Chapter 26: Seeing Through Glass Darkly
Landar
The Apple Core Court was bustling with people. The last week, most of the drudges had it easy, resting and working on cleaning up the place. Compared to their normal duties, it was substantially lighter. The three ‘forman’ who helped keep the workers from the three tenements organized and busy had been hard at work fulfilling the orders I had given.
Stegal, Brimhat, and Dugal, all stood near the front of the excited rabble now. Their excitement was clear on their faces. I had only met the men briefly before, when I had eaten the stew with them that first night. They seemed to take a de facto leadership role regarding most things, except the food. That was the elders' job, and the cripples and retired folk who worked it guarded it greedily.
Stegal was a tall, quiet man with a strong jaw and little to say. But his eyes felt like they were burrowing into your soul. If he had a properly balanced diet with enough protein, I was sure he’d have been an excellent recruit for the city watch.
Brimhat was the brooding type. A sour expression on his face most times, and a disappointed air about him. Oddly, it's what made him an effective foreman. “All I’ve got to do me’lord, is think of the worst thing to happen, and then try to stop it.” Was what he had said to me when I asked about his job and skill set.
Dugal on the other hand, was the affable sort. Loud, gregarious, and happy. If short, and rib bone thin. I caught him giving an extra portion from his stew bowl to several of the children who looked the most hungry. When he saw that I had caught him, he grinned and drank what remained in his bowl.
“Are we really going to have glass in our windows again?” One drudge asked her neighbor in the gathered crowd
“I hope so.” Another said, before Dugal gently hushed the lot of them.
“Let the Lord and his dwarf work.”
Gragon was indeed hard at work. He was nearly red faced as hammered a thin piece of scrap metal he had found among the, now organized, refuse piles. Each strike of the hammer brought more heat into the metal, as the dwarf forced mana into each stroke. After a few minutes of hard work, he had a rough cylinder pipe that was about as long as his arm.
“It's ready lad. Now, you lot,” Gragon pointed at Brimhat and the other foreman. “Bring me the bricks from that pile over there, and stack them neatly next to me. I have some pottery to do.”
There were piles of refuse from broken bricks, to half rotten wood, to scavenged pieces of metal from under the rock piles. All of it was neatly sorted, and ready for the various projects I knew we would need them for.
The three foreman, and several of their healthier looking friends began farrying bricks from various piles into a neat stacked set of them off to the side of where Gragon had designated the Kiln would go.
Meanwhile, Gragon was rooting around in the clay dirt, looking for something particular. “Anything I can do to help?” I asked, and the dwarf grunted.
“Nah lad. I have the flux I need here. It’ll help lower the melting point of the sand,” he patted a small pouch he had on his belt. “And thanks to our little outside the wall expedition earlier, I have all the sand we need. And I already have plenty of lime for stabilizer, thanks to the stones that lime the water way under your city. I’ve distilled enough of it that we won’t need to buy any. I know we’re on a tight budget, lad. What I'm doing now is prepping a crucible for the Kiln.”
Gragon grabbed a handful of clay directly out of the ground like it was butter, and his hand was a hot knife. He kneaded it for a minute, grunted acceptance of the clay, and then cast a small spell. A trickle of water entered the clay, and it instantly became malleable. Then, he held out one hand and it rotated on his palm like a centrifuge, until the lump of clay was nearly uniform. He used his thumb and other fingers to occasionally guide errant pieces of clay back into the mass he was trying to make uniform.
He's doing the work of a pottery wheel, just using some simple magic and his hands. Interesting. Sid, can you uh . . . can you copy that spell for me?
Sorry boss, I can't do it without scanning him while he’s casting. Do you want me to scan him? It might distract him.
That was surprisingly useful Sid, and no. I’ll ask him about it later.
Welcome boss, now, back to playing checkers with the city's Central Mind.
What?
Don’t worry about it boss.
Ignoring the growing eccentricities of my surprisingly complex mind spirit, I let Gragon to work, and went to help move the bricks.
***
The fire roared to life in the middle of the kiln as my spell ignited. I controlled it this time, and unlike when I cast it earlier at the river bank it didn’t explode outwards. Instead, it took root in the scraps of wood and refuse the drudges had gathered as fuel.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Good work lad. That's nifty, and surprisingly neat spell work for someone whose runes look like they were chiseled by a toddler with the palsy.” Gragon said marily, as he patted my back with a firm hand that nearly knocked out of balance.
He’s stronger than he looks, I thought as I gave the dwarf a disgruntled look.
“Alright, time for some glass work!” He grabbed a set of heavy tongs and lifted the hard fired crucible into the kiln. The sand and mixed chemicals he had carefully measured out didn’t take long to heat to the needed temp.
A loud crack filled the air, and in an instant Gragon was there, rooting around the broken crucible and ash of the kiln for the molten glass, with his long tube of iron.
A moment later the other end of the metal pipe emerged with a glowing red hot bead of glass nearly the size of my fist on one end.
“Now for the mold I made.” I looked around and didn’t see a mold. With one hand, Gragon reached into a pocket on his pant legs and produced a perfectly square metal form. He blew into the glass, growing the bubble, while he placed the form down on the ground.
