The Seven-Ring Heresy Brand remained raised in the dim, smoky air of the foundry shed. Its cold iron teeth shone in the dying red light of sixty cooling pigs.
Inquisitor Malric Ostrander stood with his feet planted wide in the molding sand. His black woolen mantle shook with clerical outrage.
Behind him, twenty Synod paladins held their heavy poleaxes leveled at Kenneth Drake’s shield wall, their steel gauntlets groaning under tension.
“By the decree of the High Council,” Ostrander repeated, his voice carrying the dry, hollow deep ring of a tomb, “I place this unhallowed chimney under interdict! Any man who strikes another blow upon these tools, or aids in the spreading of this corrupted metal, shall be burned as an apostate of the Black Flame.”
Giles Croft took off his glasses.
He pulled a clean linen handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket, breathed lightly onto the glass lenses. Then he wiped away a fleck of gray graphite dust.
He replaced the glasses upon the bridge of his nose, adjusted the ear-pieces, and turned toward Toby Karr.
“Toby,” Giles said mildly. “Bring me Volume Four of the Imperial Frontier Codification of Statutes. The current fine dust opacity log.”
Toby scrambled to the survey desk. He hauled up a massive leather-bound tome bound in brass corners, its parchment leaves bulging with red ribbon bookmarks.
Giles took the heavy volume, flipped through forty pages with a practiced flick of his thumb. Then he folded the ledger back over his forearm.
“Inquisitor Ostrander,” Giles began, his voice level, flat, and fully empty of emotion. “You’re citing the Pyromantic Proscription of 388, which governs illicit potion-made transmutation of base metals.”
Ostrander’s eyes narrowed. “I cite the eternal law of the Light.”
“You cite an obsolete statute that was amended two hundred years ago,” Giles corrected calmly. “I refer you to Section Fourteen, Subsection B, of the Royal Outside and Heavy-duty Stonework Edict of 412, ratified by the High Synod under the reign of Emperor Castellan.”
Ostrander stiffened, his fingers tightening on the iron brand. “The edicts of the secular crown don’t bind the holy ministers of the Wheel.”
“Subsection C,” Giles continued without pausing, “specifically bears the Great Seal of Grand Judge Valerius the Third. It states verbatim: ‘Nonstop metalworking reduction facilities running upon reclaimed agricultural peat or stone coke shall be deemed town utilities, exempt from all pyromantic heresy tithes, provided that stack emissions maintain an average fine dust opacity below twenty percent during active smelting operations.’”
Giles pointed his wooden ruler toward the small table where Toby kept the survey records.
“Our stack emissions have been continuously audited using a standard Ringelmann smoke chart,” Giles stated. “Average fine dust opacity over the last six hours was eight point four percent. Well within the legal threshold for an urban residential district, let alone a heavy-duty frontier settlement.”
Ostrander’s jaw twitched. His paladins glanced at each other, their poleaxes wavering slightly.
“You play with words, Croft,” Ostrander spat. “You quote parchment while building a pit of hell on the borders of the civilized world.”
“I quote the law that guarantees your bishop’s cathedral roof,” Lady Beatrice of Dunwall interrupted. She stepped off the terrace stair with her double-entry charter held in her velvet-gloved hand.
She walked directly between the two armed lines. Her auburn hair shone in the lantern light, her gold-rimmed glasses resting upon her nose with regal power.
“Duchess Rowena Wintermere is the hereditary Protector of the Northern Marches,” Beatrice said, her voice freezing the air in the shed. “Grey Crag operates under a ducal charter of regional reclamation. The ten tons of iron currently cooling in those sand beds are already pledged to the Highmarch defensive works under sovereign contract.”
She looked Ostrander up and down with withering high-born disdain.
“Are you proposing to seize ducal military ordnance, Judge? In Dunwall, we hang highway robbers, even when they wear cassocks.”
Ostrander’s pale skin flushed dark crimson beneath his hollow cheekbones.
“The Synod doesn’t bow to country duchesses,” Ostrander snarled. “This land is unholy! This water is foul! The entire valley stinks of the Black Fen.”
Lady Millicent Croft stepped forward, holding a second ledger bound in stiff sheepskin. Her silver-rimmed glasses gleamed in the twilight.
“Plus, Judge,” Millicent said, her tone as smooth and chilling as river ice, “your vessel has been moored at our deep-water quay for three hours and forty minutes without filing a port manifest. Under Section Six of the Grey Crag Town Transit City law, all foreign ecclesiastical craft exceeding thirty tons shifted weight are assessed a harbor upkeep charge of twelve silver coins per hour.”
Ostrander stared at her as if she had sprouted a second head. “A harbor charge? To the Holy Synod?”
“You occupied the berth reserved for the dwarven kaolin barges,” Millicent replied. He tapped her brass nib against the ledger. “That shifted weight caused a three-hour delay in our heat-proof delivery schedule, resulting in forty man-hours of idle labor on the charging platform. We have debited the Synod’s regional credit line in Dunwall accordingly. The bill currently stands at fourteen gold sovereigns and sixpence.”
Ostrander’s face twitched wildly. “You dare send a bill to the Grand Judge?”
“I send bills to everyone who occupies our docks without a purchase order, Judge,” Millicent said calmly. “The Synod may forgive sins, but the township ledger doesn’t forgive dock-wait.”
“Which brings us to the matter of public health,” Giles said. He closed the statute book with a heavy thud.
He turned his gaze toward Sister Teresa of the Pure Cistern.
“Sister Teresa. Has this delegation presented valid sanitary transit certificates from the lower basin?”
