There was the sky, and in the sky was a burning hole, and from that emerged a being, first hands, then limbs, then ancillary limbs, then cephalothorax, and finally propulsion. It descended with solemn grace and nobody saw it until it had reached the ground in the center of town because they had all been told at a young age not to look at the sun.
This being, they decided after brief observation, was close enough to the sun to count. So they did not stare at it, though it was almost entire naked (save for a faint haze of ionizing radiation secured about its privates), and they most certainly did not make eye contact, for its eyes were two blazing photons that scorched everything they beheld, forcing it to witness the world entirely through the strategic reflective use of a little mirror it clasped carefully in the smallest hand of its smallest ancillary limb.
“I seek the great metalsmith Shalt,” it spoke to the world at large in a voice that crackled like static on a cold dry day, “on a matter of most enormous importance.” And since the truth of this statement was self-evident, and the bearing of the stranger was so unquestionably serious, and Shalt wasn’t exactly a braggart but she was self-assured in a way that annoyed some of her neighbours, and (most importantly) everyone was curious about what would happen next, directions were dutifully given to the workshop of Shalt by all present.
Shalt was sitting outside having a drink, half of which she spat back out on seeing her guest.
“I am a Prince of the Burning Skies,” proclaimed said guest, sitting comfortably on a tuft of plasma, “and I come to you with a great and precious gift: the opportunity to make me a weapon unbreakable and unbeatable, your finest work to date, that I might cleave my foe asunder and claim this land as my rightful prize.”
“Cough, wheeze, gurgle,” said Shalt.
“Indeed!” said the Prince, sweeping its longest limb magisterially. “A mighty boon to be sure. Grant me victory in my approaching contest of arms, creature of solid matter and carbon, and in return I shall promise your people a most comfortable serfdom and the use of a reasonable amount of my lands to sustain themselves. My foe in this duel is terrible beyond your keenest reckoning in the depths of dreams, but he is ignorant to the secrets of this little place between our realms, and I have deduced that your craft – wielded by my hand – will be great enough to render me the master in our contest. Remember: your finest! Nothing less will suffice. And if I should fall, beware – do not think my people will lie down to their fate quietly! Our struggle shall be long and terrible, and in that war you and all that you cherish shall surely suffer down to the last smouldering atom! Harken, the zenith departs! I return three days hence!”
And so saying this the Prince grasped the single strongest sunbeam present and whirled his way back into the blazing hole above.
“Hhhhwwwweee,” managed Shalt, exalting in once again possessing a free and functional airway. Everything else might have been a problem, but that was going alright. She breathed in, then out, coughed, in, out, didn’t cough, shook herself off, spat on the ground, walked into her workshop, and shut her eyes in self defense against the thing standing next to her forge. There had been a mantle and a visceral mass and something else, but she was pretty sure she’d stopped before she made the mistake of finding out if it had a head because behind her eyelids she could picture the face of her husband or her favorite set of tongs instead of whatever the hell that would’ve been.
Something pale and insensible touched itself to her arm, and before she had time to jerk backwards she became aware of things.
this is the Headsman of All Unlit.
its anther is a means of death and communication and poetry.
it is here to make a commission.
a merely natural weapon to fell a supranatural enemy.
in payment, Shalt’s people will be placed somewhere with light until they are dead and do not need it anymore.
if the weapon fails and the Headsman falls, All Unlit will war and there will be no darkness that is not toothed and no shadow that does not draw blood.
The touch she hadn’t felt faded. The memories didn’t.
Shalt stood there with her eyes shut until her husband came in to ask her why she was late for dinner.
“Sorry sweetie,” she told him. “I just got told to do the best job of my life for two beings that each want the opposite thing.”
“Would talking to your godmother help with this?” asked her husband.
“Don’t want to.”
“Would beer help with this?” asked her husband.
“No, but give me some anyways.”
“Sure, if you talk to your godmother about this.”
“Fine. But I get the beer first.”
So she did, and the evening was less bad than it had been until Shalt was about to pull her boots off and get into bed when she saw her husband had drawn up the washing-basin and a candle and a thread.
“I’m tired,” she said feebly.
“You can fall asleep right after,” he said.
“She won’t want to,” she said desperately.
“You said she wanted you to visit more often after last time.”
“I don’t wanna,” said Shalt honestly.
Her husband patted her on the back as he lit the candle. “You never do,” he said fondly.
Shalt took a deep breath and dropped into the basin face-first.
Below was her bedroom, upside down. The candle, the basin, her husband.
She dropped into that basin too.
