Chapter 122 - 120 — The Next Floor II
Then he gave me the actual assessment, which took about four minutes and which I could have listened to for an hour.
"One ingot. That is a fixed quantity of metal and it does not stretch. Whatever we make, we make out of that and nothing else, and there is no second attempt if I get it wrong."
"Understood."
"Adamantine does not want to be shaped. That is the entire point of it and it is also the problem. My coal hearths will not touch it."
"The furnace will, but it wants a long soak at a temperature I have to hold rather than reach, and holding costs more than reaching."
He turned the block on its edge.
"It takes an edge poorly and holds it forever. It takes an impact and does not deform."
"What it will not do is be thin and large at the same time. Anything wide comes out either heavy enough to be useless or thin enough that I have wasted your metal."
"So small and thick."
"Small, thick, and taking impact." He looked at the block and then at me. "What do you actually do?"
---
"I hit things with my hands."
"Show me."
I put both gauntlets in front of him and he went through them properly, which took longer than the ingot had.
He got the right one open and looked inside it, and put a thumb on the plate with the play in it and rocked it, and made a noise.
"Somebody fixed these yesterday."
"A man in the Tower. Two hours on a bench."
"He did good work and it did not matter." He laid the plate back.
"This is not a repair problem. These plates are the wrong metal for what you are putting through them. They were made for a Player who punches something twice and then stops."
"That is roughly what I did with them for four weeks."
"And then you did not." He turned the left one over. "Look at the knuckle line. That is heat fatigue on the inside face, not wear."
"You are running fire across them for seconds at a time and the plate is losing temper from the inside out. Then somebody grinds the outside flat and hands it back to you, and it is weaker than it was."
That was not something I had known. It is also, now that it has been said out loud, the reason the right one has had play in it twice in two days.
---
"Adamantine does not care about heat," he said. "That solves it. That is the whole of what it solves."
"What does it not solve."
"The channels." He put a finger along the wrist join where the brown staining is.
"Your channels are the failure point and they will still be the failure point in a pair of adamantine gauntlets. Adamantine does not carry mana at all. It is inert. That is why it does not fatigue."
"So the channels have to be something else."
"The channels have to be laid in while I am forging, in a material that carries, and bedded in a metal that will not let go of them."
"Which means I cut the beds before the piece is finished. Which means I have to know exactly where you want the fire coming out before I start."
He watched me work through that.
"You cannot put channels into adamantine afterward," I said.
"You cannot put anything into adamantine afterward. Whatever this is when it comes off my bench is what it is for the rest of your life."
---
"What do the channels need."
"Conductive stock. Good stock, because a cheap channel in an expensive glove is a stupid thing to have made."
He named a figure and then named a second one for the furnace run. "I do not have it here. I can have it in four days."
"Buy it."
"It comes out of clan stores unless you tell me otherwise."
"Take it out of my account."
He looked up at that, and then did not ask, and wrote something down.
---
"How long."
"Four days for the stock. Then the soak, which is three days and which I cannot hurry. Then the forging, which I will not guess at in front of you."
He turned the ingot once more. "Then the channels. Then fitting them to your hands, and refitting them after you have hit something, because they will not be right first time."
"A number."
"Eighteen days if nothing goes wrong." He put the ingot on the shelf behind him, at the back, where the cloth-covered thing was not. "Twenty-five if it does. I am not promising the eighteen."
"And in the meantime."
"In the meantime I will put a new right plate in those and you will go back to breaking them." He was already reaching for the gauntlet. "Two hours. Come back this afternoon."
---
I went up out of the heat and into the yard and stood there for a moment.
Eighteen days. Possibly twenty-five.
My father is expecting eight days inside.
Those two numbers do not have anything to do with each other and I put them next to each other anyway, the way you do, and then I stopped doing it because it does not produce anything.
---
Then I went up to my room and got to the part I had been not doing since yesterday afternoon.
Floor Two.
I know four things about it. It exists, it has been cleared, I am allowed in, and my father is two above it.
That is a worse position than I was in before Floor One, because before Floor One I had two hundred and eleven pages and a sixty-eight-page annex and I had read both of them twice.
I could get the same again. There is a Bureau terminal in this house and the Consolidated Guidance for Floor Two is presumably sitting on it and costs nothing.
I will read it. I am going to read all of it.
But I have now been on a floor with the official document in my head, and I have a note to make about the official document.
It told me the truth about everything and it did not tell me the useful thing once.
Rev. 41 has a section on how those animals move and it is correct, and reading the sentence and having the sentence arrive at me out of cover were two completely different experiences.
It has nothing at all about what the staging district is like, or that the crate you find gauntlets in has already been opened, or that a repair takes two hours and the counter does not wait for you.
It does not tell you that the man who offers you four people in the hall is worth exactly as much as your interests lining up, or that the queue for consumables is eleven people long every single time.
Sixty-three years of contributors, a third of them posthumous, and not one of them thought to write down that you should eat before you go in.
That is not a criticism of the Bureau. That is what a Bureau document is for.
---
So this time I am going to read the other thing as well.
I got the terminal up and went to the Player Blog.
It has been running for about forty years and it looks it.
It is not a Bureau product and never has been, and the Bureau has tried three times to absorb it and failed three times, which is most of what anybody needs to know about it.
The front page had a moderator notice pinned at the top in a colour nobody has used deliberately since before I was born.
> **DO NOT POST LIVE GATE COORDINATES. This is the fourth time. Posts are removed and accounts go.**
Under that, the current threads.
---
Somebody in the Western Approaches had a Green that had reclassified twice in a fortnight and wanted to know whether anybody else had seen a site do that, and forty people had answered and about six of them had actually seen it.
Somebody was arguing that a particular class of gauntlet was overpriced, at length, with numbers, and somebody else was arguing back with different numbers.
There was a thread eleven years old with four hundred and twelve replies that had been bumped that morning because somebody had found it and disagreed with it.
There was a man offering routes for money. Two people under him saying they had bought one and it had been fine. One person under them pointing out that both accounts had been created the same week.
And there was a long, careful, firsthand account of something, in eight paragraphs, with the conditions and the times and what the writer had got wrong, and it had four replies.
Two threads below it, a shorter one that was confidently incorrect about the same subject, and it had two hundred and thirty.
---
That is the whole of what this place is and it is why I am here.
Rev. 41 is edited. Everything in it has been through somebody who decided it was worth the paper, and everything that decision removed is gone.
This is not edited at all. It has the account with four replies in it, and it also has a man selling routes to people who are going to die on them.
There is no way to tell which is which except by reading both and knowing something.
I have six years and one floor. That will have to do for knowing something.
The sections run down the left. Gates. Abilities. Equipment. Market. Regional.
And at the bottom, under all of them, Tower.
The Tower section is sorted by floor and there are only three of them, and the third one has a single locked thread at the top of it with a Bureau tag on it and nothing underneath.
I did not open that.
I put the cursor in the search bar at the top of the page instead.
---
*Tower Floor Two.*
I pressed return.
> **Searching...**
The page went pale for about half a second, the way it does.
> **1,847 results.**
> **Sort: Relevance ▾ | Date | Replies**
Then it started drawing them, from the top, one at a time.