The Heart of the Sands, Book 3 of The Gods Within (29 page)

He threw her over his shoulder, and somewhere between the
rock shelf and the horses she lost consciousness.

~~~

The crypt embraced
the silence of the dead for a time, and then the bones of the skeleton king
shimmered and glowed with an ancient light. The shattered throne came together,
its bits and pieces reassembling as if it had never been damaged. The
tapestries reformed as well, though they remained moth-eaten and old. The armor
and arms returned to their ancient resting places. Then the bones of the skeleton
king slid across the floor, and one by one reformed in the shape they’d
held for centuries. And once again the skeleton king sat upon his throne, one
arm resting casually on an armrest, the other on the hilt of the great sword.

Once again his flesh
reformed, the face filled out, the eyes were no longer pits of shadow but pools
of sorrow and mercy, and the king was once again a king of life and health,
seated upon his throne dressed in a suit of golden mail and glimmering silk and
rich leather. The tapestries on the walls shone with the brilliance of their
colors again, and the assorted trappings of arms and armor were clean and
bright once more.

He stood, this young
and vibrant king, and crossed the room to the body of Lord Mortal lying in the
middle of the crypt. The poor fellow’s body had fleshed out and
was no longer a shriveled skeleton. The king stood over him and looked at him
carefully, and he said, “Thrice, we have come to this, Lord
Mortal. Thrice now, I must torment you with life. I know you understand not the
reason for such blooding, but without it we are all doomed to a future of
slavery and degradation.”

He knelt, rested a hand on the wound in the warrior’s
side. With each healing Lord Mortal grew more reluctant to return, and too,
this third time crossed a certain threshold, a boundary beyond which control of
this mortal would quickly diminish.

Lord Mortal gasped, coughed out a gobbet of clotted blood
and sucked a breath of air into his lungs. But he quickly quieted and remained
unconscious, breathing raggedly and unevenly.

The young king stood, looked down upon his handiwork and
asked, “Did you ever find your true name, Lord Mortal?”

He considered the poor fellow at his feet. “No,
I suppose you didn’t. But you must, you know, for without it you
will suffer a fate far worse than all of us.”

He sighed, turned about and returned to his throne, sat
down upon it and looked at the unconscious Lord Mortal who lay sucking in
ragged breaths of air. The young king nodded, as if acknowledging a painful and
difficult task finally completed. He spoke, his voice a faint whisper, “And
so must a blade be born.”

He rested one arm
casually on an armrest and the other on the hilt of the great sword. Then
slowly, inevitably, the decay returned. The tapestries lost their brilliance
and the weaponry lost its shine. The king, powerful and majestic in life, was
once more a skeleton of brittle bone and rotted flesh.

The End

Here ends
The Heart of the Sands
, the third book of
The Gods Within
, in which Morgin has learned the heart of the
Benesh’ere and tasted the magic of steel. In the fourth book,
The Name of the Sword
, Morgin must save Rhianne and France if he is to save himself.

Don’t
miss
The Name of the Sword
, the exciting conclusion of
The Gods Within
. Go
to the author’s web site (www.jldoty.com) for status reports and
updates. He’ll also be posting sample chapters there in early
2014.

The author has also
constructed a Dramatis Personae for each of the first three books in
The Gods Within
,
and posted it on his web site.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Durelle Kurlinski for
fixing all my dotted t’s and crossed i’s, Kelley
Eskridge for helping me turn an ok manuscript into something I can be really
proud of, and Steve Himes, and the whole team at Telemachus, for getting a
quality product out the door.

Some Notes About Steel

The author spent a considerable amount of time
researching old and new methods of making steel, though he does not purport to
be an expert in any way. And if he has made any mistakes, he would appreciate
hearing about them.

