Chương 107: Chapter 104 - Still big

Alric had taken over one of the long tables in the common room and, over the course of the last hour, had managed to do to it what ambitious men and poor planning occasionally did to cities. Paper had spread in stages. First in a neat stack, then in a few working piles, then out across the table entirely, with rejected sheets pushed aside rather than removed, as though proximity to the correct answer might improve them by association.

A cup of tea sat near his elbow, untouched long enough to have given up any reasonable claim to warmth. Between the pages were circles, figures, rough side profiles of boilers, columns, joints and coils, and the sort of equations that always looked more convincing while being written than they did when someone had to trust them. Stromni sat opposite him with one forearm planted on the table, reviewing a page Alric had shoved across some time ago and then forgotten he had done so.

He had said very little since arriving, which in Stromni's case was either a sign of deep thought or imminent disapproval, and the deep frown currently dragging at his brow suggested the two were not mutually exclusive. He had a bit of charcoal in one hand and was using it to correct Alric's lines with the quiet irritation of a man discovering that a drawing had been made by someone who understood the purpose of a thing and had a deep and very personal grievance against proportion.

Alric, for his part, was bent over the one sheet he trusted more than the others, because it was the only one that described something already in operation rather than something he was trying to bully into existence. Four stones. Roughly three hundred litres. About an hour to bring a boiler to a boil, though not with the sort of reliability any sane person would choose to build a business around if sanity had been the standard by which businesses were made. It was never precise.

The stones varied, the placement varied, the weather seemed to take a personal interest when it pleased, and the boilers themselves behaved differently depending on how much mood one was willing to attribute to copper, which Alric refused to do on principle even when it was becoming difficult not to. He drew another line beneath the figures and redid the comparison.

The still they had spoken of in broad terms before, in the safe language people used when speaking about very large mistakes that had not yet acquired dimensions, no longer remained broad under repetition. Once a thing began to pass through calculation often enough, it stopped being an idea and became an intention, and intentions were harder to excuse.

He adjusted the assumed losses, accounted again for the heat required to bring that much wash up to working temperature, then compared it back to the known output of the brewery boilers. The number that emerged did not change because he disliked it. Eleven heating stones to get it to temperature. Six to hold it. Potentially seven if the weather was taking an interest.

He stopped with the charcoal still resting against the page and looked at the result without moving, as if stillness might somehow encourage dishonesty in his favour.

"An now?" Stromni asked, not looking up from the drawing he was correcting.

"I think this is it," Alric said. That made Stromni glance over, one brow lifting. Alric exhaled once through his nose and studied it a moment longer. Stromni grunted, which might have been sympathy, though from him it sounded suspiciously similar to amusement. He dragged one of Alric's side profiles toward himself and began thickening the belly of the still with short, decisive strokes. Alric turned the sheet and pushed it across.

Stromni looked it over without hurry, his eyes moving once down the figures, then back again, not checking the arithmetic so much as deciding whether the arithmetic had the look of something worth respecting. He nodded once.

"Aye," he said at last.

"Big. Ya weren't kidding."

"It feels mad."

"That's cause ya draw it like a lad who can't write." Stromni set the page down and tapped the larger sketch.

"Ya keep thinking of vessel. This ain't vessel no more." He turned the sheet back toward himself and, without asking, began redrawing the side elevation. He did not comment on scale. He did not make a speech about ambition, or risk, or what sort of person decided to build a still large enough to require its own relationship with the city.

He simply corrected the line of the neck, widened the body, altered the angle where the arm would leave it, then marked the places where the joins would require reinforcement as naturally as another man might note where hinges belonged on a door. Copper thickness. Column height. Strain at the joints. Weight where weight would travel. Everything Alric had been willing to leave in the category of later acquired the unpleasant clarity of something that had to be solved now.

The still, once Stromni had finished making it honest, resolved into a structure that no longer resembled the manageable, exaggerated tool Alric had been pretending he had in mind. It would stand over four metres in height, broad in the belly, narrowing through the rise before the arm came away, carrying all the familiar influence of the older Scottish stills he had once toured around in another life, only scaled to a degree none of those tour guides would have discussed with insurance still active.

It would hold roughly three thousand litres if built the way they were now drawing it, which was less a capacity than an announcement. Alric took the page back and revised the heat requirement again, this time using Stromni's corrected scale rather than the kinder version he had been working from before. He watched the figures settle into place.

"Eleven," he said. Stromni scratched at his beard.

"Ta get her warmed up?"

"Her?" Alric asked raising an eyebrow.

"Aye, her. We treat her badly and her wrath will never end." Stromni said solemnly. Alric nodded.

