Chương 8: A Good Blade

The blade came in at twenty after five, and Mr. Riddell put both hands under it to take it. Abe had worked in that shop for two years. He'd never once seen Riddell use two hands for anything. It came in its own cloth, dark green with a stitched edge, in a case better made than the shop counter.

"Beddow account," Riddell said, when the door had shut behind the man who brought it.

"Collection Saturday." He carried it to the bench under the good light and folded the cloth back off it. Abe stopped sweeping. He'd seen hundreds of blades in that shop, off the salvage trucks in crates, furred orange and bent and snapped. Abe had sorted them into bins for two years and knew exactly what a dead one looked like. This one was awake. The light went along it and stopped in places, and Abe found he'd walked four steps closer without asking his legs about it.

"Dunnett," Riddell said.

"Dead ninety years. Made maybe two hundred of these and every one of them is somewhere with a name on it."

"Can I look at it?"

"You can look at it from there." The salvage truck was already backing up in the yard with its lights on, and Riddell went to the door.

"Sweep. I will be an hour." The door banged. Abe stood in the empty shop with the broom in his hands. He waited until the truck noise settled. He picked the blade up first, because anything he wanted had to be in his hands before he went under. He'd learned that one the hard way with his father's book. So Abe stood in the middle of Riddell's holding the most expensive object he'd ever touch, and got quiet. It took about fifty seconds. The truck out in the yard stopped grinding.

The clock over the till stopped ticking. Abe sat down on the floor behind the counter with the Dunnett across his knees and had the best useless hour of his life. Nobody was coming. He turned it in the frozen light until he found the angle where the steel showed its grain, and the grain was hundreds of layers folded over and over, and he counted them until his eyes gave up. He sighted along the edge from six inches away, and weighed it in one hand and then the other.

Then he held it out at arm's length and watched the light run down it and pool at the tip. Then he sat there with it and admitted that he had no idea what he was looking at. He knew it was good. Knowing that told him nothing. Why it was good, and what made it worth more than a house, and what he was supposed to see when he picked it up, were things he couldn't get at from any angle. He had all the time in the world and nothing to do with it. That was new, and he didn't like it.

Every other night the still had given him more than he could carry, but tonight it had given him a beautiful object and a boy who didn't know one thing about swords. There was nobody in that shop to tell him, and there wasn't going to be. Abe put it back on the bench exactly where it had been, got the cloth over it, and let the world go. The truck started grinding again out in the yard. Croft came in at a quarter to seven. Abe heard the bell over the door and turned around with a box of sockets in his arms.

Miles Croft was standing in the doorway of Riddell's in his school coat. Abe's mouth went dry.

"So this is it," Croft said. He wasn't laughing, and that was worse.

"We shut at nine."

"I asked Ellis where you worked. He said Riddell's on the Corn Road, and I told him that was a scrap shop." Croft looked at the wall of files and the wall of chain and the bins.

"It's a scrap shop."

"It is."

"I'm not making fun of it."

"You are, a bit." Croft opened his mouth and closed it again.

"Yeah," he said.

"All right." He walked the length of the counter with his hands in his pockets, and Abe watched him do it and worked out, slowly, that Miles Croft was nervous. Abe had never seen that before. He hadn't known it was available. Then Croft got to the bench and stopped, and all of it went off him at once.

"Is that a Dunnett."

"That's what he said."

"That is a good blade." Croft said it flatly, as a plain fact about the world, and then he leaned over it with his hands behind his back like a boy in a museum and kept them there.

"That is a Fine. Do you know what a Fine is?" Abe knew what a Fine was. Everybody did.

"Go on," he said.

"Common is what you get. It works, everybody starts there." Croft moved his hand along above the steel without going near it.

"A Fine gives you a wider menu when you cross a rank. Ours is a Rare, and that's the whole reason we're anybody." Then he talked about it for four minutes. He named the smith and the smith's teacher. He said what the collar was made of and why. He looked at the grain Abe had spent an hour counting and told him what the folding was for, and what it did to the edge, and why nobody had done it that way in sixty years.

