Yaraka watched him the next night.

This time he placed the ingot on the ground and stood over it.

“This is how you did it last time?” Yaraka asked him, raising an eyebrow.

Elrick nodded. “Exactly like this.”

“Let’s see,” she said.

He still needed the spellbook. Weaker Mages had to often look back at a spell in their spellbook to keep it clearer in their mind. Yaraka said the novices in her guild could cast a few spells by memory, whereas she had memorized dozens. Elrick was so weak that he had to keep the book open, alternating his focus between the ingot and the spell.

He struggled for more than half an hour, and Yaraka just leaned back against the wall of the cave, yawning. “You ready to show me how you really did it?”

“I…” he started, but remembered that lying to her never really worked out too well.

He picked up the ingot and held it in his hand. “I was holding it like this, well, I was sitting down actually. I noticed it starting to melt maybe half a second before it would have burned my balls off. I barely got out of the way.”

She nodded. “I shouldn’t have left you alone with the book. It’s my fault.”

“How did you know I was lying?”

“You have to touch the ingot,” she said. “Even if it’s just briefly, you have to touch the fires that are flowing through you to the ingot to start the chain reaction.”

“I didn’t want to melt half the ingot,” he said. “I was just trying to take a tiny piece off the corner.”

“Do what you do when you meditate,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Listen to the ingot.”

“Oh,” he said, holding it up.

He did what she said. He really tried to listen, and just when he was about to give up, he heard it. It wasn’t really listening or hearing. The ingot wasn’t making any noise, but he suddenly understood how to move the fire through the ingot before it ignited.

He imagined only a tiny piece of the fire travelling inside the ingot, but welling up in just the one corner. Once that image was solid in his mind, he let the full understanding click again, which ignited the fires.

A tiny corner of the ingot dripped off in a single molten bead.

“Good,” Yaraka said. “I honestly thought you were full of shit, Elrick. Maybe even after you told me about the fire inside the world, but now you really have felt the fires.”

Elrick looked down at the molten bead, which had turned to a thick bead of copper on the sand in front of his feet. “I didn’t feel any urge to keep doing it,” he said.

“You will feel that soon enough. Let’s hope you are strong enough to resist it. And please, never practice this inside the cave.”

“Why not?”

“If you aren’t strong enough, I don’t want you to blow me up.”

* * *

When he’d shown Dia and Espa what he could do, they begged Yaraka to start teaching them as well. They didn’t have enough skill though, and they couldn’t even begin to decipher the glyph.

Not that Elrick had ever been into weight lifting, but it was as if they were a gym with nothing but a 100-pound barbell, and if you couldn’t lift 100 pounds already, then a 100-pound barbell wasn’t doing anything for you. They needed to get blank scrolls, preferably spellbooks. Neither item was especially rare in Rakote, but for people who could not risk going into the city, it was extremely difficult to get a hold of.

Even if he hadn’t put any priority on training Dia and Espa, with only one spellbook between all of them, it wouldn’t make sense to do anything but give it to Yaraka. He needed his own spellbook, which meant they needed more.

As he practiced his Red Magic, Jocha and him had another project going.

Jocha had only ever had very basic mining and smithing ability. He’d learned enough to have 32 skill in Mining, and 29 in Smithing, but he’d only ever learned incidentally, as the guild occasionally had him help during a crunch.

Over the first few weeks in the desert, Jocha’s skill leapt from 32 and 29, to 65 mining and 61 smithing.

He was actually helpful now for assisting Elrick in creating copper ingots, weapons, and armor, but for this next project, Elrick was mostly on his own.

“We gonna tell Elise?” Jocha asked.

Elrick shook his head. “We are not.”

“What if she counts them?”

“I’ll wait until we get caught to explain it to her.”

Jocha cackled, “Spoken like a man who truly understands women.”

Elrick’s cheeks flushed, as he was growing increasingly convinced that he didn’t understand women at all.

He picked up the slippery bronze ingot and held it up to the sun. Its shimmering colors were hypnotic.

“These are worth a lot more than we’ll get for them selling ingot for ingot,” Elrick said. “Elise will thank us later for taking this risk without getting her involved.”

“If you say so,” Jocha said, sounding very unconvinced.

Elrick’s Smithing was at 86.3 points now. The gains he’d gotten from casting copper were almost nothing. He’d go weeks without gaining even 0.1 skill. He’d also remembered noting that he’d never seen a Smith with less than 85.0 skill casting the Slippery Copper while he was in the guild. He knew his skill was high enough to cast the ingots they’d stolen, he just had to hope the skill meant he could make it happen without too much trial and error. He also hoped that casting slippery bronze would jumpstart his Coppersmithing gains.

