§114 Mt. Uroda (Patreon)

Taylor, Mt. Uroda

They stood around a table, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Two elder beastkin were in attendance, members of the council that ran Rossignol province, one of them a bushkin with large eyes and strong legs, the other a graying ratkin. There was a sub-minister of diplomatic affairs from the Dorian Empire, a human in an impressive greatcoat embroidered with the sigil of his imperial rank. Next to him was High Bishop Yaonoch from the Church of the Giving Goddess, in a simple priest's robes despite his rank. All those important people were gathered, but a pair of lower-ranking beastkin functionaries did most of the talking. They specialized in urban planning and asked endless questions.

Their questions were directed at a young man in battlesage's robes and a mask, of the same slate color as the volcano looming over them, trimmed in lava red. They pointed at large sheets of paper on the table.

"We're standing on top of a spring," explained Taylor, the masked youth. "When the town outgrows it, we'll build an aqueduct tapping the river here," he pointed at the largest scale map, "and treated wastewater will return to the river here."

"You have it backwards," advised one of the planners, a rare rhino-kin with a great horn growing from his forehead. He had a pen filled with red ink in his hand, ready to strike. "You're tapping from downriver and returning upriver."

"It's intentional. We have to move the water uphill, no matter what we do, so it isn't much trouble to add two more pumps. By returning the water upstream, we reduce our effect on the river. The water level won't change much, and the river will finish cleaning the water for us. We'll nurture filtering plantlife between the two points, and forbid building anything directly on that section of the river. We'll keep it groomed, but semi-wild."

The rhinokin and his fellow planner, an antlered woman, flipped through the drawings. They showed the town in stages, from an initial groundbreaking settlement composed of a handful of easy-to-construct buildings, to a village with a large multi-purpose building in its center, to a town of five thousand people. 

"I don't see a forge," said the antlered woman, "or any heavy industry at all. Where will these smiths of yours work?"

"Inside the mountain. With Wen-Uroda's permission, we'll tap the lava chamber and separate iron and other minerals from the silicate. You wouldn't know just looking at it, but Mt. Uroda is nearly half made of iron. If you know how to separate it, then all you need is an energy source."

"All of this is very ambitious," said the rhinokin, "too ambitious. Especially for a child."

"Not as ambitious as it sounds, actually. Nearly everything we've talked about has been done before. At most, what I'm proposing is a few incremental improvements to standard practice. The only new thing here is the mining."

"And everything hinges on this proposal to get iron from lava. When will this miracle be ready for use?"

"Today, good sir. Today." The masked youth's restrained manners gave way to obvious enthusiasm. "I have prepared a demonstration. Come and see."

He walked away from the meeting, heading toward the mountain, fully expecting the group to follow him, which they did. Why wouldn't they? The boy was named Taylor, but he was better known as Dux Twilight, the commander of spirit armies. He made divine figures of arcaic gods, conquered rifts, hunted giant monsters, befriended great spirits, invented a new magic system, and single-handedly dispatched a gang of fourth-tier mercenaries. There were rumors, half-believed, that he was a divine envoy, someone who acted in the gods' interest. If he were so eager to demonstrate something, then it might be worth watching.

They didn't have to go far to reach a bloomery, a twelve-foot-tall clay vessel, bulbous on the bottom with a tall neck, topped with a small cone. It was carved with sigils none of them recognized. This wasn't standard Spellscript, but something else. Something new.

"It's inactive right now. I invite you to look inside. The feedstock is in the bin," he motioned at a nearby bin.

The visitors touched the refractory material of the bloomery, traced the magic signs with their fingers, and stuck their heads through the door at the bottom to look inside the chamber, similarly inscribed. They whispered questions at each other. Beastkin were long-lived people, and all of them here had learned at least a little magic within their professions, but none of them had ever seen these symbols. The bin held gravel, made of the same slate-colored rock as the rest of Mt. Uroda: hard and useless stuff. Anyone who lived near a volcano knew that, rarely, small deposits of metal could be discovered along old lava flows. Could the young magician really pull iron from these rocks?

