Chapter 123 - 121 — Not Going in Blind I

**POV: Jace**

---

I woke up at about six and found out what nine hours in a fortress costs the following morning.

The ribs had gone from a thing that hurt when I moved to a thing that hurt when I breathed and hurt more when I moved.

Getting my legs over the side of the bed took two attempts and the second one was worse than the first.

Both forearms had come up overnight. The right one was still swollen from the wrist to the elbow and there was a green edge coming into the bruising along the outside.

I sat there for a moment with my feet on the floor and my hands on my knees, and I did not get up until I had a plan for the day.

---

Last night I went looking for it in the dark, because anybody would.

Myrmidon attempting Floor Three. Twelve people. My father at the front of it.

It is not in there. Not a date, not a headline, not a number coming out the other side.

Either it never reached the desk I had, or it has not happened yet in any version of the world, and there is no way for me to tell which.

So I know exactly what everybody else in this house knows, which is that they went in yesterday morning and planned for eight days.

---

There is a version of this morning where I go straight to the Tower and press the line that says Floor Two.

I can see the appeal of it from here. He is two floors up and I am one, and pressing that would feel like doing something.

It would also mean walking onto a floor I have read nothing about, with two cracked ribs, wearing a pair of gauntlets that came off a Tower crate and did not survive a single day of use.

Twenty of us cleared Floor One yesterday. Finishing first did not put me one metre above the other nineteen and I have been clear with myself about that since the Tower put it on two separate lines.

What finishing first gave me was two points on every attribute, five more points sitting unspent, and a block of metal.

So I am going to go and spend the block of metal.

---

The Myrmidon forge is under the eastern range, dug into the slope so that half of it sits below the yard, and you go down six steps into it and the temperature changes on the third.

I have been down there perhaps four times in my life and never for anything of my own.

It is one long room. A mana furnace at the far end behind a shield wall, and two coal hearths in the middle of the run that are still there because some work still wants coal.

Five benches, with the tools racked above them in the order they get used.

The floor is scale. Decades of it, hammered flat and black and slightly soft underfoot.

It smells of hot iron and quench oil and the clean sharp thing that comes off a furnace when the shield wall is up.

---

There was a great deal more in there than I expected.

Along the left wall, equipment in from the field and waiting.

Three Gate harnesses on a rail with tags wired to them. A cuirass with a hole punched through the lower back that somebody had written on in chalk. A pair of boots with the soles off.

Along the right, stock. Bar and plate in racks by type, each rack with a card on the end of it, and I stood in front of those for longer than I meant to.

The cards are not descriptions. They are ranks. Green-rank alloy in the bottom rack in quantity, Blue above it, one short rack of Yellow with about nine bars in it, and above that a locked cabinet with nothing written on the front at all.

A man was at the second bench pulling the fittings off somebody’s harness and putting them into a tray in the order they came off.

A woman came in behind me while I was standing there, put a broken weapon down on the third bench without saying anything to anybody, and went out again.

---

"You are in the way of the rack."

I moved.

He was at the fourth bench with a forearm guard in a vice and a scribe in his hand, and he did not look up when he said it and did not look up for a while afterward.

Owen Mercer has been doing that job since before I was born and his hands say so. He has a pencil behind his ear that I have never once seen him write with.

"I need work done," I said.

"Everybody down here needs work done." He put two lines on the inside of the guard with the scribe and then blew the metal dust off it. "Put it on the bench and stand where I can see it."

I put the gauntlets down.

Then I put the ingot down beside them.

---

He looked at the gauntlets.

That is the part I want to be accurate about, because I had expected the other thing. The ingot was sitting there on his bench being the most valuable object in the room and he picked up the left gauntlet instead.

"Who fixed these."

"A man in the Tower staging district. Two hours on a bench, the day before yesterday."

"He knew what he was doing." He got it open and looked at the inside of it. "And it did not help you at all. Where did you take them after that?"

"Floor One. About nine hours."

"Nine hours." He turned it over. "Right."

---

He went through both of them properly and it took four or five minutes and he did not say anything for most of it.

Then he put the right one down with the back of it toward me and put the scribe on it.

