The iron of the dawn did not lie.
Kang Mujin stopped hammering and raised his head, and inside the forge the iron ingot he had dug out the day before was ripening red. The surface was bright, but the heat had not filled it to the core, so if he struck it now only the outer skin would stretch thin and the center would crack.
But what he felt was not the iron on the anvil.
North of the rampart, below the slope where forest and rock field interlocked, three small pieces of metal were moving, and one was a long, slender dagger, while the other two seemed to be a short, round belt buckle and an arrowhead.
It was not the iron of the people of Steel Bastion.
Kang Mujin lifted the ingot with tongs and moved it to the edge of the forge, then raked burning charcoal over it to kill the heat.
Doria glared from beside the bellows.
“You put iron in and now you’re off somewhere?”
“Guests have come.”
“Guests?”
“The uninvited kind.”
Doria asked nothing more, and though he was a dwarf who allowed no one to interfere in front of a forge, he was not a craftsman who would ruin iron entrusted to him by Kang Mujin. Taking the tongs, he jerked his chin at the door.
“Go on. I’ll coax this one soft to the core.”
Kang Mujin took the sword hanging on the wall.
Outside the smithy, Rakan was teaching the militia how to lock shields together. The shields, made of several layers of board bound with a thin iron band at the edge, were not heavy, but one misstep and the man beside you was exposed as well.
After rumor spread that they had driven off a slaver caravan, the columns of refugees along the nearby hamlets and side paths did not stop for days. A dozen or so at a time, sometimes three families clinging to a single cart, and the residents of Steel Bastion entered on Rosen’s roll had become one hundred seventy-six. Numbers were not the only thing that had grown. Inside the rampart the tents, the cooking smoke, and the training ranks all lengthened together, until it was scale enough for a demon scout to count from far away.
“Shoulders first! Put out only your shield and your arm comes off!”
Rakan’s ears turned toward Kang Mujin.
“They’ve come?”
“The northern slope. Three.”
Rakan bared his teeth.
“Scouts again?”
“This time they haven’t come close.”
Turned earth still remained where the last scouts had been wiped out, and if they had come in by the same road they would have been fools, but the three metals did not move straight for the rampart. Spreading left and right at a fixed distance and then gathering again was the movement of measuring the roads, the changing of the watch, the height of the rampart.
“We’ll have to take them alive.”
When Rakan started to draw the sword at his waist, Kang Mujin shook his head.
“Leave your sword.”
“Catch them barehanded?”
“Take a shield.”
Rakan looked at Kang Mujin for a moment, then picked up one of the practice shields and tucked a wooden club into his belt as well.
Kang Mujin chose four of the militia, two humans who had long lived as hunters, one goat-beast used to stone paths, and a middle-aged woman who had guarded freight wagons. Their movements were still too stiff to call them warriors, but there was no problem with their taking orders.
“We do not kill.”
He said.
“And if they run?”
One of the hunters asked.
“Aim for the legs.”
“If they try to kill us first?”
“Then live.”
At the short answer the four straightened their stances.
Kang Mujin did not open the north gate of the rampart, but slipped out through the narrow gap made on the west side for bringing in construction material, for when the gate moved the iron of the hinges and the bar rang, and there was no need to announce a sortie to anyone watching from afar.
As they went down below the slope, the sound of Steel Bastion’s hammers receded.
Kang Mujin followed metal rather than his eyes.
The dagger had stopped behind a rock, and while one arrowhead climbed the left face, the belt buckle circled around through low brush. Though they could not see one another, they moved in a set order, trained men.
Kang Mujin folded his fingers to divide the directions, and when Rakan slipped off to the right with the goat-beast, the other three blocked the retreat below.
He walked toward the rock alone, deliberately stepping on a dry branch.
Crack.
The dagger behind the rock moved, and the moment it came free of its sheath the coldly stiffened iron took the warmth of a hand.
Kang Mujin did not draw his sword.
As a black shadow sprang out beside the rock, ashen skin, horns bent backward, and leather armor pressed close to the body were revealed, and the demon, gripping the dagger reversed, went for Kang Mujin’s throat.
Two steps.
One step.
When Kang Mujin opened his left hand, the grain of the dagger twisted.
Instead of bending the whole blade, he twisted only the tang buried in the grip. Too much force and the knife would snap and throw splinters, so he gauged the elasticity of the iron and the heat-treated range and turned only its direction, there inside the handle.
