Chapter 5: Fires of Creation
The armory wasn’t a room; it was a cathedral to obsolete violence. The cold here was different from the throne room—drier, smelling of old iron, frozen leather, and the faint, sharp tang of refined ice used as lubricant. Vaulted ceilings disappeared into gloom, the stone faces of kings staring down with frost-blind eyes. Racks of weapons lined the walls, greatswords with notched blades, halberds with split hafts. In the center, on a dais, sat an obsidian throne etched with a serpent and moon, looking less like furniture and more like an altar.
Ellie and Nancy hung back, their hands clasped. Nancy reached out to touch a war hammer’s leather grip, her fingers tracing the decay. “There’s a sadness to them,” she murmured. “Like retired warriors.”
“Or failed ones,” Mary said, her voice flat. She was already moving past the history to the function, her eyes cataloging flaws.
The Lord who led us here, a man named Kaelen with a physique like a bear and a surprisingly gentle voice, gestured with a thick arm toward the far wall. “Our newest… pride,” he said, a hint of uncertainty beneath the boast.
It was a cannon. Or a sculpture pretending to be one. A massive iron tube, banded with rusting steel, resting on a crude wooden carriage with solid wheels. It looked like something dragged from a shipwreck.
Amy and I approached it. My fingers itched. This was the problem, made manifest.
“Smoothbore,” Mary said, stating the obvious. She knocked on the iron. It made a dull, thudding sound. “Cast iron. Poor quality. Thickness is inconsistent—look here, the swell near the trunnions is heavier. Stress concentration point.”
“Muzzle-loading,” I added, squatting to peer down the bore. It was pitted and dark. “You’d stuff in bagged powder, a wad, then the projectile. Rate of fire? Maybe two rounds every three minutes, if your crew doesn’t faint from the cold. Accuracy?” I stood up, brushing frost from my knees. “A prayer.”
Kaelen’s face had fallen. “It was forged by our finest smiths. It can throw a stone ball the weight of a man three hundred paces.”
“It can also explode and kill the men serving it,” I said, not unkindly. It was just physics. “The design is five hundred years out of date.”
Ellie drifted closer, her artist’s eyes seeing the form. “The shape has a certain brutal grace, though. The curves… it’s like the spine of a metal whale.”
“A dead whale,” Mary muttered, but she shot Ellie a small, fond look. Ellie’s perspective always found the other angle.
“We need paper. Charcoal. Now,” I said to Kaelen.
They brought us a rough-hewn table, parchment made from some thick, leathery lichen, and sticks of sharpened graphite. The courtly pretense fell away. This was home. Mary and I stood shoulder to shoulder, the world narrowing to the space between our moving hands.
“Start with the shell,” I said, my voice low. “Self-contained. Brass casing. Here’s the primer, the propellant charge, the projectile.”
My charcoal flew. I sketched the cross-section, the geometry clean and lethal. “Breech-loading. A threaded screw mechanism here, strong, simple. Allows the crew to load from the relative safety of the rear, without having to run around to the front and ram things down a hot barrel.”
Mary took over, her lines precise. “The barrel. Steel. Not iron. We’ll need a new furnace, a different alloy recipe. Rifled. Spiral grooves inside to spin the projectile for stability and range.” She drew the interior detailing. “No more stone balls. We make shells. Different types for different problems.”
Our dialogue became a swift, technical shorthand, a duet only we understood.
“High-explosive, for structures and personnel. Thinner steel casing, a bursting charge inside. Impact fuse.”
“Shrapnel, for open-field troop formations. Timed fuse, set to airburst.”
“Armor-piercing, for fortified gates or… whatever they have. Hardened steel core, delayed base fuse.”
“Calibre?” Mary asked, looking up.
I calculated. Supply chain, weight, versatility. “One-five-five millimeter. Roughly six inches. Big enough to matter, small enough to be mobile with a proper carriage. We’ll design a split-trail system with spoked, iron-rimmed wheels. Grant recoil absorption, quick repositioning.”
We weren't just drawing a weapon. We were drawing a new doctrine of war. A factory. A supply line. A mathematics of destruction.
Ellie and Nancy had come to watch, a quiet presence at our backs. I could feel Ellie’s warmth. Nancy’s breath on my neck as she leaned in.
“It’s awful,” Nancy whispered, looking at the detailed sketch of a shrapnel shell’s dispersal pattern.
“It is,” I said, not stopping. “And it will keep our people alive. Theirs will die farther away.”
Kaelen stood watching, his initial defensiveness replaced by dawning, terrified comprehension. He was seeing the future, and it was a set of blueprints.
I finished the last notation, pointing at the finished schematic. It was no longer a crude tube. It was a complex, elegant machine. “This is a howitzer. It can fire four, five rounds a minute. It can hit a target two miles away. It will crack the walls of the Iron Marches like eggshells.”
Silence hung in the frigid air, broken only by the distant drip of meltwater.
“Can you build it?” Ellie asked. Her voice was quiet, but it held the full weight of the throne.
Mary met her mother’s gaze, then mine. A current passed between us—practical, fierce, understood.
“We’ll need to see the forges,” I said, rolling up the parchment. The weight of it in my hand felt good. It was a plan. A lever. “We’ll need the best smiths, the chemists, the miners. We’ll need to tear down that,” I nodded at the old cannon, “and melt it for scrap.”
Ellie placed a hand on my shoulder, her touch a brand through the wool of my tunic. “Then tear it down.”
She looked from me to Mary, her expression a complex map of love, horror, and necessity. “Start tomorrow. The kingdom’s swords are in your hands now. Don’t just overhaul them.”
Her fingers squeezed.
“Make them unforgettable.”