Below, her bedroom inside out. Above her was the comforting blanket of the night and the stars, above that the looming celestial vault of her ceiling; around her the hills and the trees and the cold deep spring lake and beyond them the endless crooked boards of her walls that held up the sky; underfoot was dirt and green sprouting things crawling up from the deep-seated floor.
There was a candle. There was a basin.
She put her face in that too.
Beyond that was a basin and a candle. And beyond THAT was her godmother.
She was knitting, or something like it. The motions were off and the material was impossible to parse. Shalt had touched one of the needles once, and if she hadn’t learned how to replace it she very much doubted she’d be the smith she was today. Or alive. Or human.
“Hello my singular little verb of a godchild,” said Shalt’s godmother. She was smiling. She was always smiling. She was always smiling with teeth. She was always smiling with someone’s teeth.
“Hello, godmother,” said Shalt. “I need help with something.”
“Best I can do is advice,” said Shalt’s godmother. The needles didn’t click or clack; they coughed and chucked and croaked. One of them was watching her with an amused glint in its eye, and she was pretty sure which one THAT was.
“Advice’ll do. Godmother, I’ve been asked to do my best work for two beings that each want the exact opposite thing, and whichever one of them doesn’t get it will be sure to ruin all our lives for it, and possibly in a way that worse than kills us.”
“You said ‘beings,’” said Shalt’s grandmother. “Are they people?”
“Sort of,” said Shalt. “The Prince of the Burning Skies and the Headsman of All Unlit.”
Her godmother was always smiling with someone’s teeth, but she wasn’t always laughing, which she did now. It wasn’t a very nice laugh – like boulders landing on rotten spring ice – but it could’ve been meaner. “Oh godchild, that’ll be easy,” she said. “Things like that are already mostly people, pretend though they might, and people never know what they want. If they say they want the exact opposite thing, and you can’t give them the exact opposite thing, then don’t give them that. Give them something better. I think your candle’s out. Visit more often.”
“I,” said Shalt, before the thread pulled taut and she was yanked wet-faced and gasping out of the basin and out of the basin and out of the basin and out of the basin by the thread in her husband’s hand wrapped around her sleep-braid.
“Learn anything?” he asked, patting her on the back.
The candle’s dying smoke pooled in Shalt’s nostrils as she shrugged. “I think so.”
“She wants you to visit more often, doesn’t she.”
Shalt punched his shoulder with her head.
***
The work began the day after. Shalt always thought best when she worked, because she thought less. Easy to make room for the important decisions when your head was cleared out enough for them to stretch and stand there, unobstructed by anxious clutter and lazy mess.
A forge, a hammer, an anvil, a mould, tongs, bellows, metal and an old box.
Shalt considered all of this.
Then she breathed in, breathed out, and began.
Metal.
Heat.
Those were the real work, and she let her body handle them while her mind ran over the contents of the box.
Inside it, in a little leather bag, she had:
Crow’s teeth.
Pig’s feathers.
Shrike’s conscience.
And a pinch of an adult human’s innocence.
Next to the bag, in a squat stone jar, she had:
A ray of hope.
A heart-ful of love.
A cloud of despair.
And a tragic truth.
Last, wrapped in thick cloth, she had a glass vial of grit and determination.
Shalt thought about those things as she did the work, and she picked some up and put others down.
Then she was done, stumbling back to bed with soot in her hair and dry eyes and boots still on. Her husband squawked and she fell asleep on him.
Then she woke up and did it all again.
Then she woke up and it was done.
And it was time.
***
The Prince of the Burning Skies met Shalt at first light, walking across the scattered orange sunrise from the distant mountains to her doorstep.
“My weapon lies with you, yearning for me,” it spoke, beckoning with half its hands and grooming its abdomen (frantically?) with the others. “Bequeath it unto me that I might bestow upon my kind my victory and your kind your reward.”
“Here,” said Shalt, raising her hands and lowering her eyes (and they were already pretty lowered: even the mirror-gaze of the Prince made her forge-blistered arms redden uncomfortably). “My work is done: this is a blade and its name is Wedge. Hold it in your hand – like this – and face the sharper edge – this one – towards your enemy and propel the blade into it until it is dead. It is the sharpest I’ve ever made, and the strongest: it won’t break or bend and it’ll cut anything it meets. And it has a secret: see this spur here, along the cutting edge? Even harder, ever fiercer, a splitter without equal. Strike with that and nothing can stop being torn in half.”
“You are a worker most skilled and most clever for an entity lacking in luminescence and being of a lower state of matter,” decreed the Prince, its jet fumes burning with all the spectra of gratitude. “I look forward to my victory.” And so speaking it marched forth from the town, spinning the great sword from hand to hand like a child playing with a match.
