22 – A Storm on the Horizon

  On his way to the door, Andy paused and grabbed the newspaper-wrapped scorpion stinger that had been sitting there for far too long. The waft of something rotten tickled his nose, and he hurried through the door, stretching his arm out to his side, keeping the package away from his face. He didn’t think a stinger would rot, but there was plenty of tissue attached to it that would.

  It didn’t take him long to reach James’s place, and he had to stop at the bend in the lane to gawk; the forge the older man had been working on was looking pretty much complete. The pit James had been digging was no longer a pit. It was lined with bricks, built up about four feet, with a chimney that was currently billowing smoke, and an opening that reminded Andy almost of a pizza oven that glowed with the fire within.

  More than just the forge itself, somehow James had acquired a large leather bellows, and, sitting atop a block of four-by-sixes, an anvil that had to have weighed several hundred pounds. James was currently pounding away on a piece of softly glowing metal while Lydia watched, sipping from a bottle of beer. As Andy approached, James continued to hammer, his arms and head dripping sweat, but his face relaxed and happy. Andy could see a new life in the older man—strong, broad shoulders that, before, had seemed slumped and tired.

  When Lydia saw him approaching, she waved him closer and pointed with her beer bottle. “He’s pounding out a knife blade we cut from a leaf spring.”

  Andy nodded, raising his voice over the pinging of the hammer. “Cool!”

  She looked at his spear, then over to his other hand. “What you got there?”

  “Just a sec.” Andy walked over to one of the newly built two-by-four and plywood workbenches set up on either side of the forge. He pushed aside some scrap iron and bits of lumber to make room, then set the ripe package down. When he returned to Lydia, he explained, “It’s for a quest James got a while back—ingredient for a magic spear. Remember the scorpion stinger I grabbed after the fight on the road?”

  “Oh, yeah. A crafting quest, huh?”

  “Yep.” Andy took a minute to outline some of the other ingredients he could recall, and Lydia raised an eyebrow.

  “Seriously? The System never gave me a quest like that!”

  Considering her experience with crafting, Andy was surprised. “I wonder what James was doing when he got it.”

  “What’s that?” James asked, pausing his hammer strokes to look up through his yellow-tinted safety glasses.

  “Go ahead and finish!” Lydia said, waving a hand toward the anvil. “We’ll wait.” James shrugged and went back to work, and Lydia turned back to Andy. “Messed around with your new class?”

  “Sure have.” Andy took a few minutes to describe what he’d done, and Lydia listened with what appeared to be growing excitement.

  As he finished talking, she said, “You have it with you?”

  “What?”

  “The dagger!” She pointed at his belt. “That it?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Andy drew the blade, tilting it so the rune was in shadow, gleaming with faint green lines.

  Lydia leaned close, breathing softly through her nose as she stared. “It’s complicated. Like lines within lines. Not impossible, though…”

  Andy tilted his head. “Impossible?”

  “To copy!”

  Suddenly, like the proverbial lightbulb going off in his brain, Andy realized what she meant. “Oh, shit! We could keep track of the glyphs and what they do. I could try to copy them with my Smokescribe skill.”

  “I mean, yeah, but we could also try just burning them into wood or etching them into metal.” She shrugged. “You know, just to see if they do anything.” She reached into her seemingly ever-present leather apron and pulled out a small notebook, much like the ones Eduardo liked to use. “You care if I take a stab at it? This one does poison?”

  Andy shrugged, handing her the knife, careful to allow her to grab it by the hilt. “Yeah, um, venom, actually.”

  Lydia nodded, moving to plop down on the bench of a nearby picnic table. Before she started sketching, though, she pointed to the table opposite the one where Andy had set his stinger. “Why don’t you try your new spell out on some of those tools?”

  Andy rubbed his chin, contemplating the many hammers, pliers, screw-drivers, and myriad other tools. “What if I ruin one? I mean, there are some enchantments you probably wouldn’t want on certain tools—”

  Lydia waved away his objection. “You only do one charge at a time, right? If it’s wrong for the tool, we can just burn the charge up.”