"Look at the knuckle line. Not the scratches. Under them."

There was a change in the colour of the metal about a centimetre back from the front edge, running the whole way across, that I would have walked past.

"That is heat fatigue from the inside face. Not wear." He tapped it.

"Somebody grinds the outside flat and gives it back to you looking new, and every time they do it the plate is thinner and the temper is worse. Twice on the same plate is the end of it."

"The right one has had play in it twice in two days."

"The right one has had play in it twice in two days because the plate is soft, not because the rivet is loose." He put it flat. "What are you doing to them?"

---

So I had to explain it, and I discovered while I was doing it that I have never once said it out loud.

"I have an Ability that puts fire on my hands. It is not thrown. It sits on the knuckles and the backs of the hands and up the forearms for as long as I hold it, and I hit things with it."

"How long is as long as you hold it."

"Three seconds for one punch. Six for two. Eight is the longest I have gone in a single stretch."

He stopped moving.

"Eight seconds of constant output through a plate that size."

"Yes."

"How many times in nine hours?"

I actually had to think about it, and the number I arrived at was not one I had put together before.

"Fourteen, perhaps fifteen. Two of them against something wearing plate itself, so a good deal of the heat came back at me."

---

"And the other thing you do," he said. "You take hits on them."

"I block with the forearms. That is most of what they are for."

"Show me how you block."

I put both arms up and crossed them at the outside of the forearm, the way I had against a man with a blade on a ledge above a ravine.

He came round the bench and looked at where my own plates sat when I did it.

"There." He put a finger on the outside face of the left forearm, three quarters of the way up. "That is where you are going to break one of these in half. Not the knuckles."

"The knuckles are what fail."

"The knuckles are what you notice failing. The forearm face is the one that goes without warning."

---

Only then did he pick up the ingot.

He judged the weight before he touched it and judged it wrong, the way I had, and his hand went down about two centimetres when it arrived.

"Adamantine."

"Floor One. First place."

"Mm." He took it to the light at the second bench, and turned it over there, and put a thumbnail across one corner and looked at where the thumbnail had not gone.

"I have had this in my hands twice in thirty-one years and neither time was it mine to keep."

He brought it back.

"Right. Before you ask me for anything, hear what this actually is."

---

"One ingot is a fixed quantity and it does not stretch. There is no version of this where you get a suit of armour."

"I was not going to ask for one."

"People ask. People come down here with a hand’s worth of something and a drawing." He put it on the bench between us.

"You could have a weapon out of this. All of it, one piece. It would be the best sword in this building, and you do not use a sword."

"No."

"Or it goes into something you already have, in the places that matter, and the rest of that thing stays what it is."

"Into these."

"Into those." He put his hand flat on the gauntlets. "Knuckle plates. Forearm faces. The wrist join."

"That join is where your channels run, which makes it the worst place in the whole assembly to have a weak plate. And that is about as far as the metal goes. I am not going to pretend otherwise."

---

"What does that get me?"

"It gets you a pair of gauntlets that do not soften." He picked up the right one again. "This one is a consumable and nobody told you."

"Adamantine will not fatigue, will not deform, and will not care what you put through it. You will still wear out the leather, the straps, the lining and the channels, and you will bring them back to me for all four."

"And the channels."

"The channels are the interesting problem."

---

He sat down on the stool, which I took to mean the conversation had got longer.

"Your channels are not decoration. Do you know what they are actually doing?"

"Carrying the Ability."

"They are carrying the Ability away from you." He turned the gauntlet so the wrist join was up.

"This network takes the output off the back of your hand, moves it out to the plate edges, and sheds it. Without it, eight seconds of that goes into your own skin."

I did not say anything for a second, because I have run eight seconds of that into my own skin. Bare knuckles, in a storehouse, with no gauntlets on at all.

The hair went off both arms in about a second and a half and I could not close my fist properly by the fourth second.

"I have done it without them," I said. "Once."

"Then you know." He put it down. "So whatever I build, that network survives."

"Adamantine does not carry mana. It is inert. That is precisely why it does not fatigue, and it means I cannot run the channels through the new plates. I have to bed them around it."

---

"Can you?"

