The Forge of Truth

The grey light of a winter morning found Constable Broadmoor at the window of the Blue Room, his breath misting against the cold glass as he stared out across the frost-touched grounds of Jeffries Manor. Sleep had come poorly and departed early, leaving him with the gritty exhaustion of a man who had spent the night wrestling with dreams that refused to release their grip. The scorch mark on the carpet behind him seemed to pulse with presence even now, in the pale dawn, as though whatever had made it remained somehow aware of his vigil.

His pocket watch still refused to run, its hands frozen at a quarter past nine. He had wound it twice more since waking, but the mechanism remained stubbornly silent. A minor frustration under ordinary circumstances — but nothing about these circumstances was ordinary, and Broadmoor found himself unable to dismiss even small peculiarities as coincidence.

The morning's task awaited him, and it promised to be difficult. During the previous evening, while reviewing his notes by candlelight, Thomas Whitfield had brought word that one of the convicts had information pertaining to the investigation. The butler's manner had been hesitant, almost reluctant, as though delivering news he would rather have kept to himself. Nathaniel Blackburn, the estate's blacksmith, had been asking to speak with the constable — had been asking since the morning after the disappearance, according to Thomas, but the household's chaos had delayed the message reaching its intended recipient.

Broadmoor had questioned Thomas about the blacksmith, learning that Blackburn was a man of some notoriety among the convict population. Intelligent, literate, possessed of a temper that had landed him in Van Diemen's Land in the first place. A man who had clashed with William Jeffries on more than one occasion, most recently just two days before the master's disappearance. The confrontation, Thomas said, had been heard throughout the manor — raised voices, accusations of theft, threats that had made the household staff exchange uneasy glances.

Such a man warranted careful questioning. And such a man, Broadmoor reflected as he turned from the window to prepare for the day, might possess exactly the kind of insight this investigation required.

The path to the stables led Broadmoor past the forge, its chimney cold and smokeless on this winter morning. The structure stood adjacent to the main stable block, a practical arrangement that allowed the blacksmith to serve both the estate's agricultural needs and the horses' requirements for shoeing and equipment repair. Frost clung to the grass on either side of the gravel path, and Broadmoor's breath plumed before him as he walked, each exhalation a small ghost quickly dispersed by the still air.

Jeremiah Blaylock awaited him at the stable entrance, the master builder's face set in lines of grim resignation. Blaylock was forty-one years old, a Yorkshireman whose steady hands had shaped every stone of the manor that rose behind them. Broadmoor had spoken with him briefly on the first day of the investigation and had found him to be a man of careful words and evident integrity — though there had been something guarded in his manner, some weight he carried that he had not chosen to share.

"Constable," Blaylock greeted him, his voice carrying the flat vowels of his northern origins. "The prisoner is secured inside. I should tell you — there's been bad blood between Blackburn and the master these past months. Whatever he says, you'd do well to consider the source."

Broadmoor nodded, noting the warning while filing away his own observations. Blaylock's loyalty to the Jeffries family was evident, yet there was strain in the lines around his eyes, a tension in his shoulders that suggested his own relationship with William had not been entirely harmonious. Something to explore later, perhaps — but for now, the blacksmith awaited.

"Thank you, Mr Blaylock. I'll bear that in mind."

The stable's interior was dim and cool, the familiar scents of horse and hay and leather creating an atmosphere far removed from the manor's oppressive grandeur. Shafts of pale morning light filtered through high windows, illuminating motes of dust that drifted through the air like suspended fragments of some larger dissolution. The horses in their stalls were quiet, their large eyes following Broadmoor's progress with the patient watchfulness of creatures who had learned that human affairs rarely concerned them.

In the furthest stall, seated upon a bale of hay with his wrists bound before him, sat Nathaniel Blackburn.

The blacksmith was younger than Broadmoor had expected — twenty-four or twenty-five at most, though the lines around his eyes and the scars marking his face suggested a life that had aged him beyond his years. He was powerfully built, his shoulders and arms bearing the developed musculature of a man who had spent years working metal at the forge. His dark hair, longer than regulation allowed, had been tied back from a face that might have been handsome before violence had left its marks upon it. But it was his eyes that caught Broadmoor's attention — piercing blue, burning with an intelligence and defiance that the shackles around his wrists could not diminish.

