Chương 31: Mud

Inside the blacksmith's shop, the forge was roaring with a brilliant heat, fueled by the endless supply of coal Jack provided. Barnaby pulled a glowing rod of iron from the flames using his tongs. He laid it flat against the anvil and raised his master hammer. CLANG. CLANG. CLANG. With precise strikes, he flattened the end of the rod into a wide, leaf-shaped blade.

He quickly grabbed a smaller, thicker piece of iron, placed it horizontally just beneath the blade, and hammered it fiercely into the red-hot shaft until the two pieces welded together. He plunged the finished spearhead into a barrel of dark oil. The oil hissed violently, sending a plume of thick smoke into the air as the metal rapidly cooled and hardened. Barnaby pulled it out and wiped it with a rag. The boar spear was heavy.

The sharp blade was designed to pierce thick hide, and the heavy cross-lugs sticking out from the sides were designed to stop a charging beast dead in its tracks. A man holding this spear could brace the wooden shaft by his foot and let the momentum of a leaping dire wolf impale itself without the beast ever reaching his face.

"Five down," Barnaby grunted, tossing the finished spearhead onto a growing pile in the corner.

"Twenty-five to go." Up in the village, the atmosphere was just as frantic. Giles and his men were working at a feverish pace. The second Winter Cabin was already framed, and the women were busy pouring the dry ash and sawdust into the double-walls for insulation. But as Jack walked down the snowy street to inspect the progress, Giles jogged over to meet him. The big carpenter looked deeply stressed.

"Lord Jack," Giles said, wiping his brow.

"We have a critical shortage." Jack stopped, leaning on his cane.

"Wood? Did the men not find enough fresh pine in the woods?"

"We have plenty of wood, My Lord," Giles assured him.

"The men have been chopping since, and the timber for the mine supports and the palisade wall is stacking up nicely. Our problem is stone." Giles pointed toward the unfinished floor of the second cabin.

"The hypocaust system requires flat river stones to build the underfloor heating channels," Giles explained.

"We scoured the entire riverbank to find enough flat rocks for the first cabin. But the river is frozen solid under ice. We cannot dig any more stones out of the mud. We don't have the materials to build the hearths for the remaining cabins, let alone the massive furnace for the new bathhouse." Jack frowned. He looked at the deep snow covering the valley. Without flat stones, the hot exhaust from the fires couldn't be channeled under the floors safely. The wooden floorboards would simply catch fire.

"Can Barnaby forge iron pipes to run under the floors instead?" Jack asked. Giles shook his head.

"It would take him months to forge that much hollow iron, My Lord. And iron rusts away quickly when exposed to wet ground and hot smoke. We need stone. Hard, flat stone that can absorb the heat." Jack looked out toward the frozen river in the distance. He remembered from the memories, seeing the thick, grey mud along the banks before the deep winter freeze had completely buried it. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"We don't need to find flat stones," Jack said slowly, a new plan forming in his mind.

"We are going to make them." Giles looked confused.

"Make stone? Only an Earth Mage can shape solid rock, My Lord."

"We don't need magic," Jack said, tapping his cane.

"We need clay, wooden molds, and a lot of heat. We are going to make bricks." The concept of standardized fired bricks was not entirely foreign to the empire, but it was incredibly rare in this impoverished, frozen northern region. The peasants here built with raw timber and whatever rocks they could carry from the fields.

"Bricks," Giles muttered, his eyes widening.

"I have seen them in the capital. But making them requires massive kilns and perfect clay."

"We have pure clay under the ice of the riverbanks," Jack said.

"And we have enough coal to burn a hole through the sky. Gather the men. Bring pickaxes and heavy buckets. We are going to the river." For the rest of the afternoon, a new, exhausting labor was added to the villagers' tasks. The men used their iron pickaxes to smash through the thick ice along the river's edge. Beneath the ice, they found exactly what Jack had promised: deep veins of clay. The villagers hauled buckets of the freezing clay back up to the center of the village.

Jack stood in the snow, directing the construction of the kiln. It was a crude but effective updraft design. They used the remaining river stones and thick mud to build a large, circular tower with iron grate at the bottom. The coal would burn beneath the grate, and the intense heat would rise straight up through the tower, baking whatever was stacked inside.

"The kiln is ready, Lord Jack," Old Miller said, his hands covered in freezing mud.

"Now we need the bricks," Jack said. He looked at the massive pile of wet clay they had dumped into the center of the street.

"Giles, build small wooden boxes to use as molds. The clay must be kneaded to push all the air bubbles out, pressed tightly into the wooden boxes, and then turned out to dry slightly before we fire them." The villagers immediately set to work. The women and the older men rolled up their sleeves and plunged their bare hands into the pile of freezing clay. They began to knead the material, pushing and folding it like bread dough. But within ten minutes, the fatal flaw in Jack's plan became painfully obvious.

The clay was incredibly dense, and because it had just been pulled from beneath a frozen river, it was freezing cold. A young woman cried out, pulling her hands out of the clay. Her fingers were completely numb, turning a dangerous shade of pale blue. Old Miller grunted in pain, his aged shoulders trembling violently as he tried to force the stiff clay into one of the wooden molds Giles had quickly nailed together.

"It is too stiff, My Lord," Giles panted, rubbing his own freezing hands together to return the circulation.

"The cold makes the clay very hard. The people cannot knead it. Their fingers will suffer frostbite before we even make a hundred bricks." Jack watched the shivering, exhausted villagers. They were already pushing their bodies to the absolute limit. They were chopping trees for the palisade, building the cabins, and hauling wood all day. Asking them to plunge their bare hands into freezing mud for hours on end was crossing the line from hard labor into cruelty. Human flesh simply could not handle it.

"Stop," Jack ordered loudly, raising his cane. The villagers eagerly pulled their hands away from the freezing clay, shivering violently as they wrapped their coats tight.

"Go inside the Great Hall and warm yourselves by the fire," Jack told them.

"The workday is over. You have all earned your extra porridge today."

"But the bricks, Lord Jack?" Giles asked, looking nervously at the empty kiln.

"Without the bricks, the cabins cannot have heat. The bathhouse cannot be built. We need thousands of them."

"I know," Jack said smoothly, his face completely expressionless.

"Leave the clay in the street. My mages will handle the kneading tonight." Giles let out a sigh of relief. He bowed deeply.

"Praise the gods for your retainers, My Lord. We will return in the morning to fire the kiln." As the villagers hurried back toward the warm safety of the castle, Jack stood alone in the snowy street, staring at the massive pile of clay. He had promised thousands of bricks by morning. Which meant, tonight, the terrifying skeletal warriors of the Frost-Grip crypts were going to be making mud pies. Jack sighed heavily, rubbing his temples as he anticipated the massive headache he was going to have.

He turned and hobbled back up the mountain path toward his warm bedroom to prepare for a very long night of micromanaging the undead.