The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

The Blood Forge, beneath the Ashen Reach — Central Continent

Foreman Gruzzik had three months, a Demon Lord’s personal attention, and a very specific promise about what would happen if he failed.

He considered this a good arrangement. Four hundred years in demonic industry had taught him that the opposite of a Lord’s attention was a Lord’s disappointment, and he had helped shovel out the last foreman who received some.

"Read it again," he said.

The Obsidian Spire scholar looked up and just dissappointedly started reading it again for eleventh time.

"’Hull side plate. Forty-two millimetres. Sloped fifty-five degrees from vertical. Material: controlled alloy, Elarion pattern four. Composition—’"

"Skip the composition."

"You always skip the composition."

"Because it’s the only part I can’t use." Gruzzik spread his hands. "Forty-two millimetres, I can do. Fifty-five degrees I can do beautifully. ’Controlled alloy pattern four’ is a phrase, and I cannot pour a phrase."

"It’s a specification."

"It’s a phrase until somebody hands me the metal."

Here was the thing nobody said out loud where Lord Arkhul could hear it.

The theft had worked. That was the miracle. The Spire had pressed the whole of Elarion’s drawings into a working and threaded it through the anchor-stone a whisper at a time, and what came out the far side was perfect — every curve of the hull, the turret ring, the track links, the breech of the gun, the strange clever heart of the engine. Then eleven weeks of a voice reading numbers through a stone had followed. Dimensions. Angles. Tolerances so fine the scholars had laughed at first, and then stopped laughing.

They had everything.

And on the first line of the first page, Gruzzik had discovered that the Blood Forge could not make a single sheet of it.

Not couldn’t. He’d corrected himself on that daily for three months. Couldn’t was the wrong word.(Author nods yep when you are working for a demon lord)

Elarion’s steel wanted things his forges did not do. The same ore, every time, from the same seam, weighed. A furnace held at one temperature for a stated number of hours — not hot, which Gruzzik could supply in world-ending quantities, but precisely this hot, no hotter, for exactly this long. It wanted the pour tested. The test written down. The batch destroyed if the writing came out wrong.

Destroyed. Good metal. Because of a number.

"They discard it," the scholar had told him in week two, in the voice of reporting an atrocity. "If a sample fails, the entire pour is scrapped."

"That’s not industry," Gruzzik had said. "That’s a religion."

The hall had laughed for a full minute. It had been very funny at the time.

So they improvised, because that is what a forge does.

"Right." Gruzzik faced eleven of his best on the foundry floor. "The mortals want pattern four. We haven’t got pattern four. What have we got?"

"Emberglass."

"Better than pattern four."

"Blackbone composite."

"Much better than pattern four."

"There’s ashen-iron out of the Kharvoss seams. Holds a curse like it was born to."

"You see." Gruzzik turned to the scholar with the satisfaction proving a long argument. "Look at their list. No fire in it. No working. No blood, nothing sung into it. Iron and arithmetic. That’s what you build when you haven’t got anything good." He clapped the nearest smith hard enough to bring his soul out of him for a second. "We’re not paupers. Same thickness, same angle, better metal. Lord Arkhul will have a Warhound that makes theirs look like a cart."

The scholar tried speaking once then gave up.

"Foreman. The composition isn’t decoration. That thickness was calculated for that alloy. Change the metal and you have to recalculate everything the metal was holding up."

"I’ve been pouring armour since before your clan had a name. Emberglass at forty-two beats mortal iron at forty-two. That isn’t arithmetic, it’s obvious."

"You don’t know it’s stronger. You know it’s stronger against a sword."

"What else is there?"

The scholar looked at the eleven smiths, and at the foreman, and the three months, and remembring a very specific promise. Then he closed his mouth and wrote a note in his own margin that no one would read for a long time.

The build went magnificently.

The engine came first and became the pride of the hall. Elarion’s design ran a mana core into mechanism — valves, shafts, gearing, a mill-wheel fed by power instead of water. Gruzzik’s people looked at four stages of gearing doing work that one decent binding could manage in a single stroke, and improved it. Why gear the power down at all? Why fit a governor, when a bound spirit in the housing would hold the speed just as well and could also be shouted at?

"It’ll run hotter," someone said.

"It’ll run stronger."

"Drawings say the cooling’s sized for—"

"The drawings were made by people who can’t bind a spirit into a gearbox. Not our problem. Very much theirs."

The tracks were where the hall outdid itself. Elarion’s track links were, in Gruzzik’s professional opinion, an insult: four hundred and nine identical stamped things, dull as pebbles, replaceable by any idiot with a hammer. His smiths were artists. Each took a section and made his own properly. Some heavier. Some with better teeth. Three of them were, by any fair measure, the finest track links ever forged on that continent, and the man who made them signed his work.

"Will they fit together?" the scholar asked.

"Course they’ll fit together. They’re links."

The turret was cast in one piece, because Arkhul came down to watch that day and nobody was going to cast a turret in sections in front of the Furnace Tyrant.

He stood on the gantry with the heat rolling up at him, and he was pleased — which was the most dangerous thing he could have been.(soon wont)

"It is larger than the drawing."

Gruzzik’s stomach dropped. "The pattern took a little more than we reckoned, my lord. But every bit of the extra is armour—"

"Good." Arkhul waved it away. "Larger is correct. Theirs was built to be carried by a mortal engine down mortal roads. Ours has no such humility." He looked down at the shape rising on the floor: the great sloped hull, the gun barrel on its trestles, the tracks laid out in their individual glory. "You have done well. Three months, from a whisper through a stone, and you have built what took them years to learn."

"My lord is generous."

"My lord is observant."

Arkhul’s hand rested on the rail and the metal warmed under it. "The Spire’s scholars have told me at length, and in writing, that this could not be done. That the drawings were the smallest part of it. That the real secret lay in ledgers, and inspectors, and little men with measuring sticks." Something like amusement moved through him. "And yet here it stands. Ahead of schedule. Built by smiths."(guys who is gonna tell him)

Three steps down and one step back, the scholar said nothing at all.

"Finish it," Arkhul said. "I want it demonstrated."

Nineteen days later it came off the floor, and the whole clan turned out to see.

They were not entirely wrong to be proud. It was enormous — bigger than the drawings, a third heavier, emberglass over blackbone with a cursed ashen-iron facing that drank the light off the furnaces. The engine housing muttered continuously to itself in a low voice. Every track link glittered, no two alike.

It looked like a Warhound the way a cathedral looks like a shed.

They cut the eleven smiths’ names into the inside of the hatch, which the drawings had not called for and worked a binding into the gun mantlet that Elarion’s engineers would not have understood, and would have paid well to see, and would then have asked one short question about that nobody in the hall had thought to ask.

Gruzzik walked its length twice and could not find a single flaw. He had built exactly what the drawings showed. Every dimension the whisper gave him. In better metal, with better work, by better hands.

"Let them keep their arithmetic," he said.

On a bench in the corner, the Obsidian Spire scholar packed his papers into a satchel, and made one last note in the margin of the eleventh week — beside a line about controlled alloys that had been read aloud four times to a room that did not want to hear it.

Then he went to find out whether his presence was required at the demonstration.

He rather hoped not.