Chapter 98: Roads Before Palaces
At sunrise, the first avenue existed only as two parallel ropes running from the edge of old Althoff across a broad strip of churned earth toward the future Commercial District.
By noon, fifty men with picks had broken the old road apart, another sixty shoveled loose earth into carts, and teams of oxen dragged stone from the new yard to the exposed roadbed. Raymond stood beside Mara as the crooked lane that had served the town for decades vanished beneath their feet.
Workers pulled out embedded stones, rotten planks, roots, and years of compacted rubbish until a straight corridor opened through the settlement.
Two buildings had already been dismantled from its path.
Their empty foundations made the avenue look brutally wide. A few townspeople gathered beside the barriers, staring at the cleared strip as if Raymond had ordered a battlefield cut through their homes.
Mara pointed ahead. "From the old core to the Central Commercial District. Twenty-four meters across at its widest section."
Raymond looked down the line. For the first time, he could physically see one of the pale roads from the Master Blueprint carved into Althoff.
The road crews did not immediately fill it again. Instead, Edric stepped into the cleared corridor with surveyors carrying marked poles and directed men toward the edges. Trenches began opening on both sides of the future avenue.
Picks struck earth, shovels followed, baskets rose by rope, and long mounds of soil formed behind the workers. Another crew excavated a deeper line beneath one side of the road where the first section of the Sewer and Drainage Network would run.
Stonecutters arrived behind them with shaped channel blocks from the quarry. One by one, those blocks disappeared into the trench, fitted together over a prepared gravel base, their joints sealed with mortar. Beside them, workers created covered storm drains that would collect runoff from the road.
Edric moved constantly between crews, checking gradients with measuring instruments and making men remove sections that sat too high. Water, he explained, did not care how tired the mason had been when laying the channel.
If the slope was wrong, the entire line was wrong.
The Water Distribution Network took shape beside it. Rather than wait until streets were paved and houses built, Edric marked separate routes beneath accessible margins of the avenue. Workers prepared conduits, inspection points, junction chambers, and spaces where future distribution lines could branch toward residential blocks, markets, bathhouses, workshops, and public fountains.
Most citizens understood roads.
They understood houses. They did not understand why hundreds of workers were burying expensive stonework beneath empty ground. Raymond heard one mason mutter that they were building tunnels for rats before people had roofs.
Another laborer asked why they could not simply dig the drains later.
Raymond stopped beside the trench and looked at him. "Because later this road will have stone over it, wagons on it, shops beside it, and buildings full of people. Digging it up again would mean paying twice to destroy work we already paid for once."
The laborer looked down into the channel, then toward the stripped road. "So we bury everything first."
Raymond nodded. "We build the bones first."
Road foundations came first. Drainage followed the natural fall of the terrain. Water routes were installed wherever the first development phase required them.
Only then would finished road surfaces and buildings close everything in. Mara marked secondary streets branching from the main avenue, and within days the empty eastern ground changed visibly.
Straight brown corridors appeared where grass had stood. Stakes outlined future intersections. Trenches ran beside them. Culverts crossed low points.
Cartloads of crushed stone arrived continuously, and laborers spread it across compacted roadbeds before heavy rollers were dragged over the surface by oxen.
The main avenue advanced several dozen meters at a time: excavation ahead, underground infrastructure behind it, foundation layers behind those, and compacted stone farther back.
Instead of one crew building a road from beginning to end, the road seemed to move forward like a production line.
Raymond rejected a proposal from one visiting craftsman who suggested that the broadest cleared site near the castle would make an excellent location for a grander lordly residence.
The man described towers, ornamental courtyards, carved facades, and enough rooms to impress visiting nobility.
Raymond looked past him toward laborers lowering another drainage block into place. "My current castle has a roof, walls, a bed, and more rooms than I use. I’m fine."
The craftsman hesitated. "But my Lord, a growing city should display the prestige of its ruler."
Raymond pointed toward the avenue. "That is my prestige. Build me roads that don’t become swamps, drains that carry filth away, water people can reach, houses they can live in, and markets where they can work. We can waste money making my bedroom more impressive after the city functions."
Lily, beside him, whispered that his bedroom could use better curtains. Raymond told her she had missed the point.