"Constable Broadmoor," Nathaniel said as the constable approached, his voice a low rasp that seemed to emerge from somewhere deep in his broad chest. "I've been waiting to speak with you."

"So I understand." Broadmoor settled onto an upturned crate across from the prisoner, withdrawing his notebook from his coat. The wood creaked beneath his weight, a homely sound that seemed to anchor him in mundane reality. "You have information about Mr Jeffries's disappearance?"

"Information." Nathaniel's laugh was bitter, a harsh bark that made the nearest horse shift uneasily in its stall. "Aye, Constable, I have information. Whether you'll believe it is another matter entirely."

Broadmoor met the blacksmith's gaze steadily. "I'm here to listen, Mr Blackburn. What you tell me, and how I assess it, will depend on the telling."

For a long moment, the two men regarded one another — the constable with his notebook and pencil, the convict with his shackled hands and burning eyes. Something passed between them, an acknowledgement perhaps that the usual rules governing such encounters had been suspended by circumstances neither fully understood.

"You'll have heard about my quarrel with the master," Nathaniel began, his voice dropping to a register that compelled Broadmoor to lean closer. "Two days before he vanished. He accused me of stealing iron stock from the forge — said I was fashioning weapons for an uprising." Another bitter laugh. "As if a few iron bars could overthrow a colony."

"And were you? Stealing iron?"

Nathaniel's jaw tightened. "I took nothing that wasn't owed me. But that's not what you need to hear, Constable. That quarrel — it was nothing. A pretext. The master was looking for reasons to be angry, looking for something to distract himself from what was really eating at him."

"Which was?"

The blacksmith's hands, resting in his lap, began to tremble — a fine vibration that seemed to originate not from fear but from something deeper, some memory that his body could not contain. "I worked late most nights these past weeks. The master had me forging things. Special commissions, he called them. Paid me extra to keep quiet about what I was making."

Broadmoor's pencil paused above the page. "What manner of things?"

"Symbols." Nathaniel's voice had dropped further still, barely above a whisper now. "Iron symbols, intricate as anything I've ever forged. Curves and angles that didn't follow any pattern I recognised — that hurt my eyes to look at too long, like staring at something the mind wasn't meant to comprehend." His hands moved instinctively, as though shaping the air before him, only to be brought up short by his bonds.

"Can you describe these symbols more precisely?"

Nathaniel shook his head slowly. "I've tried. God help me, I've tried to draw them from memory, but every time I set pencil to paper, the lines slip away from me. It's like trying to remember a dream — you know the shape of it, the feel of it, but the details won't hold still."

Broadmoor made careful note of this, his mind working through connections. The strange books in William's study, covered in symbols that made the head ache. The residue Thomas had found, with its metallic sheen. The geometric patterns on the window glass. And now iron symbols forged in secret, patterns that defied memory itself.

"And what became of these symbols? Where did you take them when they were completed?"

"To the master's study." Nathaniel's face had gone pale beneath its weathered tan. "The night before our quarrel — the seventh of August, it was. I finished the last of them near midnight and brought them to him as instructed. The study door was closed, but I could hear voices within. The master's voice, and... another."

"Another? Who?"

The blacksmith's eyes darted around the stable, as though expecting the walls themselves to be listening. When he spoke again, his voice had taken on a quality Broadmoor had not heard before — the tremor of a man recounting something that had shaken the very foundations of his understanding.

"I don't know who he was — what he was. Tall, taller than any man I've ever seen. Cloaked and hooded, his face hidden in shadow. But his voice..." Nathaniel shuddered visibly, his chains rattling with the movement. "It wasn't natural, Constable. It sounded like metal being dragged across stone, like something that shouldn't have been able to speak at all forcing words through a throat not made for human language."

The description aligned too closely with what Thomas had told him — the metallic voice heard through the study door, the visitor who came and went without being seen to enter or leave. Broadmoor felt a chill settle into his bones that had nothing to do with the winter morning.

