The Forge

Two brick pylons on two islands, two chains slung between them and a deck of scorched plating hanging from the chains. Chain holds as long as it is cold. The middle of the deck has sagged to within a block of the gold, and the span by the east pylon is gone: that is where the chains got warm first.

A bowl of gilded slag sunk to its shoulders in the ground, full of molten gold, hung on trunnions between two pillars so that it could be tipped. The spout faces east and the ground below it is gold where the last pour stopped. Nobody poured it: the Forge melts in this bowl, and now and then the bowl tips on its own.

A ring of ash with magma set into it, and in the middle a heap of gilded slag with a heart of living gold that does not go out. Someone sat here: there are benches facing the ember, a pot over it on a tripod, and two skulls on posts to say whose fire it is.

A casting hall of slag brick with a cupola furnace at one end and a chimney of scorched plating above it. They tapped gold here, ladle after ladle, until the furnace gave way and the gold came out on its own: it took the east wall with it and set where it stopped. The molds along the channel are still full, and the guard at the furnace has not left his post.

The same ring as on Earth, on a dais of the local stone and in the colors of this world: whoever set the gates out did it on every world at once. This one sleeps. It answers only one who has brought down the master of this world and lived through its trial; then lay the master's heart, the dust of the road and what this world gives into the ring, and it will join the other gates that are awake.

An anvil thirteen blocks long, with a horn, a heel and a hardy hole, standing on a stepped plinth of slag brick. A bar of living gold is cooling on the face and has run over the edge; the hammer lies where it was put down. Whoever worked here was forging mountains, and the one by the horn is only half done.

A guild of smiths came down the vent in bells to find adamant, the metal no fire can work. Over a slag isle they raised a smithy and cut three levels into the slag under the golden sea: the shops where they forged and slept, the foundry with its great vat, and at the bottom the lairs of the salamanders and the master's own forge. No fire was hot enough, so the master made fire alive: a coal that never goes out, wrapped in living gold, a forge-heart. From hearts and cast armor he made knights to guard the work; when even that failed, he laid himself under his own hammer. The gold rose, the apprentices left in the bells, and the Gilded Smith still works below. Lay two forge-hearts on his anvil and he will come for them.

A pier of scorched plating on heat piers, running out over the golden sea from a slag shore. The bells came here: they were lowered off the crane at the end, filled, and pulled back up. The middle of the deck has gone into the gold since, and the last bell still hangs from the chain, one block short of the sea.

A mound of slag with a burrow inside: a brick-lined throat going down into a chamber where salamander ore grows in the walls and a pool of gold keeps the floor warm. The nest is in the back, and it is not empty. The journal calls whatever warms itself here a salamander, and has never seen one leave.

A round tower of slag brick in three tiers, with a cube of living gold burning in a cage at the top. The golden sea is flat and bright, and that is the trouble: on a sea that is all light there is nothing to steer by except a light that stands still. The bell that was coming to the lighthouse lies in the gold a few paces short of it.