Chapter 12 — Lighting the Fire in the Forge

Doria was already rapping at the clay wall before the dawn mist lifted.

Two knocks with his knuckles, one with the hammer haft. Hearing the dull, solid sound, he pressed his ear to the lower part of the wall. The clay, dried hard overnight, gave back no sound of cracking.

“That’ll do.”

Doria brushed the dust of earth from his beard.

“You can build it up now.”

Kang Mujin laid a hand on the floor of the forge. The moisture left at its core, and the different heat-swell of each stone, caught at his senses.

“It has to dry from the bottom first.”

“I’ve built thirty-two forges. I know that.”

“This is my first.”

“Then why are you the one who sounds so certain?”

The two of them finished quarrelling before their hands did. Kang Mujin picked out the stones that would hold against heat and passed them over, Doria stacked the curve, and Aisha sorted the clay by how much water was in it. By the time the sun climbed over the hills, a wall stood shoulder-high.

The problem was the wind. They had neither hide enough for a dwarven double bellows nor people enough to tread it. If the one bronze pipe they owned were set in straight, only one side of the impurity-heavy ore would melt, and it would choke the forge.

Kang Mujin heated the end of the pipe gently, packed it with wet sand, and bent it in a slow curve. Doria set the pipe down on the drawing and stroked his beard for a long while.

“Turning the fire around is a fine idea, but if the southwest wind strengthens, the temperature jumps.”

Silvana came down from the hills and reported that the wind would hold until sundown. Both craftsmen looked at the open ground at the same moment.

Doria drew a wide air chamber, and Kang Mujin added over it a weighted relief plate that would open when the pressure ran high. Natural wind would be gathered into a hide membrane and made steady, and only when it slackened would a single small bellows make up the rest.

“Half the hide. One person.”

“Write down every material and every measurement, so it can be used when we build it again.”

Half a day later the wind-catcher swallowed air. The first weight was too heavy and would not open, the second too light and let all the wind slip away, but when Kang Mujin matched the density of the third lump of iron, the relief plate lifted by a finger-joint only at the moment the pressure filled.

The wind out of the pipe wound once around the ash inside the forge.

“That’ll do.”

“We won’t know until we put fire in it.”

Doria grumbled, and still could not pull the corners of his mouth down.

The forge was finished before the sun leaned to the west.

Kang Mujin did not put ore in at once. He started a weak fire with well-dried twigs and charcoal dust. As the moisture left in the walls drew slowly out, the beads of water on the clay surface rose as steam.

Everyone there wanted to drive the fire hard. Rosen, Rakan, Aisha all waited in front of the forge, and Doria, arms folded, tapped the ground with the toe of his boot.

Kang Mujin waited.

He fed in charcoal a little at a time until the heat inside the clay came near the heat outside, and whenever the flame licked one side of the wall he scattered the charcoal with a stick. He opened and closed the tuyere to control the amount of air as well.

When the sun touched the ridge, the southwest wind blew.

The wind-catcher hummed low, the hide membrane swelled, and out of the bronze pipe came a long, even sound of breathing. Inside the forge the flame, instead of lying over to one side, turned along the wall, drawing a red circle and deepening.

Doria took his hand off the bellows handle.

Even so, the fire did not die.

“Hah.”

Rakan’s ears pricked up.

“It’s as if the forge breathes.”

“It is the hide that breathes.”

Kang Mujin said.

Doria snorted.

“And who was it that hung lungs on that hide?”

Once the heat had risen enough, the two of them fed in charcoal and finely crushed iron ore by turns. When Kang Mujin marked a grain with few impurities in it, Doria’s hammer split along that line.

The trouble was that the bronze blast pipe began to soften before the ore settled.

“Cut the wind and the fire dies.”

Doria lifted a wet cloth, and Kang Mujin stopped him.

“Cool it that fast and the pipe will crack. I will move the flame to the center.”

