Chapter 42- The Steel Axe(2)/ Six Months

Chapter 42: 42- The Steel Axe(2)/ Six Months

With one hand, he could swing it fast enough to match a sword. If he needed to break a shell, he could flip it around and use the square hammer-poll on the back.

And if he needed to split a skull, he could choke up with both hands on the eighteen-inch steel tang.

"Where’d you get this?" Sol asked, testing the edge with his thumb. It was dull, covered in surface rust, but there wasn’t a single crack in the steel.

"Pulled it out of an old fire-truck cab buried in the highway tunnel two winters ago," Marrow said, crossing his arms over his leather apron. "Old-world steel. Can’t melt it down in my little coal pot, it doesn’t get hot enough, so I just riveted new hide on the grip and left it on the board. Nobody round here has the wrist to swing six pounds of solid tang with one hand."

"I want it," Sol said. "Put a fresh edge on the beard with your grindstone, give me two spare wolf-skin coats from that rack over there, a flint-striker, an iron pot, and a bag of salt."

Marrow raised a gray eyebrow, looking from the heavy hatchet in Sol’s hand over to the two thick, stitched wolf-pelts hanging inside his tin shack. "Old-world steel, two winter coats, iron cookware, and salt? Boy, you Know how far we have to haul salt from the southern flats? That’s four Medium-Stage shards right there. Clean ones, not chipped."

Beside Sol, Valera shifted slightly, ready to tell the old man he was robbing them blind, a simple iron hatchet and two dirty pelts wouldn’t cost half a Low-Stage chip in the Merchant Ring.

Sol didn’t haggle.

He reached into the leather pouch at his hip with his left hand, bypassed the four Medium-Stage boar shards entirely, and pulled out the massive, fist-sized, deep-purple Peak-Stage crystal they had just pulled out of the twelve-foot acid centipede at the bottom of the hill.

He set the glowing purple rock down right in the center of the railroad-track anvil.

The ambient pressure radiating off the Peak shard was so heavy that the coal fire in Marrow’s little brick forge actually flickered and blew sideways.

The two Low-Stage guards standing forty feet away at the camp gate stopped talking and stared toward the shack.

Marrow looked down at the Peak shard on his anvil.

Then he looked up at the fresh, pitted acid-burns on Sol’s right forearm, and slowly put two and two together.

"You just killed the crawler in the highway " Marrow said quietly, all the merchant bluster vanishing from his voice.

"That thing ate three of my trappers last month. We were getting ready to pack the whole camp up and move east before the thaw brought it up the hill."

"It won’t come up the hill anymore," Sol said, resting the head of the six-pound iron hatchet in his palm.

"Take the Peak shard. Give me the coats, the pot, the salt, a sharpening stone so I can maintain the edge myself, and those four Medium-Stage shards you’ve got sitting in that tin box under your workbench so my girl has small change to eat tonight."

Marrow didn’t even pretend the tin box wasn’t under his bench.

A Peak shard was worth ten Mediums to the nomadic caravans that came down from Gomorrah, it was enough to buy the little hold a whole winter’s worth of grain and crossbow bolts.

The old smith reached under his workbench without a word, pulled out a greased leather pouch containing five Medium-Stage shards, one extra and set it on the anvil next to Sol’s hand before picking up the purple Peak crystal with both hands like it was made of gold.

"Take the coats off the back wall yourself," Marrow said, already stepping over to his foot-pedal grindstone and motioning for the hatchet. "Give me three minutes on the wheel and I’ll put a butcher’s bevel on that steel that’ll shave the hair off a boar’s snout."

Twenty minutes later, Sol and Valera walked back out through the log gate of the Slag-Heap.

The Low-Stage guards didn’t say a word as they passed, they practically backed into the logs to clear the trail.

Valera was wrapped from neck to knee in a heavy, lined coat of gray wolf-fur, with the iron pot and salt-bag strapped neatly to a leather pack on her back, and nine Medium-Stage shards clinking softly in their pouch.

Beside her, Sol wore the second heavy fur coat open at the chest to let his heat vent into the freezing wind.

Hanging from a thick iron ring on his right hip,sharpened to a gleaming, razor-bright bevel along its five-inch bearded edge was the six-pound slab of old-world carbon steel.

Sol rested his scarred right hand on the riveted raw-hide grip of the hatchet as they stepped back out into the swirling gray fog of the Deep Wastes, his orange eyes scanning the northern horizon where the ruined highway led deeper into the wild territories of the Level 2 Crowned packs.

"Better?" Valera asked, pulling her fur hood up and bumping her shoulder lightly against his arm as they walked.

Sol tapped the heavy square hammer-poll of the hatchet with his thumb, sending a warm, resonant ring through the solid steel tang.

"Much better," Sol said. "Come on. You’re seven percent short of Peak-Stage. Let’s go find something big enough to test the edge on."

And so, 6 months passed by in the wild.

"Stop breathing so loud," Valera whispered, her shoulder pressed against Sol’s bicep inside the hollow trunk of the petrified oak. "It has ears behind its jaw."

"It doesn’t have ears, Val," Sol murmured back, his voice barely vibrating in his chest. "Snakes feel vibrations through their belly scales. And I’m not breathing loud. Your knee is digging into my kidney."

"Then move your kidney."

"There’s nowhere to move it. You picked the tree."

Valera turned her head an inch. In the cramped, pitch-black hollow of the dead tree, her nose brushed against his jaw, thick now with a rough, six-month beard that he kept trimmed short with the edge of his hatchet so nothing could grab it in a fight.