“So then,” the words came from behind Eanos causing him to start and turn back from the display of knives which stood in the front of the shop. He knew the voice well enough and gave the owner, Vacielli Haolven, for it was he, a nod of acknowledgement.
“You’ve been here for ten days now,” the Isur continue, “have you decided yet how long you will stay?” He stood expectantly, waiting for the answer.
“Not yet,” Eanos replied with a shrug. “If I am welcome to stay then I would like to stay the rest of the season and then to see how things stand then.” It seemed to him unlikely that there were the sort of secrets which he sought to be found here for it was too close to Sultros and doubtless had been scoured by those who wished for such things and yet did not want to venture too far from home.
The smith nodded. “You are welcome to stay, fear not for that, but have you found a place here yet?” The question seemed odd but Eanos thought he understood so he nodded slowly.
“Yes, I think that I have. I have been tried on a number of different things, some of which were more challenging than others, but I would like to see how my skill with blades compares to what you are used to making here.”
Vacielli considered the request for a moment before nodding his head. “Yes, I think that would be appropriate. A Pitreus smith. I think we would all be interested to see what it is that you could make for us.”
Eanos maintained a confident façade, but he had thrown the challenge down and it had been picked up. Could he make something as good as what his fellow smiths and hosts could do? He knew that he could not hope to match the skill of Vacielli or the more senior smiths here, yet all knew that he was still learning and they would pitch their opinions accordingly. Eanos, for all his bravado knew too that his work would still need much improvement before it was of a standard suitable for running his own forge, but there was an eagerness in his heart to match that of any ambitious Isur, and if he wasn’t yet good, he could hope that his work showed promise.
He started the next morning with a closer inspection of the materials which were available and chose to go with simplicity for this blade. It would be a blade with which he was familiar with the making of so that he could more easily cope with the changes in location, metal and forge. Whilst a master smith might be able to adapt to these without blinking, Eanos was not yet in that position and it was one of the reasons he had chosen to stay here a little longer. Now he had realised that he would need to really work for a living and be well skilled if he were to have either the time or the money with which to chase down the secrets of the ancients, or even just the teachings of the current age which might contain hints as to those secrets. When he walked into the forge in Syrilas, the fame of which had reached even Sultros, then he knew that he needed to impress the Isur who ran it that he was worth employing.
From the stores he drew two billets of steel, each forged to create steel with slightly different characteristics. One of the secrets of steel was that there was no such thing as pure iron, not at least when it came to the working of it. Just as it might be that tin was added to copper to produce bronze, so too different deposits of iron ore all were unique in their own way and some were harder, some were softer. Smiths more skilled than Eanos could manipulate this even more and the better ones, the more affluent ones could even afford to be working in steel, but that was as yet outside his reach. Though too, it was a truth that the dividing line between iron and steel was smaller than many thought.
He set the first billet in the fire and worked the bellows whilst he kept an eye on the colour of the metal. This was the first and easiest control over the working of steel for as the steel got hotter so its colour changed in a pattern which was well known to any smith skilled in its working. Eanos could get a better control over that by using his Auristic skills but that was something he had learned to avoid unless he needed it for overgiving was never far away and always the temptation to do just that little bit more always there. He knew that in the future he would fall for that temptation as he had in the past when he first learned the skill, but for now he didn’t want to put himself in that place and so planned to use it only sparingly.
The steel in the fire was of the most rigid they had, according to his smithing mentor here and so would form the edge of the blade. The other bar was softer and so would form the spine. It was always a compromise, this use of two steels instead of the one, but it too was ever the compromise that a smith must learn to find his way around. The great bladesmiths tried ever more complex mixes, seeking the exact balance of metals which would have the hardness of edge to cut and hold an edge yet no be so brittle that the metal would crack or chip on impact. That was a skill he knew something of, but ahead of him lay much practice and that something he could not so easily do except at his own forge with his own metal and only himself to answer to.
The bellows urged air into the coals which roared softly each time the air was pumped into them. He reached in with his left hand and turned the steel over so that the could check that there were no issues with the heating or flaws appearing. Satisfied with the way that this billet of steel had been smelted he drew it out and took the pace it needed to turn to the anvil where he placed it and started to hammer it out into the shape that he wanted.
