Chapter 78: Chapter 23: Roland's Bane

> “I looked inside to find a shining red, jagged stone and nothing else. ‘Well done,’ I told them. ‘Rita would be proud.’”

D.C.’s mansion looked ominous, even in broad daylight. It was the size of three houses. New York City-sized houses, so not large by suburbs standards, but still large just the same. It made the walk-up I grew up in look like an alleyway dumpster. But that was in Homecrest and this was Carroll Gardens, which was a world away despite the short physical distance. Maybe if my line lasted long enough, I too would one day have an entire city block to pass along to my children.

The street was quiet at the mid-afternoon hour as Duncan and I walked past the manse for a third time, trying to figure out which door was the front door.

“This guy is something else,” said Duncan. “He lives here by herself?”

“I hope so,” I said. “Either that or he has a basement full of guests who overstayed their welcome. Regardless, this is only an introductory meeting. We go in, feel him out, don’t over-commit, and then reassess with Ty this evening.”

“Fine, but as soon as the swords come out, I’m gone.”

I had filled Duncan in on some of the details of D.C. and why we needed his help. Which he had promptly forgotten so many times that I had contemplated making a set of index cards for him.

“It happened again,” he said a moment later, and I launched back into the same speech yet again.

“I need to get this memory out of my head. You need to keep memories in your head. This will solve both our problems.”

And then he always says…

“How so? It’s just going to take the memories out of my head. And then what?”

And then I say…

“Yours is a problem looking for a longer term solution. But until I figure that out, this will let you keep all your memories intact and then, when you’re better, you can retrieve them. You can stop taking notes and you can stop relying on me. Trust me, OK?”

Duncan nodded as Ty’s command kicked in. When I had successfully hunted down the Compendium, my first order of business before giving it back would be to demand the antidote for that stupid ink.

After some more pacing, we decided to try the large arched door in the middle of the complex. As I banged the silver knocker three times, I half-expected a tiny slot to appear and to be berated by an angry doorkeeper, but instead, the door swung open of its own accord. We stepped inside with trepidation and into a small antechamber no bigger than the size of a phone booth, with no other way out.

The front door closed behind us suddenly and I found myself pressed together with Duncan in the dark, nearly cheek-to-cheek. In the past, this would have been the beginning of something else, but now I felt a combination of awkwardness, anger, and shame. Duncan tried to shift away from me, and I hoped that one of his episodes wouldn’t trigger while we were trapped in this claustrophobic box.

“So far, your plan is working perfectly,” he said after a minute of silence.

“Of course it is, we just need to wait for-”

The floor suddenly drop out from under me, and I screamed as we fell into more darkness. Well, more like slid. Because after a few seconds, we landed with a soft thud on what must have been a gym mat. I untangled myself from Duncan’s limbs and stood up, only to be greeted by the sight of D.C. holding an extremely large metal mallet and wearing a thick smithing apron, a set of beaten leather gloves, and a pair of goggles perched on top of his messy hair. A foul odor emanated from his body, and I didn’t want to guess the last time he had showered.

“Why did you come in that door?” he said, after recognizing me. “That’s the trap door.”

“Sorry,” I said, pushing myself up and looking around. “It seemed like the obvious choice.”

“And that’s why it’s a trap,” he replied. “Normally there’s a row of very sharp spears here, but fortunately for you, they’re being sharpened.”

“That is fortunate,” I said.

“Who’s the spare?” said D.C., pointing the mallet somewhat menacingly at Duncan. Despite its gargantuan size, he held it aloft in front of our faces like it was a dainty umbrella.

“This is my ex, Duncan,” I said. “We’re hoping you can help with a problem.”

“Why would I want to do that? You’ve not exactly endeared yourself to any of us. That Seat has been empty from the very beginning and within a month of you taking it, look at all the chaos you’ve caused!”

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s not exactly been easy for me, either. It feels like I’ve been jumping from one collapsing pillar to another, trying to reach stable ground. If you’ll just hear me out, I promise I won’t waste your time.”

