The day after the first cornerstone was laid, one side of the forge bed they had tamped down through the night had settled by two finger joints.
Before sunrise Kang Mujin carried over the ashes of the dead campfire and scattered them across the spot. The ash was drawn slowly into a crack on the southern side. Water seeping from the damp layer he had found the day before had cut itself a path beneath the new foundation.
Doria rubbed a handful of the earth and said,
“Abandon the site, half a day. Take hold of the water, two hours.”
“We take the water.”
Instead of leveling the forge bed again, the two of them dug a drainage channel out to the shallow bedrock in the northeast. Kang Mujin would point out the direction of a seam and Doria would break the larger stones away along their grain, and over that same channel they laid the blast duct that would draw the waste heat back in. The plan drawn up the day before had met the resistance of the ground for the first time.
Rosen meanwhile shifted the storehouse, the quarters, and the line of the wall, moving the stakes. An empty work lane was left between the cornerstone and the forge, and the soft southern stretch was pulled in to within ten paces.
“We can’t keep writing ‘the Blackback outpost’ at the head of the ledger.”
Doria grumbled that there wasn’t even a wall yet, but Kang Mujin looked at the cornerstone.
“Steel Bastion.”
“Too straight.”
“A name has no need to bend.”
Rosen wrote the four characters into the ledger. Once the name was settled, each of them began to move to their own work without needing any of it explained.
While Rosen drew up the layout and a list of the materials required, Doria calculated the load on the forge foundation and on the wall that would one day stand there. Silvana searched the eastern stream for fireclay and, with the arts of the spirits, hung watch-knots on the trees around it.
Rakan came back from scouting the south only as the sun was rising. Dew had beaded on the tips of his wolf ears, and black mud clung to his boots. He did not come straight into the camp; he circled the outer edge once before approaching the others.
“There are hoofprints two hills south. Four horses. Three days old at least. They went west, then slipped away south.”
As he drew the terrain in the dirt, Kang Mujin picked the iron grit off Rakan’s boot. The coarse, dark red dust had flaked from the horseshoe of a demon warhorse. The iron had taken carbon unevenly, and the grain still held the marks of many shoes stamped out in haste.
“This wasn’t a scouting party come to look us over.”
“How do you know?”
“The shoe is worn from long use. These are warhorses that have run a far road. They only passed through here.”
Rakan glared to the south.
“They could still come back.”
“They will come back.”
Kang Mujin spoke evenly.
“Before that we decide where to meet them.”
Rakan drew his broken-tipped sword and marked out watch points, two on the southern slope and one at the collapsed beacon tower.
“When there are more of us, we’ll divide the watch. For now nobody goes beyond sight of anyone else.”
Rosen put forward, one after the other, a plan for making use of the beacon tower’s ruins and a plan for strengthening the southern line. Meanwhile Silvana looked toward the western hills and raised a bow.
“I’ll take the west. I’ll ask the spirits to pick out unfamiliar footsteps.”
“Can spirits smell demons, then?”
Rakan asked.
“Spirits do not smell.”
“Then what do they see?”
“They know when the forest is uneasy.”
Rakan looked as though he had not understood, but he asked nothing further.
Around noon carts appeared on the northern road. Thirteen adults and four children who had broken down the temporary camp arrived as promised, and Rosen apportioned quarters and food. Only then did the labor of the six who had been laying out the site since morning widen into the work of all the settlers.
Kang Mujin watched them. Doria looked first at the weight a stone would carry; Rosen studied the paths people would move along; Rakan searched for the gaps an enemy would dig into. Silvana was raising a boundary no eye could see.
A good blade was never made from one kind of iron either.
Natures that differed had to be meshed together, and not one of them forced to break.
Kang Mujin began digging out the forge bed.
Two feet down the bedrock showed, and he set an iron chisel and brought the hammer down.
Ting.
The ring traveled up his wrist. The left side of the rock was solid, but a thin fissure ran through the right, and struck with force the crack would spread far.
Kang Mujin tilted the angle of the hammer.
Not hard. Short.
Ting. Ting. Ting.
Stone dust peeled off in thin flakes.
Doria came over with a larger hammer.
“Scratching at it like that, when will you ever finish?”
“If it breaks, we have to tamp it down again.”
“Then strike only as hard as it takes not to break it.”
Doria’s hammer fell.
Thud.
A fist-sized piece came away beside the fissure, exactly that much, and the grain beneath was unharmed. At the moment of contact the wrist had turned, bleeding the shock off to the side.
“Do it again.”
“You’re asking to be taught?”
“I have to see it to know it.”
The corner of Doria’s mouth went up.
