Tower Ambrose, ancestral home of the Ambrosii in the Wardlands, was struck with lightning seven times in a single night, after a month of increasingly frequent lightning strikes. The next morning, half the remaining workers there quit.

“It’s a bad omen,” one of them told Deor syr Theorn as he paid her off.

“Personally, I don’t believe in omens,” said the next one. “I just don’t want to get struck by lightning.”

“I know what you mean,” said the dwarf. “Silver or stones?”

“Stones, thanks.”

When they were gone, Deor sadly eyed the household’s depleted stock of silver and gemstones and then flipped the strongbox shut. The eye on the lid winked at him and clamped the bolts shut like teeth.

Deor climbed the long winding stairway to the top of the tower where Morlock’s workshop was. The lock on the door recognized him as he approached and loosened its brazen fingers from the doorpost, allowing him to enter, which he did cautiously.

Morlock Ambrosius lay in deep visionary withdrawal on the floor of the workroom. The Banestone, the gem whose final making had killed Saijok Mahr, glowed luridly on his chest: Morlock was using it as a focus for his vision these days. Over him a cloud of black-and-white crystalline fragments floated in the air. In their center was about half of a longsword made of the same black-and-white crystal. As Deor watched, one of the fragments settled into place and seemed to grow into the sword.

Deor picked up a long wooden stick he kept by for this purpose and reached out with it to prod Morlock. “Hey!” he shouted. “You! Descend from your vision! We need to talk.”

Deor know that Morlock heard him—he was not asleep, after all—but he expected the process to take some time. He sat down on a nearby bench and watched the half-made sword descend into a long lead-lined box, and the crystalline fragments followed it in a steady rain, each one fitting into place on the sword like a piece in a three-dimensional puzzle.

When that was done, some more time passed. Deor thought about what he’d had for breakfast, and what he was going to have for lunch.

Eventually, Morlock’s eyes opened and he rolled to his feet. His dark-ringed eyes were bloodshot; his face was paler and thinner than Deor had ever seen it. The dwarf was worried for his harven kin, though he hardly knew how to say it, what question to ask.

“Praise the day, Vocate Morlock,” the dwarf said. “I suppose you were at that nonsense all night.”

“Most of it,” Morlock admitted. “Couldn’t sleep. How are you?”

“Unhappy. Half the workers quit this morning. I’ve got some of the dwarves running the impulse wheel, and the cleaning staff has mostly stayed on (thank you, God Sustainer). But there is no one working in the kitchen at all.”

Morlock thought of food as fuel and was more or less indifferent to its form. His response in full was, “Eh.”

Deor’s opinions on food were wholly different, and he gave Morlock a selection of them now. “That won’t do, harven Morlock. There are people in this tower besides yourself: the workers who braved lightning bolts to stay here deserve something better than dried meat and stale bread. So do I, if it comes to that. What if you have one of your colleagues over for dinner? What are we to offer them?”

“There’s a cookshop down the bluff that could cater a meal.”

Deor thought for a moment and then said with horror, “You can’t mean the Speckles? You understand they got their name from the condition of their produce? When they brag about their fresh meat, they are talking about the things living in their uncooked vegetables. The meat proper is cooked on a biannual basis, and I have it on good report that they harvest it exclusively from swamp rats.”

“I ate there all the time when I was a thain.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. No, that won’t do either, Morlock.”

“We’ll have to hire new people, then.”

“With what? Our stocks of silver and gemstones are very low. You’re sure we can’t make a little gold? Just a little gold?”

“No.”

“It’s quite easy.”

“Yes. So easy that it would be of no value. Silver passes as currency only because people believe that artificial silver can be detected.”

“I bet we can make silver that would pass any test, Morlock.”

“Yes. Except the most obvious one. A convenient and indefinite supply of silver with no known source will inevitably raise suspicions.”

“So? It’ll get us through our present difficulties. And then . . .”

“And then no one will want our money. No, we’ll just have to sell some things.”

“Sell what? The shelves are bare, Morlock.”

“Go to a few markets today; see what people are paying good money for. We’ll make it better and sell it for less. I’ve been drawing templates for a new deck of cards, also. We can run up a few of those; the original packs were pretty well-liked.”

“When will we do all this? Your Graith resumes its Station in a few days, if you haven’t forgotten.”

“There’ll be time.” Morlock looked at Deor and said, “What’s really wrong?”

“I don’t like all this lightning,” Deor admitted uneasily. “I don’t understand what you’re doing with that.” He gestured at the lead-lined box. “It’s no kind of making I can understand. Why do you have to use that damn Banestone? Can’t you just swing a hammer, like the old days?” He was half joking, half not.

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. For a while, Deor thought that was the only answer he would get. At last Morlock said, “It’s the kind of making this work needs. I meditated long over the nature of Gryregaest. When I found it in pieces on the Hill of Storms, I thought it was broken.”

“And it wasn’t?”