As the metal cooled, so did it become harder to work so he returned it to the flame, but this time he added to it the other bar so that it could be heating too and be ready to work. Not too hot for that was never good for metal. Like the finest meat so too would metal burn and be rendered fit for nothing but the waste heap. All metal carried a grain, much like that of wood if you had eyes to see it and once burnt the grains would lose the strength which held them together. These were things that other smiths knew from experience, but the smiths of the Pitreus clan, and there were some, Eanos was not the only one, knew from seeing into the very metal itself with their Auristic vision.
He hammered again on the first billet, working it down so that it was no longer the same size as the second billet, for when they were welded together he did not want them of equal size but for the harder blade edge to be just a third part of the whole. Now it became a dance to keep the two billets heated to the same heat and colour, not so hot that they burned yet hot enough that they would both weld. He tossed flux onto the backing billet, sand in this case, so that there would be no corrosion formed in the joint, a flaw which would render a weakness into the finished blade and then set them to come back up to heat together. As they did so he held them clamped together in the fingers of his left hand, the forge playing flames up his arms, flames to which he paid no attention for he had done this too many times before to notice.
Now he pulled them out of the heat and started on one end to hammer them together so that where there had been two pieces of steel, now there would be just the one. This start was the hardest part an the key to it but once it was done then it was back to the forge to heat once more and then to continue the weld down until the two were joined. Now he held the lump of metal by the longer part of the blade edge, for in making it thinner it had also become longer. That extra length would be cut off but for now it was a convenient handle.
Now too he transmuted some of his personal djed so that he could see into the djed of the mass of red hot metal and check that there were no voids, no intrusions of things which were not steel into the joint. It was hard to see but he ran his fingers along the joining of the two pieces of steel and allowed his sense of touch to extend beyond his fingers and deep into the metal. Were this a large piece of metal it might have exceeded his abilities but it was only enough to make a knife blade and so even he could be sure of what it was that he was doing. Satisfied that it had worked and that there were no flaws to catch him out later he set the metal aside from the centre of the forge and worked out the kinks in his muscles which had come from the overly careful hammering.
“Going well?” His mentor asked him as he did so, and Eanos nodded and smiled.
“Yes, the join seems well enough; I just need to shape it now.” His answer seemed to satisfy his mentor who reached out to lift the metal himself and tap it.
“A good join,” he agreed, able to tell it seemed even without the vision which Eanos had commanded, and a lesson the younger Isur thought that there were ways and means around every problem if only you had the wisdom and experience to manage it.
Eanos pushed the steel back into the forge fire and worked the bellows once more. Now he started on the end furthest from his impromptu handle and started to shape it. He needed to thin it down and to draw it into a point at the same time. It was not an easy process to do since he also needed for the harder blade edge to reach all the way up and form the point. For this to happen it was necessary to cut off some of the excess spine material with the hot cut chisel. Part of the difficulty here was that now the two steels were one and no ordinary vision would have allowed him to see which parts of the bar were formed from which type of steel. Of course again, an experienced smith would have used his skill and experience to know but that only came at the expense of making mistakes and so Eanos had been careful to transmute enough of his djed to make sure he could still see at this point. It was a heavy use of the skill and he’d need to be sure to be careful in the coming days that he got enough rest and didn’t use the skill again or not heavily in any case. The harder the materials, the harder it was to see into them and the greater the drain on his djed and of that he needed to remain very cautious.
As the blade tip came into being so he started to work the bevel down the blade, hammering home the V shape which would carry the point and working the metal so that the part of the blade which would be sharpened and carry the edge remained only the harder steel. This was careful work for every single one of his hammer blows would need to be filed out and harder blows would sit more deeply into the metal. Any blows which were too hard would mean either excess filing of the blade making it smaller and weaker or leaving a mark visible. Neither of those were acceptable options for Eanos and so he took the time to only work lightly and to refuse the temptation to speed the tedious work. He was only too aware of the maxim that one breath at the anvil was worth ten at the workbench for it told the tail of just how long and hard was the finishing work.
Now the blade was taking shape so he cut off the excess length, the hot steel falling to the forge floor with a clang. With the blade to the shape he wanted it needed only for the tang to be worked to shape and then it would be ready for the first of the shapings with the file.
Some of the large forges had mechanisms for speeding up the file work, but he could not expect this at a smaller forge which might have just stones for the sharpening, and in any case he wanted to get the feel of file on steel for this so that he had an initial view of the metal. It was all too easy on a large wheel to grind deeply and not realise until too late. Also he didn’t want to have a concave cut on the bevel no matter how small, not for this blade and so it was that the blade was clamped onto his workbench for the first pass with the file.
