Dreams and Shadows

chapter THIRTY-NINE

THE DWARVEN FORGE

Colby hummed to himself, occasionally mouthing silent lyrics to a song with which Ewan was entirely unfamiliar. The two walked the streets together, heading west, Colby mumbling, taking all manner of turn and side street. At first, it felt as if the two were lost, but Colby walked with purpose, each step determined to get to the next. He knew where he was going, even if he didn’t look it.

“What are you doing?” asked Ewan.

Colby stopped humming. “What?”

“What are you doing? The humming. What is it?”

“It’s complicated.”

“It’s a long walk.”

“I’m trying to remember where this place is.”

“And the humming?”

Colby looked around, speaking as if from rote memory rather than really listening to what he was saying, his attention focused on finding a nearby landmark. “Space and time aren’t so much expanding as they are unfolding. And if you know where the wrinkles and creases in the fabric of the universe are, you can slide down them from one thread to another. People”—he looked squarely at Ewan, paying more attention to what he was saying—“well, fairies mostly, write songs about them. If you know the words and the melody, you can find things that are otherwise hidden to the naked eye. Places like where we’re going now.”

“And where are we going now?” asked Ewan.

“To speak to a man about a sword.”

“What?”

“So to speak,” he said. “A dwarf. A kind of wood spirit. He’s a man, and I wouldn’t really call him anything else.”

“I guess it would be rude to say I’m going to see a dwarf about a sword.”

“You’d think,” said Colby, hinting otherwise.

“It’s not?”

“Dwarves have it easy. They can go out into the world, live a life like anyone else, and disregard any jokes with a withering glance and a comment about insensitivity. Most people won’t ask and try very hard not to stare; even when they’re acting just a little peculiar, they won’t notice that a dwarf’s feet are bent the wrong way or that they have a few too many thumbs. It’s easy to mask the magical behind a veil of politeness. The power of shame is a handy trick in this modern world.”

“So we’re going to see a dwarf.”

“About a sword, yes.”

The two turned a corner, past a thicket of trees, wandering down a long, winding gravel road seemingly leading directly into the middle of nowhere. Trees and brush grew thicker here, as did the light buzzing of cicadas in the air. They were no longer in Austin, a seeping darkness creeping in as the lights of the city faded into the faint orange glow of the clouds.

Half a mile farther up the road, a metal gate wrapped end to end in barbed wire greeted them. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT. Ewan gave Colby a cold but worried look—Should we? Colby nodded—Yes, we should.

The main house wasn’t much farther; just beyond it was a blacksmith’s workshop, a wood-and-steel open-air structure blackened and charred from heavy use. The air smelled thick of smelted metals, and as they walked closer, the two were blasted with blistering heat billowing out from the building. Black smoke choked the air above them, blotting out the night. But the fires were bright and the entire yard behind the house was lit as if by flickering daylight.

In the doorway stood a diminutive, stocky man, covered neck to toe in a leather apron and goat-fur leggings. His skin itself was like the apron—leathery, cauterized, cracked by constant exposure to the heat. He smoked a cigarette lazily, peering suspiciously at the visitors before stabbing out his smoke on a timber beside him. He frowned, furrowing his brow.

“Colby,” said the dwarf.

“Mimring,” said Colby.

“You shouldn’t have brought him here,” he said in a gruff, gravel-hewn voice. “Not in his condition.”

“And what condition would that be?” asked Colby.

“F*cked.” He waved the two over. “Come on in.”

Inside the temperature was almost unbearable, a sweltering stream of heat pouring out of a raging furnace. Colby felt as if the sweat would sizzle from his brow, but Ewan was entirely at home, and didn’t so much as glisten. Instead, he scratched the scruff of his chin, grimacing at the sandpaper he found there. He looked down at his hand, sure that he’d taken off a layer or two of skin, but he hadn’t.

The oddest thing about Mimring wasn’t his size; his thick, calloused skin; or his hobbies, it was that he spoke in a slow Texas drawl. While hundreds of years old and hailing originally from Germany, he’d spent the last century in and around these parts. He had grown to love it, becoming not only acquainted with the culture, but one with it, so much so that he’d become a stereotype. He took a deep breath, putting both hands on his hips, nodding with puckered displeasure.

“Whelp,” he said with a sigh. “You’re in for some rough times there, son. Y’all got yourselves in a heap o’ trouble.”

“Word travels fast,” said Colby.

“I reckon it does when you’re the guy everyone comes to for a good weapon.”

Colby narrowed his gaze. Mimring shrugged.

