Chapter 33 A Hammer That Eats Metal

The hammer took a spare gauntlet plate off the bench on Wednesday morning, with nobody in the workshop offering it one.

Maelle left the plate beside the head, went off to fetch a torch, then came back to a bench holding one object where two had been.

No metal melted or scorched, since that plate travelled the way the shell chip once entered Dreadweight, closed over rather than burned.

'It is eating our stock while she is out of the room... and it picked the most expensive thing on that bench,' Ossian looked at the empty space, 'shit, it has taste.'

By Thursday it had taken a spare comm housing, two salvage brackets, plus the cradle Maelle built to carry the salamander core out of the basement.

None of that woke the thing, beyond a colour along one edge deepening by a shade and another sixty grams of weight.

Paloma priced the losses at eleven hundred credits in four days, presented the figure at the office table, and did not soften one number on the page.

"Thirteen thousand nine hundred remains after repair plus the hammer's appetite," she turned the sheet around, "against equipment disappearing at two hundred and seventy a day."

'Nobody is telling her to stop... somebody has to choose what it gets before the thing chooses again,' Ossian read the sheet upside down, 'that choice is not mine.'

Feeding it market value is what they had been doing without meaning to, the one thing that panel wording never asked anybody for.

Something you would rather keep is the phrase, and none of the guild's brackets or housings has ever been anything anybody wanted.

Bastien asked the only sensible question at that table, being whether the thing would eventually stop if nobody fed it anything.

Not one person in four days had put a thing near that head on purpose, and it has taken five objects regardless.

Nothing in the wording suggests a relic gets bored, and Maelle said as much while looking at a bench she can no longer leave objects on.

Maelle understood that on the first evening and spent four days not saying it out loud.

Her workshop holds a drawer of failed prototypes, a bench her father built out of two doors, plus one framed award standing on a shelf above the vice.

The Rensmere Medal for Applied Materials, awarded to her at twenty-six, presented by the same industry body that struck her registration four years later.

Bronze, heavy, her name engraved on the plate under a motto in a language she has never bothered to translate.

She has carried that award through two workshops and four years of scavenging, without ever explaining to one living person why she kept the thing.

"They took the work, the registration, plus every job I would have had," she picked it up off the shelf, "and this is the only thing left saying they once thought I was good."

Nobody in that workshop said a word, given that no useful sentence exists for somebody holding the last proof of their own competence.

'Four years of being told she was nothing, one object arguing otherwise... and the hammer wants that,' Ossian stood at the door, 'let her do this alone.'

She put the medal on the bench beside the head and stepped back without any ceremony whatsoever.

The hammer took ten seconds over that one, a good deal longer than it spent on eleven hundred credits of guild kit.

Bronze sank into steel with the engraved plate going last, then the whole of it settled into that head and stopped being an award.

Heat came off the haft in a wave that pushed everybody in the workshop back a step.

[Relic Seed spent]

[The face has opened its eyes in something that is not you, and the woman who owns it owes you nothing for that]

Furnace Salamander sat exactly where it had been in Dreadweight throughout, and every panel Ossian opened afterward listed it unchanged.

One Relic Seed comes with a mask and one is all it ever spends, so Salamander wakes nothing else for anybody living.

'It gave a thing away and kept itself... and it made sure I understood she owes me nothing for it,' Ossian read the wording twice on the loading bay, 'hell, good.'

The hammer that came off that bench weighs five kilograms, runs a dark bronze line the length of one face, and holds heat in a way plain steel never has.

Maelle swung it once at a test block and took a corner off a piece of reinforced concrete that Dreadweight needed two attempts on.

Reinforced concrete of that grade carries a rating printed on the side, and the corner she removed took that number away with it.

First Masked Relic in the city that is not Ossian's, owned outright by a woman with no registration, licensed to a guild still waiting on an operating card.

"Mine," she said it holding the haft with both hands, "on paper, in writing, with my name on every line of that contract."

Then nobody at the depot cheered and Bastien put the kettle on, which is the closest that building gets to a celebration.

Paloma logged the medal in the ledger under materials consumed, at a valuation of zero credits, in the only entry she has ever written twice.

'A bronze medal, valued at nothing, entered by a lawyer who charges for her time... hell, she got that exactly right,' Ossian read the line in the exercise book, 'nobody argue with it.'

Verrick has not written again since the yard, which Paloma says is worse than another letter arriving on the mat.

'Silence off a company lawyer... and she told me that is the part worth counting days on,' Ossian looked at the pigeonhole wall, 'the counting is getting long.'

Nine days after the medal went into the head, nothing else on any bench in that workshop has been touched.

Whatever a relic wants, it wanted one thing once, and it has been an ordinary tool with an unusual weight ever since.

Then the hammer did the thing nobody had designed it to do, in a salvage merchant's back room off Aldren Street.

Maelle had gone in to price a lot of Gate fragments, the way she has done a hundred times, with the hammer across her back out of habit.

The haft went cold against her spine the moment she picked up the third fragment in the tray.

Cold is not a thing that hammer does, given that a relic carrying Furnace Salamander runs warm on the coldest morning of the year.

She put the fragment down and the haft warmed, lifted it again to feel the wood chill through her coat, then repeated that four times while the merchant watched.

"Counterfeit," she said it out loud in the shop, "and I would like to know where the rest of them are."

Gate fragments cannot be faked, a thing every dealer in this city has repeated for thirty years, and the reason the trade functions at all.

Somebody has worked out how, and the tray in that back room held nine of the things mixed in among genuine stock.

Under Maelle's meter, the false pieces carried the larval shell's structural rhythm but none of its living residue. The match justified a proper investigation without supporting any public accusation against Ivory Banner.

Every fragment in this city moves on trust, given that no test exists and no laboratory has ever been asked to build one.

'A trade worth millions running on the word of dealers... and a woman with a hammer just broke the whole thing,' Ossian heard it that evening, 'shit, somebody is going to want her quiet.'

Paloma traced the consignment in under two hours, off a merchant who wanted no part of whatever was arriving next.

Her other searches had stalled behind two offices and two different kinds of silence.

The altered addendum led to a six-officer credential pool with its user log wiped, while Ivory Banner listed the larval core destroyed without any disposal witness.

Every one of those nine fragments sits catalogued for a private auction on the eleventh, held in a building where guild masters buy material without any public record of it.

'Nine forgeries going into a room full of people who could end us... and one hammer in this city knows which is which,' Ossian read the catalogue, 'damn it, we are going.'