Abe stood there with a box of sockets in his arms and got, for free, in four minutes, everything he'd failed to find in an hour of stopped time. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. He thought about his father's paperback, in his bag under the counter four feet away. It had a price on the back, eight marks, and above the price it said COMMON, in small letters, because that's where they put it.

Then Croft ran out of blade to talk about, and the shop went quiet, and he stayed where he was.

"How long did it take you," he said.

"How long did what take me."

"Nine minutes and forty seconds. Don't be slow about it." Abe put the box down.

"I've been at it since Friday," Croft said. He was looking at the bench and not at Abe.

"Every night. I got two minutes on Sunday and I was so pleased with myself that I lost it, and I haven't had two minutes since."

"Right."

"Six days." Croft laughed at himself and it came out wrong.

"I have a hall three evenings a week and a family that's been at this for sixty years. I sat on my bedroom floor last night for forty minutes and got ninety seconds." He turned around.

"So how." There it was. Tench had asked it in a gym with a stopwatch in his hand and Peg had asked it in a kitchen at six in the morning, and neither of them had come across town to a shop to do it.

"I practice it a lot," Abe said.

"Everybody says that."

"It's still true."

"Then tell me how you practice it." Croft got his wallet out. He did it easily, with no weight on it at all.

"An hour. Twenty marks." Abe stood very still. Twenty marks was more than a shift. He swept that floor and carried that scrap from four until nine for fourteen marks, and he had been doing it for two years, and Croft had said it like it cost him nothing to say.

"No," Abe said.

"Twenty's fine. It's not a trick."

"I know it's not a trick."

"Then what's the matter with you." Abe didn't have a sentence for it that wouldn't have taken an hour, so he said nothing, and Croft stood in the middle of a tool shop with his wallet in his hand and worked something out. Then he put the wallet away and made a much bigger offer.

"I'll show you the first form," he said. He said it fast, before he could stop himself, and then he looked like he wanted the words back. Abe understood what that had cost him. The Croft first form was sixty years of somebody's family and it didn't get shown to people, and a boy raised inside it had just put it on a counter in a scrap shop because he couldn't think of anything else he owned. Abe felt sorry for Miles Croft, and he hated it.

"Put it away," Abe said.

"I'll just tell you."

"You'll what."

"I'll tell you. Sit down." Croft sat down on the floor of Riddell's in his school coat, which wasn't a thing Abe had ever expected to see, and Abe crouched on the other side of him and told him everything he honestly had. Breathe on a four count. Do not count on purpose. Let the counting happen underneath. Do not chase it. That's all of it, and it sounds stupid. The second you want it, it stops. I can't tell you how to not want it, because I never worked that out. It sort of stopped mattering as much. I don't know.

"You can't get it by trying harder," Abe said.

"That's the stupid bit. Trying harder makes it worse." Croft looked up at him.

"That's the least useful advice anybody's ever given me."

"I know." It was all true. Every word of it was true, and Abe had learned it in a wet yard behind some trash cans at four minutes after midnight, and he'd been through that door four or five times a day ever since. Six days, Croft had said. Abe had done it about six hundred times this week, and there was nobody in Calder he could ever say that to. Croft shut his eyes and tried it.

Abe watched him sit on a shop floor with his back straight and his hands on his knees, doing it properly, doing it seriously, and getting further away from it every second, because the whole of Miles Croft was built out of working hard at things and this was the one thing that couldn't be worked at. He came out of it at eighty seconds.

"That was better," Croft said. It was ten seconds worse than the ninety he'd managed on his own bedroom floor the night before. Abe knew it, and said nothing.

"Right." Croft got up and brushed his coat off.

"Thank you. I mean that."

"It's all right."

"It's not, actually. You didn't have to." He got the door open and stopped in it.

"I still don't think you're getting top ten." He said it flatly, like a fact about the weather, and it went in like a splinter anyway.

"Eighteen days to the third of November," Croft said.

"No shame in it either way." Then he was gone, and the bell over the door went on swinging after him, and the Dunnett lay on the bench under its green cloth being worth more than everything Abe Dolan's family had ever owned. Riddell came in from the yard four minutes later, wiping his hands on his coat. He'd been behind a window with a truck running and hadn't heard one word of it. He looked at Abe standing in the middle of his shop doing nothing at all, and didn't ask.