“Who else were they gonna git? I’m the best smith on the plateau.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

“Well, I told the other ones that I weren’t gettin’ involved.”

“Is that true?” asked Colby. “You’re gonna sit this one out?”

Mimring spit onto the dirt floor and made a clicking noise with his tongue, thinking long and hard as he stared at Colby. “Naw,” he said, drawing the syllable to its inevitable, but protracted conclusion. “Redcaps are good for business, but bad customers. The fewer there are around, the happier I’ll be.”

“In other words, you like them less than you like me.”

“That and them redcaps wouldn’t owe me a big favor if I made ’em up somethin’ special.” He paused. “You will.”

“You got something in mind or is this more of a blank check sort of thing?”

Mimring nodded. “Blank check.”

Colby traded looks with Mimring for a moment. Mimring stood like a statue, not so much as a piece of dirt or sweat moving on him. Then Colby nodded. “I’ll take that deal.”

“Good. I’ve a feeling it’s the only one you’re gonna git in this town ’bout now.”

“A sorcerer is a good thing to have in your pocket, I suppose.”

Mimring shrugged. “Yeah, you scare the shit outta me, son. And frankly, as much trouble as you are, I’d much rather have you in my debt than be the guy that wouldn’t help you when you came a callin’. Now, what’ya need?”

“A sword,” said Ewan.

“Will you be needin’ just the one?”

Colby nodded. “Yeah.”

“Sized for you or him?”

“Him,” said Colby.

“You sure you won’t be wantin’ a pike instead? I can make a pike that’ll take the head clean off an eight-point buck at ten paces.”

“A pike?” asked Colby.

“Yeah, a pike.” He looked at Ewan.

Colby looked over at Ewan, not understanding at all what Mimring was getting at, and watched as Ewan fiddled with a blacksmithing tool he’d found hanging on the wall. He looked him up and down, noting the red cap atop his head. Colby returned his gaze to Mimring, shaking his head. “No, he won’t need a pike.”

“I think he’ll find it more comfortable in his condition.”

“His condi . . . what the hell are you getting at?”

Mimring looked up at Ewan, who wasn’t paying attention at all. “Son? Son?” He cleared his throat and spoke louder. “Son!” Ewan looked up and immediately put the tool back where he’d found it. “Would you mind stepping outside for a moment? I need to have a word with your boy here.”

Ewan nodded, meandering hesitantly outside, leaving the two alone.

“You don’t see what’s goin’ on?” asked Mimring.

“No, what is going on?”

“And here I’d heard you were the smart one, what with you traveling the world and all, writing all those books.”

Colby’s eyes shot wide, his expression ghostly white. “I, well, I don’t—”

“Son, don’t. Everybody knows you been writin’ those books, just ain’t nobody been able to do nothin’ about it. Who the hell names themselves Thaddeus, anyway? Really?”

Colby swallowed hard. “Everyone knows?”

“Everyone that matters. Most are plenty pissed. The rest think you’re just foolish and will regret the whole thing in a few years anyway. Most do.”

“Most what? Most men who have seen what I have?”

Mimring smiled and laughed a bit. “Shit, ain’t no one’s seen half the shit you have. You’re one of a kind.”

“So, what? Am I supposed to stop writing them?”

“I couldn’t care less. Just do me a favor and make sure I don’t ever show up in one of them books.”

“Is that your favor?”

“Hell no. That’s the favor you’re gonna do me for tellin’ you what I’m about to tell you.”

“Which is?”

“Your boy out there has done imprinted.”

“Imprinted? What is that supposed to mean?”

“You ain’t noticed his color? How he used to be all pale and sickly, but now he’s all pink and robust? Or how he’s suddenly sprouting gray stubble?”

“I . . . I didn’t, actually,” stuttered Colby.

“Or how he walked in here like it was a day spa? I mean, you’re sweatin’ off a stink so bad that you’re about to stop sweatin’. That’s how bad you’re about to git. He didn’t even notice.”

“What is that supposed to mean? You don’t become a redcap just by wearing their caps.”

“Nope,” said Mimring. “Normal people don’t, anyhow.”

“He’s normal.”

“No, he’s a fairy. Got done turned into one the night of the Tithe.”

“But he never fully changed.”

Mimring paused, staring at Colby long enough to let the words he’d spoken sink in. “That’s right. Those boys don’t bother to take a child through the whole process; just get him right enough with the Devil to be able to take their place. Feed ’em on fairy milk till the point at which their body lives offa glamour and then they put ’em to the knife. Won’t let ’em imprint. So your boy has been a blank slate for a decade and a half now, waitin’ for someone to come along and take him down the final steps of fairyhood, and then he done takes the cap off a redcap, pops his head off like it were a melon, and gets blood on the cap. The cap he’s wearing. All that pent-up glamour finally found an outlet. And he became what he’s always been waiting to become. A full-on fairy.”