He turned nothing but the lie of the iron grains inside the forge, a little at a time. As the iron that had begun to melt gathered among the charcoal and changed the path of the air, the flame that had been licking the tuyere turned back toward the center of the forge. A gap had to be left for the slag to run, too, so his wrists ached as though burning and his breath came short.

“That’s far enough.”

Doria caught his arm. When Kang Mujin drew his hand back, the bronze pipe had stopped just short of sagging, and the red mass of iron was sinking exactly to the bottom of the forge.

Doria shifted the weight on the relief plate.

“We divide the wind into three. Low fire, middle fire, high fire.”

“Three catch positions will do.”

Neither of them looked at the other as they spoke.

The fire went on past sundown.

At last Doria opened the outlet at the base of the forge, and dark red slag ran out first. It was thick, but it did not clog, and behind it came the bloom, a lump of sponge iron clotted together from charcoal and iron grit.

It was not perfect iron.

It was full of holes and still held impurities, and as it was, it would have been hard to make even a decent sickle from it, let alone a sword.

Kang Mujin drew the lump out with tongs and set it on the anvil.

“We hammer.”

“Naturally.”

When Doria raised the great hammer, Kang Mujin set the place with a small one. Two quick strikes, then one that rang long.

Tang, tang. Taaang—

Doria’s great hammer fell on that spot.

Clang.

Impurities sprayed off.

Again Kang Mujin’s hammer marked the way.

Tang, tang. Taaang—

Clang.

The two hammers rang by turns. One read the state of the iron, the other folded the lump with dwarven blows carried down through centuries. When Kang Mujin pointed to where the grain was splitting, Doria pressed the far side, and when Doria stood the iron up to catch a corner, Kang Mujin pushed the dross trapped inside out to the surface.

Each time the iron cooled, it went back into the fire.

When the catch at the tuyere was moved to the middle position, the forge threw off steady heat without a single hand at the bellows.

At the third fold the holes in the iron grew fewer, and at the fifth the hammer’s sound rang clear. When the seventh was done, a single forearm-length bar of square iron lay on the anvil.

Doria lifted it with the tongs.

“Our first iron.”

As people gathered close, Aisha, charcoal dust smeared across that small face, looked up at the bar.

“What are you going to make with it?”

“What’s needed.”

Kang Mujin cut off the end of the bar and put it back in the forge.

He set the iron, glowing red, on the anvil and drew it long, flattening the tip and leaving the middle solid. The other end he bent to make an eye for a wooden haft.

Doria asked.

“Not a blade?”

“What is needed now is not a blade.”

The iron passed between fire and anvil a few more times.

What came out was a small pickaxe head. It was a tool for digging drainage around the forge and cutting ore from the northern vein, so it carried no ornament. The edge was not made too thin, and the back, where the shock would land, was left thick.

Kang Mujin ground the edge and studied its condition.

The hardness was enough. The purity was better than he had hoped, but a few small impurities remained between the grains, and had it been meant for a sword he would have folded it again. As a pickaxe it would last a long time.

He raised the tip of a chisel and struck the inner face of the pickaxe head.

A small mark was cut into it.

What was left in that place, where the eye would not easily find it, was a simple sign that resembled the grain of iron. It was the trace he had left, without exception, on everything he had forged since his former life.

Doria looked down at the mark.

“Cut it there and who’s going to see it?”

“No one needs to see it.”

“Then why leave it?”

Kang Mujin lowered the pickaxe head into the water.

Hisss.

White steam curled up.

“I know it is there.”

Doria did not answer. He took the pickaxe head, swung it a couple of times, fitted it to a haft, drove in the wedge, and brought it down on the stone ground.

Doria raised the pickaxe above his shoulder.

Crash.

The crack in the stone ran out in three branches. The pickaxe head neither bent nor chipped. If anything, after taking the blow it rang clearer than before.

One by one the hammer sounds in front of the forge stopped. The dwarven craftsman who had worked iron for centuries turned the head over, scraped the back and the eye with a thumbnail, and fell silent again.