By the end of the first week, the physical difference was impossible to ignore. The first stretch of avenue from the Historical Core had a compacted stone foundation broad enough for wagons to pass comfortably in both directions. Drain openings appeared at regular intervals along its edges.
Covered channels ran beneath sections already completed, with removable stone access slabs positioned where Edric insisted maintenance crews would someday need them.
The first water junction chamber stood near the future market square, currently nothing more than a stone-lined cavity with capped connections waiting for later branches.
Secondary roads extended eastward as rough foundations, some ending abruptly in open fields where residential districts had not yet risen. Children began using the unfinished roads as running paths until Mara stationed workers to chase them away from active trenches.
Old Althoff, with its twisting muddy lanes, now touched something unmistakably planned.
Then the sky darkened. Spring rain arrived in the afternoon with almost no warning. Wind swept across the construction fields, workers covered tools and materials, and the first heavy drops struck hard enough to scatter dust from the new avenue.
Within minutes, rain hammered rooftops and turned exposed soil dark. Raymond watched from beneath the awning of a workshop with Mara, Edric, and several workers as the unfinished sections transformed exactly as Althoff’s old roads always had.
Mud formed between wheel ruts. Water collected in depressions. Narrow lanes inside the Historical Core became brown streams.
People hurried beneath cloaks while carts struggled through softened ground, their wheels sinking deeper with every pass. One driver cursed loudly when an ox slipped near an old intersection.
But the completed avenue did something different. Water struck the compacted surface, flowed toward the carefully graded edges, and disappeared through the new drainage openings. Raymond stepped closer despite the rain blowing beneath the awning.
Streams rushed into the covered channels instead of spreading across the road. Farther downhill, the main drain carried the growing flow toward its temporary discharge point beyond the active construction zone.
The avenue was wet, certainly, but it was not becoming a swamp. No broad pools formed across its center. Gravel did not wash away in uncontrolled sheets. Wagons continued moving.
A team carrying quarry stone rolled through the downpour without sinking to its axles.
People noticed. Workers sheltering beneath nearby roofs began pointing. A merchant stepped from his doorway and stared at the water vanishing along the roadside.
Two boys ran from an old muddy lane onto the new foundation and immediately began splashing beside a drain until someone shouted at them.
The same mason who had joked about tunnels for rats stood beside Raymond, soaked through his shoulders, watching brown water rush beneath a stone grate.
"Huh," he said.
Raymond folded his arms. "Compelling analysis."
The mason ignored him. "The old road would’ve been knee-deep there."
Raymond nodded. "Probably."
The man watched another stream vanish underground. "And when the houses go up, this stays underneath?"
Raymond looked at him. "That’s generally how underground things work."
The mason gave him an offended look, but he was smiling when he returned to his crew.
The rain continued for nearly two hours, giving Public Works its first accidental full-scale test. Edric walked the drainage line in the storm, identifying two slow sections and one inlet that needed widening.
Mara marked a low point on a secondary road where water had pooled and ordered its foundation raised before construction continued.
Nobody pretended the system was perfect simply because most of it worked. The rain showed them where the drawings met reality, and crews were correcting those weaknesses before stone paving, houses, shops, and thousands of daily footsteps made changes expensive.
The next morning, construction resumed beneath a washed-clean sky. Mud still swallowed boots throughout old sections of Althoff, but wagons were already rolling along the completed stretch of avenue.
Ahead of them, workers extended trenches toward the future commercial square.
To the east, secondary roads spread toward the planned residential districts. Stone channels waited in rows beside excavations. Water components sat beneath canvas. Survey stakes stretched farther than yesterday.
Behind the road crews, another team had already begun setting the first curbstones along the finished section, giving the avenue edges where yesterday there had only been ropes. People walking from the old town naturally stepped onto the new route now, choosing firm stone beneath their boots instead of familiar mud.
Raymond stood in the center of the avenue and looked back toward Althoff. For once, the transformation did not exist on parchment, inside The Lord’s Eye, or in another report telling him what would someday be built.
A straight road now physically cut through the old town toward districts that had not existed a month ago. Water vanished beneath his boots through channels buried before anyone could see their value. Wagons moved where spring mud had once dictated whether movement was possible.
Beyond him, hundreds of workers were extending that change meter by meter into empty land.
The city still had no grand palace.
Raymond could live with that.
Althoff was finally getting a spine.