Free Web NovelChapter 244: Chapter237: Hands
The mana channel housing sat on the workbench like an accusation.
It was the size of a forearm, made of interlocking alloy segments around a crystal conduit core, and according to the instructor — a Skyforge technician named Wick, who was half the size of every knight in the room and enjoying himself enormously — it contained forty-one components, thirty-eight of which could be reassembled wrong in ways that looked right.
"This housing is the simplest mana-bearing component your armor will contain," Wick announced, walking between the benches where twenty-five of the deadliest men in Elarion sat holding small tools like they might bite. "There are sixty of them in each suit. When one cracks in the field — and one will crack, because everything cracks — the suit doesn’t stop working. It starts working wrong. Power bleeds where it shouldn’t. Servos answer late. And a suit that answers late, in your line of work, is a coffin that fits well." He set an hourglass on the front bench. "Strip it. Rebuild it. Nine minutes. Begin."
The sound that followed was twenty-five proud men discovering their hands.
Knights’ hands were trained for violence at every scale — the tourney blade, the war axe, the lance, the knife. They were not trained for a spring-clip the width of a grass stem, seated behind a retaining plate, which had to be released without bending while three other components waited to leap off the bench the moment tension came off the housing. By the third minute, Varro — who could bend a horseshoe straight with one hand — had launched the same spring-clip across the room twice.
"It’s mocking me," he said, retrieving it from under Daren’s bench for the second time. "The little bastard is mocking me."
"It’s a spring," said Pell, without looking up. His housing already lay in forty-one neat components, arranged in disassembly order like a surgical tray. "It does one thing. It’s doing the thing."
"How are you finished stripping?"
"I’m not finished stripping, I’m finished labeling." Pell turned his bench slightly so the room could see, which was, everyone had learned by now, entirely deliberate. "You put them down in the order they came off. Then reassembly is just the same road walked backward. If you pile them up like — what is that, Varro? What is that pile?"
"That’s my system."
"That’s a scrap heap with ambitions."
Down the row, Arven worked in silence, slower than Pell, faster than most, treating the housing the way he’d treated everything on the border — as a thing that would kill him if he disrespected it. Beside him, unexpectedly, Daren of House Vail was doing well. His hands, trained by a childhood of dueling instructors to be precise under pressure, moved with an economy that clearly annoyed him even as it served him.
"You look upset to be good at this," Arven observed.
"I am upset to be good at this. If I’m good at it, there’s no one to blame." Daren seated the crystal conduit and reached for the retaining plate. "My fencing master used to strike my knuckles with a rod for a sloppy grip. Eleven years of that, and its final purpose is reassembling plumbing. He’d weep."
"He’d charge your father for the weeping."
"He absolutely would."
By the hourglass’s end, four housings worked, nine were assembled but wrong in ways that looked right — exactly as promised — and twelve remained in pieces. Wick collected the nine lookalikes with visible delight and connected each to a test crystal, and each one failed in a different, instructive, faintly humiliating way. One hummed at the wrong pitch. One warmed where it should have stayed cold. One did nothing whatsoever, which Wick declared "the most dangerous of all — a suit that lies quietly."
"Again," he said, upending the hourglass.
They did it again. And again. By the fourth day, most of the room could strip and rebuild inside seven minutes. By the eighth, Wick began removing a component from each rebuilt housing while they slept and having them find the fault cold. By the twelfth day, the blindfolds came out, two weeks earlier than the official schedule — Malen’s standing instruction — and twenty-five men learned what their fingers knew without their eyes to interrupt.
Varro, to the astonishment of everyone was among the best blindfolded.
"It makes no sense," Daren said, watching the big man’s hands walk through the housing by feel, seating the hated spring-clip on the first try.
"Makes perfect sense," Varro said, eyes cloth-wrapped, contented. "With the blindfold on, I can’t see the little bastard mocking me. Now it’s just a shape. I’m good with shapes."
The medicine came in the third week, and it rebalanced every score in the compound.
