After I finished my lunch, I arranged with Darren to meet him in his family mansion the next morning, left a few copper coins to pay for my meal and bade him goodbye. My next stop for the day was the smith’s workshop, which was located on the far side of town, where the smoke from his forge wouldn’t bother anyone. The smithy was, by necessity, another stone building in the wooden town, and would have been easy to find even if I hadn’t known where it was.

The proprietor, Owen Smith, was a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, and heavily muscled from years of working his forge. He was dressed in heavy leather to prevent him from getting burned by the hot metal and was busy making what looked like wagon axles.

“Good evening Mr. Smith,” I greeted the large smith.

“Whatever it is you want made,” Owen Smith answered without raising his eyes from his work, “it’ll have to wait. I’ve got a huge backlog of orders and I’m not taking any more orders.”

“I’m not here to buy anything, sir. My name’s Jack Wilson, and I’ve got some whitesteel to sell. Darren Forrester said you’ll be interested.”

“Whitesteel you say?” he finally looked up, setting the axel he was working on aside. “I’m definitely in the market for some. Got an order for a whitesteel brewing kettle from Bernard, down at the Beerkat. He thinks it’ll help him make better beer than Henry’s at the Boar and Barrel.”

“I seriously doubt that. Whitesteel isn’t copper, and it won’t heat as well.”

“That’s what I said, but Bernard’s not very good at listening to advice, and if he’s willing to pay I’m willing to cast. So how much ‘steel do you have? If it’s the usual scraps you scavengers find, then it’s not really helping me.”

“I don’t know precisely. I just took as much as I could carry.”

“You took how much?”

“As much as I could carry,” I said as I opened my backpack and started to take out pieces of whitesteel. “I just shoved it in until I figured it would be too heavy to take back.”

“Hold on there, kid. Let me get my scales and we can weigh it properly.”

The smith went to one of the cabinets and pulled out a large set of scales, along with a number of weights to balance it. I placed all of my whitesteel on one pan, and Owen carefully balanced it with the weights. “That’s eighteen kilograms and two hundred seventy five grams. Quite an impressive haul.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And you say that you left some more behind?”

“Yeah. There was a whole room of machinery out there.”

The smith whistled in appreciation. “I can give you forty silver per kilo for this amount, and I’ll gladly take the next load too.”

This was about what I expected to get for the metal. It wasn’t among the best things to find in the ruins, since coins and artefacts were worth a lot more for their weight, but this was also the first time I’ve ever returned from a ruin with as much as I could carry, and the payout was more than I’d gotten for the two years I’ve spent scavenging the closer ruins. The ones that previous explorers have already cleared of all of the monsters and most of the treasure.

I’ve never dealt directly with Owen Smith before, but everyone always said that he wasn’t the bargaining type, and that his first price was always final.

“I’ll take it, and I’ll see about getting more of it on my next trip. Might take a while though, since it’s not a very close ruin.”

“I thought as much,” the smith said, heading to a locked strongbox and counting out gold and silver coins. “The closer ones have been picked clean since the town was established. Here’s your money. Seven gold and thirty one silver.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Smith.”

“Pleasure doing business with you, kid. I’m here for any more hauls like this you run across, but now I really have to get back to work. You just got Bernard’s kettle back into my queue.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said and left the smithy. It was getting towards the late afternoon, and I wouldn’t be able to get access to the Forresters’ Patterns before morning, so I decided to take some time to bathe and relax. I headed back to the Boar, where a silver coin would get me a decent room as well as a hot bath, dinner and breakfast.

Mabel waved at me when I entered the common room, and I was again tempted to take her up on her offer and invite her up to my room. But I’ll be left with less than two gold after Shaping four new Hounds tomorrow, and I still needed to buy supplies for my next trip, so I regretfully paid Henry for the room and went up two the second floor alone.

