Ch.31
The Hephaestus Familia main workshop was underground, which made sense when you thought about it. Forges need ventilation and stone walls and room for things to go wrong without burning down a city block. Welf led me through a side entrance on the west end of Babel's ground floor, down a staircase that got warmer with every flight, and through a corridor that smelled like charcoal and hot metal and the sharp mineral tang of quenching oil.
The noise hit before the workshop did. Hammers on anvils. The hiss of steam. A grinding wheel somewhere to the right, high-pitched and constant. Shouted instructions over the racket, most of them profane.
The workshop was large. High ceiling braced with iron beams, stone floor scored with scorch marks. Forge stations in rows, smiths working at half of them. The heat was oppressive by the entrance and got worse as we went deeper. Welf walked through it like he was walking through a park, nodding at a few smiths who nodded back, ignoring one who turned away.
"That one still doesn't talk to you?" I said.
"He asked me to forge a magic sword for his girlfriend. I said no. He took it personally."
"How personally?"
"He told the entire Familia I was a waste of divine blessing and Rakia should have kept me." Welf shrugged. "So about average."
He led me toward the back of the workshop where the forges were larger and the tools on the walls were heavier. A partition separated this section from the rest, marked with a sign I couldn't read from this distance.
"Captain's forge," Welf said. "Don't touch anything she hasn't handed you."
The partition was open. Inside, the forge was lit and the anvil was occupied and the woman standing over it was not what I expected, which was stupid because I'd seen her in the anime and should have expected exactly this.
Tsubaki Collbrande was tall. Brown skin, long black hair pulled back from her face, red eyes, the left one hidden behind an eyepatch. She was wearing a red hakama and sandals and a sarashi wrap around her chest that was doing its best against odds it was losing. Her arms were bare and the muscles in her forearms moved visibly as she turned a piece of glowing metal with tongs, examined it, and set it back on the coals.
"Welf." She didn't look up. "You brought your adventurer."
"He's not my adventurer."
"You haven't shut up about him for three days. He's your adventurer." She set the tongs down and turned and looked at me and her remaining red eye did the same assessment Tione had done last night at the Hostess. Top to bottom. Hands, shoulders, grip.
"Smaller than I pictured," she said.
"I get that a lot."
"Cute though." She stepped forward. "Let me see."
She picked me up.
Both arms around my torso, lifted clean off the floor, and squeezed. My feet left the ground. My face was at her chest level and the sarashi was directly in front of my nose and my face was pressed against the wrapped fabric and under it was warm brown skin and the smell of forge smoke and sweat and I couldn't breathe and I wasn't sure I cared.
"Good frame," she said, still holding me off the ground. She turned me left, then right, like she was examining a blade for balance. "Light for a Level 2. Wiry. You're a speed fighter?"
"I'm a fighter who's being held in the air."
"Answer the question."
"Knife and Firebolt. Close range."
She set me down. My face was hot. My nose still smelled like her skin and forge smoke and the sarashi's linen. Welf was looking at the ceiling.
Tsubaki grabbed my right hand and squeezed it. Hard. Testing grip strength. I squeezed back. She squeezed harder. The bite mark from Hestia's teeth throbbed under the pressure and I didn't flinch.
"Not bad for a rabbit." She looked at my palm. The crescent of tooth marks was visible in the red light from the forge. Her eyebrow went up. "What bit you?"
"A goddess."
She laughed. The sound bounced off the stone walls. "I like him," she told Welf. "He can stay."
"He's not a pet."
"Everything in my forge is mine while it's here. Show me the horn."
Welf pulled the Minotaur horn from his pack. Half of it. The other half was at his workshop, already sectioned for material. This piece was dark, curved, heavy. Tsubaki took it in one hand and weighed it, tapped it with a fingernail, held it up to the forge light.
"Dense," she said. "Good grain. The crystal structure is intact. Welf, this came from the Floor 9 Minotaur?"
"The one that almost killed him, yeah."
"Poetic." She set the horn on the anvil. "I'll supervise the reforge. You do the work. It'll be your best piece or I'll melt it down and make nails."
"You wouldn't."
"Try me."
While they argued about technique and tempering, I wandered the captain's forge. Tools hung from every surface. Blades in various stages of completion sat in racks along the wall. A naginata with a red-wrapped handle leaned in the corner, its edge catching the firelight. Tsubaki's weapon. Benishigure, if I remembered right from the anime.
A work of art leaning against a wall like it was a broom.
I pulled the Hestia Knife from my belt and set it on the workbench near the light. The living metal caught the forge glow and pulsed faintly. Warm.
Tsubaki was beside me in two strides. She hadn't made a sound.
"May I?" She held her hand out, not touching it.
"Go ahead."
She picked up the knife with both hands. Turned it. Ran her thumb along the flat of the blade. The pad of her thumb dragged across the surface and she closed her eye and her lips pressed together and she made a sound through her nose that was either professional admiration or something I wasn't going to think about.