"Well, six should hold it. Seven if the day is against us, or if the stones prove temperamental."

"Stones usually do." Stromni said, leaning on his elbow glancing at the drawing.

"They do when we need them not to." Alric said passing it over again. Stromni grinned faintly and leaned back enough to see the full design spread between the other papers. For a little while neither of them said anything. The common room carried on around them in the distant way common rooms did when men at one table had begun discussing something large enough that ordinary conversation seemed too small to interfere with it. The tea by Alric's hand remained ignored.

Outside, a wagon rolled past, the sound of its wheels arriving dull through the wall.

"Well," Stromni said at last and immediately beginning to have a distinctly dwarven giggle, "Where lad?" He put a hand on his face, watching Alric closely for him to reach the same conclusion he had. Alric looked at the still drawing, then at the common room around them, and then back to the still, which already answered the question by existing. A thing that size did not go somewhere discreetly.

It did not tuck itself into a corner or politely occupy a spare warehouse the way a merchant might store badly chosen hopes and dreams. It required height. Space. Strength beneath it, room around it, access enough that one could feed it, drain it, cool it, and if things turned unfriendly perhaps survive it. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. The options collapsed with insulting speed. He sat back slowly.

"My house? This place?" Stromni did not react immediately, which was somehow worse than surprise. He just glanced up once, then back to the drawing, as though checking that the answer matched the still and finding that, unfortunately, it did.

"Aye," he said.

"Ain't going in the warehouse district, that's for damn sure."

"Wait. What about..." He said trailing off as he considered options. It was, Alric admitted, not really a matter for debate. The house sat near enough to Merchant's Row to keep wagons practical, broad enough in its old inn bones to take something absurd if one stopped pretending the place was still a home in the ordinary sense, and close enough to the river in case of emergency. He drew the house in his head as he knew it, not as residence but as structure, and the transformation felt indecently easy.

"We'd need it as close to the river side as possible," he said, already reaching for another sheet. Stromni looked at him sidelong.

"If we're doing this properly, and a drain route that doesn't foul the whole place. The flow matters. If we set it wrong, we'll spend every run fighting layout instead of—" He stopped only because he had already begun sketching rooms over the plan in his head, the old common room, the broad rear section, the access from the yard, where the lines would need to pass, and because once he had started thinking of the house that way the dangers came in with the same ease. The place had too much wood.

That arrived first and without subtlety.

"We strip as much timber out of it as we can," he said.

"Anything near the still, anything above it if possible. We keep stone where we can and remove the rest. And if there's ever a fire…"

"Aye," Stromni said. Alric ignored him because he had not yet reached the point where interruption could compete with momentum.

"If there's ever a fire, we hang barrels in nets from the upper ceiling, fill them with water. If the heat gets high enough, the ropes go or the nets fail and they drop. Not elegant, but it should stop spread if it breaks right. Or at least slow it. Enough for people to get clear." Stromni's expression had not changed, but something in it had become patient in the way of a man watching someone attempt to construct an entire building out of panic and strangely specific intentions.

"We remove the roof material too, Is slate an option? Hmm.." Alric continued, now fully in the unpleasant business of designing his own house around catastrophe.

"If there's still that much old wood in the upper frame. We may need to use metal for the roof frame. Can we…"

"Alric."

"And any doors facing the chamber itself should probably be metal too…"

"Alric!" He looked up. Stromni set the charcoal down with exaggerated care, which was his way of making it clear he would now be speaking and that this courtesy should not be abused.

"That's for me ta figure out lad." he said. Alric opened his mouth, which Stromni ignored.

"No, lad hear me properly. We plan the building around the still, aye, but first we build the still. Not the room. Not the walls. The still." He tapped the drawing again.

"That comes first. Once it's in, then we stone it around. Then the doors. Metal, proper. Not banding. Doors. Roof comes off, we slate it. Whole thing done right. That part's mine." Alric frowned at him, not because he disagreed, but because the certainty with which Stromni said it made the whole undertaking feel as though it had already moved one stage further toward reality without asking permission.

"You make that sound straightforward."

"It ain't straightforward," Stromni said.

"It's construction. That's different. Not ya wheelhouse lad. Mine." There was, Alric had noticed, no point arguing with craftsmen once they had decided a thing had moved into their territory. They developed a sort of calm that was more dangerous than temper, because it meant they had ceased debating whether something should be done and had begun arranging in what order other people were allowed to be wrong about it. He sat back again and let the interruption settle properly.

