Borin Coppermantle had crossed the Ashveld Mountains, forded the Greymere River at its worst point in spring flood, and walked the last forty miles on a blister that had developed its own personality, and he had done all of it clutching a roll of oilskin to his chest like it contained the bones of a saint.
In a way, he felt, it did.
Edric Holt’s forge sat at the end of the town of Crestfall like a period at the end of a very long sentence. It was enormous, blackened, and loud even from outside, the kind of place that announced itself in heat and smell and sound before you ever saw it. Three apprentices were working the bellows when Borin pushed open the door, and the noise swallowed him whole.
Edric himself was at the main anvil. He was sixty-two years old, built like a sea cliff, and had the forearms of a man who had been hitting things very hard for most of his life. He had shod warhorses for three kings, forged the gates of Westmere Cathedral, and once, famously, reforged a broken ancestral sword so perfectly that the family had wept. He did not look up when the door opened.
“Appointment?” he said.
“No,” Borin admitted.
“Come back Tuesday.”
“I’ve walked two hundred miles.”
Edric looked up. He took in the dwarf, four and a half feet tall, braided auburn beard, road-filthy, and holding a roll of oilskin with both arms the way a new father holds an infant.
He set down his hammer.
“Two hundred miles,” he repeated.
“And forty. I forded the Greymere.”
Edric studied him for another moment. Then he jerked his head toward the back of the forge, toward the worn wooden table he used for consultations. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Borin unrolled the oilskin with the careful reverence of a scholar unrolling a sacred text. Edric leaned over the table, put on the spectacles he would never admit he needed, and looked.
The pages were covered in diagrams, meticulous, obsessive, cross-referenced diagrams, annotated in at least three different hands. Measurements in units Edric didn’t recognize, converted in careful script to units he did. Drawings from multiple angles. Close-up studies of individual components. Whoever had drafted this had cared about it enormously.
It was unlike anything he had ever seen.
Two wheels, not four. A long low body between them, a kind of seat above, a curved handlebar assembly at the front. Some sort of engine, though like no engine Edric had ever encountered, nestled in the central frame, its cylinders arranged in a V shape like two fists raised to the sky. Pipes running back from it in graceful curves. A chain assembly at the rear wheel. Gauges. Levers. An exhaust system drawn in loving detail.
He looked at it for a long time.
“I can build something like this,” he said at last.
Borin let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for several days.
“Good,” the dwarf said. “That is, good.” He pressed both hands flat on the table. “Can you?”
“I just said I could.”
“I know, but,” Borin waved a hand. “I’ve been told that before. By people who then looked at page three and changed their answer.”
Edric turned to page three. It showed the engine in section view, the internal workings, the pistons, the combustion chambers, the tolerances labeled with the kind of precision that made most craftsmen’s eyes go wide and their confidence go quiet.
He looked at it for a while.
“Hm,” he said.
“There it is,” said Borin.
“I didn’t say no.” Edric straightened up. He had, in his sixty-two years, built things that people said couldn’t be built, and he had a stubborn streak that his wife described as his worst quality and his best. He tapped the engine diagram with one finger. “This internal combustion mechanism, it’s a heat engine. Expanding gas driving a piston. I understand the principle. The tolerances are,” he tilted his head,” challenging. But not impossible. Not for this forge.”
Borin was watching him with the focused intensity of a man who had been disappointed many times.
“What I want to know,” Edric said, pulling up a stool, “before we go any further,” he folded his arms and looked at the dwarf squarely,” is what this thing is.”
Borin blinked. “I told your apprentice at the door. It’s called,”
“I know what it’s called. A Harley Davidson motorcycle.” He said the words with the careful enunciation of someone reciting in a foreign language. “What I mean is, what does it do? What’s it for?“
Borin was quiet for a moment.
“It moves,” he said. “The engine burns fuel, refined oil, which I’ve been working on, I have notes on that too, and it drives the rear wheel, and the whole thing moves. Fast. Faster than a horse. And it’s loud.” He paused. “It’s supposed to be very loud. That’s not a flaw. That’s the point.”
Edric looked at him.
“It doesn’t carry cargo?”
“Not much.”
“It can’t pull a plow?”
“No.”
“Fight in a battle?”
“Not, directly, no.”
“So it just,” Edric gestured at the diagrams,” moves. Fast. And loudly.”
“Yes.”
“And you walked two hundred and forty miles, forded the Greymere at spring flood, and came to the best forge on this side of the continent to have one built.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Borin looked down at the diagrams. He was quiet for a moment that felt, to Edric, like it had real weight to it.
