The iron taphole sat six inches above the crucible floor, plugged with six inches of heat-proof fireclay that had baked to the hardness of fiery dark rock.
Behind that clay plug rested twelve tons of white-hot molten pig iron at two thousand four hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Inquisitor Malric Ostrander stood at the edge of the casting floor, his Seven-Ring Heresy Brand raised toward the timber roof beams. His black woolen mantle shook with dramatic fury.
“Put out this pit.” Ostrander bellowed, his voice echoing over the rhythmic thumping of the distant waterwheel. “In the name of the High Synod, I command every soul here to drop their tools and prostrate themselves before the light.”
Giles Croft didn’t drop his tools.
He didn’t even look at the Judge.
He pulled a heavy six-foot steel punch bar from the tool rack, its chisel point forged from water-cooled tool steel. Then he handed it to Master Borin Bronze-Lung.
“If you put out a blast fire with twelve tons of liquid metal in the hearth,” Giles said in a voice that carried clearly across the silent foundry, “the entire mass will solidify into a thirty-ton cold-iron agglomerate. That’s a permanent equipment write-off of forty thousand silver sovereigns.”
Giles adjusted his dark-tinted ironworker’s goggles, pulling the strap snug against his cap.
“Section Twenty-Two of the Royal Heavy-duty Safety Mandate provides total legal immunity to running engineers during active metal casting,” Giles continued. “Any single attempting to disrupt an active tap is subject to summary eviction from the staging hall. Stand clear of the runner, Judge. Molten pig iron has zero respect for clerical turf.”
Captain Kenneth Drake stepped between Ostrander and the tapping platform, his ten-foot iron-shod pacing rod held horizontally across his chest.
Behind him, twelve Grey Crag spearmen stood with shields locked in a solid, unbending timber wall.
“You heard the Lord Baron,” Kenneth said, his voice flat as a ditch-blade. “Take two paces back onto the gravel, holy father. Or my men will help you into the ditch.”
The Synod paladins gripped their poleaxes, their knuckles white against the ash hafts. But none of them moved forward.
Behind Kenneth’s line, Duncan Stone-Splitter and six masons held eight-foot iron pry-bars, their eyes fixed on the paladins with cold frontier menace.
“Set the punch, Borin,” Giles commanded.
Borin placed the chisel tip of the six-foot steel bar directly against the center of the baked clay plug.
Duncan Stone-Splitter stepped forward, swinging a twelve-pound sledgehammer with both hands.
CLANG.
The hammer struck the end of the steel bar. A shower of yellow sparks sprayed across the sand floor.
CLANG. CLANG. CRACK.
The third blow drove the bar three inches into the plug.
A hair-thin fissure opened in the baked clay. A needle of dazzling, blinding white light pierced through the seam, lighting up Borin’s grease-stained leather coat in radiant golden bright glare.
“She’s through.” Borin roared, his voice cracking with excitement. “Out with the steel.”
Duncan hauled the punch bar backward with a mighty heave.
For half a second, there was only a breathless hiss, like the sigh of a sleeping monster waking from stone.
Then the heart of the mountain burst open.
ROOOOAR.
A blinding torrent of liquid pig iron erupted from the taphole.
It wasn’t red. It was a blazing bright, white-hot river of liquid fire, dazzling as the midday sun, roaring out of the fire base in a four-inch high-pressure stream.
The molten iron crashed into the main sand runner, throwing up a spectacular fountain of brilliant golden star-sparks that drifted downward through the smoky air like sky snow.
The heat streaming from the open stream was overwhelming.
Laborers twenty paces back raised their arms to shield their faces. The air in the foundry shed instantly spiked by thirty degrees, shimmering with violent rising heat waves that warped the view of the bluffs outside.
The blazing bright river surged down the central ‘sow’ channel.
As it reached each junction, the white-hot stream branched to the left and right. It poured into sixty lateral casting beds stamped in the damp moulding sand.
The sand hissed and steamed. A pale blue flame of burning carbon monoxide danced along the surface of the filling molds. It cast a hypnotic, flickering glow across the timber rafters.
Giles stood on the narrow high walkway above the main runner, his pocket watch open in his left hand, his face lit up in the golden glare.
He held a long iron skimmer in his right hand, calmly flicking away a skin of floating graphite waste scum that gathered at the weir gate.
“Fluidity is excellent,” Giles noted. His voice calm and was cold and exact amidst the roaring inferno. “Apparent heat is twenty-four hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Carbon content is about three point eight percent, with silicon around one point two. An ideal eutectic gray iron casting blend.”
Across the casting floor, Dwarf Trade Envoy Thorgan Ironvein stood numbed.
He dropped his old family brass measuring tongs into the dirt, throwing his thick arms toward the glowing rafters, tears streaming through his grey beard.
“Ten tons of liquid metal,” Thorgan cried out, his booming voice shaking with holy respect. “Ten tons in a single breath! It would take my clan forty crucibles and half a year of sweat to pour this much bronze! By the seventy hearths of the deep... The Lord Master builder has made stone bleed gold.”