"Yes. It is slow and it is the part that will go wrong if anything does." He picked the pencil out from behind his ear, looked at it, and put it back. "Now the part people do not want to hear."

"Go on."

"Stronger material is not better equipment. It is only better equipment if the thing it goes into still does its job."

He counted it off on the bench with the scribe, one tap each.

"Heavier, and you are slower with your hands, which for you is worse than being hit. More rigid, and the assembly stops moving with your wrist and you lose the last fifteen degrees of your own punch."

"Badly bedded, and the network runs hot at the joins instead of the edges, and you have built yourself a pair of gauntlets that burn you at four seconds instead of eight."

"So there is a wrong answer here."

"There are three wrong answers and you have to pick which one you are furthest from."

---

He put both hands flat on the bench.

"So. Do you want them hard, or do you want them heavy?"

"Explain the difference."

"I can put the metal in thick, on the striking faces, and you will hit harder than you do now because there is more of it behind your fist. That is the fashionable answer and half the people who come down here want it."

"And the cost."

"Weight on the far end of your arm, and a stiffer assembly, and less room at the wrist for the channels, which means shorter output before the joins go hot."

"And the other one."

"Thin and even. Everywhere it needs to be, nowhere it does not."

"You do not hit harder. You hit the same as you do now for considerably longer, you take forearm blocks that would have ended this pair, and you stop losing a plate every time you go somewhere."

---

I did not have to think about it for as long as I expected to.

Nine hours ago I was on one knee against a column with thirty-eight Health and a man standing over me, and the reason I got there was not that I had failed to hit somebody hard enough.

The reason I got there was that I had spent everything I had over four fights and had nothing left for the fifth.

Nothing on that floor was decided by one enormous punch. All of it was decided by whether I could still do the ordinary ones at the end.

"The second one," I said. "Thin and even. Durability and the channels. Do not give me striking power at the cost of either."

Mercer made a short sound that was not approval and was not disapproval.

"Good. That is the answer I would give and most people do not give it." He picked up the scribe. "It is also the harder job, so you are not getting them back this week."

---

"How long?"

"Nine days. Twelve if the beds do not go in clean, and I am not promising the nine."

"And if I needed them in four?"

He put the scribe down.

"Then I would do it in four and they would be worse, and you would come back down here inside a fortnight with a cracked bed and no way to fix it, because there is no second ingot."

He looked at me properly for the first time since I came in. "Do you need them in four?"

"No."

"Then do not ask me that again."

"Fair."

---

He went and got a card off the rack and started writing on it.

"Conductive stock for the channel beds. I will not reuse what is in there, it has been cooked. Good stock, because a cheap channel in a gauntlet made out of that is a stupid thing to have built."

He named a figure for the stock and a second one for the furnace time.

"It comes out of clan stores unless you tell me otherwise."

"Take it out of my account."

He stopped writing for about a second, and then did not ask, and wrote it down differently.

---

The man at the second bench finished the harness and carried the tray out. Two more came in, one of them arguing about a delivery, and neither of them looked at us.

Mercer wired a tag onto my gauntlets and put them on the shelf behind him, and put the ingot in the locked cabinet, and I watched both of those happen and did not enjoy either.

"You will want to know something before you go," he said.

"What?"

"Tower work is not Gate work and I have spent four years learning it the expensive way."

---

He tipped the scribe at the equipment along the left wall.

"That cuirass. Orange Gate, and the thing that went through it is in a Bureau record with a name and a weight and a reach, and whoever repairs it can build against that specific animal because we know what it does."

"And Tower equipment."

"There is a man in this clan who came off a Tower floor last year with a set that had been perfect for eleven hours and useless for the twelfth, because the floor changed what it was asking him for."

He shrugged. "Gate gear is built against a known animal. Tower gear has to survive a floor that gets to change its mind."

"So you build for the floor."

"You build for the floor if you know what the floor is. Most people bringing me Tower work do not, so I build heavy, and heavy is a compromise and everybody pretends it is not."

He picked a harness fitting out of the tray and looked at it.

"There are four shops in this region doing nothing but Tower equipment now and there were none of them six years ago. Charging what they like, as well. It is the only part of this trade that is growing."