§101 Avimore I (Patreon)

Getting into Avimore was inconvenient compared to every other major city in the empire. Taylor didn't have any travel points into Dorian at all, not from Twilight or the Other Place. Partly, that was because the emperor kept his front yard clean of rifts, so he'd never had a reason to lead an expedition there. Partly it was because Taylor avoided the empire's home province. Other than his trip to Moyalwande, he'd managed to avoid all of Doria.

He took his portals to various places, running his errands, but ended in Wokehaad, arriving there a day before Rasmusen would pass by on the train, and stopped to visit with his friend Nelis, the master orchardist, and the two apprentices Taylor had taught a little magic to the winter before. On a whim, he accepted the maestro's offer to stay the night and took a turn on the Dark Lord's Discourse. He navigated his way through the maze of folded space to throw wooden disks at faraway baskets.

The course was in excellent shape, and the season being right for it, tourists and locals gathered on the clubhouse patio for drinks and small plates of food sourced mainly from Nelis's farm. Nobody bothered him or sent suspicious glances his way. They looked at him when his back was turned, or nodded to him solemnly as he passed.

Everyone knew about the masked magician who made the course by doing impossible things to the fabric of reality, and then used the maze to crush a team of twenty rogue IEF infiltrators. Twenty. That's how high the count had grown in the retelling. He wondered how long it would be before they reached a hundred.

After a pleasant night at Nelis's grand "farmhouse", Taylor caught the train to Avimore, handed his first-class ticket to the conductor, and settled himself across from an amused Domine Rasmusen.

"That's a neat trick," said the priest. "You couldn't have saved me that leg of the journey?" It was an open secret that Taylor could travel across the empire quickly, but few knew how he did it.

"I had things to do, and happened to wind up in Wokehaad. Since I don't have a way into Doria, I chose to join you."

"How do you make a way? How does it work?" said the eager priest.

"That's as much as I'll say on the subject." Taylor unpacked a stack of books into the seat next to him, both to lean on and to browse. "I was lucky to get a ticket, though. The station master is hardly ever at his post. I don't know how he keeps his job."

"You poor boy," mocked the priest. "Lazy station masters aside, will you come into the palace with me? There are people who would like to meet you."

"I'd rather not. While you're getting your package to where it belongs, I'll be scoping out the town for corrupted mana. I'll send word through the priory if I find anything."

At Avimore's station, they bid each other good luck and parted ways. Taylor hired the first carriage he found that was willing to drive him for the rest of the day, and got his first lesson in local geography. Avimore was split between the upper and the lower city. "Upper" Avimore was upstream, and "Lower" Avimore was downstream. It was more than a simple moniker: there was a very real dividing line in the form of an expansive park straddling the river. The pleasant trees and winding paths decorated it enough that one could almost forget there was a line at all. To many of those living downriver, the park was as good a boundary as a national border.

His second lesson came as the carriage drove further downstream. The lower city stank – not of garbage or sewers, but of industry. Dismal clouds loomed over the lowest sections of the city and emanated a fine black dust that settled everywhere. Smokestacks thrived in the far reaches, some short and dark, others tall and thin, all of them breathing out the same gray fumes. The tallest ones, their tops obscured in the overcast sky, had haloes of fire.

Lower Avimore wasn't poor, mostly. Small houses and neat apartments clustered in tight neighborhoods around knots of retail businesses focused on local needs. A few small restaurants, a bakery or two, a grocer, and a place to drink at night covered most people's needs. Arguably, the denizens of Lower Avimore were better off than the poorer farmers of a town like Mourne. They had a wider variety of food, more jobs to choose from, and their homes were slightly larger.

Yet Taylor couldn't help but be offended. Everything was paved, and he was hard-pressed to find a single tree. In a few places, along a dirt easement or a patch of ground that used to be a park, trunks dried out in the dismal air, collecting the city's black dust in their dead rings. Someone had cut down all the trees, then neglected to replant a single one. It felt intentional, all that ruthless cutting and leaving the reminders behind.

People trudged back and forth from their homes, too weary or cautious to lift their heads. And if they had, what would there be to look at? Gray wood buildings floundered beneath a gray sky. He spied the occasional building where the owners had tried to fight back against the city's monochrome oppression, but the brightly painted surfaces took up the city's grime, their colors spoiled of promise.

Taylor had his driver quarter the city, passing up and down over and again, while he scoped it with his mana sense and small binoculars made specially for the purpose. He kept a map in his lap and marked the areas of the city as they passed through. They covered all of the lower city in a day. 

There were traces all over, a sign of something that had touched corruption, brushed against it, and carried its taint away; but the source eluded him until late in the day. There was a walled-in compound at the far end of town, and its gates were open. Tired, dirty workers emerged on foot; a high proportion of them were dwarven, so it was probably some type of heavy labor, yet they had no tools on them. 

Every single one of them had been exposed. Not so much that they would come down with the fatal disease, but they had touched corruption. Recently.

"Driver, what is that place?"

"Metalworks. That's all most people know around here. Anyone who knows better keeps their mouth shut about it. I heard Imperials run that place."