Once it had, the logic of it was impossible to escape. The still would have to be fabricated in sections large enough to be meaningful and small enough to move, brought into the gutted space, and stitched together from copper plates on site because no sane street in the city was built to permit a complete monster like that through it. It would be, in effect, assembled where it intended to live and then walled in, which was precisely the sort of sentence people should not have to say about domestic property.

Stromni pulled another page toward himself and began sketching a rough sequence, each mark impatient and confident.

"You want less wood? Fine. We gut what we can. But not before I know what needs supporting and what can go. Stone walls inside the chamber. Roof out, slate in. Metal doors. And enough room to work round the damned thing without one fool catching a sleeve on hot copper and dying stupidly."

"That last one sounds specific." Alric said trying not to laugh.

"I've met people." Stromni said simply. Alric let out a short breath that was not quite laughter.

"And the upper room?"

"Depends how much of it you want left once I'm done."

"I do still live there."

"No lad. No one will live here." That irritated him because it sounded too much like the truth. The house had been resisting the idea of being merely a house for some time now. Seren had said as much before, though with more precision and less enjoyment. Offices had crept in first. Staff movement after that. Records, meetings, deliveries, interruptions, whatever remained of privacy being reduced to the parts of a building people forgot to demand all at once. Now the still arrived to finish the argument.

Less of a house and more of a headquarters with beds.

"No guild rules for this," Stromni said tapping the page. Alric looked up. Stromni shrugged one shoulder.

"Nothing written for a still this size. Not that I ever heard. Boilers, forge works, storage, aye. This?" He tapped the page again.

"Too strange, too big, and no one thought a brewer would lose his mind in just this direction."

"That's not very reassuring you know?" Alric responded.

"Aye, It ain't reassurance." Stromni's mouth twitched.

"Means scrutiny comes after. Not before. Artisans guild will have a small fit when it's all working ya know." Most regulations, Alric had learned, were simply other people's disasters turned into handwriting. If none existed for this, it did not mean safety. It meant originality, which was rarely a quality worth boasting about when fire, pressure, and three thousand litres of volatility were involved.

Worse, it meant they would attract attention simply by crossing the threshold into a category no one had needed words for yet. He glanced again at the drawing. It was no longer possible to pretend this remained a side project, some indulgence of curiosity undertaken in a forge with tankards and bad ideas.

"It will draw eyes," he said.

"Aye. It will."

"Just by existing."

"Aye. Which is why we make plates at me forge, bring em here, build it inside. Otherwise we will never get this things done before we face more paperwork than we can handle. I'll need a small forge ere for solder ya know." Alric rubbed the bridge of his nose and exhaled.

"I miss when this was just difficult." Stromni laughed under his breath.

"No you don't." They returned after that to the drawing with the odd calm of men who had already passed the point of no return. Stromni revised the lower plates again, muttering about weight and access for riveting. Alric marked where the feed would enter, where the condenser line would run, where space must remain not because he wanted it aesthetically but because anyone forced to work too close to a thing that hot would eventually invent a tragedy out of impatience.

At one point Stromni looked up from the page and across the room, as though picturing the still here instead of there.

"Would dominate a hall, this."

"It will dominate a building."

"Aye," he said.

"That's why it'll be good."

"You have the strangest standards you know." Alric quipped back.

"My standards are excellent. Your standards bought a giant still and a ruined house."

"It is not ruined yet." Stromni gave him a look.

"Lad, I just told you I'm taking the roof off." By the time they were finished, the table looked worse but the paper looked better. Alric sat back and looked at the final pages for a while without speaking. There was something uncomfortably final in seeing a large mistake written cleanly.

"This is the only place in the city that will take it," he said at last. Stromni nodded once, the movement small and entirely satisfied.

"It'll do nicely." Alric glanced at him.

"That is a monstrous thing to say about my home."

"I'm not talking about your home. Is our distillery now ya called it."

"That is worse, somehow." Stromni grinned and gathered the corrected sheets into one neat pile, which, coming from him, suggested ownership more than tidiness.

"Construction's my issue," he said.

"First ya go find a new house and get all this furniture out me distillery." Alric nodded slowly. Outside, another wagon passed in the street. Somewhere nearby, someone dropped something loudly and swore with admirable commitment. The common room had not changed, but the table between them had, and that was enough. The still on the page no longer looked hypothetical. It looked patient. He stared at it a moment longer, then let out a long breath.

"Seren," he said, mostly to himself, "is going to be absolutely furious." Stromni rose from his chair, papers in hand, and gave him a sympathetic look so brief it might have been a trick of light.

"Aye," he said.

"But she'll also be right." That was, unfortunately, the sort of observation one could not even argue with honestly.