“OK, OK, but I’ve got my hands full here in the back, so make it quick.”

I craned my neck to see what was in the “back.” We were in an empty basement, save for a glowing light and what looked to be a workbench about 100 feet away. From the smell that had wafted up to my nose and D.C.’s outfit, it appeared we were in some desolate blacksmith forge.

“Hands full with what? Looks like the crafting business has been slow as of late.”

“That’s cute,” said D.C. “Tell me, why did that scofflaw annoyingly send you to my doorstep?”

“She said you were the one to go to if we needed something rare. But I see we were mistaken.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“Appearances can be deceiving,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. I need to get back to work.”

We traversed the length of the room and arrived at what was indeed a small wooden bench next to a blazing forge, a wooden barrel, and a gleaming silver anvil. Something glowed brightly within the fire, and D.C. finally set down the mallet and picked up a pair of tongs that were balanced on the edge of the forge, which he used to withdraw the glowing object: the blade of a sword.

Placing the white-hot metal on the anvil, D.C. grabbed the mallet again and pounded it against the sword, sending sparks flying everywhere.

“What are you doing?” I yelled in between swings.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Making pancakes,” offered Duncan, and I repressed a snicker.

D.C. glared at us and went back to his work.

“He’s funny. Why’d you dump the funny one?”

“Reforging Durandal,” I said. “Seems like you’re a way off.”

“Do you know what my initials stand for?” D.C. asked abruptly.

“No,” I replied. “Should I?”

“D’naeraeon of clan Crenshezbon,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Can’t see why you wouldn’t want to go by that,” said Duncan. I glared at him as if to say, “stop quipping with the guy with the enormous mallet that could knock your head off,” and he took the hint.

“That is an … interesting name, but what does that have to do with the sword?”

“My clan dates back more than two thousand years, maybe longer. We were charged as the keepers of Durandal, some say, by the remnants of Troy.”

“Wait, hold on,” I said, Frankie’s voice echoing in my head.

“I’m not the Guild’s Keeper. Far from it.”

Maybe it was a random choice of words, or maybe it was indeed Keeper with a capital K. Beatrice had claimed that she was the Keeper of the Medoblad in an unsuccessful bid to impress Dalia, but Frankie had proved that the title was more than a throwaway honorific.

“You mean Troy, as in the Trojan Horse, Achilles, Hector, that Troy?” asked Duncan.

“Yes, but clan lore, as I’m sure you can imagine, gets very muddled after a few hundred years.”

D.C. brought the mallet down onto the metal with a loud bang that forced me backward, but he seemed unaffected. Given his frame, I wondered how he managed to lift the implement off the ground even an inch.

“Anyway, we carried out our charge successfully until my ancestor, also named D’naeraeon, was betrayed by his friend Roland, who stole the sword in the 8th century. But our failure not only doomed our line, but Roland as well.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Durandal is a remarkable Relic for two reasons. First, it is one of the sharpest blades in history. The human body is like butter before it. Needless to say, Roland killed a lot of people with it. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it is indestructible.”

Another mallet blow and another spray of sparks erupted from the mythical metal.

“Not to state the obvious, but it looks pretty destructible right now,” I said.

“Yes, well, that’s what happens when you go around stealing swords that don’t belong to you.”

I shrugged my shoulders, not getting the reference, and D.C. shook his head.

“You know, you could have saved me some time and just gone to the Guild library first. One of the D’naeraeon’s from the 18th century recorded this for posterity.”

“It’s my next stop, I promise, but since we’re already here, can you indulge me?”

“Fine. But then you tell me why you’re here and get going post haste.”

“Deal,” I said as D.C. shoved the metal unceremoniously back into the forge and stoked its fire with what appeared to be coal briquettes sitting in a burlap sack next to the anvil.

“Roland, for all his hubris, knew when he was beat and didn’t want to let Durandal to fall into the hands of the Saracens, who were hot on his heels after the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. Trying to escape back across the mountains to France, he drew the sword and, with a single stroke, sliced through the Pyrenees, creating what is now known as Roland’s Breach.”

