Demon Metal

Heavy as gold with a warmth that can kill, one man might make use of this cursed ore.

The smith’s name was Lu Ban’shadow, though history would later call him simply Lu the Radiant.

He began as no one: a soot-blackened man in the mountains of Shu, hammering ploughshares while the wind screamed through the bamboo like ten thousand ghosts.

One winter the wind refused to stop. It howled for forty nights, and Lu watched his charcoal fires die again and again. In fury he built taller chimneys, then taller still, until he lashed a broken ox-cart wheel to the roof and let the gale itself drive the bellows. The forge roared white. Iron flowed like water. On the third day he added crushed limestone and a handful of strange black sand a traveling merchant had sold him, and the iron came out hard enough to ring like a temple bell.

Steel was born.

Word reached the Son of Heaven. Within a year Lu stood in the capital, master of every forge from the Yellow River to the sea, with ten thousand smiths under his seal. They gave him a palace of brick and bronze and a problem no one else would touch.

They called it Demon Metal.

Seventy winters earlier, in the high valley of Hei-long’s Hollow, a village had burned to death in the middle of the coldest month ever known. When the thaw came, the snow was gone in a perfect circle around one cave mouth. Inside lay a single seam of dull green-yellow stone that steamed in the open air. The villagers had broken it into slabs, carried it home, and set it beneath their heated floors. For nine days the houses stayed warm. On the tenth every man, woman, child, dog, and chicken was dead, faces twisted as if screaming at something only they could see. The snow returned and buried the village forever, except for that one circle of bare earth that never froze again.

The court had sealed the valley and posted warnings. Scholars called the stone a yin poison. Generals wanted nothing to do with it. Then the winters grew longer, the granaries emptier, and the Emperor remembered Lu.

They brought him a single sealed jar the size of a man’s head. Inside, wrapped in lead foil and silk, lay a fist-sized lump that felt like holding the sun through a blanket. Lu’s apprentices dropped dead within the week. Lu himself only lost his hair and the feeling in two fingers, but he learned.

He needed more. Much more.

The first chain of slaves (criminals, debtors, prisoners from the northern frontier) was marched into Hei-long’s Hollow wearing wet straw cloaks soaked in vinegar. They mined with bronze picks because iron sparked too brightly near the stone. They died in dozens, then hundreds. Their bodies were burned far away so the “ghost wind” would not follow. Lu refined the ore in clay retorts, washed it with boiling lye, hammered the yellow cake into metal under sheets of lead. The metal came out heavy as gold and warm forever.

One spring morning an apprentice named Huo (himself a former slave who had lived because he worked slowest) knocked over a crucible. The molten metal spilled into a bowl of water. The water exploded into steam that filled the workshop. Three men fell choking, their skin bubbling. But the clay pipe that carried the steam to the roof came out glowing red, and the great hall beyond stayed warm for a day on a single handful of demon metal.

Lu understood at once.

He built the first Dragon Heart: a nest of demon rods sunk in a cistern of river water, wrapped in lead and fired brick. Pipes of bronze carried the angry steam to every noble house in the capital. That winter the city steamed like a kettle while the countryside froze. Palaces of ice were raised for banquets; the Emperor walked barefoot on heated marble and laughed at the sky.

The appetite grew. One Dragon Heart became ten, then a hundred. The sealed valley could not feed them all. Lu petitioned for more slaves. The Emperor gave him entire provinces.

Wars began small: a raid on the horse peoples, a punitive campaign against the Koreans who would not sell their prisoners. Each victory brought fresh bodies to the mines. The fleet that sailed south in the forty-third year of Lu’s ascendancy carried something new (portable Dragon Hearts no larger than a war elephant, cooled by the sea itself). Their ironclads moved against wind and tide, belching steam instead of smoke, tireless. Cities that had never heard of the Middle Kingdom opened their gates when the steam rams ground against their walls and the marines came ashore in bronze masks, untouched by cold or fatigue.

The world cracked like thin ice.

In the seventy-ninth year after the first wind-forge, Lu (now hairless, toothless, skin the color of old parchment) stood on the walls of the city that had once been Rome and watched the steam banners of his grand-nephew’s fleet crawl up the Tiber. The Emperor sent a single command by courier falcon: Enough. The circle of warmth is wide enough.

Lu the Radiant burned the message and ordered the next mine opened under the mountains the Europeans called the Alps. There was still demon metal there, the prospectors said. Enough for another century of heat.

He died that winter, not from the curse but from simple age. They buried him inside the greatest Dragon Heart yet built, a reactor the size of a palace that warmed the capital for four hundred years after his bones were dust.

The empire he forged lasted nine hundred and eleven years in total.

Its banners showed a black dragon coiled around a circle of unbroken snow.

And everywhere beneath the empire, in mines that went deeper than any grave, the slaves still sang the same song their grandfathers had brought from a hundred conquered nations. No one knows the words anymore, only the tune (slow, hopeless, endless) rising through ventilation shafts that never quite carried the ghost wind away.