Teresa stepped forward like an avenging angel of cleanliness, her wimple straight, her high-pressure brass lye-lance humming with eighty pounds of tightly packed high-pressure head.
Behind her, four new students held the wooden pumping handles of the mobile chemical tank, their faces grim and determined.
“They haven’t,” Teresa proclaimed, her voice ringing with fanatical fury. “They landed at Wharf Three without undergoing the forced vinegar foot-wash! They walked through the southern marsh margin where the red leeches breed. They have tracked unsterilized bog muck directly onto our dry casting sand.”
She leveled the gleaming brass nozzle directly at Inquisitor Ostrander’s black glass mantle, her thumb resting on the discharge petcock.
“Section Eight of the Frontier Sanitation Mandate.” Teresa cried. “All individuals arriving from contaminated riparian halls must undergo immediate decontamination with high-pressure burning lime powder and harsh cleaning acid wash! Surrender your weapons and kneel for disinfection, false shepherd, or by the living Cistern, I’ll scour the heresy from your breeches.”
Ostrander stared at the brass nozzle in horror.
“You... You would dare wash a Judge?”
“I’d wash the Emperor himself if he had marsh mud on his boots,” Teresa snapped back, clicking the brass lever open a quarter-turn.
HISSSSSS.
A high-speed jet of frothing, scalding burning lime powder spray shot from the nozzle, striking the ground three inches from Ostrander’s leather boots.
The skin-burning liquid hissed wildly against the sand. It dissolved a patch of dried mud into bubbling white froth that released a cloud of sharp, eye-stinging vapor.
The Synod paladins recoiled in blind panic, their shields clattering together as they backed away from the boiling chemical spray.
Even Ostrander staggered back two paces, his eyes watering from the fumes, his black glass robes splattered with white bitter-salt spots.
“Madness,” Ostrander choked, his voice cracking into a ragged wheeze as he covered his nose with his sleeve. “The entire valley is infected with clockwork madness and heretical arrogance.”
Giles stepped forward, his wooden ruler tucked under his arm, his expression utterly calm.
“You have forty-eight hours to vacate our town anchorage, Judge,” Giles said. “After that time, your galley will be assessed an unmoored vessel docking fee of four silver shillings per hour, plus twenty gold sovereigns for secret fine dust discharge from your censers. If the fees aren’t paid, Captain Kenneth will seize your anchor as scrap iron for the blast fire.”
Kenneth Drake grinned, tapping his ten-foot pacing rod against his palm. “We can always use another anchor, my lord. Good forged iron.”
Ostrander looked from Giles’s impassive glasses to Teresa’s hissing lye-lance, then at Beatrice’s icy smile, and finally at the four hundred armed laborers standing silently around the casting shed with iron pry-bars in their hands.
He lowered the Seven-Ring Brand, his knuckles trembling with impotent rage.
“The Synod doesn’t forget,” Ostrander hissed through his teeth. “You may hide behind town bylaws today, Baron Croft. But when the winter comes. The deep rot wakes in the fens, your machines won’t save your soul from the fire.”
He turned on his heel, his black glass mantle swirling around his boots.
“Back to the ship,” Ostrander spat at his paladins. “Back to the river.”
The paladins didn’t need to be told twice. They beat a hasty, disorganized retreat down the wooden ramp, their boots clattering over the gravel toward the black galley.
Sister Teresa gave the retreating clergy a final, parting blast of burning lime powder spray that coated the quay timbers in a clean blanket of white foam.
“Cleanliness is preserved,” Teresa declared, wiping the brass nozzle with her linen cloth. “The holy floor is secure.”
Master Borin Bronze-Lung wiped a smudge of white lye dust from his copper beard. He grinned broadly as he watched the black galley cast off its stern lines.
“By the seventy ancestors,” Borin chuckled, slapping his heavy leather thigh. “I’ve seen dwarven kings argue with High Kings of the mountain. But I’ve never seen a holy judge driven from a wharf by a book of tax laws and a squirt of lime water. If our clan elders had known the power of town bylaws, we wouldn’t have spent two hundred years fighting the border barons with axes.”
“Axes are expensive to maintain,” Giles replied, checking the posture of the sand beds. “They suffer edge chipping and need frequent tempering. A town city law operates indefinitely without resharpening, provided your records clerk is adequately fed.”
Duncan Stone-Splitter and twelve masons were already moving down the sand aisles with heavy timber tongs. He hauled the cooled pig iron bars onto low wooden haul-sledges.
Each fifty-pound bar rang like a bronze bell as it was stacked atop its fellows.
“Look at them,” Duncan said, running his rough hand over the clean gray iron. “Sixty bars of solid Grey Crag metal. The blacksmiths in the lower town will be singing all night.”
Lady Beatrice of Dunwall let out a soft, musical laugh that echoed through the quiet foundry.
“An Judge of the Sun-Wheel, routed by a town statute and a bucket of whitewash,” Beatrice said. He shook her head in genuine admiration. “Lord Croft, you have made a mortal enemy of the Synod, and secured the eternal friendship of Highmarch. The Duchess will be delighted.”
“I have no interest in making enemies or friends,” Giles said, pulling his pocket watch. “I have an interest in clearing the casting floor. The pigs are cool enough to handle. Toby, assemble the hauling gangs.”
A brilliant golden banner flashed in the center of Giles’s vision, with a triumphant orchestral fanfare that only he could hear.
Giles closed his notebook with a crisp, final snap.
“Toby,” Giles said, looking toward the southern drainage levee. “Mark out the railway right-of-way. It’s time we laid down the rails.”