Half a heart beat later the bubble looked like it was about to burst, and he folded it several times into the shape he wanted within the form. Then, as it was about to finish cooling with the air bubble trapped, Gragon burst the bubble with a long metal needle.
The glass erupted into riotous flower that mixed various colors. One one side, the side that would face inwards, we had a flat plane piece of clean glass. It would allow in light, but it wouldn’t permit people to see outside very easily. On the other, a beautiful flower that would shed a rainbow of light over the rest of the Apple Core Court.
He left it to cool, then laid out several dozen more of the uniform metal molds, each made I noticed from different types of scrap metal. He probably took them from the scrap piles, I thought before I realized they each had a small scratched-in rune that prevented heat expansion and shrinkage.
“Just needed to see if it’d work with the weak metals I had, lad. Now, let's get to work!”
***
By the time the first flower glass lenses were cooled, and the last half a dozen or so were freshly in their molds, a small chain gang of workers were hard at the effort. Feeding the fire, cleaning the glass in water and with rough adhesive paper, or prepping the glue, made from wood sap and a little actual glue I had scrounged, or, tactically acquired, from the academy grounds.
When I went to help put in the first metal framed glass, I realized that it was actually two frames in one.The inner frame rotated, to allow in fresh air, and cool breezes while the outer frame was firmly affixed using our makeshift or stolen glue, and one or two of the wooden or rusty metal nails we had fashioned out of the scrap piles.
I’m going to have to do something REALLY nice for Gragon after this, I thought as I set in the second window into its slot on the top floor. The design of these frames is fantastic. If we can get some actually good material to use, I'm sure we’d revolutionize how smaller windows work, kingdom wide. As it is, only the larger windows open, and only outwards. This? This ‘d save a lot of work, and will allow people to clean the outside windows when they get dirty. Maybe we can set up some kind of royalty thing. Heck, if we can train the drudges on how to make them, it might make an excellent small business. Hmmm. Sid?
Adding it to the to-do list boss.
Thanks!
The rest of the work went fast, though when we were done the light was starting to fade. “Where did the day go?” I asked, as I looked towards the fading sun. The chill of the day was light, but growing.
“That's what a good day's work will do for you lad. Makes the day go quick.” Gragon said as he handed me a bowl of stew. I eyed it wearily, before I realized there were actual vegetables and real meat chunks that were legitimately identifiable in it.
“Did you add your food to the pot?”
“Yup.”
“Thank you Gragon. Again. I haven’t been able to set up food runs yet. That’s going to be the first thing I do when I get a free day. But today was a . . . very long day. Classes until noon, then that nonsense with the gate house, the digging and Fire Jet spell, and finally this.”
“Aye, and the work went surprisingly fast. Look at that.” I followed where he gestured, and found that both of the tenements with people living in them were now fully filled with glass windows. Windows that could open, and close at will. “They won’t last more than a season or two with the quality of materials we had on hand.” The dwarf grumbled. “Don't’ like making temporary work. But then again, emergencies call for us to put down our pride, and lift our hammers. You humans are far too susceptible to the cold. No wonder you make your homes so cozy, you have to stay in them far too much for my liking.”
“What do you mean?”
“You humans, well, the mortal ones anyway. You make little comfy homes, with all the comforts you can fill them with. You have to stay in them almost year round. Summer? Too hot, you’ll die of dehydration if you work out in the midday sun, so you make cellars with cold chilled drinks, and hang hammocks indoors with a nice summer day breeze. Spring? Too rainy, you’ll catch sick if you stay too long in the wet. Fall? Too cold once the sun goes down, need a fire at minimum. A blanket and a warm cup of your favorite tea is what most of you lot enjoy. Not saying I don’t, but it's almost cute how much you all seem to look forward to it. Winter? Well, you never leave your dens if you can help it. It's really adorable.”
“Wait you uh . . . you’re telling me dwarves think humans are cute?”
Gragon barked a laugh, “You got the right of it kid! You’re all lanky and awkward, but cute as a button almost to a man, woman, and child! Your most grizzled war vet is like looking into the face of one a scarred up toddler.” He put his bowl to his lips and took a long sip. Then he whispered, as if trying to keep it to himself. “Can’t let you lot get hurt. Just wrong, so, so wrong. Like a dog with puppies, can’t stand to see you all cold and hungry. Just wrong.”
I blinked, several times at the revelation. Dwarves think we’re cute?
Yes boss. Why do you think Humanity survived long enough to put down roots? Dwarves, elves, pretty much everyone on two legs with two arms thinks humanity is a bunch of baby faced toddlers running around with sticks too sharp, and are likely to poke your eye out with them rather than do any good. Even the most genocidal and supremacist elf from their Old Empire thinks you should all be rounded up and kept as pets rather than exterminated. It's how you survive. Well, that and tasting absolutely atrocious. All that black sludge running around in your bodies makes everyone else gag. You’re just not appealing as dinner really.
“What do you think of elves then? If we’re cute, they must be cherub-like.”
“Eh, too stuck up. Too skinny. Like skeletons on stilts. They’re alright folk, but . . . well. Not as cute as you lot by half that's for sure.”
I had no idea how to respond to that information, so instead I sipped my soup and enjoyed the dying red sunlight as it reflected off the rainbow flowers of glass we had just planted. And smiled.