Those first passes were careful ones for they set the angles at which the later filing would be done. The first strokes took off the high edges of the hammer marks, and with every careful pass of the file more bright steel was revealed. As the file dug ever deeper into the blade, smoothing it, so too did every stroke require more effort and more fine control. To counter the risk of digging too deep he flipped the blade over regularly and squinted down the edge to ensure that he was taking the same amount of both sides. This was a part of the problem with having deep forging marks on the metal for not only would that side need to be taken down until all metal above that mark was removed, but the same would need to be done on the other side even if there were no marks at all. All in all a waste of time and metal all because of a careless moment with the hammer.
Fortunately in this case there were no seriously deep marks and so he changed to a medium file as he started to get to the bottom of the marks which were there. The rough file was quite destructive in its own right and could leave cuts just as damaging as those of the forge. Now he worked to remove those cuts and at the same time remove the last of the forge marks. With this file the blade would assume its final shape and yet even so would still leave a rough finish for there were still more levels of polishing before the blade was done, each of which would remove yet more metal before it was done with.
But polishing was all very well and the final stages could not be done yet because the blade was still soft, at least for steel. There were still more stages of forging to be done, though none should require the use of the hammer. As it was the metal had been left in a relatively soft state so that it could be shaped. The two different types of steel in the blade each had its own temperature point at which changes happened and that was again a compromise in this sort of blade, but one in this case which produced the desired effect for at the point at which the cutting edge of the blade reached maximum hardness, the spine had yet to reach the same point and so was still softer. Both metals on their own could produce blades of the same hardness for cutting but it was only in the mixing of the two could the effect that he desired be produced.
The first thing though was to ensure that the metal was not suffering from the effects of the forging, for the repeated heating followed by hammering would have work hardened the metal and left stresses in the grain of the metal. First then was to bring the blade up to heat and then allow it to slowly cool down again. At heat the grains disconnected and flowed inside the metal dissolving the stresses and poor structure. As it cooled slowly the grains would reconnect into something which flowed well inside the metal and would make it stronger. He would repeat this three times just to be sure that the internal grain structure flowed well. If he had dared to use his Auristic vision then he could likely have short cut that process, but as it was he would need to fall back upon more traditional smithing techniques.
This was a time of some frustration this heating and then allowing to cool and it would have been easy for an impatient smith to have skipped them. For this though it needed to be his best work for it was a test of sorts. Yes of course there were shortcuts he could have considered taking and for an average knife it would have been correct to take them else the cost of making it would have exceeded its worth. But aside from the point of principle that a blade produced by an Isur should never be considered cheap, what he needed to show was what he was capable of doing, not that he knew only the short cuts to make an inferior blade.
With the metal properly annealed it was time to harden it again, this time to more than file hard, but at that hardness it would also be brittle and useless. Still though, as he slipped the blade quickly into the pot of cold oil, ensuring that it went in properly vertical so that one side did not cool a fraction before the other and so warp he was still tense. Even good smiths sometimes made mistakes here, but then he knew that a really good smith knew how to avoid the mistakes. That he achieved that by making those mistakes and learning from them was not much of a consolation to Eanos just then for it would count against him if he was seen to be careless.
The blade though came out straight and he breathed a sigh of relief to himself. He wiped it free of oil, made a quick inspection and set it back in the flames again. Not for long this time for with it hardened, now it needed to be tempered which was to say just softened again a little so that it dropped below file hardness but not so much. Enough that it could be worked, sharpened and polished but not so hard that it would be brittle.
With it back on his bench it was time to cosset the blade and turn something still slightly rough and covered in scale from the forge into something which someone would not only buy but would boast of to their friends. Of course a pretty handle and sheath would help that but always it was the naked steel which would attract the main interest. Now of course though the working on the blade was harder and no longer could it be filed with relative ease. Fortunate then that the bulk of the shaping and finishing work had been done. Now the final marks from the shaping and if necessary any small amount of warping from the heat treatment could be eliminated with the finer files before the blade was polished and brought up to a mirror shine.
The blades that Eanos made were to a fault so plain that there was not the slightest doubt that here was a blade intended for use. Never yet had he made something which was to please the eye at the expense of its function as a blade, and it was perhaps likely that he never would. Perhaps his blades when he had his own forge might be made more to please the eye than he did now, but that would only come when his expertise had improved such that he could do such work and not compromise on the functionality of the steel.