The diplomat and the priest, both human, kept their distance, preferring to watch from the sidelines. Their interest wasn't whether Taylor could do what he said he could. Their interest was whether or not the council of Rossignol would allow a human found a town in their province. The beastkin council was wary of imperial interference and could grow hostile in the face of overreaching authority. Beastkin were allowed their customary system of governance, but they weren't a client state. They were a province. If he wanted to, the emperor could install a human governor to rule over them. The main reason he didn't was that things were fine as they were: the empire's coffers received taxes, the Imperial Expeditionary Force filled out its ranks with capable beastkin, and Rossignol needed little oversight from imperials. Not everyone was happy with the arrangement, but few people were willing to risk breaking it.

If Rossignol gave land to a human to govern, it would be a significant exception to their usual policy. If there was anyone they would make such an exception for, it was Taylor.

When they had all had their fill of exploring the bloomery, Taylor went to work. A wolfkin boy and an older human man shoveled a cubic foot of gravel into the bloomery and closed the thick door. Taylor placed his hand on the bloomery and charged it with mana.

"How long will this take?" asked the ratkin council member.

"About ten minutes. Let's have  some refreshments, shall we?" He looked to one side, where a table had appeared, laden with warm drinks and a light luncheon. Most of those assembled were important enough to be used to such treatment and didn't hesitate to help themselves. They filled their plates and peppered him with more questions while they ate, preventing Taylor from enjoying any of the food himself. They wanted to know his construction schedule, where he would source his materials, and, most of all, where he planned to get the metalworkers he needed. The town wasn't supposed to just turn out ingots of raw iron, but finished products as well.

"That's the hardest part," he admitted. "All of this is speculation until we find workers. But once we have our group of recruits, the first phase of building will take a few days. As for construction materials … you'll understand in a minute."

The bloomery was long ready by then. When Taylor opened the hatch, liquid glass flowed from the vessel into a mold. He helped it along with a long-handled hoe, scraping the layer of glass away from the heavier layer of molten iron. He explained as he worked.

"The glass floats above the heavier iron. We can further refine the glass to make finished products, or mold it into ingots and ship it to other workshops. But initially, we'll pour it into molds like this one." With a trowel, he scraped unwanted extra material from the top of the mold and flicked it deftly to one side, where it landed in a heap with other blobs of glass. Taylor kept his explanation limited to what his audience could see, and didn't tell them about electromagnets helping separate the iron from glass, or the many other metals present in the lava.

His helpers used ropes to pull the glass mold aside and replace it with a different mold that made long, flat bars. Taylor opened a valve at the bottom of the bloomery, and the hot iron flowed. It nearly filled the mold.

"How many of these do you plan on building?" The antlered beastkin was making notes with a stick of graphite wrapped in string, this world's version of the pencil. She wanted to calculate the town's output.

"None," explained Taylor. "This kind of batch processing is fine for demonstrations and experiments, but the real production process will be continuous and offer better control over the final product. But I can't run that process without helpers, so here we are."

"By continuous, you mean," she prompted.

"Lava flows in one end, and finished ingots come out the other. The line keeps working as long as there are workers to man it."

"Is that safe?"

The mask tilted slightly, as if amused. "Molten metal is never safe. But the workers will be safer here than at most places. They'll also have housing in short order. The glass we produce becomes stackable bricks." He led them to a low wall made from interlocking blocks of green translucent glass. "The real ones will be bigger, and we'll make them in different configurations so people can design the buildings they want. When it's time to take down part of the town and rebuild it, we can reuse the materials or melt them down to make products."

High Bishop Yaonoch asked his first and only question of the day. "How are you powering the factory? I hope you're not planning on donating all the mana by yourself."

"We'll capture mana from the vent."

An uncomfortable silence descended on the gathering. Everyone present had assumed that, when Taylor rescued Wen-Uroda from the corrupted rift, he had closed it off. That was imperial policy. It was law.

"Do I need to explain why it shouldn't be closed?" asked the young man.

"Not to us," said a council member, "but perhaps we should explain it to the imperial representatives. This vent has been a recurring problem for us. The last time it opened was fifty years ago, but it had opened sixty-two years before that. And less than a hundred years prior to that. Prior to that, it opened thrice in a century, and every incident was a disaster. But what is the alternative?"

