The Iron Revolution Chapter 68: Powder Test

Chapter 68: Powder Test

Wynn had bored one functional cylinder in the days Beorn spent occupied with the city management. Tam had run the corrective magic force on the tool while Aestrith handled the outside compression. The bored barrel now sat in the courtyard on a low bench, made into a flintlock pistol prototype by the foundry, together with a powder container, and a stone block set against the far wall as a target.

The chalk marks from the Tam session were still on the ground. Beorn had not bothered to clear them. He set the powder container beside the bench and looked over what he had.

The powder had taken a few days after the nitre arrived. Two of the three ingredients were already in the citadel. The charcoal was a foundry byproduct that had been piling for weeks, and the sulfur had come in on a trade shipment Beorn had arranged quietly through a merchant contact, listed as a preservation and metallurgy supply.

The third ingredient was the nitre from the mine shaft.

He had ground each ingredient separately, mixed them in the correct ratio, wet-blended them to cut dust risk during the work, pressed the paste through a fine wire sieve to form granules, and left them to dry under cover.

He poured a small measure of the powder onto a flat stone. Then he lit it.

The reaction was faster and louder than he had expected in an open courtyard. The powder vanished in a crack of sound and a column of gray-white smoke surged upward and outward, much larger than the small amount on the stone should have produced.

The smell was sharp and distinct, with a sulfur-and-carbon that did not resemble any of the foundry odors.

Aestrith was standing at the courtyard wall with her arms crossed. She had not moved when the powder went off. She watched the smoke clear.

"That is the thing," she said.

"The beginning of it," Beorn said.

He was already studying the stone where the powder had burned, checking the residue. The granule size in this batch was uneven, and parts of it had burned faster than the rest. The sieve work needed a finer mesh.

He wrote that down in the margin.

He loaded the pistol. The process was specific and troublesome. He had to measure the powder charge by volume, pour it down the barrel, seat a small cloth patch over the bore opening, then push a cast iron ball down onto the patch with the ramrod until it rested against the charge.

He poured a smaller measure of finer powder into the pan beside the breech and closed the frizzen over it.

Then he aimed at the stone block forty feet away and squeezed the trigger.

The flint struck the frizzen. Sparks dropped into the pan. The pan powder ignited with a small flash.

Nothing happened after that.

He lowered the pistol and checked the touch-hole, the small channel drilled through the barrel wall between the pan and the main powder charge. It was slightly off-center. The flame from the pan had not carried cleanly into the bore.

He cleared it with a thin iron probe, adjusted the pan cover, and reloaded.

The second shot went through.

The crack was the same sharp sound as the powder test, only more contained and directed. Smoke poured from both the muzzle and the pan vent at once. The stone block showed a clear impact eight inches to the left of where he had aimed.

Aestrith pushed away from the wall and walked toward the target. She looked at the impact mark, then back at him.

"It doesn’t look very accurate." she said.

"At this range, a trained crossbowman is more accurate," he said.

He kept his eyes on the pistol as he spoke.

"This is less accurate right now and faster to reload. With a hundred men carrying crossbows, you need a hundred trained crossbowmen. With a hundred of these, you need a hundred men who can do the basic projectile reload."

"So it is cheaper to use."

"In terms of training time, yes."

He loaded the pistol again.

"The problem is indeed, accuracy."

He fired from forty feet. The ball struck the wall three feet from the target block. He noted it in the margin without emphasis.

Aestrith looked at where the ball had gone.

"Are you sure those are better than crossbows?" she said.

"At forty feet with a smoothbore barrel, no."

He set the pistol on the bench. "The ball is round and it doesn’t fly straight. You have to fire these in large groups aimed in a general direction, not one at a time at a specific target."

He wrote another note.

"Which means the tactics for these are completely different from what the militia uses now."

"How different?" she asked.

"Crossbow doctrine trains individual accuracy. You pick a target, you aim, you fire. This weapon trains for a coordinated volley fire. Everyone fires in the same direction on the same command, then reloads together, then fires again. The accuracy comes from the number of balls in the air, not from any single shot."

He looked at the stone block.

"I would have to rebuild most of the formation training from the ground up."

She considered that.

"When do you plan to start?" she said.

"After I have something worth training with."

He picked up the powder container and turned it in his hands, thinking about the granule problem.

"The powder burns unevenly. That changes the force behind the ball from one shot to the next, which changes where it lands. I need to fix the sieve before this becomes a repeatable test."

He reached for the ledger and opened it to the formula page. The ratio was written at the top in a tight hand, the numbers exact, the components listed in order, the safety notes about grinding separately written below.

He had written it on the first attempt, without looking anything up, without the push that usually came before fragmented knowledge. He added a note about the sieve mesh below the formula.

Aestrith had been watching him write.

"How do you know about all of this... knowledge," she said.

He looked at the page.

"I read it somewhere," he said.

The answer was accurate, and he knew it was not complete, so he did not expand on it.

She looked at him for a moment, then back at the stone block. She did not ask what he had read or where. She stored it the way she stored everything, without comment, somewhere she would find it again.

He closed the ledger.

What had come easily was the formula. The atmospheric engine had taken weeks of reconstruction. The cement ratios had required a painful push through the fragment in his memory before the numbers surfaced.

The powder had simply been there when he reached for it, already waiting, the sort of knowledge his previous life had considered essential to keep regardless of other losses.

That imbalance was plain and factual, military and civilian knowledge, and he noted it the same way he noted the sieve problem. It did not deserve more attention than that.

"The stock needs adjusting."

He said. "And the touch-hole needs to be redrilled from a more precise position. Then the bore alignment needs Tam to run another correction pass."

He was already organizing the next session in the margin.

"Within the week I should have something that fires consistently at short range."

Aestrith looked at the smoke that had mostly cleared from the courtyard air, though a faint gray residue still hung above the wall line.

"That’s how you plan to deal with the remaining work," she said.

"Correct," he said.

She did not ask which part. The answer was visible in the distribution of what Wulfric had given him and what Lewin was currently retrieving.

By the time the flintlock pistols were functional, the funds cache would either be in the citadel or no longer in the eastern settlement, and either outcome would tell him something he needed to know.

He set the powder container back in its sealed case and picked up the prototype.

The touch-hole alignment was the first correction. Everything else was iteration.