"Twin-hearth stacks on a shared flue," he said. "How are you holding temper on the far hearths?"
Silence.
A different flavor of it this time: three hundred craftsmen simultaneously failing to process a sentence.
A dwarf came forward through it. She was built like the anvils she ruled, forearms as thick as the tongs racked behind her, iron-grey hair twisted back in a smith’s knot and singed at the temples where a smith’s hair always singed.
The masters made way for her without needing to look, which said everything about who she was, and she planted herself a spear’s length from the most dangerous being on the continent with her chin out.
"Brokk," she said. "First Hammer of the royal smithy. If you’ve e with terms, Villain, say them plain and say them to me."
"I haven’t e with terms. My elven lover is interested in your smithy, and frankly, so am I."
The First Hammer stared at him, then at Kaelira, who seemed pletely checked out of the conversation, taking in the vast pound with mesmerized eyes.
"...Baffle-gates," she replied to his question slowly, feeling for the trap she was sure hid somewhere in the question. "Every third stack. The draw balances itself, if your gate-smith knows her work."
"Self-balancing." Quinlan’s eyebrows went up, and he looked back at the hearth-row with honest appreciation. "The whole row breathes as one system. Wonderful."
"...Aye," Brokk said. "It is."
And she had no idea, none at all, what to do with the fact that the big bad evil, the one the dwarven high nobility swore would bring down their entire race should he win, had just praised their setup.
...
It became, against every instinct the royal smithy possessed, a tour.
Nobody declared it one. It simply happened, one question at a time, the way a frozen river breaks up: first a crack, then a groan, then the whole surface moving.
Quinlan asked about the water-troughs and got a grudging answer. He asked about the crucible steel and got a longer one. He asked about the quench-oil blends, and a master on the second tier, forgetting himself entirely, shouted down the answer, and then went white as his own beard when the hall turned to look at him.
The apprentices broke first, as the young always did.
Dread has a short shelf life at that age, and curiosity has none at all. They began accumulating along the rails of the upper tiers, in doorways, behind pillar and post, watching the impossible thing below: the conqueror walking their hall, asking about flux ratios.
Not every face on the rails thawed. On the second tier a young master named Vorn stood planted, arms locked over his chest, watching his colleagues forget themselves one answered question at a time.
The smith who’d raised him from his first nail had marched out with the army and hadn’t marched back. Let the whole hall warm itself around the invader if it wanted. He intended to remember.
It was then Kaelira spoke up. She’d stopped before a squat, riveted machine crouched beside the third-tier forges, all pistons and countersunk gearing, and circled it twice with her brow furrowing deeper on each pass. "Quin. What is this?"
"You know that all my smithing knowledge es from that old bastard and you, so..." He shrugged, shameless. "We’re standing in a hall full of professionals. Let’s ask one."
The nearest professional was a stocky master with copper wire braided through his beard, who had been eavesdropping from a respectful five paces and froze solid when the overly curious elf turned and looked at him expectantly.
"..?"
"You build it?"
"I... aye. It’s a drawing bench. Wire-work, for inlay." The master glanced at his colleagues for rescue and found none, and then a force older than his fear took over, because his hands were already moving to the crank. "Easier shown than said. Here. Watch the guide-screw..."
The hall watched the heretic elf and the Conqueror bend over the bench together, watched their own master forget who he was talking to somewhere around the third turn of the crank. And the last of the frost went out of the royal smithy without anyone marking the moment it left.
"You know smithing," Brokk said at one point. It landed as an accusation.
"Just a bit. My smithing partner is the real deal, though." He nodded at Kaelira, proudly grinning. "She does the real work. I just do finishing enchants, so I’ve picked up enough to know what I’m looking at. Enough to know this hall is the best thing this continent has to offer for smiths."
Brokk’s mouth opened, reconsidered several responses, and settled on a grunt that failed to disguise itself as indifference. "Right on..."
Two rows later, Quinlan went quiet in the middle of somebody’s answer about bloom furnaces.
He drifted off mid-sentence, crossed to the hearth-stack against the wall, and laid both palms flat on the stone. Then he simply stood there, silent, eyes closed, listening with his hands. The draw ran smooth under his palms, a warm even pull deep in the stack, until two feet in it snagged on something cold and wrong.