“But he’s not turned yet,” said Colby.

“Oh, he’s turned. He just ain’t done turnin’. No going back, though. He’s done for. He’s gonna be a redcap for the rest of his life, however short that may be.” Mimring looked over his shoulder at the forge behind him. “So I say to you again, are you sure he wouldn’t be more comfortable with a pike?”

“You have something in mind?” asked Colby.

Mimring smiled, his yellow teeth glinting in the firelight. He nodded proudly. “I actually happen to have an honest-to-god John Brown pike in my possession.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“John Brown. The civil war abolitionist who commissioned a thousand pikes from a local blacksmith that he planned to give to a bunch of freed slaves, and as there weren’t nothin’ more that frightened southern slave owners like a Negro uprising, well, they sent Robert E. Lee after him and then they hanged old John Brown for treason till he was dead. Never used the pikes, but they got his blood on ’em. Spiritually, anyhow.”

“And you’ve got one.”

“And I got one. I figure I could reforge the blade with a few drops of blood squeezed from your old boy’s cap—to capture his strength—and a few hairs of a sorcerer . . .” He gave a knowing glance to Colby. “And I reckon I could make something that would feel like an extension of his own arm. I mean, if you’re fixin’ to leave him alone at any point, and you want him to be able to hold his own, this’ll do the trick just fine.”

“It’ll take the head off an eight-point buck at ten paces?”

Mimring nodded. “Yup. Just about.” There was a brief quiet between the two. “You know you’re gonna have to keep a good eye on him from here on out, don’t ya?”

“Yeah,” said Colby, the weight of everything sinking in.

“He’s gonna become more aggressive. He’ll be someone you won’t wanna argue with. And once that cap starts drying out, well, animals are only gonna slake that thirst for so long.”

“I figured.” Colby slumped against the wall, shaking his head and staring off into the dirt floor.

“Well, it was about time that curse kicked in. We’ve all been waiting for that shoe to drop for an awful long time.”

Colby looked up, confused. “Ewan wasn’t cursed.”

“No, Yashar was. Ages ago.”

“Yeah, he was cursed to walk the earth or something.”

Mimring gave Colby a dark, somber look that read: you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me. “You don’t even know the curse on your own genie?”

“We don’t talk about it. That’s his cross to bear.”

“Yeah. His cross. All the wishes he grants are doomed to end badly, no matter how well intentioned they are. His cross, he says.”

Colby’s eyes smoldered. He didn’t know whether to dismiss Mimring’s dreamstuff altogether for even insinuating such a thing, or to fly into a rage looking for Yashar. The air tingled as Colby’s emotions excited the ambient dreamstuff floating nearby. Mimring raised a steady hand.

“Now, now,” he said. “Don’t go doin’ nothin’ you’re gonna regret. Hell, don’t go doin’ nothin’ I’m gonna regret.”

“I don’t understand. How could . . . how could he . . . ?”

“Not tell you that making a wish would sure as shit f*ck up the rest of your life?”

“Yeah,” said Colby.

“How could you not tell your friend what his deal was until you had to?”

“It was in his best interest.”

“His or yours?” asked Mimring.

“His.”

“Are you entirely sure about that? Are you sure you didn’t want to keep your little world to yourself?”

Tears began to well up in the corners of Colby’s eyes. “I didn’t want him to end up like me.”

“Knowing more than he should?”

“Yeah.”

Mimring nodded. “How’d that turn out?”

Colby took a deep breath, chasing the glass from his eyes. “How come in all these years, you’re the only one to tell me the truth about any of this?”

Mimring thought hard for a moment, searching for the right answer to that question. Then he nodded knowingly. “Maybe ’cause not so many people know for sure. And maybe ’cause I’m the only one who never wanted nothin’ outta ya.”

Colby nodded. “What now?”

“Now you get me a few drops of blood out of that hat, a few hairs off your head, and I forge your friend a weapon that’ll give him one hell of a fighting chance against those devils.” Mimring smiled. “Only thing you can do at a time like this is channel all that anger into a serious ass whoopin’. That’s what I’d do, at least.”

“Really? That’s what you’d do?”

Mimring’s smile turned into a smirk. “Hell no. That’s what guys like you are for.”