“Set it against the good iron of our mountain and it wouldn’t lose.”

This was the first day, a forge finished that same day, iron drawn out of poor mixed ore. When those words fell, the people turned to look not at the pickaxe but at the forge breathing by itself behind them. From tomorrow the same fire could be not one but ten.

Rosen wrote something in the ledger.

“Steel Bastion product No. 1. Mining pickaxe.”

Aisha peered into the inner face of the pickaxe.

“Is this mark Mister Kang Mujin’s?”

“It is.”

“The nail I made doesn’t have one.”

“That one you made yourself.”

The child looked back at the nameplate beside the cornerstone. Even in the dark, the head of the crooked nail gleamed faintly.

“Then next time I’ll put mine on too.”

“After you make something that can be used.”

“It can be used. The nameplate hasn’t fallen off.”

“Then you have already left it.”

Aisha thought for a moment, then nodded.

The night ran deep, but nobody went straight back to the tents.

While the forge burned with a low, heavy sound, Rosen worked out beneath that light how much ore they would cut tomorrow, and Rakan took hold of the pickaxe haft to find where the weight balanced. Silvana stood well back and watched the smoke climbing above the forge.

Doria squatted beside the blast gear and measured the spacing of the three catches again.

“On the next one the air chamber should sit a little lower.”

“The pipe has to be thicker too.”

“Iron instead of bronze.”

“If only the end can be changed out, repairs are easy.”

“Right. A screw joint seizes once it takes heat, so we fix it with a wedge.”

Doria drew a line on the ground with a piece of charcoal, and Kang Mujin added a cross-section of the pipe beside it.

For a while the two of them rubbed lines out and drew them again. This would not end with the one forge they had built, so a larger forge was needed, and more iron had to be drawn with fewer hands. The strength of the wind had to change with the quality of the ore.

The old craft of the dwarves was a hard frame of bone.

Kang Mujin’s senses found the places inside that frame where things clogged.

Neither of them alone could have steadied today’s fire.

Doria set the piece of charcoal down.

“This method ought to have a name.”

“It’s too early.”

“That again?”

“We have built one forge, that is all.”

“It’s the first forge. That is exactly why it gets a name.”

Kang Mujin looked at the burning fire.

“Name it after we have made something better.”

Doria stroked his beard.

“Then we’ll have to keep making them.”

“That is why I lit the fire.”

The flame in the forge drew one great breath.

The relief plate of the new blast gear clicked open and shut, the wind went through the pipe into the heart of the fire, and the charcoal came alive red.

Kang Mujin ran his thumb over the mark on the finished pickaxe.

The ore had come out of this land. The iron had been drawn from a forge built of this land’s stone and earth, by dwarven craft and his own senses joined together.

The first thing ever made in Steel Bastion was not a blade for cutting people.

It was a tool for opening the ground.

That pleased him.

The next morning the fire in the forge had still not gone out.

Because they had taken turns adding charcoal through the night, red embers breathed evenly along the floor of the forge. When Kang Mujin opened the tuyere, the flame went turning along the wall again.

The smoke rose straight up.

The grey column climbed above the hills and streamed long to the north on the morning wind. It was a sign that there were people on empty ground that had held only a few tents, and a sign as well that there were people here who handled fire, made iron, and would not step back.

Kang Mujin watched the far end of the smoke, then lowered his hand.

Down below the northern road he felt a small sound of iron.

It was not one.

The rim of a rusted pot, a broken sickle, an iron nail worked loose from a wheel: metals all different from one another, swaying irregularly, coming this way. The steps were slow and stopped often.

A moment later Rakan appeared at the top of the slope.

Behind, worn-out people were climbing in a line. Some carried a child on their back, some dragged a broken cart, and every piece of metal they owned was rusted or split.

The old one at the front looked up at the smoke of the forge.

And gripped the broken hoe blade held against their chest more tightly.