Well, that didn't take long, reflected Taylor. He needed a closer look, but if he was going to peek illicitly, he should do it at night.

"Take me to a hotel, please. Someplace where they speak arcaic and accept payment by Dwergbank."

"Actown it is, sir. I don't want to stay this deep in low-town if I can help it. I don't have anything against the people who work here, but I'm glad I'm not one of them."

Taylor watched the workers queue up for passenger wagons that would take them to different parts of the city, and wondered how many of them would fall ill if he did nothing. It was his nature to help people. But soon, he would have to start setting limits. He couldn't possibly solve the world's problems in addition to his own, whatever the great spirits might think. The number of people he could save far exceeded his available time. Meanwhile, the changes that could truly help the most people had to be his top priority.

Still, these particular people were right in front of him, and they were hard to ignore.

Arctown was situated away from the branch river and drew its water from wells scattered over the area. Lower Avimore merchants did a brisk business in water filtration. The Silver Larch Hotel used magical filters that separated water from everything that wasn't water, and his room came with a sealed jug of the purified result. As soon as he checked in, Taylor sent a single postcard: to the Avimore priory, to let them know he was in town. Rasmusen had explained to him a while ago that it was important he notify authorities when he planned to stay overnight in a city. People knew who he was, even if they didn't know everything, and having a significant power walk "secretly" into town made people uncomfortable. And since he wanted to avoid the governors and their connections to the emperor, his best contact was the local priory. According to Rasmusen, if anyone asked, the local bishop could say he was aware of Taylor's presence and didn't find it remarkable. 

With nothing to immediately occupy himself, Taylor asked for, and received, a jar full of waste material from the hotel's filtering system, for "academic purposes." They didn't ask him what it was for, didn't even blink. Either they were afraid to ask a masked magician why he wanted something so odd, or they were used to getting strange requests.

Nightfall brought new opportunities. Taylor climbed into the smudgy skies of Lower Avimore using Airwalk, turned into a gray slime, and rolled his way toward the smokestacks. It was one of the better mobility tricks he and Premi had discovered for this slime form. By constantly extending his Airwalk platform in front of him, he could roll through the sky faster than most birds could fly. He could even do loops and corkskrews if he wanted to, but tonight he made a straight line for the fuming heart of the city. The night shifts were hard at work, but Taylor couldn't make heads or tails of which buildings were doing what. From his perch near one of the granddaddy chimneys, each building was an opaque block where people went in, and smoke and noise came out.  He could see where the taint of corruption was a little stronger, but he had no idea why.

It was after midnight, when the shifts were close to ending, that the great factory below him started to make sense. The buildings threw open their loading doors and spat out lines of carts, pulled by men and laden with each building's output. Taylor changed to human form so he could dig out paper and pencil, and make a map of what went where. He didn't get it all, but he got the gist of it. Raw ore, fuel, and other basic materials went into the complex at one end, and finished metal parts came out the other. Parts to what, he couldn't say, and didn't want to risk discovery by getting too close. There were beams and sheets of steel, brackets made of alloys he couldn't identify from far away, screws and fasteners, and many boxes of stamped metal parts. The ultimate destination was a line of train cars on a spur line that didn't appear on Taylor's map. In fact, most of the factory was entirely new, and likely hadn't been committed to any public map so far.

Later, after the fires were banked and workers were all at home, he descended to rooftop level and slipped into the most contaminated building by an upstairs window. As expected, the building housed banks of machines for crushing limestone and iron ores. Minerals passed through one machine after another, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces, until the final products piled in hills at the far end of the line. The goods were destined for another building where a blast furnace would heat the ore and limestone with copious amounts of fuel to make iron and smoke. The machines were driven by mana crystal, with some assistance from earth magic to make the minerals easier to work.

Of the two inputs, it was clear to Taylor which one was the problem: iron. The iron-processing machines needed a good purification, but he refrained from fear of detection. The raw ore on hand was clean, but at some point, they had taken a corrupted shipment. If one shipment could be tainted, then so could a second. The input bins were separated by type and grade of ore, as each required slightly different treatment to get the ideal result. The most tainted bins were labeled, "magnetite." Black crystalline rocks lined the bottoms of the bins. There were other types of ores, in lines of wheeled bins as tall as Taylor. Hematite, lemonite, and lesser ores that would need further processing before they went into the furnaces. This place's job was to crush rock.

There was a small office in the building, with a shelf of organized papers describing the building's worker attendance, intake, output, and machine maintenance. There was nothing about where the different ores came from, and nothing at all older than a few weeks. It seemed management, whoever they were, periodically collected all records and stored them elsewhere. That same person would also know where the shipments came from.

The magnetite arrived irregularly, possibly from different sources, until they had enough to crush all at once. It was premium ore, more than two-thirds iron. When crushed into small enough granules, it could be fed directly into the furnaces. Workers had probably carried the corruption with them as dust on their clothes and breathed it into their lungs.

So where were all the sick workers? There were only twenty in the palace's clinic, and many of them looked like palace servants, not ore crushers.

As he was stalled for the moment, Taylor went to the hotel to sleep. He couldn't do anything until he learned who ran the place.