“I’m going to try to make a shield,” Elrick said, “that’s the easiest thing to make, right?”

Jocha nodded, “even I can make a nice shield.”

Elrick had created a mold for making shields that didn’t need to be closed on both sides. The mold was a big disc shape, and he simply weighed the copper before melting it down. With just the right amount of copper, the molten copper filled the mold exactly, and it leveled off straight on the open end. He’d gotten the size and thickness of the shield just right so that it all cooled off without cracking, and he’d already made twelve flawless bronze shields, which was four more shields than they had people to give them to.

A slippery bronze shield would be different though. Armor seemed like it would be the best use of slippery bronze, but Elrick was worried the “null field” might not be strong enough on armor, which had to be made quite thin in order to curve and fit nicely along a human body. A shield could be made thicker than armor, and since it was pointable, he got the feeling it would focus the null field better. More importantly, he hoped that a shield in one hand could be held far enough away from his other hand to still be able to use magic while protecting himself with slippery bronze.

He had a lot that he needed to experiment with, but first he’d have to see if he could make anything with it at all.

They’d built a bellows. It had been one of the hardest things to make with their limited resources, but they’d used hides from kubex and sand hounds to make the portion that formed the accordion part of the bellows. The accordion was made of patchwork sections of hide of different colors, sewed and melted together over the fires with utmost care. Every few days a leak would pop up, which they patched. The pump handles were made of wood from the far side of the mountain, and the air came out of a long bronze tube that Elrick had custom made.

It had also been difficult to make a crucible, but between Elrick and Jocha, and after three or four botched attempts, they’d managed to make one big enough to hold a whole ingot without splitting or cracking.

Jocha worked the bellows in the pit. The little bronze pipe was buried under the sand, as were all of the coals, but Elrick had learned to read the sand, and the way the smoke filtered through it, to know how hot the forge needed to be.

“A bit more,” Elrick said, “it isn’t quite hot enough.”

Jocha grunted and pumped, and Elrick placed the ingot into the crucible. They dug out an opening for the crucible with a big wooden shovel, and Elrick placed the crucible into the hold.

Jocha handed him the bellows, and he pumped for all he was worth. He didn’t quite trust Jocha to hit the perfect temperature here. Jocha usually got this right, but in case the slippery bronze needed a more precise temperature, he wanted to make sure he did it himself to eliminate any other possible error factors.

Once it had been the right amount of time, Elrick handed the bellows to Jocha and grabbed the shovel.

He dug out the crucible, then fetched his tongs, but even as he was reaching for his tongs, the smell had filled the air.

Jocha started gagging, then vomiting.

Elrick dry heaved, and the tongs nearly slipped out of his hands. He focused though and gripped the crucible, but the smell got so bad toward the end that he had to set it down on the sand and let go of the tongs.

Both Jocha and Elrick ran away to escape the fumes, and then they collapsed onto the ground and coughed their lungs out for several minutes. He could still taste the fumes inside of his nose and clinging on the back of his throat. It tasted and smelled like he’d expect molten metal to taste like, just without the part where it would have burned his tongue and throat off and killed him.

Finally, both of them lying on the ground and wheezing, Jocha asked, “So you think that worked?”

Elrick punched his arm and got back up, approaching cautiously to assess the damage. He walked slowly in case the fumes hit him again, but there were none left. He just had the acrid aftertaste of the fumes lingering on his taste buds.

He frowned down at the crucible. It was full of blackened and cracked shards of metal. The area directly over the crucible still stunk.

“I think it was too hot,” Elrick said.

“You told me to pump as hard as I could!”

“I’m not blaming you, Jocha. I’m just saying that for regular copper ingots, we have to pump our weak forge to full temperature to melt it, but I think slippery bronze must have a lower melting point. Let’s try it again.”

Jocha grabbed his arm. “Elrick, that was a whole ingot. We only got so many of them. You sure you can make this work?”

“We’ll start a lot lower than we think we need to be,” Elrick said, “we’ll increase as slowly as we can to figure out what will melt it. We’ll try to cast with it just after it melts, and we won’t risk burning it again. Then, even if we do melt it and mess up the cast, we can still recover the ingot.”

Jocha knew enough about mining and smelting from his time in the Coppersmith’s and Miner’s Guild to know that Elrick wasn’t bullshitting him. Still, Elrick had already decided that if he couldn’t cast the ingots at just above melting point, that he was going to risk increasing the temperature. He just wouldn’t tell Jocha that part.

“I guess it won’t hurt to try again,” he murmured, “as long as we’re very, very careful.”