Bending steel without touching

[Eanos]

Spring 38, 510

Behind the Isur, the forge glowed red and he could feel the heat upon his naked back. His hands however were busy riffling though a small stack of steel plates, checking each one in turn to ensure that it had been filed so that it’s surface was bright and that all the scale from it’s creation and storage had been removed.

This day he was working on a piece commissioned by a customer of the Ironworks; a customer who was willing to pay over the odds to have a knife created by by an Isur because it was known by those who appreciated fine weapons that the Isur were not only fine craftsmen but had the ability to bring the favour of their god into the work. Eanos was only too well aware that although he was competent, he still had much to learn and much experience would need to be gained in order to produce the sort of work which he knew he was capable of.

The workplace was prepared and he glanced around one final time to ensure that everything was in place before he started. The forge had been rebuilt with a new mound of coke that morning as he had arrived and now the flames licked through the top of the pile and the air between coke and the heavy hood which drew away the smoke shimmered in the heat. In the rack by the anvil stood a selection of hammers, each of whose face was freshly dressed and square. Beside them were the files and the chisels and he picked up the hot cut chisel which he would use and checked it over, running his fingers carefully over its edge before placing it back with a satisfied grunt. The metal which would become his work piece he moved over to the bench and stacked it anew, careful to ensure that the plates sat in the right order and finally he moved the open pot of flux with its brush over by the anvil where it would be at hand as he worked.

”Izurdan, bless this work,” he said his voice clear though likely it wouldn’t be heard from more than a few paces away because the air was already heavy with the sound of the other smiths working. ”I dedicate this day to you my Lord. I thank you for the heat of the forge, the coolness of the quench, for the air which blows and for the solidity of the anvil. Let each bring it’s blessing on the work I do this day, and I thank you Lord for the chance to improve my skills, skills which are dedicated to your service.” He closed the short prayer by taking a heavy hammer and striking it on the anvil so that a clear note like a bell rang through the shop.

[Eanos]

From the bench he selected the long bar of steel which would be the handle which would make controlling the steel in the forge easier at the start and the top plate from the pile. Each of the plates in that pile were as long as his hand, no more than an inch wide and just thick enough that bending it by hand would have taken an effort for a strong man. Laying the long bar on the anvil he painted flux upon the end and repeated the process with the plate so that no scale would build up in the flame for scale and welding did not mix well at all and could result in a flawed blade at the end and he’d rather throw away days of work than to risk the reputation of the Isur by allowing shoddy work out of the shop.

Scooping the coals with the fingers of his left hand he created a small bed at the top over which he could hold the steel while he worked the bellows. It was a tricky operation and one he’d failed at before because too much air especially would cause rust to form and prevent the layers of steel from merging into one. Slipping the steel into place he worked the bellows carefully as the metals heated. As ever he watched not just the colour but also the auras of the two pieces of metal as slowly the metal went red then though orange into yellow and almost into white. It was at that point that he pulled the steel out with his left hand and turned back to the anvil where he struck it carefully but heavily with a hammer. Not too much so that the metal distorted overly much, but not so light that the layers didn’t start to merge into one. He worked the metal as it cooled, noting the point at which the auras of the separate pieces started to merge into one and as it did that so he changed his hammering, turning the piece round to reshape it back to the original dimensions.

Hammer slipped away back into its rack he added the next sheet of metal from the stack, leaving its five fellows still sitting on the bench, refluxed it and put it back into the forge to come back up to temperature. This was a little harder to get right because the larger lump of metal was already hot but it would heat slower while the new but thin piece was cold but would heat faster. Careful attention was needed here and as the process was repeated and new layers added he started to need to heat the pieces separately so that both reached the necessary temperature at the same time.

Finally it was done and he struck the final blow with his hammer. The bench was now empty of metal and eight layers of steel had been merged into one. All the pieces of steel were of a grade suitable for knife work, and having easy access to such steel was one of the great advantages of working at such a large and well supplied place as the Ironworks, though having to work with non-Isurians was enough of a disadvantage to sometimes make him regret having come here. But if the two types of steel were usable then both were of different grades of steel and the end result should be a blade which was both at least as strong as if it had been made from the one steel but also a good deal more attractive. This blade then would be made for use, not as a showpiece and though good enough, he hoped at least, to make its owner boast of it, it would suffer no compromises as a result.