Then he went into the back room and came out with a stone. It was a gray rectangle the size of a bar of soap, worn hollow in the middle, and he put it into Abe's hand and closed his fingers over it.

"You are going to hold it like it is a hammer," Riddell said.

"It is not a hammer." He got the box of chisels down off the shelf, the ones too far gone to sell, and tipped six out.

"Ruin these first. Everybody ruins about forty." Then he showed him. It took about ten minutes. Where the angle lives, and why you do not chase it. How to feel the burr come up on the far side with your thumb, which is the only way anybody's ever known when to stop. Riddell put two fingers on Abe's wrist and moved it four inches.

"There. That. That is the whole thing." Abe had spent an hour at a lit shop window on Gill Street last Wednesday learning bevel angles off a book behind glass, but the book had never told him about the burr.

"Thanks," Abe said.

"Do not thank me. I have been doing my own edges for thirty years and I am sick of it." He took the ledger into the back room and shut the door most of the way. Abe looked at the stone in his hand. Then he got a chisel and the oil and a rag, and stood at the far end of the counter where the door could not see him, and got quiet. The shop stopped. It turned out that sharpening in a stopped world is the best fun Abe Dolan had ever had.

He ruined the first chisel in about twenty minutes, and it didn't matter, because the clock over the till was never going to move again. He ruined the second one differently, which he decided was progress. By the fourth he found what Riddell's wrist had been telling him about. He got a burr up along the whole length, and he felt it come, and he made a noise out loud in an empty shop. Sharpening · Novice Lv 1 (0 / 50) Abe laughed at it. Sharpening, which is what a person does to a pencil.

Conditioning had come up with the dullest name on Earth too, and that had turned out to be a road that went a very long way. His father's book had nothing to say about any of it. The guard's line covered conditioning and nothing else, because nobody's ever asked a wall guard to put an edge on anything. There was no page for this and there was no blue pen. He came out three times, because his shoulder gave up before his patience did.

Each time he checked the back room door, heard Riddell's pen still going, and went back under. He worked all six until they'd take hair off, and then started again with a coarser stone, because Riddell had four stones and there was obviously a reason for that. When he finally let the shop go, the clock over the till had moved seven minutes. It had been two days. He stood at the counter with his arms hanging and read what the Weave had made of it.

Sharpening · Novice Lv 5 (36 / 1250) Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 2 Foundation: 648 / 900 (Body Layer 3) Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind Layer 1 Foundation: 187 / 400 (Mind Layer 2) It was the bottom two lines that stopped him. That second bar had been on his screen since the night he turned eighteen. It had said zero out of four hundred for thirteen days, and he'd stopped seeing it in the first week. Everybody knew there were two ladders.

The corridor board had a column for each, and almost every name in the year had a one in the second one and expected to still have a one there in June. Mind came out of crafts and books and sitting still, and nobody in Calder had hours to give to something that was no use to them in a fight. Piers Danforth had a four in that column, and Abe had walked past it every school day since the board went up without once wondering how it got there. The bar said a hundred and eighty-seven.

Abe put both hands flat on the counter and stared at nothing. He had no idea what it was worth. He knew it had been a zero when he came in to work. Then Riddell came out of the back room, and Abe had no time at all to decide whether to look normal, and didn't manage it. Riddell picked up one of the chisels instead of asking. He held it up under the good light and put his thumb across the edge, sideways, because a man who does it any other way only does it once. He was quiet for a long time.

Then he picked up a second one.

"Take the stone home," he said.

"And you can have the sharpening from now on. A mark an edge." Abe looked up.

"How many come in?"

"Six. Eight in a good week." Riddell put the chisel down on the bench.

"It is not going to make you rich."

"No," said Abe. He was thinking about a chain off its post, and about eight flooded steps four streets from his apartment. He kept those to himself. Riddell looked up at him then, for a second, with the same look he had given the chisel.

"Go home, Abe."