Chapter 97: Stone, Wood And Iron
Four days after the sawmill foundations were laid, Althoff’s construction sites stopped looking like separate projects and began resembling parts of one enormous machine.
Ormond’s survey teams returned from the western ridges with the first useful geological report since House Althoff expanded its territory.
Less than twelve kilometers from town, beneath a shallow layer of soil and scrub, they had found a deposit of dense grey building stone that fractured cleanly enough for blocks, foundations, drainage channels, and roadwork.
Another site farther south contained limestone suitable for producing lime once proper kilns were established. Raymond rode out with Ormond, Mara, and several guards that morning and stood above the marked deposit while laborers cleared vegetation.
Ormond handed him a drawn map. "This isn’t the only stone in Althoff, but it’s the closest deposit worth developing immediately."
Raymond looked toward the city in the distance. "Then let’s stop carrying our future out one rock at a time."
Within days, the western site became Althoff’s first organized quarry. Public Works laid out access paths while Ormond marked safe cutting faces and areas that required further inspection.
Experienced stoneworkers supervised laborers using wedges, hammers, chisels, pry bars, and lifting frames. Blocks emerged slowly at first, rough and irregular, before stonecutters shaped them into usable dimensions.
Nothing about quarrying was glamorous. It was dust, sweat, noise, broken fingernails, aching backs, and men shouting warnings whenever a section separated from the rock face. Yet Raymond found the operation hypnotic.
Every block stacked beside the loading area represented something that had not existed yesterday: part of a foundation, a drain, a warehouse wall, a road, perhaps eventually the outer defenses.
The mountain was becoming a city one wagonload at a time.
Corvin immediately attacked the transportation problem. Producing stone meant nothing if wagons spent half their days waiting to be loaded or returned empty because nobody had coordinated the routes.
He established scheduled runs rather than allowing foremen to seize whichever wagon appeared nearby. Quarry wagons moved from the western deposit to a new stone yard near the construction districts, where blocks were sorted by size and purpose before being dispatched.
Timber followed a different chain. Logging teams worked inside designated forestry zones, hauling felled trunks to collection points. Heavy wagons carried those logs to the sawmill. Processed lumber then moved to construction yards positioned near the residential and commercial districts.
Corvin posted route schedules at each loading point and assigned clerks to record every departure, cargo, destination, and return.
Raymond stared at one board filled with columns and arrows and murmured, "You’ve invented traffic before we’ve finished the roads."
Corvin replied, "Which is why we need the roads."
Forestry changed just as dramatically. Before, timber meant sending men into the nearest woodland with axes and telling them to bring back trees. Ormond, Mara, and the forestry supervisors now divided accessible woodland into cutting zones.
Trees suitable for structural lumber were marked separately from smaller timber, firewood, and species worth preserving.
Access tracks were cleared so wagons could reach collection areas without destroying everything beneath their wheels.
Cutting crews worked in rotation rather than stripping one patch bare. Young growth and seed trees were deliberately left behind. Raymond had no interest in discovering ten years later that building Althoff City had transformed the surrounding territory into a wasteland.
The forests were resources, but they were resources he intended his family to possess long after the current construction frenzy ended.
Iron presented a different problem. Althoff had blacksmiths, but most were accustomed to repairing farm tools, shoeing horses, producing knives, hinges, simple weapons, and whatever else a small frontier settlement required.
City construction multiplied demand beyond anything they had experienced. Roderic Vann spent two days visiting every forge before gathering the smiths and reorganizing production.
Instead of each workshop making whatever orders reached its door, large government contracts were divided according to capacity. One forge concentrated on nails and spikes. Another produced hinges and brackets.
Others handled picks, chisels, shovel heads, axes, wagon fittings, wheel rims, clamps, bolts, and replacement tool parts. Skilled smiths still accepted private work, but government orders guaranteed weeks of paid production.
Roderic introduced improved furnace practices where existing equipment allowed and began planning what Althoff would need for larger metalworking later.
The effects spread beyond construction immediately. Blacksmiths needed charcoal, ore, leather, handles, apprentices, and laborers. Carpenters needed assistants because processed lumber was beginning to arrive faster than established workshops could turn it into doors, frames, flooring, carts, and roofing structures.