[Eanos]

The billet returned to the flame but this time not to heat to the same degree as before for the next step was to reshape it not to force the steel to merge into itself as he had done so far. Sweat sheened his brow as he pumped the bellows a few times and he left the work in order to heat he drank from the water flask which hung from a hook by the bench. This was work which he loved and which he might well have done without the reward of payment except that money was something he needed to build for his future. Not so far ahead he would need to return to his studies and while he might still be able to earn enough to buy food and lodging, his studies would themselves require materials and perhaps even a place in which to work them.

He returned to the forge and judging the piece to be done, pulled it out and returned it to the anvil where he wire brushed it to remove scale and ash from the coals. Taking great care with his measurements he struck the billet half way along its length with the chisel and cut nearly all the way through it. Working quickly for the steel cooled even as he breathed he shifted it over to the edge of the anvil and struck the end with the hammer, bending it over then round so that it nearly came round to meet itself. He paused to reflux and then hammered the gap shut so that now the billet was twice as tall and half as long as it had been before. But now where it had been eight layers of steel thick; now it was sixteen. He returned it to the forge and heated again watching the colours turn. This time the aura was different because it was still only one piece of metal for he had not cut all the way through it, but the aura still showed that there was a gap in the middle, a gap which would be harder to close than before.

As the piece nearly hit white hot he removed it from the heat and took it back to the anvil. A mistake now could ruin all work which had gone before and yet, that was always the case and the more he worked, the greater the penalty of a mistake would be. Hammer blows fell heavily on the steel and now sweat ran more freely from his brow and down his back, and yet the heat of the forge soon dried it all. He worked to lengthen the piece so that not only did it become one again but also so that it was once more the length of his hand and no more than an inch wide. As it cooled, so it was returned to the flames to reheat.

As he worked, so the routine became more dangerous but he did not allow complacency to slip in but retained his concentration. Again the piece was cut, now becoming thirty two layers thick, then doubling again and again until the fifth time made it over two hundred and fifty layers of steel thick. This was many more layers than most knife makers used, but pure decoration was not his aim and in any case he enjoyed even the repetition as the aura of the piece changed each time it was ready for a new cutting and folding. Only two more times did he need to repeat the process and finally the billet now had more than a thousand layers though in truth if he had done his job properly those layers did not exist for the billet was one piece of steel, but a steel with an internal structure very different from how it had started.

He took the steel back to the forge and heated it one last time, this time though once it was done he laid it aside to cool on its own, allowing the steel to reset itself, to align itself anew and allow the somewhat tortured aura to settle itself back into a more consistent whole.

[Eanos]

When the steel had cooled and Eanos had finished with the next project which had occupied his time; since he was being paid to be here he was even less inclined to sit around even had he of been such a mind. That wasn’t to say that he hadn’t taken the opportunity to slip a kettle onto the edge of the coals for the smoke and dust tended to dry his throat, but now the steel was heating once more and this time there was a serious amount of work to be done for the billet now needed to be made much longer than it had been. Already the billet was long enough for the blade he intended to make, though not long enough when the tang was taken into consideration, but still it was much too thick and a little too wide.

It took a good deal of work, returning the work to the forge to allow it to heat and then bringing it back to the anvil where he smote it heavily with the hammer. Slowly the metal became longer as it became also thinner and began to resemble less being a hammer and started to take on the appearance of something which might be a blade. He had to be careful to not allow the bar to get too thin anywhere along its length but he also wanted it to be about three times as thick as the original metal sheets had been for that was how thick he wanted the spine of the knife to be at its thickest point. By the time he was done it was nearly four times as long as it had been and he had a bar which was long enough for a sword. This in itself was intentional for now he cut off the bar half way up its length and once both had been returned to the forge for a final heating he laid them aside to cool once more so that the metal could relax into its new shaping.

