Chapter Twenty-eight

Platt clutched the flaccid wineskin in both hands and said, "You know, Sparrow, I don't see what good you get outa making all this for King Hermann."

The smith shuddered on his pallet of furs.

"Hey, you!" Platt shouted. He pounded his hand on a bar. The metal rang. The attendant cursed the pain in his hand. He picked up his stool.

Sparrow's dog lay with its head across its master's belly. The beast growled and bared its teeth without lifting its head. Sparrow was still in the outer fringes of his trance, but his hand stroked the dog back to silence.

The crippled animal tracked Platt with hate-filled eyes.

Platt rang his stool across the bars in a clatter like a bridge falling. "Hey!" he bellowed. "Hey, you legless bastard!"

Sparrow's eyes snapped fully open. For an instant, the smith's expression was the same as that of his dog. His face calmed in quick stages, as though control overlaid hatred in a series of nictitating membranes.

Platt stepped back from the bars and belched. He tried to squeeze another dribble from the stolen wineskin. Scarcely enough remained to wet the tip of his tongue. He threw the container down in anger.

Sparrow stroked the head and neck of his dog. "What are you doing with wine, Platt?" the smith asked. His tone held no more emotion than the sound of a distant landslide.

"None of your business, is it?" Platt shrilled. The question had surfaced fear in his drunken mind like a shark slicing up from murky seas.

He turned and picked up the wineskin, then paused for a moment to regain his balance. At last he plunged the container deep within his slops bucket. It would stay there unnoticed until he had a chance to empty the bucket unobserved in the community cesspool.

Platt stared again at the prisoner he attended. "What I wanna know . . ." he said.

He blinked and glanced down at his hands. After a moment, he wiped them on his breeches.

"What I wanna know," he resumed as he traced the thread of his intention, "is why you do it? Make the stuff. Seeings they treat you like shit."

Platt belched again. He caught the bars to keep from failing down.

The dog growled. Platt stared owlishly at his hand, then removed it with care from the metal.

You didn't cling to the bars of a bear's cage. Not even if the bear had been hamstrung.

"Seein' as they treat you worsen 'n they treat me," the attendant muttered. "And they treat me like shit."

Sparrow sat up; his dog perked sharply onto its haunches and front legs. It was not immediately obvious that either of them was crippled.

The smith smoothed the dross away from the piece on which he had been working in his trance. Some of the rocks crumbled to grit and dust as he touched them.

Bits of the crystals forming the rocks' structure had been rearranged into the core of a metal/ceramic/metal sandwich: the left calf of a battlesuit. Scrap metal—a broken scythe, a worn plow coulter, a grill from the palace kitchen which long use had warped and thinned—had been added to the pile. Most of the metal had vanished into the sheathing of the workpiece which Sparrow withdrew from the dross and eyed critically.

"You think I should refuse to work for King Hermann, do you?" the smith asked in a voice too flat to be calm.

"I didn't say that!" Platt cried.

He hadn't said it, the wine had been talking; and anyway, he'd deny the words with the experience born of a life of lying denials.

Sparrow set the workpiece down and laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. "Are you worried I'll tell the king?" he said. "Who would believe me?"

Of course, who would believe that crippled husk?

"And besides," the smith continued with a smile as brutal as his laughter, "you're too useful to be chopped for what you spew when you're drunk. A slave would run away if they kept him like they do you—"

The smile again. "—but the king knows that if you ever leave the protection of his palace, there's a hundred men waiting to kill you in the slowest way they can think of. See how useful you are?"

Sparrow's fingers caressed the upper ball of the armor's knee joint. He would form the thigh piece in a few hours. The join would be so perfect that only the creator himself would know where one section stopped and the other began.

But even Sparrow needed rest and food.

He looked in his bowl for the remainder of his noon feeding. The crust and porridge were only a memory.

A hog thighbone had arrived the night before with some fat and skin. The bone remained, lying between the dog's forepaws. The animal's jaws had worried but could not crack the dense bone. He whined hopefully as his master lifted the thighbone.

"Tell them I need more food," Sparrow said. "The Matrix is cold. . . ."

Sparrow's mouth trembled with the memory. He controlled it. "If they want the work out of me, they'll have to feed me better."

"You'll get whatever the king chooses to send you, crippled scum!" Platt cried in an attempt to assert the authority both men knew he lacked.

"They will send me more food," Sparrow said.

His right thumb pressed against the ball of the hog thigh which snapped like an arc breaking. The shaft of the bone splintered between his palm and fingers.

"Not because they love me," the smith continued with his eyes focused on his attendant's. "But because they want what I make."

Sparrow smiled. He opened his right palm and gave one of the bone fragments to his dog. He put another in his own mouth and began to suck the marrow.

"So they must feed me," he concluded.

"I . . ." Platt said. He was suddenly very queasy. He could steal wine only rarely, and there was no place to hide a part-finished container. He'd drunk his spoils too quickly.

"You tell them yourself when they come next," Platt said in the bitterness of sudden self-realization. "They won't listen to me, whatever I say."

Sparrow picked out another splinter for the dog. It growled in anticipation.

"You want to know why I work for King Hermann?" the smith said with his usual lack of affect. "Because in the Matrix—"

Platt knelt and began to vomit, onto the floor and onto the tumble of his own bedding. The spasms wracked him as though they were trying to bring his bowels up through his throat.

"—I'm not a slave any more, Platt," Sparrow continued.

The smith smiled, but his dog drew away from him with a sudden yelp of concern.

"In the Matrix, I'm free," said Sparrow in a harsh, terrible voice. "And there are no walls around me!"