The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

The Blood Forge, beneath the Ashen Reach

Lord Arkhul had invited four other Demon Lords to watch.

That was three too many. Gruzzik had said so out loud exactly once, in his own workshop, to a wall and the wall seemed to have agreed with him, which was more than anyone else had done in three months.

"One would have carried the story," he muttered, watching the gallery fill. "One goes home, tells the rest, they’re jealous from a safe distance. Four isn’t a demonstration. Four is a jury."

"Wrong its not Four its Five," said the Obsidian Spire scholar beside him. "Lady Vaelritha sent an observer instead of coming herself. That’s worse."

"How is a clerk worse than a Lord?"

"A Lord who dislikes you says so. A clerk who dislikes you writes it down."

Gruzzik grunted. "Eleven weeks I’ve known you, and that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said."

"I’ve said several sensible things. You skipped them, along with the compositions."

The casting hall had been swept for the first time in living memory — one of the apprentices had found a hammer under the slag that three separate smiths had sworn oaths about losing. Above, the gantries were filling. Lord Malgrath had come in person, which was flattering, and had brought forty of his siege-legion officers, which was not — they had spent the whole morning circling the machine and making notes, and siege men only ever took notes on how a thing came apart. Kharvoss arrived last, took the highest seat, and sat silent. There were two lesser lords whose names Gruzzik kept mixing up, and had resolved to address only as my lord, in the plural if it came to it. And Vaelritha’s observer: a small quiet figure with a wax tablet who had asked eleven questions on arrival, nine of them about the alloys.

"Nine questions about the alloys," Gruzzik said.

"Yes."

"Out of eleven."

"Yes."

"I don’t like that clerk."

"Then he’s doing his work properly."

Below them all, on the swept floor, stood the Warhound.

Gruzzik looked at it because in an hour the entitlement might lapse. It was the finest thing his clan had ever built. Enormous, sloped, the cursed ashen-iron facing drinking the furnace-light, so the hull read as a fortress-shaped hole in the world. The gun sat long and heavy in a mantlet that hummed if you stood too close — two apprentices had already been cuffed for standing too close on purpose. Every track link glittered, no two the same.

"They’re staring," Gruzzik said.

"They are."

"Look at Lord Malgrath. He came here to be unimpressed and he isn’t."

"No," the scholar agreed. "He isn’t. I preferred him unimpressed."

Arkhul came down onto the floor, and the hall went quiet immediately.

He was in a magnificent mood, and that was what Gruzzik had dreaded since the turret pour. A Lord in a foul mood was survivable — you kept your head down and let it burn past. A Lord in a magnificent mood had made promises out loud. To other Lords. If those promises turned inconvenient, a magnificent mood did not take the blame. It appointed somebody.

Gruzzik was the most appointable person in the hall, and he knew it.

"My fellow lords." Arkhul’s voice filled the space without effort. "You were told a story about the sealed continent. That a mortal duke builds engines of war there and arms half a coast with them. That our own Spire scholars judge his methods beyond us — that the secret lies not in his machines but in some mystery of organisation. Ledgers. Measuring sticks. The counting of bolts."

Polite laughter from the gallery. Vaelritha’s observer wrote something down. Gruzzik watched him do it and felt a strong urge to confiscate the tablet.

"I sent no army through the shield, and I stole no machine." Arkhul turned and laid a hand on the hull, and the metal rang softly under it. "I sent a whisper. Eleven weeks of patient reading. And my smiths took that whisper and built you this. Better armour than his. A heavier gun. A stronger engine. In three months." He paused on the number. "The mortals needed years to learn what my forge did in a season from a rumour. So much for organisation."

Malgrath leaned forward on the rail. "It’s larger than the original."

"It is."

"How much?"

"A third heavier." Arkhul sounded delighted about it. "Every ounce of it armour and gun."

Malgrath sat back without a word, and Gruzzik’s stomach tightened.

"Did you see that," he said quietly.

"See what?"

"He sat back."

"Lords sit. It’s most of what they do."

"Siege men don’t sit back when they’re impressed. They sit back when they’ve finished a sum." Gruzzik rubbed his jaw. "I’d give a year’s wage to see what’s in those notes."

"No," the scholar said. "You wouldn’t."

"you dont have to agree to everything do you?"Gruzzik stared at the clerk.

Down on the floor the crew were mounting up, and Brakh was making a nuisance of himself.

Brakh had forged the three finest track links on the machine and had not stopped mentioning it since the day he cut his name into them. His own mother had reportedly stopped answering her door. He stood on the forward hull now with one boot up on the glacis, explaining to a knot of Malgrath’s officers exactly which links were his and how they differed from the common run. Heavier at the tooth. Cut with a better bite.

"So mine grip," he announced, "where the others slip."

The scholar repeated it under his breath. "Mine grip where the others slip."

"He’s proud. Let him be proud."

"Foreman." The scholar’s voice had changed, and Gruzzik turned. "Say the sentence back to yourself. His links grip where the others slip. On a track. Where every link is pulled by the same chain, at the same instant, with the same force. Now tell me what happens where the grip meets the slip."

Gruzzik opened his mouth. The answer arrived somewhere behind his teeth and refused to come out.

The scholar had both arms around his satchel, holding it against his chest.

"I have said this eleven times," he said. "I would like it noted that I am not saying it a twelfth."

"Noted. Written down, even. You’d like that. You people like things written down."

"We do. It’s why we’re rarely surprised."

"Foreman!" Arkhul’s voice rolled across the floor. "Are we ready?"

Every eye in the hall came down on Gruzzik at once, and every one of them belonged to somebody who could kill him. He ran a quick private count: two who’d do it slowly, one who’d delegate, and one clerk who would record the time and date and also the method probably.

He thought about emberglass over blackbone, and a plate thickness calculated for a metal he had never once held in his life and an engine with a spirit bound into the housing instead of a governor, because a spirit could be shouted at and a governor couldn’t, a cooling system sized on a drawing for an engine that no longer existed. Lastly those four hundred and nine track links made by eleven artists, each determined to outdo the other ten.

"ReaReaReady, my lord," said his mouth, entirely on its own.

"Then start it."

The crew chief hauled the ignition lever, and the bound spirit in the engine housing woke, and began complaining very loudly.