“Ahem. Watch closely. I won’t show it twice.”
For someone who wouldn’t show it twice, Doria made the same motion five times. When Kang Mujin repeated it exactly on the sixth, Doria stopped smiling and jerked a chin toward a bigger stone instead.
“That one’s yours.”
By midday the outline of the forge floor had taken shape.
Aisha picked gravel out of the clay and gathered pieces of charcoal. No one had asked the child to do it, but the child’s eyes followed Kang Mujin’s hammer the whole time.
Kang Mujin took out the axle clamp he had stripped from the slaver caravan’s cart. It was soft iron with almost no carbon, not enough for a blade, but serviceable as nails.
He put the end of the clamp into the makeshift hearth. The surface went orange first while the core stayed dark red. Kang Mujin waited until the warmth spread evenly through the inside of the iron and drew it out only once the grain had loosened. Two strikes to draw it out, one turn to square it, and there was a small nail.
Aisha came closer.
“Doesn’t this rust?”
“It rusts.”
“Then why make it?”
“Because there’s work to do before it rusts.”
Kang Mujin put the nail back into the fire. He heated it red only as far as a child could handle it, then held out a small hammer.
“I do it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s heavy.”
“Hold it with both hands.”
He cut two finger joints off the end of the haft.
Aisha’s first blow went wide.
Clang.
The hammer struck the edge of the anvil and the child’s shoulders drew in.
“Again.”
The second grazed the side of the nail, and the shock knocked it crooked.
“It’s ruined.”
“It’s still hot.”
Kang Mujin set the nail straight again.
“While it’s hot, it can be mended.”
Aisha raised the hammer again. This time without hurrying, small hands wrapped around the haft and the wrist held upright.
Clang.
The head of the nail flattened a little.
“Don’t be afraid of the iron!”
Doria shouted.
“Whoever holds the hammer is the master!”
Kang Mujin shook his head.
“Not being afraid and striking carelessly are two different things.”
“Lecturing the child already?”
“Don’t interfere.”
“You don’t even have a forge!”
Aisha looked from one to the other. The corners of the child’s mouth rose, very slightly.
The third blow landed square. The nail’s head was thicker on one side and the point bent a little, but it was still enough to hold two boards together.
Kang Mujin cooled the nail in water. A small plume of steam rose.
“Is it mine?”
“It belongs to Steel Bastion.”
Aisha ran with the nail to the cornerstone and set it against the nameplate Rosen had put up. Kang Mujin handed over the hammer.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The nail went in crooked, but it did not come loose.
As the sun sank, the nameplate reading Steel Bastion hung beside the cornerstone. The wall was only a line in the ledger, the forge had nothing but a floor, and the quarters amounted to a few tents.
While Rosen wrote the date at the top of the ledger, Rakan shook the stakes to test them before going out to scout, and Silvana tied a single warning knot to the end of the nameplate.
Doria stood in the middle of the forge bed and said,
“Tomorrow we raise the wall.”
“We could do it today.”
“The clay isn’t dry. Stack it in a hurry and it splits from the inside.”
“You’re right.”
Doria gave Kang Mujin a sidelong look.
“It’s worse when you admit it that easily.”
Just then Rakan, up on the southern slope, raised a hand. He came back and held out a black sliver of iron, a fragment of horseshoe the size of a finger joint.
“That wasn’t there this morning.”
Kang Mujin took the fragment.
It was lukewarm.
Not the warmth of metal heated by sun. Friction heat still lay inside the grain of it, and the faint tension of a cut face freshly twisted away caught at his fingertips. The piece had not been broken long.
He looked toward the southern hills. He stretched his sense out, but a few old arrowheads buried below the slope and one rusted blade were as far as it reached. Beyond that it was closed off like empty darkness, and he could not feel which way those who had passed here only moments ago had gone.
Rakan pointed at the horseshoe fragment.
“The tracks run south. Below the slope there’s too much rock and they break off.”
Doria hefted a hammer.
“Shall we follow?”
“No.”
Kang Mujin studied the double nail marks inside the horseshoe. Unlike the worn shoe he had checked that morning, this piece carried the clear imprint of nails driven in recently. For a warhorse that had merely brushed past by chance, both the hour of its passing and the distance from the camp were far too close.
“We let them look.”
“There’s nothing here. What is there to look at?”
Kang Mujin looked in turn at the forge with only its floor laid, at the cornerstone, at the crooked nail Aisha had driven.
“They will have seen something begun.”
He set the horseshoe fragment down beside the forge bed. Tomorrow that scrap of iron too would go into the fire.
Kang Mujin looked down at the forge that still had no fire.
The first fire lit here would not melt iron alone.
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