"What did you hear them say?"

Nathaniel's hands clenched in his lap, the knuckles whitening. "I stood outside that door like a man frozen. I should have left — every instinct screamed at me to flee — but I couldn't move. And I heard..." He drew a shaking breath. "They spoke of gates. Of gates opening. Of powers beyond mortal understanding, and prices that must be paid."

"Gates?" Broadmoor pressed. "What kind of gates?"

"I don't know. But the stranger — the thing — it spoke of boundaries between worlds growing thin, of appointed times when passage became possible. And it said that the master had a part to play. A sacrifice to make."

The word hung in the air between them, heavy with implications that Broadmoor's rational mind struggled to accommodate.

"And how did Mr Jeffries respond to this talk of sacrifice?"

Something shifted in Nathaniel's expression — disgust, perhaps, or fear, or some combination of both that defied simple categorisation. "He was eager, Constable. Eager as a child promised a gift. He spoke of having prepared for years, of having gathered what was needed, of being ready at last to receive what he was owed." The blacksmith's voice cracked. "And his eyes... I caught a glimpse through the gap in the door. His eyes weren't right. They glowed, Constable. Glowed with a light that had no earthly source."

Broadmoor sat in silence for a long moment, his pencil still against the page. The rational part of his mind — the part trained by years of naval discipline and colonial law enforcement — rebelled against what he was hearing. Yet another part, some deeper faculty awakened by the strange events of the past days, recognised truth in the blacksmith's trembling account.

"What happened then?"

"I fled." Nathaniel's voice was flat with the admission. "I ran back to my quarters like a frightened child and barred the door behind me. I didn't sleep that night — couldn't sleep. I lay there in the dark, listening for footsteps, for that terrible voice, for whatever came next." He raised his eyes to meet Broadmoor's gaze. "The next morning, I half convinced myself I'd imagined it all. Fever dreams brought on by working too long at the forge. But then came our quarrel, and the master's rage, and I knew — I knew something had changed in him. Whatever bargain he'd struck with that creature, it had cost him something of himself."

"And the night of his disappearance? The ninth?"

"I was in my quarters, reading a letter from my brother in Birmingham. I have it still — you can check the date it arrived, check the postmarks. I didn't leave my room all night." Nathaniel's voice had steadied somewhat, the recitation of alibi restoring some of his composure. "Whatever took the master, it wasn't me. But I know this much, Constable — William Jeffries didn't simply vanish. He went somewhere. He walked through one of those gates he and that creature spoke of, and wherever he is now, it's nowhere on God's earth."

Broadmoor closed his notebook slowly, feeling the weight of everything he had heard pressing against the boundaries of his understanding. The testimony was impossible — gates between worlds, creatures with metallic voices, men whose eyes glowed with unholy light. Yet it aligned too closely with what others had witnessed, what he himself had seen in the Blue Room and the study, to be dismissed as mere fabrication.

"Mr Blackburn," he said carefully, "you must understand how this account will sound to others. A convict's word against a respectable citizen, tales of supernatural visitations and otherworldly bargains — these are not the foundations upon which cases are built."

Nathaniel's laugh was hollow. "You think I don't know that, Constable? I'm a branded man, transported for violence, known throughout this estate for my quarrels with the very person who's now vanished. I could tell you the sky was blue and half the colony would swear I was lying." He leaned forward, his eyes boring into Broadmoor's. "But I'm telling you the truth. Whatever you choose to do with it, that's your affair. Just know this — there are forces at work here that don't care about evidence or alibis or the difference between free men and convicts. Forces that were old when this land was young, and that will be here long after all of us are dust."

The interrogation continued for another hour, Broadmoor pressing for details, clarifications, anything that might anchor the blacksmith's account to verifiable reality. Nathaniel described the symbols he had forged in greater detail — their approximate size, the way the iron had behaved strangely under his hammer, the heat that had seemed to emanate from the finished pieces as though they contained some internal fire. He spoke of William's increasingly erratic behaviour in the weeks before the disappearance, the midnight visitors, the letters sealed with crimson wax that the master would snatch from Thomas's hands and spirit away to his study.

