From outside this overheated chamber, the great machines of the bellows thundered like an incessant heart, the reverberations rolling through every stone of the Great House. The sound never fell away – in all the days and nights Kellaras had been guest to the Lord of Hust Forge, he had felt this drum of industry, beating the pulse of earth and stone, of fire and smoke.

This was, he had begun to believe, a place of elemental secrets, where truths roiled in the swirling heat, the miasmic tempest of creation and destruction clamouring without surcease on all sides; and this man, who had finally granted him audience, now sat across from him, in a high-backed chair shrouded in shadows, both lord and arbiter, ruler and sage, and yet his first words uttered had been … nonsense.

Henarald might have smiled then, but it was difficult to see in the gloom. ‘One day, I will be a child again. Carved toys will caper and dance from my mind, out across rock I will raise as mountains. Through grasses I will proclaim forests. For too long I have been trapped in this world of measures, proportions and scale. For too long I have known and understood the limits of what is possible, so cruel in rejecting all that can be imagined. In this way, friend, we are each of us not one but two lives, for ever locked in mortal combat, and from all things at hand, we make weapons.’

Kellaras slowly reached for the goblet of riktal on the tabletop before him. The spirit was fire in the throat and the only alcohol the Lord was purported to drink, but Kellaras’s first mouthful still rocked through his brain.

‘You hide your sudden acuity well, captain, but I well noted your intensity when I spoke the word “weapons”. To this you cleave, for among the words I have spoken, this alone you understand. I was speaking of all that we lose as the years crawl over us and the past – our youth – falls away.’ He closed both hands round his goblet, and those hands were massive, scarred and blunted, shiny in places from deep burns acquired over a lifetime at his forge. ‘Your lord wishes from me a sword. As a gift? Or does he seek to join the Hust Legion, perhaps. I cannot imagine Urusander’s supporters would be much pleased by a proclamation so overt.’

Kellaras struggled for a reply. Henarald’s easy shift from the poetic to the pragmatic left him feeling wrong-footed. His thoughts felt clumsy, like a child’s when confounded by a puzzle box.

But the Hust lord was of no mind to await a reply. ‘When I am a child again, the grown-ups will retreat from my eye. Drifting away into their own worlds and leaving me to mine. In their absence I am filled with trust and I reorder the scale of things to suit my modest command. Time yields its grip and I play until it is time to sleep.’ Henarald paused to drink. ‘And should I dream, it will be of surrender.’