The heavy ash-wood axle of Hauler Wagon Seven didn’t merely snap. It blew up under eight tons of dressing granite, showering the crushed-gravel roadway with jagged iron splinters.
Lord Giles Croft halted two paces from the ruined carriage. He crouched, his boots crunching in stone dust, and picked up a shard of the fractured spindle. The fracture face showed a coarse, dark-gray crystal-clear texture that crumbled into graphite crumbs under his leather work glove.
“Four point two percent carbon,” Giles muttered, tossing the iron scrap aside. “Raw pig iron from a primitive bloomery hearth. High phosphorus, too much silicon, zero ductility. The item health threshold on these transport units is atrocious. One pothole and the component suffers total brittle shear.”
Ten paces back, Master Borin Bronze-Lung hovered in greasy boiled bull-hide. The master dwarven smith clutched his sight disappearing-filament fire gauge to his chest like an infant, his thick beard bristling with soot and panic.
“My Lord Master builder!” Borin rasped, voice trembling across the cold solid mountain stone. “The axle was cooled in animal fat blessed by three forgemasters of the Iron Hearth! We chanted the Litany of Tempering seven times! If the iron broke, the earth-spirits must be offended by the speed of our haulage!”