Teamsters needed stable hands. Quarry crews needed cooks and water carriers. Forestry camps needed food, axes, rope, medical supplies, and replacement boots.
Merchants who had previously arrived hoping to sell a few luxury goods began bringing iron stock, rope, lamp oil, leather, salt, tools, canvas, and other practical supplies because those were the things Althoff was suddenly consuming in quantity.
Money paid to workers flowed into food stalls, tailors, taverns, workshops, and markets, then returned to other hands again. Raymond could watch an economy waking up around the construction sites.
What affected him most were the people inside that economy. Months earlier, many had entered Althoff with almost nothing.
Raymond recognized a man from one of the winter refugee groups now driving a quarry wagon with his teenage son beside him.
Two women who had once worked in communal kitchens were selling meals near the Public Works yard. A carpenter from Fellcross had taken three apprentices, all young refugees who previously possessed no trade beyond whatever labor kept them fed.
Former farmers waiting for their spring land assignments earned wages clearing roads and digging drainage trenches. Widows found work sorting salvaged materials, sewing work clothing, preparing meals, maintaining records, or assisting workshops.
Not everyone had become prosperous overnight, and Raymond knew wages alone did not erase what winter had taken from them. But people who had once waited for ration distributions were now earning coins and deciding for themselves what to do with them.
Then the sawmill started.
The facility had taken less than a week to assemble because the System package provided specialized machinery and precise installation instructions while Althoff supplied the building, foundations, ordinary structural timber, labor, and supporting materials.
Raymond arrived for the first operational test with Mara, Lucan, Corvin, and several carpenters who looked at the unfamiliar mana-assisted mechanisms with equal parts suspicion and hunger.
A log was rolled onto the feed assembly and secured. The mana-drive engaged with a deep mechanical hum. Cutting blades moved. Sawdust sprayed into collection channels.
Men who normally needed hours of exhausting manual work watched the machine turn a raw trunk into straight, consistent boards with insulting efficiency.
The first board emerged.
One carpenter picked it up, checked the thickness, sighted along its length, and looked at the next board coming behind it. "Again," he said.
They ran another log.
Then another.
By midday, nobody was suspicious anymore.
The sawmill did not eliminate workers. It changed what their work accomplished. Men still felled trees, transported logs, operated machinery, sorted cuts, maintained blades, moved boards, dried lumber, and prepared specialized pieces.
But the slowest stage of the old process had been crushed. Standard dimensions could now be produced repeatedly instead of every beam being shaped from scratch.
Lucan immediately began adjusting construction schedules around reliable lumber sizes. Carpenters could prepare standardized frames. Public Works could estimate material requirements more accurately.
Corvin could count boards instead of trying to compare piles of irregular timber. Waste fell because logs were cut systematically rather than according to whatever a sawyer happened to need that morning.
Raymond returned three days later and barely recognized the timber yard. Long stacks of boards stood beneath covered drying shelters. Structural beams were arranged by dimensions.
Smaller cuts occupied separate racks.
Offcuts had their own piles for workshops, fuel, temporary braces, crates, and other secondary uses. Wagons arrived carrying logs and departed carrying standardized lumber toward construction districts.
A clerk stood beside the loading area recording quantities so quickly that Lily whispered he looked like his hand was trying to escape his body. Beyond him, the sawmill continued humming.
Raymond walked between the stacks, running one hand across the edge of a freshly cut beam. Four days ago, timber had threatened to stall construction.
Now the problem had shifted toward transportation, drying capacity, carpentry labor, and keeping enough logs moving through the mill.
That did not annoy him. It delighted him. Solving one bottleneck revealed the next, and every bottleneck removed increased what Althoff could produce.
He looked toward the distant construction zones. Quarry wagons rolled in from the west. Timber wagons came from the forest. Smoke rose from blacksmith forges working through government orders.
Stone accumulated in organized yards. Iron fittings filled labeled crates.
Workers carried wages home. Merchants unloaded supplies. Apprentices learned trades that would exist long after the current building campaign ended.
The city was not rising yet.
But everything needed to make it rise was.