Pure iron is a fairly soft metal, and as Salula pointed
out, will not hold an edge well. Add carbon to it, and it gets harder—it
becomes steel; the more carbon added, the harder it gets, and the better the
edge it will hold. But if too much carbon is added, the steel becomes brittle,
and a long, thin blade like a sword could easily break, or shatter on impact. So
a sword smith must draw a careful balance between enough carbon to provide a
hard edge, but not so much that the blade shatters during a fight.

An alternative approach is to make the backbone of a blade
using steel with less carbon that is more flexible, then wrap a layer of
high-carbon steel around it that will hold a good edge. In this way, the sword
smith can make a blade with an extremely hard edge, but flexible enough to
maintain its integrity on impact. Morgin alludes to this technique when
Chagarin tests his knowledge of steel.

Sulfur, in very controlled, small amounts can make steel
easier to machine, but too much will make it extremely brittle. Hence, Morgin’s
comment that one of the steel blooms had been “. . . fired
or smelted with stink coal, coal contaminated with the yellow earth.”

Chromium is added to make stainless steel, steel that is
resistant to oxidation. The iron in simple carbon steel can oxidize when
exposed to oxygen and water vapor, producing hydrated iron oxide: rust. Rust is
active and accelerates corrosion by forming thick layers of iron oxide which
then flake away. The addition of chromium impurities (as much as 11%) allows
the steel to produce a chromium oxide layer on the surface that is passive. Due
to the similar size of the steel and oxide ions they bond very strongly,
producing a microscopically thin protective layer of chromium oxide that doesn’t
progress.
Stainless
steel is not truly stainless;
it can be discolored in many ways. But the thin chromium oxide layer isolates
the iron in the steel from oxygen and water vapor, preventing the active
formation of rust.

Iron ore is a mixture of rocks and minerals that contain
high concentrations of about five different types of iron oxides. Smelting is
the process of extracting the iron from those oxides and removing other
contaminants in the ore. It uses heat and a chemical reducing agent (usually
some source of carbon) to drive off undesired elements as gasses or slag,
yielding raw iron or steel. Coke, and in times past charcoal, is most often
used as the reducing agent. Coke, derived from coal, and charcoal, derived from
wood, are produced by burning off all volatile elements, leaving behind
relatively pure carbon. If simple coal or wood is used to smelt or forge steel,
the presence of the volatile elements can contaminate the iron, producing an
inferior grade of steel.

An experienced smith can control the contaminants in the
steel by controlling the contaminants in his flame. Residual oxygen in the
flame can combine with carbon in the steel to reduce the carbon content,
driving it off in the form of carbon dioxide. But residual oxygen can also combine
with the iron in the steel to produce iron oxide, which can result in seriously
inferior steel. Conversely, residual carbon in the flame, with no residual
oxygen present, can increase the carbon content of steel. Hence, Morgin’s
comments about adjusting the hardness of the pig iron and mild steel when
Chagarin tested his knowledge.

Only a knowledgeable and experienced smith can
successfully make use of these techniques.

Other Books Available by J. L.
Doty

A Choice of Treasons
(hard
science fiction)

To save himself, he first had to save two empires . . .
but when he tried, his options were limited to a choice of treasons.

As a lifer in the Imperial Navy, York Ballin’s
only hope at an honorable discharge is the grave. Matters only get worse when
he finds himself deep behind enemy lines on a commandeered imperial cruiser
without a trained crew, commanded by an incompetent nobleman, with the empress
and 200 civilians as passengers, and everyone hell-bent on turning them into a
cloud of radioactive vapor.

The Thirteenth Man
(hard
science fiction)

Beware the curse of the thirteenth man, for should he
not fall, all may fall before him.

Charlie Cass returns from five years in a squalid POW
camp to find the nine Dukes and the King conspiring against each other, and
plotting with Charlie’s old enemies. As interstellar war looms, he’s
forced to assume the mantle of the thirteenth Duke de Lunis, who, according to
legend, is destined to fall beneath the headsman’s ax. But if he
can survive the headsman, all may fall before him.

Child of the Sword
, Book
1 of
The Gods Within
(epic fantasy)

When gods and wizards go to war . . . it’s
best to just find a good shadow and hide.