The demon’s wrist was dragged around by the knife and his body opened, and Kang Mujin’s fist struck the solar plexus, and when the demon retched out his breath and dropped to his knees, he bent that arm and pressed it behind his back.
A bowstring sang on the left face.
As the arrow grazed the rock and came on, Kang Mujin pulled his hand, and the arrowhead bent downward and buried itself in the dirt before his feet, and then the brush shook hard and Rakan’s shout burst out.
“Down!”
There came the dull sound of a shield striking.
When the third demon fled downhill, the waiting hunter threw a stone, and the middle-aged woman hooked his ankle with a long pole. The fallen demon drew a small scrap of iron from his waist and brought it to his mouth.
Kang Mujin felt the nature of that metal.
Inside the thin iron casing was a glass tube, and what the substance in the glass was he could not tell, but a thing made as if to be hidden was unlikely to be honest medicine.
When he flicked a finger, the casing slipped out of the demon’s hand and rolled along the ground.
Rakan ran up and struck the demon’s jaw with the corner of his shield, not hard enough to break teeth, only hard enough to cut off consciousness.
“Three, right?”
“That’s right.”
Kang Mujin swept the surrounding iron once more, and there was only one rusted arrowhead long buried in the soil, grains of iron ore in a crack in the rock, and the gear of the captured men.
All three were alive.
He found a single black iron plate on the first demon’s belt, and on the surface of the plate, a little smaller than his palm and thin, fine lines and demon-realm characters were carved densely. There was no ornament, and at the corner only numbers that looked like a serial number were stamped neatly.
It resembled a tag attached to goods rather than a letter sent to a person.
Rakan saw the plate and growled low.
“I know that thing.”
“Can you read it?”
“Not all of it. It’s like what the overseers carried around in the mine.”
Rakan did not take the plate, and as the hair on the back of his neck rose and the tendons on the back of his hand thickened, the edge of an old brand showed beneath his wrist guard.
“What’s stamped at the top is the command grade. Below it is… a recovery list.”
Kang Mujin wrapped the plate in cloth.
“We return to the Bastion.”
The three captives had their hands bound behind them, and Kang Mujin did not use chains. There was no need to force the shape of a slave onto men taken as prisoners.
Instead he checked the knots of the rope twice.
Before noon, Rosen emptied the storehouse beside the smithy and prepared a place for the questioning.
There was only one window, and Rakan stood before the door, and the militia were kept outside, and Aisha too was not allowed near. The three prisoners were put in separate places so they could not even see one another’s faces, and it was decided to call them one at a time first and compare their statements.
The first demon to come to his senses was a man with black hair cropped short, and he wore no insignia, but his gear was better than the other two’s, and thin silver thread was lined inside his leather armor. It looked less like something to stop a blade than a structure for channeling magic.
Rosen set the black plate on the table.
“Read it.”
The demon licked the blood at the corner of his mouth.
“I have no duty to explain to one who cannot read.”
Rosen spread a sheet of paper beside the plate.
“Then I will only confirm the parts I have read. Sender, the command of the border invasion army. Recipient, the Seventeenth Observation Unit. Purpose, Steel Bastion’s defensive capability and… an assessment of held resources.”
The demon’s eyes narrowed just slightly, and Rosen, seeming not to have missed the reaction, pointed to the next line with a finger.
“Resources does not mean minerals or grain. Human adults, one hundred ten to one hundred forty. Beasts, forty or more. Dwarven technical personnel, one. Metal technician of unknown lineage, one.”
Because Doria was not there the storehouse was quiet, and had he heard this he might have smashed the table first.
Kang Mujin looked down at the plate.
Metal technician of unknown lineage.
That was himself.
There was no name.
Not Aisha’s name, not Rakan’s name, not the names of the people raising the rampart, and people were divided by race and number, and the lines were split according to usefulness.
Rosen asked.
“Who issued this order?”
The demon was silent for a while.
Kang Mujin set on the table the iron button he had taken from the man’s waist, and on the back of the thin metal was a mark resembling a three-pronged spear.
Rakan said.
“Vargas.”
The prisoner’s gaze moved to Rakan.
“That’s General Grimoire Vargas’s mark. It was stamped on the documents every time new prisoners came into the mine.”
Rosen shifted in his seat.
“Does a general personally order even small-scale reconnaissance like this?”
The demon pulled up a corner of his mouth.
“You are not a target of reconnaissance.”
“Then what?”
“It is a procedure for classifying the cause of losses.”
The voice was flat, without even contempt, and he spoke as though the count in a storehouse did not match and the ledger were simply being tallied again.
