Chapter 30: The Road Home
The first thing I had noticed was that the garrison grounds occupied the entire western quarter of the inner wall.
I had seen the outer edge of it the previous day from the corridor of campaign maps, but walking through it was different. The training fields alone were larger than Hekou's entire fenced perimeter.There were four separate yards with different surface conditions ranging from packed earth to sand, as well as stone flags, and a raised platform of hardwood that flexed slightly underfoot. Impact structures along the eastern wall built from a stone composite I didn't recognize, harder than what Gao Ren's forge produced and shaped that implied either a mold-casting process I hadn't seen before.
"What's the binding agent used for the impact walls?"
Xu walked beside me with her arms folded as she nodded as the passing soldiers and administrators who acknowledged her. " It is river clay fired with ground iron slag. It absorbs impact better than stone and it doesn't fracture the way packed earth does in the winter."
I looked at the surface closely. The texture was consistent throughout with no visible seams and the color was a uniform grey-brown. "How thick is it?"
"Forty li at the base, tapering to twenty at the top. The weight distribution keeps them from shifting in heavy rain."
I noted all of it. The construction list I'd been building in my head since before I left Hekou was growing more specific by the hour. Zone three's impact walls at Hekou were packed stone and they worked, but this composite would work better, and if Gao Ren could source the slag in sufficient quantity from the ridge cave operations then the binding process would be replicable.
We moved through the supply depot next, and I took notice of how every category of material had a location, a rotation schedule, and a designated party whose name was on a placard at the station. The documentation was current to within two days, which meant that no food or resource would be out of date or expired.
"Your quartermaster chain," I began to say, "How far does it extend before the information degrades?"