Chapter 299 -292:The second warhound
Demon Forge
Gruzzik stood in front of the iron machine for a long, quiet time lost in his own world.
It had rolled off the secondary assembly floor at the the last week, and now it sat square in the middle of the main casting hall floor. The entire shift lined the soot-stained brick walls, heavy tongs and sledges resting loose in their calloused hands, watching the steel hull. Not a single smith had returned to his forge.
It was smaller than the previous prototype. Harder. Plainer. The armored turret sat in bolted cast sections, every seam and raw join left completely exposed. Its tracks dull, stamped clean without any smith’s mark or cipher to claim individual craft.
He walked the length of it once, then back.
Then pressed his broad palm flat against the cold glacis plate and left it there until the steel began to draw the warmth from his skin.
"Herrek."
"Foreman," the boy said, stepping out from the shadow of the structural pillars.
"Go and tell Lord Arkhul the machine is finished, and that I would like him to come and see it."
Herrek hesitated, clutching his tools against his chest. "On my own, foreman?"
"On your own. Take the book with you too and let his people look at it while you wait." Gruzzik pulled his hand back from the plate. "And if anybody in that hall asks you a question about what is in it, answer them. All of it. There is nothing in that book we are hiding."
Herrek immediately went to inform the lord.
An under-officer stepped up as the heavy oak doors shut behind him. "Foreman. Shall I send word to the other halls? If the Lord is coming, there should be a gallery."
"No gallery."
"The siege legion would want to see this. Lord Malgrath’s officers—"
"No gallery, no guests, and nobody taking notes," Gruzzik said without turning round. "If it works, the Lord can tell whoever he likes. If it does not work, I would rather have it not work in front of forty people this time."
Arkhul soon came at the forge hall, flanked by two towering honor guards whom he left posted at the outer doors.
The hall had been cleared. Only eighty-one smiths stood along the wall.
Arkhul walked the length of the machine once without speaking.
"It is smaller than the one you showed me before."
"It is the size of the drawing, my lord."
"The other one was a third heavier."
"The other one went ninety-one paces too."
Arkhul then stopped at the front and put a gauntleted hand on the glacis plate, covering the exact spot where Gruzzik’s palm print was fading.
"Start it."
Herrek pulled the lever.
The engine came up roaring and settled at a flat, steady note. The note did not climb or whine. The governor held it precisely where it was set.
Nobody had to shout over unaligned gear teeth.
"Take it forward," Gruzzik said.
The driver took it forward slowly down the length of the hall and turned at the far end of hall.
Every man along those walls had watched the last one turn and also watched four hundred and six hand-forged links let go while three of them held, and with a track come off like a whip and put Brakh into a masonry pillar like a painting.
This one turned. All the links took the load together, slipped together, and the machine came round and went back down the hall the other way.
Arkhul watched it pass him. "Turn it the other way and bring it back."
It turned the other way and glided back along the floor.
"Take it up the ramp and hold it on the slope."
They had built a ramp of packed earth at the north end for exactly this. The machine went up it, stopped halfway, held there without sliding an inch, and came down again under control.
"Stop it and start it. Four times."
The driver stopped it and started it exactly to the instructions.
"Now turn the turret. All the way round, then back, and then stop it where I tell you to stop it."
The turret went round the full circle, came back, and locked dead where it was told.
Arkhul was quiet for a while.
"How long has it been running today?"
"Two hours, my lord. We ran it four hours yesterday and six the day before."
"And before that?"
"Eleven hours in the yard, with full crew sitting in it the whole time."
Arkhul came away from it and stood in front of Gruzzik.
"How many of these can you make?"
"What my lord"
"Do I have to repeat myself again foreman,how many can you make "
"Five a month, my lord."
"Five."
"Itt It will rise my lord as the men get familiar with the work." Gruzzik stuttered a bit "The first one took eleven weeks. The second will take six. By the time we have built twenty I expect a fortnight."
"You expect?."Arkhul said raising an eye.