“Not exactly. It was . . . dead. The pieces were once united by a talic bond, like the one uniting soul to flesh. I am . . . reweaving them again, piece by piece. But when it is whole, if I can make it whole, it will not be Gryregaest anymore. I will give it a new name. One to honor Oldfather Tyr, I think.”

Deor bowed his head in honor of the late Eldest of Theorn Clan, Morlock’s harven father. The old dwarf had died recently while Morlock was out in the unguarded lands, and Deor knew his harven kin was still in grief. So was Deor, for that matter.

“And the lightning?” he asked presently, thinking Morlock’s attention had wandered.

“Deortheorn,” Morlock said, without seeming to reply, “have you read Lucretius?”

“No. What is it?”

“A poet from my mother’s world. He lived four or five hundred years before she was born. I’ve been reading a lot of Latin lately.”

“No wonder you look sick.”

“I look sick?” Morlock seemed dismayed. That dismayed Deor: he had never known Morlock to worry about his appearance. Never.

“Yes. You were telling me about this Latin poet, Lucretius.”

“He claimed that everything was made up of invisible particles called atoms.”

“God Avenger! What do the superstitious maunderings of a deranged poet have to do with these lightning strikes?”

“When I am deep in my vision, reweaving the blade . . . I seem to see them. The atoms, or . . . or something. They dance in the air like motes of dust. There is a darker kind, implicit with some physical energy that is just subtalic, on the verge of the immaterial. They cluster about like flies as I reweave the blade. They seem to call the lightning to them somehow. Or they are a silence the lightning strives to dispel. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I am starting to know. I summoned most of those thunderbolts last night; the aether from the lightning was useful in binding the blade.”

“You”—Deor hastily revised what he was going to say—“always surprise me, Morlocktheorn. But in the interests of keeping our workers—”

“Do they have relatives?”

“I don’t know who you mean,” Deor admitted.

“The workers who stayed.”

“I don’t know. I suppose some of them must have.” Deor still didn’t see what Morlock was driving at.

“Maybe they are also unafraid of lightning. You might ask if they are interested in working here. I also have friends in the League of Silent Men. You might send a message to them, seeing if any of their people need work.” Morlock’s bloodshot eyes peered at his harven kin. “I’m not giving you too much to do?”

“Not really. Anyway, I’ll repay you double when you get back here tonight. I suppose you’ll be off on your usual rounds?”

“Yes.” Morlock ran one hand through his dark tangled hair, another over his stubble-laden chin. “How do I look?”

“I told you; you look sick. You should stay home and get some rest, but you won’t.”

“I’m not sick. But I’ll wash and shave before I go. Change clothes too, I guess. Is there hot water in the washroom?”

“How would I know, Vocate Morlock? I washed before dawn, with cold water in my closet, as God Creator intended. But the impulse wheel has been running for hours, so I assume the hot water reservoir is full.”

“Then.” Morlock nodded to his harven-kin, punched him gently on the shoulder as he passed, and ran down the stairs.

“Don’t forget to eat something!” Deor roared after him, without any hope he would be listened to. Heard, yes; listened to, no. If Morlock was not sick, what in the canyon was wrong with him?

Deor wandered through the workroom, looking for the templates Morlock had talked about. If they were anywhere near complete, he could get some of their kin to start working on them right away: dwarves liked to do things with their hands, even (or especially) when they were running on the impulse wheel.

He found some of the new cards on a drawing table. Deor found them disturbing, but that didn’t mean they weren’t good. There was one of Tower Ambrose being struck by lightning; a dwarvish figure with a bundle in his arms was seen jumping from the tower. “Watch over us all, Oldfather Tyr,” Deor said, smiling, when he recognized the figure, remembered the story.

Next to the sketches was a piece of Latin (Deor could recognize it, if not read it), and on the same page a bunch of scribbling in Morlock’s hand. It looked as if he was trying a translation from Latin verse into Wardic. The clearest part ran like this:

But my tongue can’t talk;

a slender fire sears me under the skin;

ringing re-echoes in my ears;

my two eyes are touched by twin night.

Was it a medical text? Deor wondered. These sounded like pretty unpleasant symptoms. Something from that Lucretius fellow? Deor didn’t like to think about atoms bouncing around inside his nose and ears; it seemed unsanitary. Maybe that’s what it was about.

But there were a few other words on the page that stood out clear, among many that were struck out or smeared with ink: “like a god” and “sweetly laughing.”

Slowly the pieces of the puzzle came together, like the pieces growing into Morlock’s damn sword.

“This is a love poem,” Deor said aloud, not quite believing it until he heard his own words. “He’s in love.”

It all made sense now. Deor had actually seen Morlock comb his hair on five occasions in the preceding month, and he never left the house anymore without putting on fresh clothes, sometimes of rather bizarre cut.

It seemed all too likely to end in disaster. But courtship was rather different for dwarves, and Deor could think of no way he could help.

“Poor Morlock,” Deor said. “Poor whoever-she-is, too,” he added, equally sincerely.