COLBY AND EWAN milled about outside, knocking tin cans off a tree stump with stray rocks, the steady sound of a pounding hammer on metal echoing out from the workshop. They spent quite some time silently tossing pebbles at the cans, knocking them over only to set them back up again. Neither knew exactly what to say to the other, both clearly upset. Just not at each other. That, it seemed, was their only consolation.

Ewan scratched his cheek with his knuckles. “I need a shave,” he said. “I could have sworn I shaved yesterday.”

Colby looked closely at the stubble, now noticeably gray, aging Ewan a full ten years older than he was. “Yeah, you’re looking a bit ragged there.”

“So what’s our next move?” Ewan leveled a cold, serious glare at Colby. “I mean, why exactly do I need a weapon?”

“Because I have places to go where you can’t follow.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I have to go into fairy country to speak to the powers that be to calm this whole situation down.”

Ewan nodded sarcastically, pretending for a moment that this made any sense to him. “You think you can talk those beasts out of wanting to kill me?”

“No. But I might be able to talk the rest of the court out of wanting to kill you.”

“What? Why would they want to kill me? Didn’t they let me go?”

“Yeah,” said Colby. “But you killed a fairy.”

“I had to!”

“Doesn’t matter. You did it. Whatever truce they believed in disappeared the moment you shed fairy blood.”

Ewan rose to his feet, his eyes bloodshot and blazing. “That’s not fair. I was defending myself.”

“Fairies care little for nuance, Ewan. To them you’re a problem that won’t go away until they bury you. I need to assure them otherwise.”

“By telling them you’ll bury ten times as many of them?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“No.”

Ewan puckered his lips. “p-ssy.”

“What?”

“It sounds to me like you’re p-ssying out. You’re going to talk to them? All that grand wizardly power and you’re just going to talk to them?”

“Yes. I’m going to talk with them. They can be reasoned with. Reason is just not what I would call their default setting. But I can get them there.”

“And you’re going to leave me at my place so you can talk them out of killing me?”

“My place, not yours. Yours is the first place they’ll look.”

“You sure about that? Last I checked they attacked me in the street outside a club that had advertised my being there. I don’t think anyone knows where I live.”

“Except your girlfriend,” said Colby coldly.

“Well, yeah,” said Ewan, not yet acknowledging the truth staring him in the face.

“Who is a fairy,” continued Colby.

Ewan calmed down a bit, his eyes softening. He took a step back and then sat down. His voice went up an octave, losing its bravado, gaining sincerity. “Do you really think she’s in on it?” he asked.

Colby sighed and shook his head. “I won’t know that until I ask her.”

“It seemed like she wanted nothing to do with it. I mean, it sure looked that way.” Ewan fidgeted while he talked. The rage burning in his gut subsided, now roiling and churning with heartbreak.

“Yeah, but you never know with the fair folk.”

“So you’re going to see her?” asked Ewan.

“I hope so,” said Colby.

“I want to stay in my own apartment. I don’t care if she knows where I am. I don’t care if they know.”

“You’ll be safer at my place.”

“Will I really? Or does everything in this godforsaken town already know where you live?”

“They . . .” Colby paused. Everything did; everything he was worried about, at least. “Shit.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The hammering stopped and the heat diminished as the furnaces inside dimmed. Mimring stepped out of the workshop, his face charred and blackened with soot. In one hand, he held a long pike—a wooden shaft nearly six feet long with a blade fashioned like a Bowie knife atop it—while his other hand rubbed a greasy rag over the blade to give it a good, final polish. He stood the pike up on its end—towering over him at nearly twice his size—motioning up toward it with a nod of his head.

“This outta do you boys up real good,” he said proudly.

Ewan’s eyes swelled large in their sockets. “What’s it do?” he asked.

“Well, the blade is so sharp that it can take a man’s head off and never lose its edge. And there is no magic in the world that can heal a wound it causes—not to a fairy, at least.”

“Whoa,” said Colby. “You don’t mess around. I heard you were good, but—”

“The best,” interrupted Mimring. “You heard I was the best.”

“I did,” said Colby with a nod.

Mimring handed the pike to Ewan, who grasped it with a grin. He stepped back, singing it a bit to test the weight. It felt natural in his hands, as if he were born with it. Politely, he gave an enthusiastic bow to the blacksmith.

“Now,” said Mimring, “let’s hope for two things. One, that you’ll never be needin’ to use this thing.”

“And two?” asked Colby.

“That I’ll never be needin’ to call in that favor you owe me.” He smiled weakly. Colby understood the gravity of what he was saying. “Now, get the hell off my property. Our business is done here.”

Colby motioned to Ewan. Their welcome had officially worn out.