Because of this, ancient mines dug into to the sides of the mountains above Okot that had long lain sealed and dormant were now reopened, in order that they could join those few that were still active, as well as allow the Bane to more easily gain access to veins of a special iron ore that had been propelled from the night sky into the Earth countless ages ago. In addition, the miners digging into the mountainside were told to bring their day’s or night’s gatherings of coal (the main substance with which the unique iron ore would be smelted) to Caliphestros, before any thought was given to using them to fuel the new, smaller but far hotter and more numerous forges that the old man designed. The fiery effect of the forges was increased by the thousands of torch lights that lit the way into and around the mines, creating an ever-expanding impression that the Bane had bargained with their old gods, and been allowed to tear open a terrifying gateway into their underworld: the dreaded Muspelheim.†
But why, some workers could occasionally be heard to ask, was any deep coal mining necessary at all, when the mountains were already so covered in young and old trees of all varieties — trees that could easily be used to fuel the old cripple’s forges? That the city of Broken itself needed coal was not difficult to understand: the summit of Broken mountain was, as has been seen, primarily composed of stone, and been shorn of nearly all its readily accessible stands of heating timber during the kingdom’s early generations, as had the plain north of the Cat’s Paw. Indeed, it was well known that direct control of new supplies of wood and coal, along with all metal ores found in the great forest (primarily iron and silver), were two of the chief reasons that Lord Baster-kin so coveted Davon Wood. Yet Caliphestros not only insisted on coal, but on personally examining every piece of it that was brought out of the mountains, surrendering much of the little nightly rest that it was his custom to take and instead relentlessly searching through the cartloads that Bane miners, with blackened faces and bleeding hands, dragged under his practiced eye. He was seeking a type of black rock that was marked by certain qualities, qualities that took the miners long days to recognize in the darkness beneath the ground, but that they eventually learned to identify by the light of day quickly enough: qualities of weight and texture, all of which made it well suited to transformation by fire into yet another variety of fuel, related but not identical to coal, that was vital to the creation of Caliphestros’s near-miraculous grade of steel.‡
But in truth, for all the talk among the Bane townspeople of the mines and forges above Okot resembling, to an ever-increasing extent, some sort of terrible entrance to the most fiery of the Nine Homeworlds,†† a passageway that would eventually disgorge those agents that would cause the end of the old gods and perhaps of the world, Caliphestros privately told Keera that all such tales were but myths, while the work that he was directing on the mountains above Okot, whatever its sinister nighttime appearance, was in fact, like all undertakings to which he applied himself, based on such scientific learning as had been developed and carried on by men and women like himself for hundreds if not thousands of years. These refinements, which so closely resembled sorcerous transformations to the ignorant, were carried out upon the mountains that brooded over Okot not because the spot had been appointed as the site at which the end of the Earth or the imminent arrival of infamous demons would take place, but because the position of the caves within allowed the Bane metalworkers to capture the only winds in the area strong enough to heat the coal and charcoal in Caliphestros’s furnaces to so great an extent that they could to do the work that must, at this critical hour, be done.
One particular mountaintop cave, meanwhile, became both Caliphestros’s private new forge and the scholar’s and Stasi’s temporary home. The panther herself slept above the cave, as much as she did within, during these days, for the old man worked long hours, producing (or so the Bane thought) additional weapons in order to keep some vague pace with the Bane smiths to whom he had taught many of his secrets. During these restless hours, when Caliphestros turned his mental and physical efforts to ever more arcane experiments, Keera became the old man’s sole assistant; and such only after she swore not to reveal what he was in fact doing. The work in the Bane mines and the mountaintop smithies multiplied daily: Caliphestros knew that the Bane had always been extraordinarily clever and imitative people, who, once shown how to do a thing, required little repeated instruction to achieve their object. All the special coal and special charcoal they created did, indeed, create sufficient heat to allow Caliphestros to himself smelt what the Bane workers came to call the “star iron,” because the iron ore itself was brought from deep in the mountains and the mines where it had presumably been embedded hundreds of years ago, after hurtling down from the heavens. That iron was combined, first and above all, with the remarkably high quality charcoal that Caliphestros had taught his smiths to create, a combination that produced a steel capable of not only attaining but holding an edge of fearsome sharpness. Some Bane smiths swore that there were traces of other elements in the ore, a tale that reinforced the other-than-Earthly origins of the “star iron,” although none among these same smiths could even guess at what those other elements might be.† This new style of heating and smelting, brought back from the East via the Silk Path by Caliphestros during his youth, allowed even the highest grade of ore, what the Bane called “the star iron,” to be heated to so uniform a consistency that it could be masterfully united with another iron — one of equal purity but also of greater resistance to fracture or breakage — with the object of giving the blades both mighty durability and at the same time astonishing cutting power. After this, the combination was folded and refolded, worked and reworked, pounded together by smiths until there were hundreds of layers in each uninterrupted strip that became a weapon; and any one of these weapons was capable of becoming higher in both strength and sharpness even than that which Heldo-Bah had demonstrated to the Groba, and far superior to anything manufactured outside the realms of the East.†
For, while the occasional daring seeker of a European trading fortune, or traveler of great renown as a swordsman, might journey far to bring back examples of this remarkable steel from the most distant realms of the East to the markets of their homelands, Caliphestros alone had understood the formula for the manufacture of the steel well enough to record it, during his travels on the Silk Path. He had then brought it back west with him, and awaited the day when the loosing of this seminal substance would create weapons that would change the very rank of power among kingdoms in the West where they were used — just as they had already done in the East.
And yet, even as Caliphestros made a gift of the knowledge of how to create the star iron to Keera’s tribe of diminutive outcasts, Keera herself — perhaps the most perspicacious member of her tribe — remained far from easy about all the reasons why he might be doing so. His obvious motives — revenge, for himself and for Stasi, contempt for how the Broken state had changed since the death of his former patron, the God-King Izairn, and the desire to end the dangers of disease that seemed not to be invading the city on the mountain, but rather to be emerging from it — were apparent and easily understood; although Keera nonetheless wondered, at certain moments — moments when the old man’s blood and ire were truly racing — if it would ever be truly possible for her or anyone else to comprehend the inner feelings that drove a man who had lived as long, colorful, and mysterious a life as Caliphestros.