He didn’t allow too much time for the metal to cool for there was still a good deal of work to be done in terms of moving metal around. At the moment the bar was just that, a bar of metal which might be of use as a lever but which had none of the useful characteristics of a knife, so once it had been heated once more in the forge he set to work with his hammer to transform its shape into something which would look more like a knife blade albeit one which would have a blade most of twelve inches long. No chopper of wood was this to be, but a blade for combat, one able to parry lighter cuts of another blade and easily able to stab and slice. Like a sword it needed to be strong and like most swords the price to be paid for that was in a loss of ability to hold an edge, but then that was why Eanos had been chosen for this job and not another smith, for like all Isur he had a trick literally up his sleeve.

He began by heating up what would become the tip of the blade and started to hammer that out, working his way slowly up the blade, thinning it out so that the thickest and strongest section would be at the hilt. First he formed the tip which on this knife would be a slanting shape then made a first pass up the blade. Each pass was lighter and more precise than the one before as the shape became more clearly defined. Though it was heavy work it also required a great deal of care for all that because one carelessly heavy hit with a hammer could create a dent which would be visible in the finished work and mean starting again from the remainder of the bar stock he’d made before. Mess that one up and he’d be back at the forge creating a new bar and that he had no intention of doing just because of a moments inattention.

The blade already existed in his mind, for this was a piece made to a specific design, not just a matter of hammering and making do with whatever the end result happened to be. He’d done that when he was less experienced in the craft, and now that happened less, though he still lacked the ability to make the metal go just where he wanted it. Patience though was key here and if he was able to curb his aggression with the hammer to the level of his ability to mould the metal then he would not make mistakes which he couldn’t rectify.

[Eanos]

It was perhaps inevitable that his pride would sooner or later overstep his abilities and it was shortly after he’d finished working on the tip of the blade and turned his attention to creating the bevel which would create the cutting edge that a blow would be struck too hard at the wrong angle. Perhaps he’d been overconfident, perhaps it was simply that he was feeling the strain of so much hammering of metal or perhaps it was just bad luck, though even he knew that the latter was no excuse for a craftsman, but either way he stared at the dent in the bevel and he knew in his heart, though he tried at first to deny it, that this was one dent he’d not be able to hide when it came to filing and dressing the edge. Foul words crawled through his mind and his face reddened with a mixture of embarrassment and anger. He carefully placed the hammer back in its rack before he could no longer resist the temptation to throw it somewhere and moved away from the anvil, leaving the now distorted piece to cool while he paced his way around the forge. Recriminations came easily to him and the air around him burned as hotly from the words as it did from the heat of the forge. The blade was ruined, at least for the purpose for which he’d been working. He could rework the piece to a degree and still produce a knife, but it would not be the one which he’d been tasked to produce and while Ros might not have been surprised by the mistake, still it burned the pride of the young Isurian smith.

The pacing however brought its own advantages for with the time away from his obsession over the weapon and the mistake he realised that there was a way forward, one which would work for him. Technically the end phase of its creation was one which he would need help with. Everything up until that point was using knowledge he already had, though clearly he still needed a good deal more practice at it, and now his pride was forced to accept that. Likely it wouldn’t remain that way, but at least just now humility had forced its way into his mind. Taking the blade in hand he went to seek the owner of the Ironworks and to make him a proposition. It was this that had sprung to mind as he’d paced, a way to turn failure into something less than failure and a way to salve his pride.

He returned with more purpose in his stride, although considerably lighter in his money pouch, or he would be if he could bring this back into success and if the work under the supervision of the far more experienced Isur worked. In truth though Eanos didn’t realise it, Ros had expected that the job would push his new employee to the edges of his abilities and as it was he could look forward to an additional profit as Eanos would buy the knife for thirty gold mizas and it would allow Ros to teach the younger smith how to create the arch in the blade which was so characteristic of the type.

[Eanos]

Back at the forge, the blade was reheated, the tip cut off and the metal reworked into a new shape; still using the same template, still thinning down in width and depth through to the slanting tip, but now two inches shorter than it had been. This time he worked more carefully than before, his strikes more controlled and slower and so it took him a good while to create the bevel along the edge. He worked no more than a hands breadth at a time creating the bevel on that section then moving on. Carefully he worked one side at a time, taking the blade back to the forge to reheat before working the other side. Each side he worked caused the blade to bow away from the hammer and working the other side allowed him to bring it back to straight, though he still needed to take the time to make corrections as he went.

