Chapter 57: Royal Emergency
The throne room’s echo felt like a lifetime ago. Here, in the Royal Armoury, the silence was a different beast—sharp, metallic, and waiting.
The cavernous hall swallowed sound and light with equal appetite. Frost etched delicate, persistent patterns across blackened steel breastplates and silver-edged greatswords that hung on walls like frozen trophies. The floor, a sheet of polished ice over ancient stone, reflected the guttering torchlight in broken, wavering lines. It smelled of old forge-fire, cold iron, pine resin used to preserve leather, and something fainter, earthier: the ghost of old blood.
Mary stood before a broad stone table, a blueprint unscrolled and held down at its corners by a set of clean, polished bolt-action rifle bolts. Her hands were spread flat on the parchment, her shoulders tense. "The gap is inefficient," she said, her voice crisp in the cold air. "We have the long-range indirect fire. We have precision marksmanship. We lack saturation. We lack area denial in close-quarter defense."
I came up beside her, my own breath pluming. "You’re talking about something automatic. But black powder is rubbish for that. Unreliable. We’d be cleaning jams more than fighting."
"Then we don’t use black powder." She tapped a drawn cartridge on the blueprint. "We scale down. We take the 7.62mm cartridge from the scout rifles, modify it. Less powder, lighter projectile. A reduced charge. It’s about volume, not single-shot penetrationThe silence of the armory was a different creature than the throne room’s. It wasn’t the hollow, expectant silence of an audience chamber. This was a dense, absorbed quiet, broken only by the scrape of steel, the clink of a tool, and the distant, ever-present sigh of wind through high arrow-slits. The air was cold enough to see your breath, and it smelled of oil, stone, and the sharp, clean scent of ferric oxide.
Mary and I stood over a wide, scarred oak table, blueprints and charcoal sketches weighted down by spare bolts and a mug of cold tea. Racks of finished rifles lined the walls like a metallic forest, their polished wood and blued steel gleaming dully in the torchlight. Beyond them, older relics—greatswords, pikes, suits of plate armor—stood as silent, frost-touched sentinels.
“The gap is mid-range suppression,” I said, my finger tapping a sketched diagram. “The .308s are for precision. The howitzers are for obliterating grid squares. But anything that gets inside five hundred meters and moves faster than a walking pace… we’re relying on volley fire. That’s inefficient.”
“And psychologically taxing on the shooter,” Mary added, her brow furrowed. She picked up a prototype component—a machined steel housing. “We need a high rate of fire. Something that makes the air itself seem solid to anyone coming at us.”
“Automatic weapon. Belt-fed. But it has to be something the smiths can replicate with local materials. No fancy alloys.”
“Chamber it for the .308,” she said, nodding. “Logistics. One round for rifle and… what are we calling it?”
I looked at the schematic. It was ugly, functional, all angles and purpose. “The Hammer. Simple. They’ll get it.”
“The Hammer it is.” Mary picked up a charcoal nub and began sketching a feed mechanism on the margin of the blueprint. “Open bolt, delayed blowback? We want it to run dirty if it has to.”
“Yes. And a quick-change barrel. They’ll burn through them.” My back ached from standing, a deep, persistent throb. I shifted my weight, feeling the baby turn, a slow, heavy rotation. A familiar tightness spread across my chest, a dull pressure. I ignored it, focusing on the drawing. “The tripod is key. It needs to be stable on frozen ground, rock, rubble. No bipod nonsense for sustained fire.”
We fell into a familiar rhythm, a technical duet. Sentences were shorthand, concepts communicated in fragments. It was our language. The cold of the room receded, replaced by the focused heat of problem-solving.
From the corner of my eye, I saw movement. Ellie and Nancy had entered quietly. They stood by a rack of ceremonial longswords, pretending to examine the etched blades. But they weren’t looking at the swords.
They were watching us.
Ellie leaned against a stone pillar, one hand supporting the small of her back, the other absentmindedly rubbing the side of her swollen belly. Her blonde hair was a soft cascade over the fur collar of her cloak. Nancy stood close, her arm looped through Ellie’s, her head tilted. They were whispering.