“Three slaver caravans did not return, and one low-grade search party was lost. The volume scheduled for recovery has fallen below standard. The General dislikes waste.”
Rakan’s hand gripped the doorframe, and the wood groaned low.
Kang Mujin asked.
“Is that the only reason you take people?”
The prisoner looked at him.
“Labor is assigned where it is needed. Species capable of digging go to the mines, species with dexterity to the workshops, species suited to combat to the expendable units. Those with no determined use are decided at the sorting station.”
“Children too?”
“For pre-growth resources, maintenance cost is compared against projected productivity.”
Rakan moved a step, but Kang Mujin raised a hand and stopped him.
There was no need to raise his voice.
He had already heard enough.
“How did your general judge Steel Bastion?”
“The initial assessment was negligible.”
The prisoner answered.
“And now?”
“Under verification.”
Rosen tapped the last part of the plate. Beneath the order, strokes deeper and rougher than the main text had been carved over it.
“‘The finding of negligible is revoked. The cause of losses is reclassified as a local variable, and the testing force is raised to one elite company. The metal technician is to be taken alive, and the rest disposed of according to the cost of resistance.’”
He turned the last mark toward Rakan. Beneath the three-pronged spear a short name was stamped directly.
Grimoire Vargas.
It was not an order that had waited for the prisoners’ report. The moment the slaver caravans and the search party vanished, Grimoire had not written the losses off as an error in the ledger, but had set Steel Bastion down as a variable he himself had to break.
“So the general changed the grade himself.”
The prisoner did not answer Rosen’s words, but that silence was enough.
Kang Mujin picked up the plate. The cold, uniform iron was wrought iron with almost no carbon, rolled thin with its surface blackened by corrosion, an object made with care so that a record would last long. Yet in what was written upon it there was no trace of a person.
Iron did not lie.
It was only the one who used the iron who attached false names.
“The size of the testing force?”
Rosen asked.
The prisoner shut his mouth.
Rakan let out a dry laugh.
“There’s one thing I learned in the mine. Demons don’t like pain either.”
Kang Mujin shook his head.
“There’s no need for that.”
“You don’t know what those bastards did to us?”
“I know.”
Kang Mujin looked straight into the prisoner’s eyes.
“That is why we do not become the same.”
Rakan’s breath came rough through his nose, but he came no closer.
Rosen thought for a moment, then looked out the door. The other two prisoners were confined apart from each other, and one, even after coming to, kept his mouth shut and only tested the ropes.
“I will keep the three separated. If we tell each of them that the other two have already talked, we should be able to find the points where the statements diverge.”
“Do that.”
“After that there are two options. We can continue the questioning and learn their organization and approach routes, or we can send one back and make it look as though we never found them.”
Kang Mujin looked at the map on the table.
The northern slope, the western material passage, and the eastern rampart still only half raised were drawn upon it, and what the enemy meant to test was not only troop strength but response speed, chain of command, and the weak points as well.
If they sent one back, they could put false information into his hands. But all three had surveyed the inside of the Bastion to some degree, and it was likely they had also counted the swollen numbers of refugees, the unfinished rampart, and the militia.
“We do not send one back.”
“The enemy will learn that all three of the observation unit have disappeared.”
“They will come even knowing.”
Kang Mujin set the black plate down at one side of the map.
“They have already decided the force to send.”
Rosen slowly nodded.
When he stepped out of the storehouse, the sound of the hammer could be heard again.
Doria was drawing out the ingot he had taken charge of earlier into band iron for the rampart, and because the heat had gone evenly to the core, each time the hammer landed the iron stretched straight instead of bursting out to the sides.
Aisha was sitting beside the water barrel folding weapon-cleaning cloths by size, and when she spotted Kang Mujin she stood up.
“Are they bad ones?”
Kang Mujin looked at Aisha for a moment.
She was a child who had been dragged off by a slaver caravan at a young age and had grown up without a name, and someone even now called her a pre-growth resource.
“They are.”
“Will they come again?”
“They will.”
Aisha looked down at the cloth she had been folding and pressed the corner firmly with her fingers.
“Do we have to run?”
“No.”
Kang Mujin took down a small hammer hanging on the smithy wall.
“Make more nails.”
“Why?”
“They’ll be used on the wall.”
Aisha took the hammer in both hands and went to the workbench. Only after seeing her set a short strip of iron near the forge with her mouth shut did Kang Mujin head for the rampart with Rosen.
All along the way there were names.
