Chapter 6: Hammer and Flame
The Royal Forge didn’t sleep. It breathed. Great bellows, worked by teams of men with backs corded like oak roots, sighed and roared, driving air into stone hearths where coals glowed a furious, living orange. The heat hit like a physical wall after the palace’s chill, a dry, punishing warmth that seared the lungs and pulled instant sweat from the skin. The scent was complex: molten metal, charcoal, the sharp bite of quenching oil, and underneath it all, the old, mineral smell of the mountain itself.
Our plans, now smudged with soot and dotted with drops of our sweat, were pinned to a battered wooden board. Mary and I stood at a central anvil, a block of steel so massive it seemed grown from the floor. Around us, the head smiths—men and women with forearms like knotted rope and eyes narrowed from a lifetime of judging fire—waited for translation.
“The steel isn’t right,” Mary shouted over the din, tapping a crucible of molten slurry with a long iron rod. “Too much carbon. It’ll be brittle.”
“We need to alloy it,” I yelled back. “Add a measured amount of chromium. Where’s the manganese ore we sourced?”
A runner brought a bucket of dark, lumpy rock. Theory met practice here, in the smoke and the sparks. We worked side-by-side, our shoulders brushing, our hands moving in synchronized passes as we instructed, demonstrated, took up tools ourselves. The heat melted the professional distance. Soon, we were stripped down to tunics and breeches, fabric plastered to our bodies, skin gleaming in the hellish light.
Ellie and Nancy arrived sometime past midnight, bearing a kettle of strong, sweet tea and thick rye bread. They moved through the inferno like visiting spirits, their fair skin flushed. Ellie’s eyes traced the lines of my back, the shift of muscle as I hammered a test ingot. There was no disguise in her look, just a frank, warm appreciation that sent a different kind of heat through me.
“You’ll exhaust yourselves,” Ellie said, placing a cool hand on the back of my neck.
“It’s a deadline that moves toward us,” I said, not stopping. “The Iron Marches aren’t waiting for us to get the metallurgy perfect.”
Nancy handed Mary a cup. “It’s starting to look like your drawings,” she said, nodding toward the rough, cylindrical form beginning to take shape in the main forge. “Uglier, though. Angrier.”
“That’s the spirit,” Mary said, gulping the tea. She gave Nancy a quick, soot-smeared kiss that made Nancy smile, a bright thing in the gloomy heat.
The work was a brutal physics. Heating, hammering, folding. We were not just making a tube; we were weaving a consistent grain structure, eliminating weaknesses. My world shrank to the color of the steel, the sound of the strike, the feel of the hammer in my blistering hands. Mary was my mirror, my second set of eyes, catching a flaw in the temperature gradient I’d missed.
As dawn threatened, a pale bleariness at the high, soot-caked windows, we oversaw the casting of the first proper shell casing. The molten brass poured like liquid sunlight, filling the sand molds with a hissing, golden promise. The smell was acrid, glorious.
Mary wiped her brow with a filthy forearm, leaving a new streak. She gazed at the cooling casings, then at the furnace where the barrel steel now glowed a uniform cherry red, ready for the final shaping.
“You know,” she said, her voice conversational amid the rhythmic hammer blows. “For anti-personnel, in enclosed spaces… we should design white phosphorus shells.”
I paused, the water skin halfway to my lips. I looked at her. Soot darkened the hollows of her cheeks, her short blond hair was plastered to her skull with sweat, but her eyes held a sharp, technical curiosity, utterly devoid of malice. It was the same look she’d had when, as a child, she’d disassembled a clockwork toy to see its heart.
“Taking the war crimes route, then?” I asked, my tone matching hers—light, almost teasing.
She shrugged. “It’s a highly effective incendiary and smoke agent. They have stone fortifications, likely wooden interiors. It’s a logical solution for clearing redoubts.” She met my gaze. “Is the objection moral or logistical?”
I took a long drink. The water was tepid. “Logistical, for now. Phosphorus is a bitch to handle safely. Let’s master high-explosive and shrapnel first. Then we can debate the Geneva Convention equivalents over dinner.”
A faint grin touched her lips. “Deal.”
It wasn’t evil. That was the unsettling part. It was just… engineering. Optimizing a system for maximum output. The output here was death, but the process, the problem-solving, felt as pure and engaging as designing a bridge. The thought left a cold spot in my gut the forge’s heat couldn’t touch.
Finally, as true morning light finally pierced the smoke, it was done.
The howitzer sat in the center of the forge, dwarfing the anvils around it. It was no longer a drawing. It was six tons of dark, oiled steel, still radiating a residual warmth. The rifling inside the barrel gleamed in a precise, spiraling pattern when we peered down it with a lantern. The breech mechanism, a heavy, threaded screw block, opened and closed with a satisfying, heavy clunk-thunk of perfectly machined parts. The carriage, with its two large, spoked wheels and split trail, looked rugged and ready to move.
We stood there, the four of us, surrounded by the exhausted, silent smiths. The only sounds were the crackle of dying fires and the hiss of steam from quenching barrels.
Ellie slipped her hand into mine. Her fingers were clean, soft against my cracked, burnt skin. “It’s terrible,” she whispered, her eyes tracing the brutal, functional lines. “And beautiful. You built a song no one should ever have to hear.”
Mary leaned against Nancy, her energy spent. “The first note is always the loudest,” she said.
The weapon sat there, dormant, full of a silent, potential violence. We had built a door. Tomorrow, we would open it and see what lay on the other side.