Much of it aligned with what Broadmoor had already learned. The consistency troubled him in ways that contradictory testimony would not have — either multiple witnesses were telling the truth about events that defied rational explanation, or some elaborate deception was being orchestrated that implicated nearly everyone connected to the estate.

When at last he rose to leave, his notebook filled with cramped handwriting that would take hours to properly review, Nathaniel called after him.

"Constable."

Broadmoor turned. The blacksmith's face had changed — the defiance giving way to something that looked almost like concern.

"Be careful," Nathaniel said. "The room they put you in — the Blue Room. It's not safe. I've felt it when I walked past, that wrongness in the air. Whatever happened there, it left a mark that hasn't healed."

"How do you know which room I'm in?"

A ghost of a smile crossed Nathaniel's scarred features. "Convicts hear everything, Constable. The walls in this place have ears, and those ears gossip amongst themselves." The smile faded. "Just... be careful. The master thought he understood what he was dealing with. He thought he could control it, use it for his own purposes. Look where that got him."

Broadmoor held the blacksmith's gaze for a long moment, then nodded once and walked out into the winter morning.

The path back to the manor seemed longer than it had on the outward journey, each step weighted with the accumulation of impossible testimony. The frost had begun to melt in patches where the strengthening sun reached the ground, but the air remained cold, sharp with the scent of eucalyptus and damp earth.

Jeremiah Blaylock fell into step beside him as he passed the forge, the master builder's expression carefully neutral.

"Get what you needed, Constable?"

"I'm not certain what I need any longer, Mr Blaylock." Broadmoor glanced at the older man, noting again the tension in his frame, the shadows beneath his eyes. "You built this manor. You've served the Jeffries family for years. What do you make of all this?"

Blaylock was silent for several paces, his boots crunching on the gravel path. When he spoke, his voice was low, meant only for Broadmoor's ears.

"I'm a practical man, Constable. I believe in what my hands can build and my eyes can see. But I'll tell you this — there's been something wrong in this house for months now. Something I couldn't put a name to, but felt in my bones every time I walked these corridors." He paused, his weathered face turned toward the manor that rose before them. "I built these walls. I know every stone, every beam, every nail. And lately, it's felt like they're not mine anymore. Like something else has moved in, something that doesn't belong."

"Did you tell Mr Jeffries of your concerns?"

A bitter edge crept into Blaylock's voice. "I tried. The morning before he vanished, I went to him about a missing shipment — materials we needed for repairs. He flew into a rage, accused me of negligence, of theft, of every failing he could think of. Dismissed me from his service on the spot." His jaw tightened. "Thirty years I've given to this family's interests, and he threw me out like a dishonest servant."

"Yet you're still here."

"Mrs Jeffries asked me to stay. To help manage the estate until the matter is resolved." Blaylock's voice softened slightly. "She's a good woman, Constable. Whatever her husband was involved in, she deserves better than to face it alone."

They walked in silence the rest of the way to the manor, two men burdened by knowledge they could neither fully accept nor entirely dismiss.

As Broadmoor climbed the steps to the manor's entrance, he paused to look back over the grounds. The forge stood silent, its chimney cold. The stables where Nathaniel Blackburn sat in chains were hidden from view. And beyond it all, the forest waited — ancient, patient, indifferent to the small dramas of men who thought they could master forces they did not understand.

Whatever had happened to William Jeffries, Broadmoor was increasingly certain that conventional investigation would not suffice to uncover the truth. Gates between worlds. Creatures with metallic voices. Iron symbols forged in secret, their patterns slipping from memory like water through fingers.

He had entered this case expecting to find a crime — murder, perhaps, or abduction, or even voluntary flight from creditors or scandal. What he was finding instead was something far stranger, far more unsettling, far more difficult to accommodate within the orderly frameworks his training had provided.

The manor's door opened before him, and he stepped inside, leaving the pale winter sunlight behind. The shadows of the entrance hall reached out to receive him, and somewhere in the depths of the house, he could have sworn he heard a sound — faint and distant, like metal dragged across stone.

But when he stopped to listen, there was nothing. Only the silence of a house that had learned to keep its secrets.