The sound of shattering iron rang across the northern ditch like a pistol shot.
Giles Croft stopped on the narrow high walkway, peering down over the timber rail.
Down in the digging trench, an exile named Joram stood looking stupidly at a two-foot ash handle with nothing on the end but a jagged, splintered stump. The cast-iron blade of his digging hoe lay four feet away on the frozen shale, snapped clean in two.
“That’s the fifth hoe this morning, Lord Giles,” Kenneth Drake called up from the trench bottom.
The captain kicked the broken piece of iron against the frozen bank.
“Soft lowland iron,” Kenneth said. “It gets cold, hits a frozen quartz seam, and snaps like a dry biscuit. We can’t dig the counterscarp ditch with kitchen scrap.”
Giles climbed down the ladder, his boots thumping into the freezing mud. He picked up the broken hoe blade, inspecting the fracture with his pocket magnifying glass.
“Grain structure is coarse as beach sand,” Giles muttered, shaking his head. “Grey pig iron, zero carbon control, full of phosphorus inclusions. In a cold-weather test model, pig iron has an impact pushback of near zero. Who balanced this equipment table?”
“The Imperial Penal Board, my lord,” Kenneth said dryly. “They give convicts tools that break so they can’t use them to dig tunnels or crack guards’ skulls.”
“Well, they can’t dig defensive earthworks either,” Giles said. “We have eighty people and three hundred yards of trench to finish before the big pack arrives. We need high-carbon hard dark metal tool steel.”
“And where do we find high-carbon steel in a frozen bog?” Kenneth asked.
Giles turned toward the storage shed behind the granary. “Court guard Skag’s wagon.”
Ten minutes later, Giles, Borin, and Kenneth stood around the remains of the royal freight wagon impounded during the flour audit.
The ash-wood cargo box had already been dismantled for timber. But the heavy iron undercarriage remained bolted to the chassis.
Giles tapped the four-leaf mid-air springs beneath the axle with his wooden ruler.
“Look at those laminations,” Giles said. “Quarter-inch curved plates. Oil-cooled spring steel. Silicon-hard dark metal alloy. Designed to carry two tons of royal freight over mountain ruts without taking a permanent set.”
Master Borin Bronze-Lung knelt in the mud, running a calloused thumb along the curved leaves. His eyes widened beneath thick brows.
“True spring steel,” the dwarf rumbled, his copper beard twitching with sudden hunger. “Flexes like a bowstring, bites like a shark. But Giles, cutting spring steel without a power shear will take two days with a cold chisel.”
“Then don’t cut it cold,” Giles said. “Heat it in the charcoal hearth. Use the hot-cut fuller on the anvil. Cut them into ten-inch billets, punch the eye for the ash handle, and forge them into heavy dual-purpose trench mattocks—a two-inch chisel blade on one side, an adze blade on the other.”
Borin grunted, scratching his bald scalp. “And the temper? If we leave it hard as a spring, it’ll shatter on granite.”
“That’s why we draw the temper,” Giles said. “Heat to fifteen hundred degrees until cherry red, cool in cold salt water for three seconds to lock the martensite, then polish the face and watch the oxide colors run. When the steel blooms straw yellow turning to peacock blue at four hundred and fifty degrees, cool in animal fat. The edge stays hard, but the body keeps its ductility.”
Borin stared at Giles, his mouth slightly open. “You know the color of the draw?”
“It’s basic heat-treatment, Borin. Every junior toolmaker knows the oxide chart.”
“No lowland lord knows the draw colors,” Borin muttered, shouldering a heavy sledge. “Only guild masters and clan elders. Hand me the crowbar, Kenneth. We’re stripping an axle.”
Before the wagon was stripped, Lady Millicent had arrived with her tally-book tucked beneath her arm.
“The inventory value of that transport chassis was thirty silver pieces,” Millicent remarked, eyeing the rusted iron fittings. “If you dismantle it into hand tools, brother, how do you balance the capital asset ledger?”
“Capital depreciation,” Giles said without hesitating. “A stationary wagon in a frontier stockade has an asset work of zero. Forty carbon-steel mattocks speed up our earthwork construction rate by two hundred and twenty percent. The value generated in defensive fortifications offsets the vehicle loss within six working shifts.”
Millicent dipped her pen into her ink-horn. “And if Bailiff Skag returns demanding the return of royal rolling stock?”
“We return the carriage frame,” Giles said. “Minus the springs. We can cite Section Nine of the Frontier Transit City law regarding emergency supply order during hostile mob conditions.”
Millicent allowed herself the faintest ghost of a smile. “Very well. I’ll enter it under Reallocated Town Hardware.”
At the sawpit bench, Master Caleb was inspecting the timber for the handles. He tapped a split ash billet with his mallet, listening to the pitch.
“Seasoned white ash,” Caleb said. “Straight grain, five growth rings to the inch. It flexes under shock without snapping. If you put green oak on these heads, the shaking will jar a man’s elbows loose before dinner.”
“Flame-harden the grip,” Giles instructed. “Pass each handle through the charcoal chimney pipe for three seconds. It seals the wood pores, prevents splintering, and burns off the fine fuzz. Then rub them with warm sheep fat. A smooth handle prevents the Blister debuff. A worker with torn palms loses forty percent of his daily swing count.”
