pair of tongs with a thick gauged drift spike, setting it down over the center of the piece.
Clang! Keydis hammered the drift spike, barely making a dent in the tough metal. Again, then again, slowly working up a rhythm. She slackened her muscles at the end of each strike, allowing the hammer and her arm to rebound so she could build momentum for the next strike.
Still, she was taking it slow, infusing a steady flow of heat from her ring to keep the puck at working temperature while she hammered with measured swings. When the drift was all the way in, they flipped the disk and started again from the bubble left by the first attempt. Soon, there was a hole all the way through, clean and consistent.
Nyct held the ring with the tongs while Keydis flipped the hammer over to the slimmer hook side. She hammered, slowly spreading the green metal along a straight line between the outer edge and the central hole. They flipped the metal several times before it was done.
It was slow, bitter work, but it was steady. With every swing, Keydis was moving one step closer to the vision in her head.
The pair didn't talk much throughout the process. Keydis was focused on her work, Nyct was focused on absorbing the details in the process, in the effort required, in the motions used.
By the end of the second day, they had a split ring. By the end of the third, it had been bent, hammered, and folded over until it was a strong bar of metal that Keydis could be satisfied with. "Now we have an ingot," Keydis declared happily, lifting it up to test the weight and then handing it over to Nyct.
"It's so small. Heavy, though."
"It's a spearhead, it doesn't take that much metal."
Nyct let out a curious hum. "Will you be splitting it into two or three pieces and then assembling them together?"
"Considered it. Doing two pieces would be sturdy. But nah, I'm going to go for one piece. It'll be a bitch and a half but if it works, it'll be stronger!"
The avian started to protest, "I'm not sure that's necessar--"
"We'll leave this to temper overnight before the next stretch begins." Keydis slid the ingot into a specially sealed oven and then locked it down. "We should get something to eat. Maybe take a dive into the canals." She laughed and dropped her gloves onto a table and then tossed her apron onto a peg. Her face-shield and Nyct's more-specialized gear went into a lockbox. Keydis was left in dark grey canvas pants tucked into her black boots, and a dark red sleeveless shirt.
Not for the first time, Nyct eyed Keydis' bare arms worriedly. Keydis was fit and toned, with rock-hard muscles, but she bore the clear signs of a vistra. Her right arm had bands of a metallic, violet substance around the elbow, spreading forward in small jags and vines. Her normal flesh was red and inflamed where it met the inhuman material and then lightning-like scars traveled all the way to her wrists. Her left arm was much worse, though. The strange violet metal had spread up to her biceps and halfway down to her wrist, melding into similar lightning scars but with an even more jagged red line near the top of her wrist.
Without a word, Keydis grabbed a long red gloved sleeve, covered in golden Aridusian designs, and pulled it over her left arm, cinching it tight around her bicep. For the other arm, Keydis simply wrapped the noticeable bits in white bandages.
Nyct had yet to ask about it and possibly never would. The enlil's apron came off, and tools went into the chest. "Do you have a piece of steel I could use? I want to try creating a spear head of my own, while you work on yours."
"You bet. Got a piece that's a perfect match for the vita ingot. You wanting to try to show me how much better a two-piece construction is?"
"No! I just want to do something besides watch and hold tongs!" And prove that a two piece construction was more secure.
"Fine by me. Steel moves faster than vitatium, though, so you should finish before I do."
Nyct laughed. "I can't keep your pace. You'll have your ring to speed things up anyway!"
"We'll see."
It took the entire following day to finalize their two spearheads. While Keydis worked on a one-piece vitatium construction, Nyct worked on a two-piece version in steel.
For Nyct, the primary piece was the straight, broad spear ending in the tang. The second piece would be the two winged blades. Once the two pieces were forged to shape, Nyct used a drift spike to put a hole vertically down the center of the wings, large enough to slide the tang of the main spearhead through. More forging to solidify the weld of the two pieces, and then the blade was quenched and hardened. The enlil then drilled a hole through the center where the two pieces met, adding a metal pin and peening it over. It was now secured by three mechanical connections: friction, forge-welding, and the pin.
Keydis took a different route. She stretched the bar of vitatium, then used a hammer and chisel to make two hot cuts on the tang-end, spreading the split pieces out to the sides, leaving only about a third of the original bar at the top. Slowly, painstakingly, Keydis stretched out that top third into the main spearhead, then shaped the two wings one at a time. By the time she had finished, however, the three blades were similar in size and thickness, and the two wings were symmetrical. Once it went in for the quench, this blade was essentially finished.
"This looks pretty damned good," Keydis remarked, looking over Nyct's spearhead. "It's got a bit of a swell where the pieces meet, but it still looks like one piece. Get yourself a pole and you can make some good coins off this one."