The instructor was a field surgeon named Hetta, on loan from the Workers’ Hearth clinics, who had spent six years sewing up foundry accidents and had exactly no reverence for knights whatsoever. She laid out her opening lesson on a trestle table: bone splints, tourniquets, wound clamps, needle and gut, and a pig carcass with injuries she had inflicted personally and described with unsettling fondness.
"Everything you did in the workshop, you’ll do here, except the housing screams and the components are wet," she said. "Same discipline. Order, sequence, hands that don’t panic. A bleed is a system fault. Find it, isolate it, patch it, test it. The only difference is the clock — steel gives you nine minutes. Blood gives you ninety seconds."
The knights who had ruled the workshop discovered the trestle table did not care. Pell, whose hands were the surest in the unit on alloy and crystal, went pale and slow the first time the practice wound welled up over his fingers. Daren’s dueling precision survived the blood but fought his stomach for the privilege. And Varro — enormous, clip-launching Varro — turned out to have hands like a mother with a sick child, which he explained, when pressed, with a shrug: "Eight younger siblings. Somebody was always bleeding."
Rellan, naturally, was in paradise.
He finished each exercise early and then drifted between benches, offering commentary with the serene cruelty of a man who had found his kingdom. "Tighter, Pell, it’s a tourniquet, not a hat ribbon. Daren, your stitching is beautiful and he’s dead — beautiful was never the assignment. Arven — acceptable. Border-taught?"
"Border-taught," Arven said, tying off. "Buddy you learn or you bury."
"You learn or you bury." Rellan nodded slowly, with the first full approval he’d shown anyone. "I’m going to have that sewn on a banner. It’s better than the official doctrine."
"The official doctrine is four words," Daren said, not looking up from his stitches. "’No one is coming.’"
"Mine’s more optimistic. Mine also implies somebody learned."
By the fifth week, every man in the unit could stop a bleed, seal a wound, splint a break, and keep a dying man alive for the hour the doctrine demanded — and every man had done it with cold hands, in the dark, in the rain the compound’s hill weather provided free of charge. Hetta signed twenty-five basic certifications with the expression of a woman who had expected to sign eleven, and told Malen, on her way out, that if soldiering ever failed them, nine of his knights could earn honest wages holding clamps.
"Which nine?" Malen asked.
"That’s between me and them. Guild confidentiality." She paused at the door. "The big one, though. Varro. If you ever tire of having him carry guns, send him to me. Wasted, those hands. Utterly wasted."
"I’ll pass along the compliment."
"Don’t. He’ll be unbearable."
Lucien came to the compound at the end of the fifth week, unannounced, and watched from the range fence as the unit ran the day’s combined drill: a timed course where every man sprinted, fought through a line of instructors, stripped and rebuilt a housing with rain-numbed fingers, and then kept a "casualty" — a straw man with Hetta’s cheerfully vicious injury cards pinned to it — alive for a full hour while carrying him uphill.
Twenty-five of twenty-five passed. It was not close, and it was not graceful, but Malen valued the second fact more than the first.
"Watch it noble," he said, at the fence. "The card said arterial bleed and a broken jaw. He stopped the bleed one-handed while Arven held the line off him, and never once looked around for someone better qualified. Five weeks ago he’d have called for a surgeon and considered his part done."
"And the basics hold across all of them?"
"The basics hold. Every man in that mud can now keep himself and his brother alive without help." Malen watched Rellan chase the last team up the hill, shouting stitch corrections through the rain like an insult. "Which means they’re ready for the second half. Next week the specializations split — and the five paths stop being words on a barracks wall."
Lucien watched Varro crest the hill with the straw casualty over one shoulder and Pell under his free arm like baggage, both of them arguing about something inaudible, and found himself, not for the first time at this compound, thinking that the deadliest thing about the unit might end up being none of the things it was built to carry.
"And the equipment?" Malen asked, quieter. "They train on rigs and mock-ups. Sooner or later they’ll need the real things."
"The armor’s first full prototype is eight weeks out. The rifle’s ahead of it — the test benches at Ironhold fire the first full-power rounds this month." Lucien turned from the fence. "Get them through the specializations, Malen. By the time their hands are ready, the things they’re reaching for will be real."