"I will not promise a number I have not done twice." He said it evenly. "The last time I told you what you wanted to hear, my lord, I said this hall could copy a mortal machine from a whisper in three months. You believed me. Four Lords came here to watch, a clerk wrote it all down, and a smith of mine died on that floor because of what I promised you."
The hall had gone icy still.
"So. Five a month."
"Five a month, and every one the same as the others, and every part able to go on any of the rest. That is what I have today. It will grow soon my lord."
Arkhul studied him. "You have become a great deal duller in time"
"Yes yes, my lord."
"That was not a compliment."
"I know my lord but I took it as one anyway."
"Now answer me something else." Arkhul turned back to the machine. "Can you improve it?"
The hall immediately became dead quiet.
"That is a difficult question, my lord."
"I know what it is. Answer it anyway."
Gruzzik took a while pondering over it.
"Yes," he said. "But not the way this hall used to mean the word. Nobody puts better metal into one plate because he thinks it wants it and casts a turret larger because larger looks correct. That is finished here."
"Then what is left?"
"We change the drawing slowly over time my lord." He nodded at the machine. "If something on it is wrong, we find out how it is wrong. We alter one thing, we write down what happens, and if the altered one is better, we change the drawing. Then every machine after it is built the new way. All of them, the same. Not one clever version made by one clever smith."
"That is much slower foreman."
" It is my lord but it is also the only sort of improvement that does not put a track through a smith chest." Gruzzik shrugged. "Send those machines to a war and tell me what breaks on them, and I will improve it. Give me a year of that and the drawing will not look like the one I am holding now."
Arkhul looked back at the machine, still idling in the middle of the floor.
"Are they truly the same? Not near enough. The same."
Gruzzik put out his hand.
"Every pour is in here, my lord. The heat, the hours, and the weight its test bar broke at. Every track link checked against one pattern, and thirty-one thrown out. Every bolt cut to length off one bar." He held it out. "If a part of that machine fails in the field, the crew take the same part off another machine and it fits."
Arkhul took the book and turned a few pages, and Gruzzik watched a Demon Lord read a column of figures written out by a boy six years in the hall.
"This is what the scholar told me."
"Yes, my lord."
"I did not believe him. I used the word ledgers in front of four Lords, and I said it in the tone of a man making a joke." He closed the book. "That was an expensive joke."
He handed it back.
"Fill the hall. Every furnace you have and four more. Take whatever smiths you want out of the lesser halls and tell them I sent you. Build a second floor for the assembly work, and take the ground the old hall stands on."
Gruzzik hesitated for the first time that afternoon.
"The old hall, my lord?"
"Is there a reason to keep it?"
"There is a wall in it with three track links set into it at the height of a man’s eyes. They have a name cut into them."
Arkhul looked at him.
"Then take the wall out whole and put it in the new building. Somewhere the day shift walks past it."
At the doors he stopped.
"Avarran."
Gruzzik straightened. "My lord?"
"That is where they go. Not to a parade ground and not to another demonstration."
"The canal line."
"The canal line." Arkhul pulled on his gloves nodding.
"Do you know why that war has lasted as long as it has? It is not their soldiers. We have more bodies than the alliance has, and we can spend them in a way they cannot. We always could."
"Their smiths."
"Their smiths." He said it with a hint of anger. "Dwarfs work. Everything they field is better made than everything we field, and it has been that way since before either of us was born. And when we push them off a line, their goblins come over the top of us in those airships."
"Nightwing meet them."
"Nightwing clan meet them, and they die. Every time." Arkhul’s hand closed on the glove. "They bring the airships down, and leave half of the soldiers in the mud doing it, because a goblin sits in those damn balloons and turns a handle, while our fliers have to reach him with their hands."
Gruzzik kept quiet.
"That is the whole war. We spend bodies to answer things that were built in masses, and I have grown tired of paying for it." He looked back down the hall at the machine idling in the middle of the floor. "That is the first thing the clan has ever made that the alliance will find hard to match."
"Five is not many, my lord,it will not even make a ripple."
"You are indeed right about that but Five is meant to be seen." He turned for the doors. "Put them where their officers are standing. Let the dwarves have a proper look at it, and let them work out for themselves how it was made — and how many more are coming."