With the blade and bevels formed he turned his attention to the tang and after heating he cut off the excess metal with the hot chisel in the Hardie hole of the anvil before reworking the tang into the shape he wanted. With that done he laid the blade aside to cool. The basic shaping of the blade was now done and if it was still straight then that was to be expected though perhaps a surprise to those who assumed that the arch in the blade was forged into it at this stage. When the blade had cooled it was time to check it and to correct as best he could the various twists, kinks and irregularities in thickness. This was all delicate work once more and having come close to ruining the blade once and in fact had done so for its original purpose, he worked somewhat nervously to ensure that it did not happen again.

For all his work so far, still some of the most complex processes still awaited him and the work would not be completed in one day for indeed that first day was already drawing to a close. The time and skill required to make this even for an experienced smith was why the blades were so expensive. Now the blade went back into the fire and his close attention to the aura of the blade as he worked, though it had given him a headache and likely had contributed to the mistake he’d made earlier showed him that the blade while appearing to the eye to be as good as could be expected of something unfinished, the aura showed something quite different. Once more the metal would be heated and then allowed to rest and as it did so, so the aura which became more excited in the heat of the forge calmed and flowed around the blade, wiping away the irregularities which had marked his working of the metal.

Now he was faced with a blade which looked like a dirty, black , lumpy and uneven piece of metal. It was hardly the smooth and shiny object like those which could be found at the front of the Ironworks where the visitors came and a great deal of work needed to be done to get it into that condition. That work though could wait for the following day and so he left it to finish cooling overnight.

[Eanos]

The next morning saw Eanos at work long before the other smiths arrived for work. During the night the blade had rarely been far from his mind and now the screech of file over metal filled the air. His first task had been a general clean up to remove all of the forging scale so that he could see the bare metal beneath, though doing so revealed also all of the hammer marks, dings and gaps left by the forging process. Fortunately the metal was relatively soft in its current state and he worked diligently. Still though it was hard and tedious work, using ever less aggressive files as he removed metal to flatten out ripples, remove high points and smooth the edges of low points. It was now that he became more relieved that this blade would not be for sale and if it was ever finished he’d be paying for his own time and for someone to handle it and make a sheath for him. The work was far from what it needed to be in his mind at least and already Ros had been round to offer advice and pointers as to the best way forward as well as giving him some suggestions as to technique to avoid some of the mistakes in this one.

Much of the morning had passed before he was done with the preparation work and now it looked like a knife blade though it would never be able to cut anything with its very blunt edge, but that was to save the edge from the heat of the forge as something that delicate would never survive the heat.

Now was the point at which he started working closely with the older Isurian smith Ros for though Eanos was familiar with the process of hardening the blade there was a special process for this type of blade which he’d not used, that and the fact that it would be very easy to ruin all of his work in but a few moments. Ros had brought with him a sealed container of clay which Eanos first applied in a thinned down coat over the whole blade and then when it had dried to be tacky, he spread the clay thickly but evenly over the spine of the blade. Ros explained that patterns could be formed and indeed it was possible to change the way the blade reacted to stress by using specific patterns of clay, but that was for another time and when he was more experienced with the process. Clay applied it was left to dry, a process which he accelerated by leaving it close to the forge.

[Eanos]

With the clay dry the next step was to heat the blade again, a process which the two smiths did together. Ros had already inspected the blade before the clay had been applied, warning Eanos that any ripples in the blade could cause real problems with the quenching which needed to be done.

As the blade heated, Eanos was careful to ensure that it heated evenly, moving as necessary and watching the aura avidly for he’d seen previously how it changed with the temperature and for this it had to be just right. With the nod from Ros as confirmation, Eanos withdrew the blade and plunged it into the deep can of water. With his fingers still in contact with the metal he could feel the aura react though the water blurred his vision of it. He waited until the water surface stopped roiling and he could feel the metal get cool enough to touch with his right hand. He drew it out and handed it over to Ros who had outstretched his hand as Eanos moved.