I caught a snippet, carried on the still, cold air.
“—look at Mary’s hands when she’s focused,” Ellie murmured, her voice a warm honey-tone against the stone. “So sure. Every movement has intent.”
Nancy’s reply was lower, softer. “It’s Amy’s eyes for me. That narrow, calculating look. Like she’s dismantling the world to see its gears.” She paused. “I want to know what that focus feels like. Directed at me.”
A flush of heat went through me, unrelated to the work. I kept my eyes on the blueprint, but my hearing sharpened, tuning out the scrape of my own charcoal to catch their words.
Mary had heard it too. I saw her hand pause for a second on the drawing, a slight tremor in her fingers before the clinical precision returned. She didn’t look up.
“They’re building a song of death,” Ellie whispered, and there was no horror in it, only a kind of awed reverence. “And they do it with the same concentration I’d use to glaze a vase. It’s… breathtaking.”
“Do you think they talk about us like this?” Nancy’s voice was a conspiratorial thread. “When they’re up here, surrounded by all this cold steel?”
“Of course they do.” Ellie’s chuckle was a rich, quiet sound. “Amy will be measuring the tensile strength of a barrel and her mind will drift. She’ll start thinking about… yield points. In a different context.”
My face felt warm. She wasn’t wrong.
“Mary will be calculating cyclic rates,” Nancy whispered back, a smile in her voice. “And wondering about… frequency.”
Mary cleared her throat, a little too loudly. She reached for a caliper, her knuckles white.
We kept working, but the space between us and them crackled now. Every technical term felt like a double entendre. Recoil operation. Sustained fire. Feed mechanism. The blueprints were just paper; the real design was happening in the charged air between the four of us.
“The trigger group,” I said, my voice slightly rough. “It needs a two-stage. A deliberate pull. No accidents.”
“Safety first,” Mary agreed, her tone dry. She finally glanced over at them, a quick flick of her eyes. Ellie met her gaze and smiled, slow and knowing. Mary looked back down at the table, but a faint pink tinged her ears.
“God, look at them,” Nancy breathed, her whisper a little louder, bolder. “They’re trying so hard to be clinical. It’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Ellie shifted, a small, uncomfortable wince. A dark patch bloomed on the wool over her breast, then another. She sighed, a sound of pure physical resignation. “The babies disagree with your assessment, my love. They’re demanding a more immediate form of sustenance.”
The spell broke, but into something softer, more domestic. The visceral reality of our bodies reasserted itself.
I straightened up, my own blouse sticking uncomfortably. “Break?” I asked Mary.
“Break,” she said, setting the caliper down with precision.
We walked over to them. The cold of the armory seeped back in, a contrast to the warmth in their corner. Ellie’s cheeks were flushed. Nancy took her cloak and draped it over Ellie’s front without a word, a simple, intimate gesture of care.
“The Hammer, eh?” Ellie said, nodding toward the table.
“It’ll fill the gap,” I said.
“I’m sure it will.” Her eyes held mine, and there was a universe of meaning in her look. It spoke of thrones and nurseries, of petitions and private whispers, of the seamless, strange weave of our lives. “You two… when you’re in that world, it’s like you’re speaking in lightning. It’s terrifying. And beautiful.”
Nancy leaned into Mary’s side, slipping a hand under her leather jerkin, resting it on the small of her back. “Did you solve the feed problem?”
“Yes,” Mary said, her arm going around Nancy, pulling her close. Her voice lost its technical edge, softening. “It was a geometry issue.”
“I love it when you talk geometry,” Nancy murmured, tilting her face up.
From outside, far below in the valley, came another series of distant, concussive thumps. The ranging exercises continued. A fine dusting of ice crystals shivered loose from the ceiling, glittering in the torchlight as they fell.
The sound brought it all back. The bears at the gate. The need for the Hammer.
Ellie’s smile faded into something more thoughtful, more weary. “How long until the first prototype?”
“A week,” I said. “If the forge has the ore.”