“I found these plans in the ruins of a human crossing-point,” he said. “One of those places where their world and ours gets thin. These were just, left there. Like they fell through.” He smoothed the oilskin with one hand. “I’ve been a smith myself, forty years. Good enough. Not, ” he glanced up, and there was nothing false in the acknowledgment,” not your level. But I know craft when I see it. And I looked at these, and I thought,” he stopped. Tried again. “There’s no reason for this thing. It doesn’t produce anything. It just exists to go fast and be magnificent and make a sound like the world is ending in the best possible way.” He looked at the V-engine cross-section. “I’ve spent forty years making things that are useful. Hinges. Brackets. Horseshoes. I’ve made some beautiful things too, but always because they had to be beautiful for a reason.” He tapped the page. “These humans made something beautiful for no reason at all except that they wanted to. And it became,” he searched for the word, “it became legendary. Amongst themselves. Generations of them. They loved it.”
Edric was quiet.
“That’s it,” Borin said, slightly defensively. “That’s the whole reason.”
Edric looked at the diagrams for a long time. Then he looked at the dwarf. Then he looked back at the diagrams.
“Forty percent deposit,” he said. “Materials are going to be, unusual. I’ll need to source a few things. The fuel refinement process, I want your notes on that today, all of them. And I need you here, in this town, for the duration, I’m going to have questions.” He picked up page three again. “A lot of questions.”
Borin stared at him. “You’re saying yes.”
“I’m saying forty percent deposit and I want those fuel notes today.“
“You’re saying yes,” Borin said again, and something in his face changed — not dramatically, nothing so simple as a smile, but a kind of settling, a weight put down.
“It’s the most interesting thing anyone’s brought me in twenty years,” Edric said, simply. He rolled the diagrams back up with surprising care for a man with hands the size of dinner plates, and tucked them under his arm. “The engine is going to take three attempts minimum. The chain tolerances are going to make my best apprentice cry. And I have no idea if the thing will move when we’re done, or just sit there looking extremely proud of itself.”
“It’ll move,” Borin said.
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” Borin agreed. “But I’d like to find out.”
Edric looked at him for a moment, and then, unexpectedly, for a man not known for it, he laughed. It came from somewhere deep and genuine, the laugh of a craftsman recognizing another craftsman’s madness.
“Tuesday,” he said. “Come back with your fuel notes and your deposit, and we’ll start talking seriously.” He paused at the door back to the forge floor. “And find lodgings that aren’t temporary. You’re going to be here a while.”
Borin Coppermantle picked up his empty oilskin case and held it to his chest one last time, out of habit, before he remembered it was empty now.
He smiled, a small, private, forty-years-in-the-making smile.
“I’ll need stabling,” he said, “for the goat. She came with me.”
Edric did not turn around. “Not my problem.”
“She’s very well-behaved.”
“Not my problem.“
The first engine attempt cracked at the third firing. The second seized entirely. The third ran for eleven seconds before a seal failed and oil went everywhere, and Edric’s senior apprentice, a young woman named Sera, who had never in her life encountered a problem she couldn’t solve by hitting it, sat on the forge floor and put her head in her hands.
But the fourth, The fourth ran.
It ran rough and loud and imperfect, clamped to the workbench with iron braces, shaking everything on the shelves, and the sound it made was absolutely nothing like anything any of them had heard before: a low, rhythmic, chest-deep thunder that climbed as the throttle opened and filled the forge and spilled out into the street and brought half the town to the doorway.
Borin stood in front of it with his hands at his sides and his eyes bright.
“There it is,” he said, very quietly, to no one in particular.
Edric stood beside him, arms folded, forge-soot on his face, watching the engine run.
“Loud,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Seems excessive.”
“Yes,” said Borin. “That’s the point.”
Edric was quiet for a moment. The engine thundered. The shelves shook. Sera had taken her head out of her hands and was watching it with the expression of someone who has, despite everything, fallen in love with a problem.
“We’re going to build it properly now,” Edric said. “Properly. No compromises on the frame geometry, no shortcuts on the chain assembly. It’ll take what it takes.”
“Agreed,” said Borin.
“And when it’s done,” Edric said, and his voice had gone slightly careful, “I’m going to need to understand how the throttle works.”
Borin looked at him.
“For professional purposes,” Edric added.
“Of course,” said Borin.
Neither of them said anything else. The engine ran between them, improbable and loud, making its sound like distant thunder or the world beginning, and outside the door the people of Crestfall stood in the street and listened to something they had no name for, and felt, without knowing why, that they were hearing a thing that had never existed in their world before and would never quite leave it again.
The finished machine was painted midnight black with copper fittings. It took fourteen months.
Edric rode it first, on the grounds that it was his forge and he outranked everyone. He rode it exactly forty feet down the main road of Crestfall before overcorrecting and ending up in a hedge.
Borin rode it next. He did not end up in a hedge.
He rode it to the edge of town and then out past it, along the road that ran beside the river, and he opened the throttle all the way, and the sound rose up like something ancient being woken, and he rode and rode until the town was very small behind him and the wind was enormous and the thunder was all there was.
He came back an hour later, wind-burned and grinning, and said nothing at all.
He didn’t need to.
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