”Not too bad,” the older smith commented as he turned the blade in his fingers and held it up to the light so that he could squint along it. ”Not too bad for a first attempt but I’ll expect you to be a lot better on the next one,” his smile took away some of the sting of the words and he handed it back to Eanos who looked at it closely himself. He’d seen already that the blade had arched a little, not a lot because this was a short blade, but still enough to know that on a longer blade the arch would be noticeable. What he hadn’t seen was that there was a slight ripple to blade near to the tip, one that was only noticeable to a careful inspection, but there none the less.

”Well, I’m happy with it as a test piece,” he replied with a nod of his head at which Ros was called away by another smith leaving Eanos with the task of tempering the blade. As it stood now, the edge was hard, but brittle so he placed it back into the flame where there was a moments steam as the surface of the metal dried and heated. It would be the first of three sessions of tempering the metal, each about an hour apart, each of which would ensure that the metal relaxed into the new shape and that any stresses from the quenching were relieved and indeed he could see where the aura no longer ran as smoothly as it had before.

With that process out of the way, he spent the rest of the day refining the blade and putting an edge on it. But it was just a rough edge so that the worst of the filing on the now hardened steel was out of the way and to remove some of the high points caused by the rippling.

[Eanos]

The profile of the blade had now been established and it had an edge of sorts though it would barely cut grass and then only if the grass were held under tension and so he moved into the final phase of the project.

Morning was once more with him and again the Ironworks was still quiet. He’d said his morning prayer to Izurdan but now he needed to expand upon it. His aim this morning was to apply a proper edge to the blade, but he wanted to ensure that the edge did not dull too quickly. For that was the essential of a knife that it was sharp enough to cut. Swords still had effect even when the edge had been dulled because of their weight, but a blunt knife was an ineffective and dangerous tool.

His black and metallic arm was a visible sign of the gnosis granted by his god to his race and by virtue of that Eanos had the ability to grant the knife an ability of its own which in this case was the virtue of staying sharp. That wasn’t to say that it was an easy thing to do, which is why he’d made sure that he’d had a good nights sleep and now started while there were no distractions. Honing the blade, applying the final finishes and polishes to it was a difficult task at the best of times, demanding as it did the utmost of concentration for mistakes could take hours to work back out. Adding in the concentration required to apply the gift to the work only added to the difficulty.

He started with the coarse stone, having exhausted the files the night before. The metal glided across the wet surface of the stone with a light grinding noise as the rough marks of the file were erased. Both sides needed to be worked equally and as an added complication the curve of the blade only added to the difficulty as it meant he could not simply lay the blade flat on the stone and make a single pass. Instead he had to make multiple passes, each with the blade incrementally shifted from the last pass and each of which tended to produce a flat onto the edge instead of the smooth curve. That required a fresh pass all of its own to correct and then he started to work with finer stones.

As he worked the hardening line of the harmon became visible, something which intrigued him for he’d never produced such a thing before. As he used finer stones so he moved from removing the marks of making the blade and into actually polishing it. Getting the edge properly angled and honed was a difficult process, one which he had to correct several times, but then it too was a process with which he was very familiar having had many years of experience at with his own blades.

Eventually he was happy with the finish and he had a headache from the concentration of feeding in his gift into the sharpening process. Ros had given him a tip for this point, though it had been one that Eanos had seen before so he wiped the blade with a vinegar solution to bring out the grain of the layered blade and to show off the harmon to its fullest effect. He changed over to a metal polish at this point and after giving the acid a short while to etch in the polished it off, repeating the process several times until he was happy with the effect.

He held the blade up and inspected it closely. There were some flaws in it, some of which likely only he would notice given the time he’d spent working on the blade. It had a grain to it as a result of the more than a thousand layers of steel which it contained and the hardened edge was a slightly milky colour. The blade itself now was effectively flat though a careful look would show some minor rippling in it. Overall he was happy with it and now he only had to hand it over to be handled and sheathed, that and pay Ros for it.

[Dusk]

XP Award! Eanos XP Award Weaponsmithing: 3 XP Auristics: 1 XP Lore Award Blacksmithing Clay