Rat is no ordinary thief. A feral, filthy and
malnourished child; he survives on what he can steal. But he creates his own
shadows and hides within them, though he’s completely unaware of
his use of magic. When a clan of powerful wizards see his shadowmagic they
adopt him, because they want such magic in the clan. Perhaps that’s
a good thing for Rat, as long as they don’t kill him in the
process.

The SteelMaster of Indwallin
,
Book 2 of
The Gods Within
(epic fantasy)

Can one ever rule both the steel within, and the shadows
without?

When Morgin’s sword goes berserk and wants
to butcher everyone at the annual meeting of the Lesser Council, he’s
barely able to control its rabid bloodlust. But the Lesser Council declares him
an outlaw for bringing such a dangerous talisman onto the Mortal Plane. So with
a price on his head he goes on the run, a wizard without power always just one
step ahead of the next bounty hunter.

When Dead Ain’t
Dead Enough
, Book 1 of
The Dead Among Us
(contemporary
fantasy)

The dead should ever rest in peace, but when dead ain’t
dead enough, the living should fear for their mortal souls.

Paul Conklin is a rather ordinary, thirtyish fellow,
sharing his ordinary, present-day San Francisco apartment with the ghosts of
his dead wife and daughter. Suzanna’s cooking for him again, and
Cloe’s bouncing around the apartment in her school uniform, and
things are almost back to normal. But a piece of Paul realizes he’s
really bug-fuck nuts, or at least that’s what he thinks. He has no
idea that a Primus caste demon from the Netherworld covets his soul, and that
he’s going to have to take a crash course in killing big, bad
hoodoo demons, or lose his soul for all eternity.

Still Not Dead Enough
,
Book 2 of
The Dead Among Us
(contemporary
fantasy)

When the dead refuse to rest in peace, perhaps they just
need a helping hand.

Now that it’s clear Paul isn’t
a demon, he hopes he’ll no longer be a target, but he quickly
learns otherwise. The Russians want him dead on general principal. The Sidhe
have no souls, so they’re not really alive, and Paul may have
added power over them, which they don’t like. And the Summer
Knight, Anogh, is pulling strings in the background, manipulating everything
concerning Paul and Katherine.

About the Author

Jim was born in Seattle, but he’s lived most
of his life in California, though he did live on the east coast and in Europe
for a while. From a very early age he made up stories in his head, but he never
considered writing. In his family you went to college, got a degree in
something useful and got a real job. So he got a Ph.D. in optical engineering,
and went to work as a research scientist. But he was still making up those
stories in his head, so he wrote the first draft of
A
Choice of Treasons
, and as he says, “It was 250,000 words
of pure, unmitigated crap. It was terrible: poorly written, poorly plotted,
shallow characters that no reader could come to care about. It was the hardest
decision I ever made, but I literally threw it away and turned to other
projects.” He spent more than a year writing the first draft of
Child of the Sword
. Then he went back to
A Choice of Treasons
and started again, from scratch, a
complete rewrite from the get-go. He worked on it for several years before
releasing it, and also spent some years putting
Child of
the Sword
through a number of rewrites to insure quality.

Science has always been a passion of Jim’s,
but writing is an addiction. He’s finished seven books now, and is
working on a prequel to
A Choice of Treasons
, the
third book in
The Dead Among Us
, and the fourth
and final book in
The Gods Within
.

Jim has a big pet peeve regarding lasers as weapons in
science fiction. He spent decades working in the laser and electro-optics
industry, even did some research on laser weapons in the 80’s. And
when writers use a laser as a weapon in a story, they invariably get it wrong,
usually by violating some basic law of physics.

Jim intends to keep on writing and producing more stories,
but no laser weapons.

Visit the author’s
website at
http://www.jldoty.com

Contact the author at
[email protected]

Follow the author on Twitter at
http://www.twitter.com/@JL_Doty