Read Online The Anvil of Ice by Michael Scott Rohan - Free Book Online

storing up masses of questions for Ingar or the master. To break the boundaries of his reading he mastered not only his native Northland speech, but also the tongue of Suderney, and many no longer spoken in south or north. Even some words of Ekwesh he acquired. But much as he learned, it never satisfied him. In his dreams he searched out all the secrets of the world, from its heart to its heights, and shouted out his questions to the silent stars. Awake, he longed to end his apprenticeship, to become his own man, free if he chose to go out and explore the world. Much as he admired the Mastersmith, Alv had had his fill of these barren mountains, the house from which he could not stir for six months of every year, the few faces he was forced to see every day. Most of all he yearned to see women again, for none had ever come there save Ernan's old wife, and she died during his third winter in the house. Knowledge was his road to escape, his path to his own fortune, and he longed for it with the fervor of love. That forbidden North wall of the library drew him like a magnet, and he deeply resented the prohibition. He would run his hands lovingly over the scrolls there, fingering the smooth dark fabric of the cylinders and their cold carved finials, as if he could somehow divine their cloth-shrouded secrets through his fingertips. It seemed to him almost that he could, that half of the hidden knowledge came through to him and that he lacked only a single clear glimpse to set it free in his mind—and that that glimpse, that essential key, should be his by right. Always he was tempted— but he never dared risk it. Even more clearly he felt the force of the Mastersmith's word. And perhaps it was this hunger, and the only source of feeding it he knew, that drew his mind toward what, in his innermost heart, he knew to be evil. He felt himself apart even from the others of the household, and quietly looked down on them all. Ingar he despised, even after the older apprentice had completed his prentice pieces and been made journeyman; his amiable lack of ambition and his decision to stay with the Mastersmith and study, rather than make a life of his own, struck Alv as cowardly and contemptible. But outwardly he showed little of this, following the Master-smith's example as in all else.
    Sure it is that he needed no urging to despise his origins and admire the man who had raised him out of them and might raise him higher yet. So perhaps it is not strange that he came to feel it right and admirable to be as hard, as detached, as his master, to feel joy in the domination of others and cloak it under studied civility and friendship. Would that not seem the very stamp of a great man, a master? But he was to learn that not all of the Master-smith's visitors were his servants.
    It fell in the last winter of Alv's apprenticeship, when he might have been some twenty or twenty-one years of age, that the Mastersmith sent for him. Alv found him by the firepit, gazing at its low flames as if reading something from them; when Alv stood respectfully by him he did not raise his head, but spoke briskly.
    "Well, boy! The world moves apace, and you with it; you are molding yourself well. I will need other helpers besides Ingar in the days soon to come. Therefore, though you are young for it as yet, I judge you ripe now to try your prentice pieces."
    Alv lost all his studied calm. "My… You're making me a journeyman?"
    "If I accept your work. If . Strictly by rule of guild, for it would be very useful to me one day if you were to hold a mastership in it. Very useful…So, you must prove to me that you have some command of the higher arts of the smith—scholarship, jewelry, armory, weaponry, suchlike. You will begin three test pieces, two under my direction, but the first you must manage for yourself. We will make that jewelry, I think. A simple gold armring, the kind wealthy young pups covet to give their girls—when they can be sure there's a good