The hot water felt wonderful after two weeks of life in the field, and I stayed in the tub until it cooled off to room temperature. By the time I got back to the common room, the dinner crowd was starting to arrive, and I found myself sitting at a small corner table with a large helping of Agnes’s chicken pot pie. It wasn’t long before the room was crowded enough that I was joined by three more men at my table, but I didn’t recognize any of them and didn’t feel up to any serious conversation, and as soon as I finished my dinner I went upstairs to my room. Lying in the soft, clean bed felt as good as the hot bath, and I was asleep mere seconds after my head hit the pillow.

***

I woke up early the next morning, and after a large breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and fresh bread, I left the Boar and Barrel and headed towards the Forrester mansion. Up close, the already impressive mansion looked even more luxurious. A tall hedge surrounded the grounds, with only a single opening leading into the perfectly manicured lawn. The mansion itself was built from large marble blocks that must have been carried from far further away than the simple grey rock used in Owen Smith’s workshop, and it rose three stories high.

Darren knew I was coming, and the guards at the mansion’s gate waved me in without any questions. Evelyn, Darren’s aunt and the curator of the Forrester’s Patterns was sitting in the heavily guarded Pattern room in the middle of the mansion. A heavy whitesteel door closed of the Pattern room from the rest of the mansion, but the room itself looked like nothing special. Five oak cabinets set against the wall of the room, and I knew that each held one of the Forresters’ Patterns.

“Good morning, young Jack. Darren told me you would be coming to access the Patterns today.”

“Good morning to you too, Miss Evelyn.”

“What can I help you with today?”

“I’d like to buy four accesses to the Hound Pattern, please.”

“Four more Hounds? You know that a proper Shaper must have access to many different Shapes, right?”

“Of course, ma’am. But I am at the very beginning of my path, and most of the Shapes I have now aren’t going to remain with me for long anyway. And the Hounds have already proved their worth in the ruins I’m exploring.”

“Very well. Four Hounds will cost you a total of eight gold coins, which I would like to see up front.”

“Here you go,” I said and took the coins out of my pouch. “Eight golds.”

“Follow me please.”

I followed Evelyn into the room and to the cabinet I already knew held the Hound Pattern. She took a ring of keys from her pocket and unlocked the cabinet, and stepped back so I could open the door. The Pattern inside the cabinet looked like nothing more than a large tapestry depicting strange, abstract shapes. Nobody knew what Patterns were made of, or how they did what they did. All we knew was that if you touch a Pattern in specific points and had enough vim for the Shape it held, the vim would be syphoned out and forced into the rank I version of the Shape.

I pressed my hand into a pair of circles on the Pattern. It was always easy to know where to touch a Pattern in order to activate it, since the proper points were the only shapes we could name. Every other part of it was twisted and seemed to be constantly shifting, but the circles meant for the Shaper’s hands were always constant.

As soon as I touched the Pattern, I felt it trying to pull the vim from my body, but nothing was happening since I wasn’t holding any. I reached out with my mind to my Hounds, and pulled on one of them. It was like taking a knitted cloth and pulling at the yarn until it unraveled, and a second later I felt a burning sensation. The Hounds held twice as much vim as my body could hold, and the excess was quickly becoming painful. It wouldn’t actually harm me, but if I didn’t get rid of the excess, it would start to dissipate and in a couple of hours I’d be down to the maximum I could safely hold.

Not that I would keep it for two hours, of course. In fact, since I was still touching the Pattern, the vim flowed straight through me and into the Pattern. The vim flowed into the design, lighting more and more of it up with a bright blue glow. I could feel the Pattern now, and instinctively knew I held enough vim to activate it four times. When the entire Pattern was glowing, a blue fog started to rise from its surface, and began to coalesce beside me. As soon as the fog left the Pattern, the light vanished, and it began to syphon vim again, preparing to Shape again.

It took a total of ten minutes to Shape each Hound, and I thanked Evelyn when I was finished and left to find Darren. I had to pick up some more blast crystal, and then I would head out to the ruins for another trip.