Barun the goat-beast carrying stone, Marena the human woman mending a cauldron, and even Urdam the old orc silently tamping earth, all of them were written in Rosen’s roll. There were names written by their own hand in clumsy letters, and names taken down for those who could not write.
No one was a number between one hundred ten and one hundred forty.
Rakan, up on the rampart, was glaring north.
“Elites will come.”
Kang Mujin said.
Rakan was not surprised.
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“When?”
“That I don’t know either.”
“You don’t know much.”
“That is why we must prepare.”
Rakan bared his fangs, and it might have been a smile, or it might have been the face of a man facing a fight.
“That much I understand.”
When Rosen drew a drawing from his coat, the edge of the paper shook in the wind.
“If we raise the east wall first, the north gate work falls behind. If we put the north gate first, the residential quarter is exposed for three days. You must choose.”
Kang Mujin felt the iron underground and inside the rampart.
The cramps driven in the day before were taking the weight of the stone evenly, but the iron for the north gate hinges still lay on the smithy floor. A thin branch of the ore vein ran beneath the east wall, and though the amount of iron was small, it was enough to draw out core rods for fixing the stone pillars.
“We raise the east wall first.”
“And what of the north gate?”
“We do not make a gate leaf.”
When Rosen moved an eyebrow, Kang Mujin laid a finger on the northern passage of the drawing.
“We hang two layers of iron chain and stand carts on the inside. If an attack comes, we bind the carts together with iron pillars.”
“You mean to hold with a temporary barricade.”
“It can be made faster than a gate.”
“Passage will become inconvenient.”
“If we are alive, we can fix it again.”
Rosen added lines to the drawing at once.
Kang Mujin went down below the rampart, but he did not halt the work, and instead he increased the watch rotations and called those who could swing at iron to the smithy, and put off the repair of farm tools. Before spearpoints, he had them make cramps, core rods, and the iron bands for the edges of shields.
Making many weapons alone was not enough.
The amount of iron was limited and good steel was less, and the militia’s hands had not yet hardened and the rampart was low, so it had to be decided where and how much of what they had would be used.
That too was no different from quenching.
Make every part hard and it snapped the moment it took a shock, and the edge had to be hard and the spine had to endure. If all of Steel Bastion were seen as a single blade, the people were not material to be crammed into any one side.
Each had a place of their own.
As the sun sank, the prisoners’ gear was carried to the smithy.
Kang Mujin set the black plate on the anvil.
Doria stroked down his beard and asked.
“Are you going to melt this?”
“No.”
“It’s a thing I hate the sight of.”
“We keep it.”
“Why?”
Kang Mujin struck out the letters on one side of the plate with a chisel. When he left his own small mark beside the place carved with ‘metal technician of unknown lineage’, short, deep hammer prints bit into the black surface.
“Because we have to remember who was wrong.”
Doria stared at the plate for a while, then snorted.
“Hrmph. Then store it well. Later we’ll have to throw it in that general bastard’s face.”
Kang Mujin hung the plate on the wall.
Beneath it the nails Aisha had made were cooling, and their lengths were all different and the heads still uneven, but which could be used and which had to be reheated was clear.
Kang Mujin sorted the nails one by one, putting the usable ones in a box and setting those needing work beside the forge.
Nothing was thrown away.
As the night deepened, a short bell rang from the northern watch.
Once.
A moment later, two more followed.
Rakan shouted from atop the rampart.
“Lights!”
Kang Mujin went out of the smithy.
Beyond the northwest ridgeline red points appeared one by one, and the spacing was far too regular for torches, and past ten and past twenty they kept on increasing.
Iron caught at the end of his senses as well.
One was a band strung out long along the northwest mountain road. The amount of metal was great, but most of it was thin and light, and small heads made to a uniform weight swayed in time with the steps of men. It was closer to a column carrying a mass of arrows of the same specification than to an armored host, but at this distance he could not make out even whose they were.
Further north than that, there was separate iron.
The number was small but the density high, and metal he guessed to be thick armor, spears, and the rims of broad shields moved slowly behind the ridgeline. At times it seemed to come abreast of the northwest column, and then the gap widened, and it was not yet even clear whether they were bound for the same destination.
Two bands.
One was coming down toward Steel Bastion, and the other was measuring its direction beyond the far ridge.
Kang Mujin took off his apron and folded it on the workbench.
“Raise the fire.”
When Doria seized the bellows handle, the forge drew in breath.
Whoever reached the gate first, Steel Bastion could not meet them empty-handed.
Only, which side the iron following behind belonged to could not be known until it reached the gate.
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