Chapter 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.

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“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.”