The Headsman of All Unlit rose to meet Shalt when the rain came that morning, trickling in under the eaves and standing behind her ear as she froze at the workbench, cleaning what she could.
“Here,” she whispered, holding her hand out, palm pronated, laden with weapon. “My work is done: this is a blade and its name is Notch. Hold it in your hand – like this – and face the sharper edge – this one – towards your enemy and propel the blade into it until it is dead. It is the sharpest I’ve ever made, and the strongest: it won’t break or bend and it’ll cut anything it meets. And it has a secret: see this gap here, along the cutting edge? Let the enemy strike there and twist and their weapon will burst apart. Nothing can escape that enters it.”
No anther descended. The weapon was removed. The Headsman was gone.
“Rude,” muttered Shalt in profound gratitude. “Rude, rude, rude.”
She went indoors and had tea with her husband until she heard the horns.
***
At the first horn, the entourage of the contestants approached.
The sun widened in the sky and disgorged a ballooning swarm of Earls, Dukes, Counts, and Lords, all descending on delicate sails woven of their own filaments and elegantly filigreed electromagnetic frequencies. They used their own hand-mirrors carelessly, if at all, and so much of the viewership of the spectacle retired indoors where it ran less risk of being scorched by an errant glance.
The dark, cold spring lack cracked open at the seams and up from its black water marched the Jurors of All Unlit, soft tendrils coiling from their masked summits, their great soft visceral masses trailing something scentless and massless and hueless than was thicker than treacle and made your ears hurt when you looked at it. They touched each other as they walked, anther to stigma, and the discussions that transpired were inaudible, inconceivable, and indecisive.
At the second horn, the contestants and their seconds arrived.
The Prince of the Burning Skies was armoured now as well as armed; beautifully ornamented in plates of firmament and hydrogen and outfitted with an extra set of photon eyes above its forehead. Beneath the backwash of its heels stood a solid supporter, a thick neutronic mass with the bare suggestion of appendages and an implacable lack of face.
The Headsman of All Unlit stood there. Its petals moved gently across the hidden depths of its apex, hiding whatever crawled within. Its vines cradled itself as gently as a parent might their child; behind them its bulb squirmed slightly, poking out soft uncoloured tendrils and tasting the earth before retracting in inevitable and resigned disappointment.
At the third horn, the duel began.
The opening moves were things Shalt and her husband couldn’t sense. Decisions that happened and ended before they left the realm of notion.
The initial blows were murkier, but there. The wrestling of the clouds and the sun; the wavering of the shadows at their feet; the sudden gut-lancing-terror that caused every mouse nearby to climb up Shalt’s leg and cower in her shirt-sleeves; and so on.
Then the gloves were off, and out came the secret weapons.
Wedge sprayed gleaming from the incandescent core of the Prince of the Burning Skies, danced through all of its hands in one motion, and shot forwards like a volcanic plume.
Notch erupted from the crown of the Headsman of All Unlit, held in a thing that Shalt refused to understand, and swung to meet it.
Both swords were steel so there was a sound, presumably. It just got swallowed up by all the things that weren’t. The snarl on the Prince’s face. The rippling sneer on the Headsman’s mantle. The strain of limbs and the heave of the foot. The press, the weight, the pressure, the rigid rictus of impossible forces trying to communicate through impossible ones, leaning closer, closer, bringing more to bear, committing more of themselves, putting everything and every hope and all they were on one little fulcrum where Wedge and Notch met, pushing, reaching, longing for contact.
Shalt said the Prince kissed the Headsman first.
Her husband insisted it was the other way around.
Since the contestants’ entourages and seconds were too mortified to register fine detail the matter – like the determination of a victor, and who claimed ownership over the battlefield – was left permanently unanswered.
***
Shalt woke up, which was harder than it sounded after four months with a newborn. But although the rap-rap-rap on the door was surreptitious and quiet it WAS desperate, and so she sighed and swore and dragged herself upright and half-dressed and through the dark and to the door.
“Come back tomorrow,” she said. “Shop’s closed.”
“Fine, fine, fine, fine,” said the Prince of the Burning Skies, in the voice – one Shalt knew intimately now – of someone who had half their mind on a person that wasn’t part of the conversation. “But, well, you see, I was wondering, if, that is… – I’m GETITNG to it, don’t worry, I just don’t want to be CRUDE about it – well FINE.”
There was a silence. Shalt sighed into it.
“So. Do you do rings?”