Outside the shed, along the canal stone retaining walls, fifteen hundred gathered settlers saw the golden light erupting from the open doors of the foundry.
They saw the great white steam plume rising from the granulation pit, and the roaring river of sparks lighting up the autumn twilight.
A single, unified roar of ear-splitting, tearful triumph erupted from the crowd. A cheer that shook the timber palisades and rolled across the Black Fen for leagues.
Men who had spent three years breaking their backs with stone adzes and wooden spades embraced each other in the mud. They wept with joy.
“Iron,” an old blacksmith whispered, his hands trembling as he stared at the glowing light. “No more broken plowshares. No more wooden nails. We have our own iron.”
Lady Beatrice of Dunwall stood motionless on the upper terrace. Her glasses reflected the sixty glowing bars of white-hot metal filling the sand floor.
She turned to Lady Millicent, her high-born composure fully gone.
“Ten tons,” Beatrice whispered, her voice barely heard over the roaring fire. “In eighteen minutes. Your brother has just shifted the economic axis of the entire continent.”
“Ten point four tons,” Millicent corrected with precise satisfaction, making a bold, final stroke in her tally-book. “And the cost per ton has officially dropped by eighty-two percent.”
As the surface of the central runner solidified into a dark, crusted skin, Master Borin Bronze-Lung seized a heavy sixteen-pound iron maul.
He walked along the cooling beds, stepped up to the junction between the main sow runner and the first pig. Then he swung the maul with a thunderous downward blow.
CRACK.
The brittle neck of the pig fractured cleanly, separating the cooling fifty-pound iron metal bar from the runner with a sharp, crystal-clear snap.
Giles crouched beside the cut bar. He pulled a small brass-framed magnifying glass from his waistcoat pocket.
He held the glass over the freshly fractured metal face, studying the grain structure under the dying orange glow of the sand beds.
“Gray cast iron,” Giles observed, nodding with quiet, skilled satisfaction. “Fracture surface is uniform dark slate-gray with zero white hardened carbon-iron chill. Carbon has precipitated as fine graphite flakes throughout the pearlite matrix. That gives the alloy outstanding machinability, self-lubricating properties, and excellent shaking damping capacity.”
Borin crouched beside him, running a thick, calloused thumb across the granular fracture.
“Not a pocket of melted rock waste,” Borin whispered, his voice trembling with pride. “Not a single gas bubble in the core. In Karak-Thurn, an apprentice who poured a bar this clean on his first heat would be named a Journeyman of the Third Hammer on the spot.”
Duncan Stone-Splitter tapped the fractured face with the point of his mason’s scutch.
“It rings true,” Duncan said, grinning until his teeth showed white through his beard. “Good, tough mountain iron. Iron to make plows that won’t snap on granite boulders, and pickaxes that can bite into the world’s ribs.”
Down on the floor, the tap was completed.
Borin and Duncan drove a cone-shaped clay stopping plug into the taphole using a long wooden pole, cutting off the metal stream with a final hiss of sparks.
The sixty iron pigs lay cooling in their beds, their color shifting slowly from blazing bright white to dull orange, and finally into a deep, heavy gunmetal grey.
Inquisitor Malric Ostrander stepped forward, his boots crunching on the scorched gravel.
The light of the cooling metal reflected off his silver breastplate. But his eyes were black with cold, unbending hatred.
Sister Teresa of the Pure Cistern stepped forward. Her high-pressure brass lye-lance was held at port arms, her eyes flashing with righteous fury.
“You speak of holy purification, Judge?” Teresa’s voice cut through the steam like a whip. “You stand in an active heavy-duty work-yard with uninspected boots, swinging an unlisted charcoal pot that discharges fine dust soot into our clean casting sand! This foundry was blessed by the water of the living water tank and washed with forty gallons of harsh cleaning acid! If any creature here is a monster, it’s a priest who seeks to put out honest work with superstition.”
Ostrander’s paladins shifted their grip on their poleaxes, their faces tightening under their iron helms.
Captain Kenneth Drake didn’t move. He simply leveled his ten-foot pacing rod at the lead paladin’s gorget.
“Twenty paladins against four hundred armed pioneers who just saw their first iron poured,” Kenneth said. His voice dropped to a deadly, conversational whisper. “I suggest you calculate the odds before you swing that brand, Father. Out here on the frontier, men have very little patience for people who try to break their new plows.”
He raised his Seven-Ring Heresy Brand high above his head. He pointed it directly at Giles Croft.
“You have poured the metal of the pit, Lord Croft,” Ostrander’s voice hissed through the settling steam, trembling with fanatical rage. “You have built an unholy altar that mocks the heavenly order of labor. By the power of the Holy Synod and the Seven-Ring Council of Highmarch, I declare this works a monster of the Black Flame! This day, the Synod claims this foundry for holy purification.”