  “Huh. Yeah, I guess that’s true.” With a mental shrug, Andy approached the bench and picked up a flat-head screwdriver. He concentrated, activating his Evaluate Material ability:

  Material: iron alloy

  Enchantment potential: natural-low

  Enchantment capacity: 0/100

  It was the first “low” potential he’d seen, so he was cautiously curious as he began to cast Glyph of Fate. As the mana poured out of his fingers into the metal of the screwdriver, he watched as tiny glowing orange lines etched themselves into the metal, forming a long, narrow, complicated runic symbol. When it was finished, the System issued a report:

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  ***Glyph of Rust Ruination applied! This narrow chisel will now apply Rust Ruination upon an object when used with purposeful intent. This enchantment will remove rust and corrosive residue from a metallic object in a small area around the tool’s point of contact. Charges: 1.***

  “Narrow chisel,” Andy said with a chuckle. Then, he evaluated it again:

  Material: iron alloy

  Enchantment potential: natural-low

  Enchantment capacity: 91/100

  “What did you do?” Lydia asked from behind him. “I felt the mana.”

  Andy glanced at her, arching an eyebrow. “Yeah? Mind me asking what your Perception score is?”

  “Seven. Why?”

  “I have eight, and I notice mana being used, too. I haven’t heard that from other people, but then, I haven’t really done a survey.”

  “Interesting. Well? The screwdriver?”

  “Oh!” Andy walked over to her, noting that James’s hammering had stopped, and the other man had walked over to a quenching barrel. Andy handed the screwdriver to Lydia. “It’ll remove rust in a small area around the tip. The System called it a narrow chisel.”

  Lydia chuckled. “That’s funny. You’d think, considering how damn much it’s in our heads, that the System would know what a screwdriver is.”

  “Might be my fault. I’ve probably used screwdrivers for scraping gunk out of my bike’s chain and mud out from under the fenders more than I’ve used ’em for screws—especially flat-heads.” As he spoke, Andy caught a flash out of the corner of his eye, and when he turned to the east, he inhaled sharply. “Holy shit! Look at those clouds!”

  Lydia stood up, then, as she followed his gaze, promptly climbed onto the bench she’d been sitting on. “Yeah, that’s a nasty one. Black as night over there, and it’s still the middle of the day.”

  “This must be what Bea was talking about,” Andy said, earning a sharp glance from James as he pulled his freshly crafted knife blade out of the bucket of water.

  “What’s that?” the older man asked.

  At the same time, Lydia said, “She’s the healer lady, right?”

  “Yeah. She said she had a feeling that a storm was coming. Like a sixth-sense kind of thing. She’s a, um, Water Witch.”

  “Well,” James said, holding his hand to his eyes. “We’ve got hours before it gets here, if it does. I don’t feel any wind blowing this way, so it might just go past us.”

  Andy nodded. “We’ll see. We’ve got a shelter anyway, if we need it.”

  Lydia narrowed her eyes, but then she snapped her fingers. “Oh! The caves.”

  “Yep.”

  James walked over to his workbench and picked up the newspaper-wrapped package, wrinkling his nose. “What the hell is this, young feller?”

  “That’s the scorpion’s sting! For the spear quest!”

  “Oh!” James chuckled, exposing his straight white teeth as he began to peel back the paper. “Stinks!”

  “Yeah, I should probably help you clean it up. I know how to get the venom glands out, and then we should boil it.”

  “Huh? Boil?” James looked at him sideways. “Why?”

  Andy shrugged. “Just something I know. It’ll preserve it better, and that kind of monster carapace is perfectly usable after being boiled.” He tapped his temple, grinning. “System gave me some monster-butchering knowledge.”

  While they were speaking, Lydia stood and walked over to the other workbench and, a moment later, exclaimed, “Hah, wow! That’s cool!”