"Really?" Nyct stared in wonder as Keydis handed the spearhead back over. "I didn't think I did anything special."
"You didn't rush. Most fuck-ups happen when people rush, or don't care about taking their time."
Nyct took up the vitatium spearhead, comparing it to the steel one. "Yours is so light. It still feels strong, though."
"Part of that is the metal. Regia's tough shit, and vit is almost as good as it gets. Gram for gram, it's hella better than steel. But! You don't have to make a blade thick to make it strong. Nail the heat treat, forge in the correct bevels, get the edges right, and it all reinforces the cut." Keydis took up her spearhead and pointed out some of the finer details as she spoke. "Not sure how much this will apply for a gearhead, but as a smith, I'm always aware of how the weapon will be used." She flashed a grin. "Since I know how to use all sorts of weapons, I know what to focus on.
"This particular spear is meant for a member of the guard. Its purpose is to defend the wielder, stop the baddies, and capture criminals. It can be deadly if it needs to be -- that spear blade isn't joking around -- but like that boar spear you mentioned, these wings will act like lugs, stopping the thrust. I left the tops of the wings thicker, and they won't be sharpened. That thickness also reinforces the base of the main blade on the thrust, so there aren't rigid corners to create stress. On the reverse cut, the inner edge of the wings is sharp, and the tips of the wings are formed into a tri-tip. It'll snag material without ripping straight through... but if you want it to slice through, just a little twist and applied force, and it'll start a draw cut."
Nyct absorbed it all in silence for a moment and then had to point out, "See, now you're explaining things! That's what a teacher is supposed to do!"
Keydis laughed. "Alright, did you learn all that? It's going to be on the quiz!"
"Ha ha..."
The brunette took up Nyct's spearhead. "The way you forged this together, you left right-angles where the blades intersect -- that's natural when doing a two-piece construction, so you'd normally want to forge in a curve there to relieve stress. That's going to make it easier to shear off in a fight. The spearhead is totally flat, risking a horizontal bend. You've set up the upper edge of the wings for sharpening. Instead of a versatile weapon for capturing, you've created a deadly weapon that will create wounds almost impossible to stitch up. The tips will act as barbs if they're thrust in deeply enough. The inside angle is also designed perfectly for a slice. You've created a deadly weapon, but one which may break on the user, and one which can't reliably be used to subdue a target alive."
"You didn't tell me it was for a guard, though," Nyct pointed out.
"Shouldn't you have asked?" Keydis retorted, handing the spearhead over. "Don't get me wrong, it's a good weapon. The equal of most you'll find in the markets."
The enlil huffed irritably, trying to take the praise but still annoyed at the harsh critique. "For your uncle, then," Nyct asked, changing the subject.
Keydis nodded. "Long overdue. Before... this happened," she explained, pointing vaguely at her arms, "he tried to stop me, saying it was too dangerous. He offered to come with me, use his spear to help. I told him I didn't want him, and that his spear was worthless. After I beat that monster, I would make him a better spear.
"I beat it, but it took until now to start on the spear. I mean, I haven't spoken to him in a while, and the last time we talked it wasn't... friendly. Now I'm about to go off again on some mission to the Empire. Thought I should do this, let him know I'm still thinking of him."
"And using the mission as an excuse to not have a long sit-down with him," Nyct surmised. "You know...."
Keydis raised a hand. "Don't say it. Ever since you told me about your dad, it's been on my mind."
"Then you know what you should do!"
"Yeah... yeah."
"Then you'll do it? Tomorrow?"
For a long moment, Keydis stared at the spearhead, thinking. "Yeah," she finally agreed. "But first I have to finish this up."
Havital's home stood quiet. It was a nice neighborhood, not far from the Conexus station he reported to. On a guard's wages, it wasn't anything extravagant, but it was at least its own building, a mere three stories high. Most of the surrounding homes were at least five stories tall, and outside the small neighborhood, buildings climbed high overhead.
Keydis walked up to the front door. She pulled out a key and tried it: it still worked. The old enlil had never changed the locks on her. The brunette smiled faintly and let herself in. Havital was at work; despite what she'd said to Nyct, she wasn't ready just yet to see him face-to-face. For a few moments, she just stood in the entryway thinking, remembering.
Finally, she walked the rest of the way in and propped up the spear on the coat rack where he would hang up his tabard at the end of the day. The completed corseque had a long, lacquered black haft, ending in a simple faceted knob of vitatium. The haft was ovoid, for better grip indexing. The blade itself was hidden away under a white leather scabbard. The spear blade and the scabbard both displayed her maker's mark. Finally, she perched a piece of paper on the snaps holding the scabbard in place, simply saying, "Don't cut yourself!"
With a satisfied nod, Keydis turned and left, locking the door on the way out.
After her business in the Empire, she'd come talk to him.