"Closing it only causes problems later," Taylor concluded. "By putting mana and lava to constant use, we can prevent future eruptions of both."

"If the vent is open, and your planned facility is not yet built," asked the imperial diplomat, "what are you doing with the mana right now?"

"I'm permuting it to useful types, and growing crystal from it." Taylor shrugged as if his actions were the most obvious of solutions. He opened the satchel he wore across his shoulder and pulled out a large wooden box. "Which reminds me. This is for Emperor Osumund. It's all the crystal that I've grown here, minus what I used to maintain the process and secure the mountain. Please deliver this with my respects."

The assembly stared at the box full of crystal in stunned silence. It was the most potent source of stored magic in the world of Aarden, and Dux Twilight had just declared he was growing it like a crop. He proposed to control the dangerous rift instead of closing it, as people had done for millennia. Even in the most fanciful of novels, only dark lords presumed to control such forces.

The diplomat spoke in a dazed half-whisper. "We'll need to inspect the facility to ensure it's safe."

"That will be a problem," said the rhinokin. "The ground we're standing on belongs to Rossignol, but the mountain's interior is the domain of Wen-Uroda. It always has been. Great spirits are beings as near to gods as a mortal will meet until Lady Death embraces them."

A council member nodded. "That is another major issue we need to bring up with you, young Taylor. We need proof of the great spirit's cooperation in this endeavor."

"I assume her word in person will suffice." He turned without waiting for an answer and took several paces away from the group to a place of bare rock where nothing grew. He knelt, placing one hand on the ground. "I call to you, Lady of Ancient Stone. I call to you, Progenitor of Fire. I stand at your door and seek an audience, Wen-Uroda."

The stone beneath Taylor's hand glowed bright, then slumped into the flat surface of a pool of lava. Bright yellow hands rose from the pool and gripped the side, hauling a massive salamander behind it. She rose, yellow and orange in her blazing glory, hot enough to trigger her summoner's magical defenses against fire, and leaned her torso against the edge of the pool as if she were enjoying a hot spring. Her wide amphibian's mouth made something like a smile at the mortals before her. If all of her could be seen, she would be twice as long as any man was tall, not including her tail. The arcaics all bowed deeply in her presence. A few of them trembled. Though most of her was submerged, she made an imposing figure. 

The two imperials, the diplomat and the high bishop, did not show as much reverence. But even they bowed a little.

"It's good to see you, friend. You brought guests today." Taylor made introductions and then invited the council members to speak. Though they stammered through part of their question, the mighty spirit spoke patiently with them.

"I cannot tell you how pleased I am to have Dux Twilight living nearby and working inside my domain. We have discussed all he wishes to do, I have seen his magic, and I am satisfied. There is no need for an imperial presence," she flashed a hot orange eye at the two imperials. "You entered recently, uninvited. You will not enter again without my express permission."

The imperials bowed to her again. It was often said that great spirits were equivalent to classed humans of the fourth tier, at minimum. If they wanted to take issue with her demand, it was clear they would have to go through the only person known to summon her: Taylor.

"And Taylor," she purred, "I know it will take a while to gather your workers, but don't be a stranger in the meantime. We had such fun at the banquet. Let's do it again soon."

"Have you ever had karposh?" asked Taylor. They chatted briefly, arranging to meet again, forcing the others to wait for their conversation to end. The situation was entirely in Uroda's hands, with Taylor playing along. Whatever her reasons, she made a point of favoring him above such august company.

After the massive salamander had dived into her pool and the lava hardened to a gray rippled stone, the other council member spoke. The bushkin had been silent up to that point, and his voice reflected both his awe and his reluctant determination to finish the day's business. "The council accepts your many excellent references, and we will deliberate on your plans. But there is one more thing you will require before you can proceed. It's a minor issue, and should be no great problem for you."

"And that is?"

"You will have to be certified in imperial governance, which means taking your exams."

Taylor stared at the man. He knew the circumstances were already exceptional because of his youth and the fact that he was a regular human. Even with his superlative references and accomplishments to date, the situation was strange. But he had acted as a legate before. Were they really going to make him take a bureaucracy test?

"It's not us," said the nervous bushkin, as he pointed at the two imperials. "It's imperial law."