Whisper of Blade | ✓ (Crimson #1)

Chapter 7: Crafting Kirukkan

Minerva held her hands poised between the two layers of needles. Row after row of metal fangs waited for her focus to waver. If her hands moved a fraction of an inch, the tips of the needles nipped her skin and tiny beads of blood dripped into the cobalt-blue bowl waiting below.

Five minutes in and her hands shook as if she had the palsy.

"This is an exercise in concentration that you shall undertake," Amarante had begun without greeting upon Minerva's entering her hut. The imperial kirukist abode high up in the mountains among the dragons, where the cloud cover was constant. "We can't replicate the Trial of Fire, but this is the closest we've come to it."

Minerva looked at the woman—with her sunken amber eyes and hands withered to paper overlaying bone—and wondered whether her attention to her work was such an all-consuming passion that she forgot to eat and sleep.

Kirukists were the stuff of legends, craftsmen given wholly to the pursuit of refining kishuki stone into the unbreakable metal of the Pyros. The metal the Terron wars had been waged over.

Kirukkan.

"Meditation is about emptying the mind of everything," Amarante had said, dragging the torture contraption out of the room's corner. Her dwelling appeared to be kept in better shape than her person, if only because it was barer than a soldier's quarters. "Crafting kirukkan is not meditation. It requires the mind to focus solely on one image for an extended period of time."

Minerva watched the woman scurry around. First, she wrestled her creaking window shutters open, coughed at the dust, then gave a shrill whistle with her stick fingers shoved in her prune-creased mouth. Then her bare feet pattered across the bamboo flooring and she cranked the handle on the thin wooden box she'd moved, exposing the needles. When closed, they meshed together like teeth.

Amarante tapped her finger on a needle and yelped. "Still sharp," she'd remarked, sucking off the blood and spitting it to the floor.

Minerva revised her former opinion of the hut's cleanliness.

"How long is an extended period of time?" she'd asked.

Amarante cackled and shook her finger as if Minerva had asked for a pastry right before meals. "Can't tell you because you won't know until you're done or you're dead!"

She's mad. Absolutely burning mad, Minerva thought, regretting her agreement to stick her hands between the spikes. She hissed at a sharp nick of pain. The blood drop surfaced on her skin and she couldn't help but watch—with a morbid fascination—as it grew before slithering down her hand and plopping into the bowl.

"I hate this," Minerva said, not caring whether Amarante heard. The woman would be paid a hefty sum if Minerva passed her Trial so she could stand a few bitter complaints.

The renowned kirukist had her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms pulled out of the sleeves and back into the dress that hung like a rice sack on her thin frame. She rocked back and forth, mumbling to herself.

Minerva found she could pick out words when she tried.

"Three-eighty-one, three-eighty-two, three-eighty-three—"

Amarante sat up straight. Minerva flinched at the sudden flare of lucidity in the woman's eyes as she stared her down.

"Most of them do hate it," she answered. "But you don't seem like a bad egg, so you listen when I tell you that you better do this exercise. The ones who don't last through this part until I tell them to stop don't make it. They go" —Amarante's fingers ignited into flame with a snap— "poof."

"Poof," Minerva repeated in disbelief.

Amarante nodded. "Poof."

"Isn't it more like 'burn to death while screaming and slowly dissolve to ash'?" Minerva's voice shivered like her hands.