Caleb nodded solemnly. “I’ll have Toby grease every shaft before they leave the bench.”
* * *
For thirty-six hours, the forge shed was an ear-splitting cathedral of steel.
With Borin’s new high-heat charcoal clamp providing a steady core heat of twenty-two hundred degrees, the hearth roared white-hot.
Borin and his apprentice hauled the cherry-red spring leaves from the coals, pinning them to the ninety-pound anvil while two High Timber exiles swung eight-pound sledges in alternating rhythm.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
The heavy steel parted cleanly under the hot-cut chisel.
Borin drove an oval steel drift through the center of each glowing billet. It spread the eye to accept an ash handle. Then, with swift, vicious blows of his hand-hammer, he drew the chisel point out sharp and true.
“Cool,” Borin barked.
He plunged the red-hot mattock head into a barrel of soaked salt water. The water boiled wildly, screaming with white steam.
Three seconds later, Borin whipped the tool out, scraped the face with a coarse sandstone block. Then he held it to the lantern light.
Giles stood beside him, watching the metal cool.
First came pale yellow. Then a rich, golden straw. The heat from the heavy eye crept toward the edge. Then, the color shifted to a warm bronze, then tipped with vibrant purple and peacock blue.
“Now,” Giles said.
Borin dropped the head into a tub of melted beef animal fat. The fat hissed, smoking white, locking the temper in place.
When Borin pulled the mattock from the oil, the metal had a dull, gunmetal-gray sheen.
Caleb Thorne-Wood stood by the assembly bench, fitting each finished head onto seasoned, flame-hardened ash handles turned in the sawpit. He drove a dried oak wedge into the top of the eye, locking the head forever.
“Forty mattocks,” Caleb said, wiping sweat from his forehead with his apron. “And twenty-five felling axes forged from the wheel tires.”
Kenneth Drake picked up the first finished mattock. It felt heavy in his hands, perfectly balanced, lethal, and true.
He walked out into the yard, stepped up to a boulder of frozen, quartz-veined shale. Then he swung the mattock with the full force of his scarred shoulders.
CRACK!
The chisel point sank four inches deep into the solid rock.
A chunk of shale the size of a loaf of bread snapped away and tumbled into the ditch. Kenneth lifted the tool and examined the edge.
Not a chip. Not a dent. The steel was as clean and sharp as when it left the oil.
“By the Crown,” Kenneth breathed, a savage grin breaking across his scarred face. “This isn’t an entrenching tool. It’s a siege weapon.”
“It’s a digging implement,” Giles said, recording the completion in his log. “Issue them to the ditch crews right away. Shift speed should increase by two hundred percent.”
The exiles received the new mattocks with awe.
Men who had spent three weeks blistering their palms on cracked iron now tore into the frozen clay like moles. The north counterscarp deepened by two feet before midday.
Bram swung his mattock with easy power, cleaving through frozen loam and gravel with a rhythmic crunch that echoed off the wooden wall.
“The ground cuts like cheese,” Bram called out, laughing aloud. “The Lord Master builder put lightning into the iron.”
“He put carbon and heat-treatment into the iron, Bram,” Giles called down from the narrow high walkway. “Keep your spacing five paces apart so you don’t scalp your neighbor.”
* * *
By mid-afternoon, the ditch was forty yards longer. The outer earthen berm was rising in packed, smooth layers.
Then, from high on the southern timberline, a shrill, piercing whistle broke through the rhythm of the sledges.
Two long blasts, followed by three short.
Kenneth’s head snapped up. “That’s Hollis Reed’s signal from the south ridge stand.”
“The frontier trapper?” Giles asked.
“Aye,” Kenneth said, already reaching for his recurve bow. “That whistle means horsemen.”
A moment later, Hollis Reed broke out of the brush. It slid down the frosted slope on his elk-skin moccasins. His breath plumed like a steam pipe as he sprinted toward the wooden wall gate.
“Lord Giles! Captain!” Hollis wheezed, catching his knees at the ditch edge. “Dust on the old post road! Two miles south and closing fast!”
Kenneth vaulted onto the narrow high walkway, leveling his brass spyglass toward the southern tree line.
“How many, Hollis?”
“Forty,” the trapper gasped. “Heavy cavalry in blackened mail. Crossbows at their saddlebows, iron bards on the mounts. And riding at the head under a royal banner...”
“Skag,” Kenneth spat, his eyes narrowing through the lens. “Court guard Orwen Skag. He went to the guard post at Fort Harrowgate and bought a mercenary company.”
Giles looked down at the newly forged mattocks gleaming in the ditch. Then he pulled his pocket watch from his waistcoat.
“Forty armored hostiles,” Giles noted calmly. “Approaching from the south road. Kenneth, tell the ditch crews to keep digging. We have twenty minutes to secure our biosecurity before we negotiate.”
Kenneth lowered the spyglass, staring at Giles with wide, incredulous eyes. “Biosecurity? My lord, they have forty heavy lances and twenty iron heavy steel crossbows! They’re coming to hang us.”
“They’re coming to engage in an unpermitted audit,” Giles said, turning toward the latrines. “And if we don’t finish the drainage chimney pipes before they arrive, this camp will drown in its own waste before the parley ends. Follow me.”