“Wait, he cut through the actual mountain?” asked Duncan. “You said the blade was sharp, but-”

“It can cut through anything,” said D.C. quietly. “Marble. Stone. Iron. Diamonds, if anyone was dumb enough to make diamond armor. And any alchemic material. Except on that day, Roland’s past caught up to him, and the blade shattered into a dozen pieces. My ancestor recovered half of them before he was forced to flee. It took eight hundred years to find the rest. We’ve been reforging the sword ever since.”

D.C. plunged the metal into a water bath and an eruption of steam burst forth from the barrel, causing Duncan and me to cough uncontrollably. When it finally cleared, D.C. had already put the sword back into the fire and had removed the leather gloves.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re telling me that your family…”

“Clan,” corrected D.C.

“…clan, OK, has been trying to repair the sword since the 1500s?”

“That’s right,” he said, smirking at the disbelief on my face. “Did you really think Relics are so ordinary that it would require otherwise?”

“I … I never thought about it like that. I always assumed that the important knowledge was lost centuries ago but never considered the effort to create a Relic in the first place.”

“See, that’s the problem with the lot of you,” said D.C. “You think that alchemy was just magic that made everything easy. And now that it’s mostly used and gone, all that’s left to do is cling to the tiny scraps we still have or send idiot scavengers off by the thousands to somehow locate what centuries of alchemists haven’t been able to find. But there is another way.”

“And what is that?” I asked.

D.C. gestured to his set-up and tools.

“This is the way,” said D.C. “We hammer away the sins of the past. We strengthen the bonds of our clan. We restore our legacy. And we forge a new future.”

I glanced at Duncan, who seemed ready to launch into a tirade, but instead, his eyes fluttered and his memory fell into the black hole that I had created. When he came to, the fire was gone, and he looked at me for some purchase, something familiar.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked D.C. “He looks lost.”

“I’m what’s wrong with him,” I said. “I used too much letherium on him, and now his short-term memory is on the fritz.”

“That’s so nice that you care so deeply about him to waste a favor on that,” said D.C.

“Waste a favor on what?” asked Duncan matter-of-factly. “And what’s with the blacksmith get-up?”

“Wow, you weren’t kidding,” said D.C. “Where’d you even get enough letherium to do that?”

“What’s letherium?” interjected Duncan.

“Duncan, can you go wait over there while I talk to D.C.?” I asked. He hesitated, and I added the word “please,” which did the trick.

“It’s a long story,” I said to D.C. “But I promised him I would help undo the damage I did, even if he doesn’t remember right now that I’m responsible. And until I figure out how to do that, Ty said you have one of the only stashes of nemosyne left on the East Coast.”

“Not sure how she knows that, but it’s true,” said D.C. “And if that’s what you’re after, the answer is a firm no. Besides, I thought you wanted to plug the hole in his head, not empty it all the way.”

“This is just a stop-gap,” I said. “Ty needs time to figure out a more permanent solution.”

“Still no,” said the blacksmith.

“You haven’t even heard what I’m offering.”

The truth was that I had very little. He probably already had a Guild cloak. The vitality serum was on Jade’s “track,” not mine, but in any event, not very valuable to a guy who was content hammering away at a piece of metal for the rest of his life. The glamour stone was worth more than the ink, present circumstances aside. On the walk over here, I had resigned myself to giving it up if that’s what it took to find Beatrice, taking the risk that it would reactivate as soon as I touched it again. But this conversation had reminded me I had more than that.

“I know what you’ve been searching for all this time, and I can give it to you.”

D.C. cocked his eyebrows at me and even Duncan looked at me sideways.

“I’m listening.”

“The secret to reforging Durandal.”

The First Seat let out a laugh that echoed through the basement chamber.

“That’s a good one. I told you the secret already: time. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And what we’re trying to gain is-”

“But that’s exactly what I’m offering, my dear D’naeraeon. Time itself.”