Free Book of Iron by Elizabeth Bear Page B

braced, Ambrosias clattering along beside her. If she were defending that forge, she would strike when her enemies were bottlenecked on the cane-width span.
    But Liebelos just watched them come, her hands at her sides, until they reached the far bank and fanned out, three on each side of Salamander.
    Bijou noticed that Maledysaunte kept the black-man construct close beside her. His presence—or lack thereof—still discomfited Bijou deeply. But Maledysaunte was right—bringing him along had been the best solution. What else could they have done? Try to fight him, when they were in a hurry, he’d done nothing to provoke them, and they knew nothing of his powers? Leave him behind, and have him following out of sight?
    Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer , she told herself. It was good advice: and for now, the enemy was Dr. Liebelos.
    Except Liebelos was tossing her round-headed hammer casually to the rock beside the anvil and wiping the sweat from her palms onto her leather apron as she came forward. “Darling,” she said, extending her hands to Salamander. “I knew you’d come around. And you’ve brought your friend…”
    She didn’t acknowledge Riordan at all, and her eye only skipped appraisingly over Bijou, Kaulas, and Prince Salih. She did give the guardian a considering glance, though.
    “Mom,” Salamander said, “I’ve come to talk you out of this madness.”
    “It’s not madness,” Dr. Liebelos insisted. “This is necessary. I’m a precisian, Wove. A scholar of order. Trust me when I tell you that it is a ticking bomb to have the Book present in the world in a form as capable and enduring as Maledysaunte’s. It is a pattern that will remake all our world in its image, with the Hag of Wolf Wood its possessed and terrible demon-queen.”
    Bijou was close enough to Prince Salih to see his eyebrows rise in the light of the smithy. “A precisian complains of an excess of order?”
    “Just because I am a scholar of order,” Liebelos said, “does not mean I am always its partisan.”
    With a shrug of dismissal, she turned back to the forge and anvil. From here, Bijou could see that what she had taken for coals were no such thing. Pellets of stone filled the Forge Unquenchable, as Maledysaunte had called it, glowing white-hot. The air above them shimmered with heat as Dr. Liebelos moved toward the forge.
    She lifted a set of tongs from a rack and reached into the coals with them. As if miming, she drew the tongs back, holding nothing in the tines.
    She laid the nothing on the anvil. Left-handed, she took her hammer up. She raised it high and struck a ringing blow, hammering air against forged steel. In the flickering red light of those coals that weren’t, Bijou saw something begin to shimmer into existence between anvil and hammer, in the grip of the tongs.

Eight
     

Prince Salih glanced at Maledysaunte. “What’s to stop us from just walking up and grabbing her?”
    “There’s magical energy accumulating with every blow of that hammer,” she said. Her pale face drew in over the bones beneath it, collapsing as if each strike against the anvil pulled blood and strength from her. “I can contain it. I will contain it. But the longer you wait….”
    Salamander stepped forward. “Mom,” she said.
    She paused at the edge of the hammer’s swing. Liebelos didn’t hesitate.
    “ Mom !” Salamander yelled, more forcefully.
    The hammer came down ever harder. Bijou could see the ropes of Liebelos’s muscles moving under sweat-slick skin. The sweat flew from her face, dripped from her nosetip to sizzle on the anvil. The blows reverberated within the enclosed chamber, dizzyingly loud, like the pound of a heart if you stood inside it. The anvil itself grew hot, hotter with every blow. The shimmering shape upon it resolved, clearer and clearer, like an image on a photographic plate emerging under the developer.
    It was, of course, a book. A folio volume, as tall as the reach of Bijou’s