The row’s noise died around him one gulp at a time.
The channel-master of that row had given half her life to the channels behind that stone, and soot had worked so deep into her knuckles it no longer washed out.
She watched the thing the high nobility swore would tear down every dwarven work standing lay his hands flat on her life’s work, and the dread the hall had spent the last hour letting go of found her again, all at once.
"G-get your hands off my flue, Villain!" She stomped despite all her survival senses screaming at her. Her colleagues, Brokk included, looked like she’d just signed her death warrant.
"That flue’s cracked." Quinlan’s eyes stayed closed. "Third channel in, two spans up. It’s bleeding your draw into the rock."
"H-huh?" The channel master’s overwhelming sense of dread and panic turned into condescension from one moment to the next. "With all due respect, Villain, there’s no crack in my channels."
"There is."
"There is not."
"Yes."
"No."
"Okay," Quinlan shrugged, moving on. "If you care so little, then it can’t be helped."
"???" The channel-master looked ready to lunge at the man who sported the greatest audacity of them all.
Her? Not caring???
Heresy!
"Open it up!" she shouted, eyes narrowed.
Her assistants did just that, opening the inspection plate to humor him. The hall listened to the channel-master clamber up into the shaft, heard the scrape of her measuring hook against the stone, and then heard nothing at all for a long moment.
"...Lamps." Her voice came back down the shaft muffled and entirely changed. "Lamps and a mortar-lad. Now. NOW!"
The row detonated into activity, and Brokk stood in the middle of it without moving, looking at the creature who had just read a hairline fault through two feet of her mountain with his bare hands.
"How," the First Hammer demanded of the universe at large.
"Magic," Quinlan grinned as he took his palms off the stone and wandered on toward the next row.
Brokk watched him go, knowing there was more to it. She had numerous geomancer-types who could read the earth, but not one of them ever came close to this level. He displayed such an unnatural level of affinity for their element that every single dwarf took a collective breath, silence reigning supreme.
High in the shaft, the shouting for mortar had stopped. The channel-master had pushed the plate wide instead, and stared down at the Villain’s back with open respect, the kind she’d given maybe three dwarves in her whole life.
Sera, for her part, had appointed herself exactly one duty, and it was hanging off Quinlan’s left arm being luminously content.
His right hand, meanwhile, belonged to Kaelira between stations, reclaimed without looking each time she finished touching something.
The topic interested Sera not at all. The topics could have been discussed in gibberish and she’d have kept the same warm, content smile.
She watched her lover and best friend geek out, Kaelira ing out of her shy elf shell and blossoming into the overly enthusiastic master smith she was, while Quinlan went on a generational run of subverting expectations.
Elowen was having a harder day.
"Holy Son, please do not stand so close to the... Holy Son, that is an active forge. Holy Son, the soot, your clothing..." Her protests fell like arrows on armor.
Around her, dwarves kept doing the thing she found most disorienting of all: relaxing.
She had entered this hall as the haughtiest thing in it, and the hall was steadily forgetting to be terrified. Watching dwarven apprentices creep close enough to eavesdrop on her Holy Son’s opinions about crucible steel was quietly unmaking assumptions she’d carried since childhood.
And through all of it, Kaelira burned.
She’d held herself together through the first tier on discipline alone, but the smithy kept happening to her. The gravity-fed coke hoppers. The water-troughs’ triple gates. The anvils, entire dynasties of anvils, each one worn to a silk polish by ten generations of hands.
She moved from station to station with her fingers hovering just off every surface, asking questions in a voice that kept losing its calm, and the dwarves watched her.
Quinlan clocked it early, and said nothing, and kept watching.
They weren’t glaring. That was the thing.
An elf stood in the royal smithy of the dwarves, in the holiest hall of the craft her people had been legally barred from for centuries, and the masters watching her didn’t wear disgust.
They wore something closer to hunger. A knot of them had drifted in her wake for a full tier now, elbowing each other at the way she handled a set of tongs.
It was at the billet racks that she stopped them all cold.
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