"Hephaestus made this," she said. "You can tell by the grain. Nobody else forges with this pattern. The fold count, the heat distribution, the way the edge holds itself." She opened her eye and looked at me. "You know what you're carrying?"
"Yeah."
"Do you though? This isn't a weapon. It's a declaration. Hephaestus doesn't make things for mortals. She hasn't personally forged a blade in years. This knife says a goddess who won't make weapons for kings made one for a Level 1 nobody because another goddess begged her." She set the knife down gently. "Whatever Hestia promised for this, it wasn't enough."
"Two hundred million valis."
"Like I said. Not enough."
A door opened at the back of the forge. Hephaestus walked through it carrying a stack of papers and a mug that was probably not her first of the morning. She wore the same white shirt and black pants from the Hostess. Her red hair was pushed back from her face and her single crimson eye swept the room and landed on the Hestia Knife on the workbench.
She stopped walking.
"You brought the Knife," she said.
"Tsubaki wanted to see it."
"Tsubaki always wants to see everything." She set the papers down and came to the workbench and looked at the knife without touching it. Her hand went to her eyepatch. Adjusted it. Came back down.
"How is it performing?" she asked.
"It saved my life on Floor 12. The edge holds through anything I've hit. The balance hasn't shifted since day one."
"It shouldn't. The metal is alive. It adapts to your grip over time." She picked up the mug, drank, set it down. Her crimson eye was on the knife. "The grain is tighter than when I finished it. You've been using it hard."
"Every day."
"Good." She looked up at me. "A weapon that isn't used is a waste. I didn't make it to be displayed."
I leaned against the workbench. The forge heat pressed against my left side. Tsubaki and Welf were arguing about quenching temperatures behind us.
"How do you know when a piece is finished?" I asked.
She looked at me. Held it. Her hand went to the eyepatch again. Back down.
"When I can't find anything else to fix," she said. "When the metal has accepted every correction I have to give and is better for all of them and I've run out of ways to improve it. That's when it's done."
"So never."
The corner of her mouth moved. "Sometimes I let them go anyway."
"Is that what you did with the Knife?"
"The Knife was different. I made the Knife in one sitting. Sixteen hours. No sleep, no food, no breaks. Hestia sat on the floor of my forge the entire time. She didn't ask questions. She didn't fall asleep. She watched every fold, every strike, every quench. When I finished and put the blade in her hands, she cried." Hephaestus picked up her mug again. "I've been making weapons for longer than most civilizations have existed. That was the first time someone cried."
Her hand was at the eyepatch again. She caught it this time. Pulled it back to the mug with a deliberate motion.
I looked at the knife on the workbench. The forge light played across the living metal. I didn't look at her eyepatch. The knife was more interesting.
When I looked back up, Hephaestus was watching me with an expression I couldn't read. Her crimson eye was steady. The hand holding the mug was still.
"You don't stare," she said quietly.
"At what?"
"Most people stare."
"At a knife? It's polite to look at it when you're talking about it."
She held my eyes for another second. Then she looked away and took a long drink from her mug and when she set it down her jaw was tight.
"Welf," she called over her shoulder. "If the quench temperature is off by more than ten degrees, Tsubaki has permission to hit you."
"She hits me anyway," Welf said.
"That's a perk of rank," Tsubaki said. She had the Minotaur horn in one hand and a hammer in the other. "Bell. You're welcome here anytime. Bring the Knife when you come. And tell Hestia her taste in men has improved since the last time she tried to date in Heaven."
"I'll pass that along."
"Don't actually pass that along."
"Too late. Already committed."
She threw a rag at my head. I caught it. She grinned. Welf groaned.
Hephaestus was back to her papers. Her mug was in her right hand and her left hand was flat on the table and she wasn't touching the eyepatch. She looked up once as I walked toward the exit. The crimson eye caught the forge light and held it.
I nodded.
She looked back at her papers.
Welf walked me to the staircase. The cooler air of the corridor felt sharp after the forge heat. A water stain ran down the left wall in a shape that looked like a running dog if you squinted.
"She doesn't talk to people like that," Welf said.
"Like what?"
"About the Knife. About the process. She barely talks to ME about how she forges and I'm in her Familia."
"I asked."
"Nobody asks."
We climbed the stairs. The noise of the workshop faded below us and the city sounds of Babel grew above. My hand still smelled like Tsubaki's sarashi from the bear hug. Forge smoke and warm linen and brown skin. The bite mark on my palm throbbed where she'd squeezed it.
Two eyepatches. Tsubaki on the left. Hephaestus on the right.
I stepped into the daylight and the afternoon sun was too bright after the forge and I squinted and walked toward the Guild to file the Minotaur horn reforging as an official equipment upgrade.