What came through the north gate in the dawn mist was not the enemy’s battering ram but three burned carts.
The refugees pushed the carts with ash and mud caked over them, and the last cart carried half-burned sacks of charcoal and an iron measuring plate melted fast to its load. Four charcoal kilns to the north and two wheel-repair shops had been struck the same night. Instead of hammering at the walls, the demon army had cut the throat of the fuel and haulage leading into the Steel Bastion.
When Kang Mujin laid a hand on the measuring plate, he caught wheel grooves of differing gauges and three thick axles. On the fire-warped edge, half of the Grimoire’s dark red seal still remained.
Rosen spread three notes of separate origin across the table. The reports — from a porter on the northern trade road, a hunter out of the abandoned mining village, a driver at the border market — had come by different roads but pointed to the same direction and the same hour. Storehouses had been opened, garrisons had moved south, and dried meat and cartwheels had vanished from the markets.
The order written beneath the seal was shorter.
The Steel Bastion is designated the first target for elimination in the plan for the conquest of the north. Recoverable labor is to be sorted; resisting assets are to be discarded.
“The vanguard that has broken off from the main force is nine to ten days out. The main body comes up behind it.”
Rosen laid the travel times of the three reports one over another. “Seeing that they burned the outlying kilns and the roads before the walls, what comes next is heavy engines and supply carts together.”
Doria turned the scorched measuring plate over. “Three axles means a ram sheathed in plate, or a mobile tower. And that they went for our fire first means they saw us clearly enough.”
Rakan set the refugee roster against the troop ledger. Regular combat teams that could be put into the line at once: thirty-eight. Reserve teams still in training: twenty-three. Even taking in more people from the outskirts, the number who could learn the formations within ten days came to barely fifty.
“Even if we take the people in, we have no spears to put in their hands.”
Doria went through the state of the forges. One’s heat wavered; another was full of farm-tool repairs. Above all, with four charcoal kilns burned out, the fuel on hand meant half the forges would have to go cold in three days.
Kang Mujin turned over the wheels of the burned carts before he touched the weapons ledger. Inside the iron tires were not blade cuts but scorch marks left at even intervals. Before burning the carts, the demon army had let a delayed-ignition oil soak into the axles and the iron tires, and black residue clung to the surviving carts as well.
“Use the remaining carts as they are and they burn again.”
The refugees took their hands off the carts all at once. Kang Mujin stripped the iron tires and cut away the contaminated sections, and had Doria build two low mobile hearths that could dry even wet charcoal. Rakan did not tie the regular combat teams to weapons drill alone, but split them between escorting the charcoal road and searching out smoldering fires.
“If the vanguard is ten days off, shouldn’t we be making spears first?” Rakan asked.
“If the fire goes out in three days, there are no spears either.”
The first objective became reopening the fuel road, not the count of armed men.
That noon, Kang Mujin went out to the burned kilns himself. The enemy had burned the roofs and the storehouses, but had not managed to destroy all the hard charcoal beneath the kiln floors. The miners cleared away the collapsed earthen walls, and the refugees who had handled carts picked out sound axles and lashed together makeshift carriers.
At the moment he moved to open the second kiln, three thin wires caught at Kang Mujin’s fingertips. A delay device, linked to an oil jar behind the door. Pull the iron ring and the oil would pour onto the embers still alive under the charcoal pile, and burn the recovery crew along with it.
He drew the people back, then released the tension on the wires first. Doria carried the jar to an earthen pit, and Rakan’s scouts found the same device in two more places.
The third device was already half in motion. Oil fell drop by drop to the kiln floor, and inside the earthen wall a red ember brightened and darkened as if breathing. Pour water in and the hot kiln would split, burying what charcoal was left.
Kang Mujin had the refugees bring wet sand and a wide plate. Rakan emptied the windward side, and Doria blocked the oil’s path with an axle plate torn off a cart. Kang Mujin did not cut the wires; he shifted the pulling force, one at a time, onto three small wedges. When the last wedge took the tension, the jar’s slow tilt stopped.
“Do I cut it now?”
Rakan raised a blade, but Kang Mujin shook his head.
“First we starve the fire.”
Wet sand filled the kiln’s cracks, and the plate turned the oil’s route toward the earthen pit. Only after Doria pressed the jar’s mouth shut with tongs did Kang Mujin cut the wires one by one. Among the people holding their breath the smell of burning spread late, but no flame rose.
When the kiln’s owner knelt and made to rake through the remaining charcoal by hand, Kang Mujin caught them by the wrist.
“Your hands have to come through this first.”
He handed out gloves and long rakes and divided the recovery crew inside the kiln and out. Those inside drew the charcoal out; those outside checked every sack for the smell of black oil. Sacks that carried the smell were tied with red cord and sent not to the forges but to the reclamation drums for incendiary oil.
Taking back a charcoal kiln did not end with putting out a fire. There had to be a work order that would not burn again, and markings anyone could read as danger.
“They calculated even that we would come back.”
“Then next time we calculate first.”
Before the sun tilted, one kiln was open again. The usable charcoal came to only a cart and a half, but once the wet charcoal and the half-burned timber went into the mobile hearths, there was fuel to dry through the night. The smithy at the wheel-repair shop brought one small bellows back to life as well, so axle pins could be mended on the road.
The first cart to come back to the Steel Bastion carried more than charcoal. Among the fourteen newly joined refugees were miners and drivers, and each wrote into the roster, in their own hand, the work they could do. Kang Mujin set a single unadorned spearhead on the workbench.
“From tomorrow, one person does not make one spear from end to end.”
Doria looked from the spearhead to the unfamiliar hands and back.
“The fuel road is saved, and now you mean to divide the hands.”
“The first failure sets the standard.”
There was still only the one spearhead, and the process chart was empty. The next day, in the course of real hands ruining iron and repairing it, they would have to find the standards for length, for width, for the quench.
To the north, the vanguard’s light metal was moving south faster than the main body. Before the fire they had taken back went out, they had to build a way to divide that fire among fifty pairs of hands.
Kang Mujin set the first billet of stock down beside the forge.
Join the discussion