  Andy had felt a small surge of mana, and when he looked over, he saw she was holding the enchanted screwdriver against a yard-long piece of rebar. He could see from where he was standing that the rebar looked brand new—not a speck of rust on it. In fact, it veritably gleamed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shiny piece of rebar before.”

  “That enchantment is amazing!”

  Andy laughed. “Too bad it’s random. I don’t suppose you copied it down?”

  Lydia shook her head. “I wish. I’m only about halfway done with the one on the dagger.”

  “The hell are you kids jabbering about?” James set the stinger down and came to stand beside Andy, fists on his hips.

  Chuckling, Andy took a few minutes to bring him up to speed on his new enchanting class. As he finished, he said, “I’d like to play around with it some more, but I just had a thought—what if Lucy and the others don’t notice the storm coming in time? How far is it to that cave with the dungeon, Lydia?”

  “Here. Gimme a boost.” Lydia held out a hand, and Andy took it, helping the short, wiry woman to clamber up on top of James’s workbench. She turned to scan the line of the Catalina Mountains to the north, slowly turning her head from left to right, and finally she said, “I think I see the canyon. Shoot, I think it would take me a couple of hours. I’d say we should just trust those guys to be smart enough to hurry back, but now you’ve got me worried. A bunch of my people are with ’em, you know.”

  “They’re all our people now,” James said, much quicker than Andy would’ve thought of something like that.

  He turned to the older man and nodded. “True.”

  Lydia jumped down from the table with a grunt. “I think it would be a mistake to go out there looking for them. What do you think?”

  Andy imagined trying to track the party through the desert, up into the mountains, and then, if they found them, getting back to the mesa ahead of the storm. He considered everyone who was out there—Lucy, Bella, and Omar especially—and knew they all had good heads on their shoulders. He looked into Lydia’s sharp brown eyes and shook his head. “Nah, I think they’ll see those clouds and hurry home.”

  “How about some help with this stinger then, young blood?” James asked. “I can’t get the smell out of my nose.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Lydia said. “I’m gonna give Robert a heads-up. He needs to get the horses back to the Refuge.”

  At first, Andy was going to ask her why, but then it clicked—what would they do with the horses if they all took shelter inside the mesa? Just hope for the best? “Yeah, that’s a good idea. What about the rest of you?”

  “Gonna send most of ’em back with him so he has an escort, but I think I’ll stay here and wait for the folks who went out to scout out that dungeon and the ranger station.” She looked toward the east again. “If that storm comes this way, we might have to shelter with you all.”

  Andy smiled. “Won’t be a problem.”

  “Oh, I know. I saw that big old cave down there. Anyway, be back soon.” With that, she turned and walked away. Andy watched her go, amused at the cocky saunter in her step, but James nudged his shoulder, and, realizing he’d been staring, Andy hurriedly looked back toward the forge.

  Scrambling for a change of topic, he said, “Pretty great work on the forge, James.”

  “Oh yeah, that young gal’s got a good head on her shoulders. She did all the brickwork. Anyway, I’ll go get my big soup pot. We can boil some water on the fire.”

  Andy laughed, the image of the scorpion’s stinger being used in actual soup flashing through his mind. “Sounds good. I’ll get to work on those venom glands.”

  James wrinkled his nose. “You do that. Carve off some of that rotten stuff, too, and toss it into the fire.” He winked, punched Andy’s shoulder, and walked up and into his trailer. His voice carried through the open door as he yelled, “Keshawn! Get on up off that couch. Get out there and watch how Andy cuts up that giant scorpion stinger!”

  Smiling, Andy walked over to the chair where Lydia had been sitting and picked up his dagger. He supposed the bad thing about the glyph he’d put on it was that he couldn’t really use it for anything other than trying to kill something—or someone. Stuffing it into his sheath, he searched through the tools on James’s bench until he found a coffee can containing a few pocket knives and box-cutters. Breathing shallowly through his mouth, he unwrapped the stinger and got to work.