Chapter 13 The Last Inventor #3
“That… should be easy,” Kraghtol said slowly. Adding more energy to the blast clearly meant he would need to use the Light Principle. It seemed as straightforward as the glowing mixture.
“Good! Because we only have one try,” Dagna grinned.
She was right. Her blast powder wasn’t the only limitation. The previous experiments had depleted the pouch of Activator as well. Perhaps there was enough left for two, maybe three applications. So, he had to make it count on the first try.
Recalling the feelings he had when he touched the Principle in his dream, he let his instincts guide him on the choice of materials and ended up with lamp oil, pitch and sulfur, a sharp-smelling Dwarven liquor, and red-hot heated copper shavings.
It was hard enough to keep the mix from bursting into flame even before adding the Activator, which Kraghtol took as a good sign.
When it was finally time to add the mysterious catalyst, he hesitated for a moment.
Only one try! Shoving away all thoughts of what could go wrong, he focused on the desired effect as intensely as he could.
Demolish a stone wall. Blast. Explode. Without looking, he sprinkled the powder over the mixture and heard the sizzle of the alchemical flame.
Only when it subsided did he dare to open his eyes again.
In the pot was a dangerous-looking liquid. It was dark now, but illuminated by a low red glow from deep within, reminding him of embers in a burned-down campfire.
Dagna whistled through her teeth. “Will it work?”
“How should I know?” Kraghtol answered. “It looks dangerous enough, though.”
“There’s only one way to find out!”
Valir was enjoying all this decidedly too much and underlined his enthusiasm with a chord of hard-sounding notes from his instrument.
Considering how complicated it looked, Valir was getting better fast. Perhaps he had learned another instrument before.
He imagined the noble with his eyes closed and a violin to his chin.
“Okay. But I wouldn’t risk removing it from its pot,” Kraghtol decided, forcing his mind back to the matter at hand. He didn’t know whether the mixture was as volatile as it looked to him, but didn’t want to find out the hard way.
Kraghtol could not remember having carried something so carefully before, as he took baby steps in order not to shake the contents of the pot too much.
The result of his experiment scared him, and droplets of sweat fell from his brow.
Dagna, on the other hand, didn’t seem particularly concerned about her safety as she spun around the bag of blasting powder like a handbag.
They chose a spot not far away from the metal seal and set up the powder around the pot, directly against the wall.
From there, Dagna unrolled a long fuse, which she stuck into the pile of explosive powder on one side and went around a corner holding the other one.
“Oh, I’ve got a feeling this is going to be good,” she grinned as she was about to light the end. “Are you ready for a big boom?”
“Wait,” interjected Valir. “Won’t people notice an explosion that big?”
Dagna dismissed his worries with a wave of her hand. “Hardly. We use explosives all the time in mining, and since there’s nobody there in the alchemists’ foundry, nobody will be able to tell where it came from. So, are you ready? Cover your ears!”
She lit the fuse, and the spark crawled around the corner towards the explosive charge.
Dagna and Valir had already pressed their hands on the ear, and Kraghtol was about to do the same, when he heard something.
There were voices coming from the foundry behind them, talking and laughing.
The workers had returned! In panic, he lunged forward, planning to extinguish the fuse, but felt a pull on his clothes, holding him back. It was Dagna.
“What are you doing?! It’s going to explode any moment —”
The explosion wasn’t loud at first. Instead, it was as if someone had hit him with both fists on the ears.
He didn’t hear the bang as much as he felt it in his whole body.
A shockwave made him stumble back two steps, fighting for his balance.
Smoke filled the tunnel, just as dull silence filled his head, interrupted only by a ringing and whistling sound in his ears.
Valir was shouting something, but he didn’t understand a word.
Meanwhile, the dwarf had already put on a pair of goggles from somewhere deep within her pockets and was approaching the source of the smoke.
Kraghtol had trouble staying upright, and Valir was gesturing wildly at him.
The noble was probably urging him to leave immediately, but even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, as the world was still spinning.
He took a few steps towards the smoke and wondered why his feet and legs were getting wet.
Cool water and hot steam mixed into the smoke in front of him, and only after a few more steps, Kraghtol realized why.
His concoction had worked. Too well. There wasn’t just a hole in the tunnel wall, but a huge rift.
A good six meters of the wall were just gone, along with the floor and part of the opposing wall as well.
And the ceiling. The ceiling, with the pipes running under it, transporting water and steam.
Frayed metal ends were all that remained, and the pipes’ contents poured out into the tunnel.
Did he do that? He had not known the alchemical effect would be so enormous. Was the tunnel stable? Did he have to get Valir out of here? Where was Dagna?
He saw something moving in the smoke in front of him and took more steps.
The hot steam was burning, and he quickly lost all sense of direction.
Soot clang to his wet clothes and skin, and was constantly getting in his eyes.
Where was that fey-cursed dwarf? Blinking rapidly, he thought he recognized movement straight ahead, and then, a heartbeat later, to his right.
He wasn’t sure on both accounts but went right.
It was the right direction. He stumbled and fell into the water-filled blast crater when his feet didn’t find solid ground anymore, and bumped his head afterwards as he climbed up into another tunnel with a lower ceiling.
At least the smoke and steam were thinner here, and after rubbing his burning eyes a few times, he could see better.
Dagna was a few steps ahead of him, just about to open a door. Kraghtol called her name without hearing himself, but she didn’t react. Perhaps the bang had deafened her as well, temporarily, as Kraghtol hoped.
He took the last few steps, and Dagna flinched in surprise as he touched her shoulder but gestured excitedly at the door in front of her.
Even without hearing a word, Kraghtol understood.
This had to be her idol’s workshop. The door was stuck, but that was nothing his half-Orcish strength could not handle.
Inside, it was dark and dusty, and it took Dagna a while to ignite a lantern.
Kraghtol had expected the workshop to look much like Dagna’s: dominated by creative chaos and crammed full of half-finished projects.
The opposite was true. There was a workbench with some single cogs lying around on it, but aside from that, the room was large and empty.
No, not entirely empty. On the large desk — made of wood, as he noticed — was a stack of dusty paper.
And on the walls hung several large sheets as well.
Dagna immediately made a beeline for the desk, leaving the walls for Kraghtol to inspect.
Carefully, he wiped his hands on his pants before removing the patina of dust from the paper.
It felt old and brittle, but the dryness of the room had preserved it well.
Slowly, the ringing and whistling in his ears subsided, leaving only the heavy feeling of silence, which, too, was getting lighter by the minute.
It was a map. As he uncovered more and more of it, he realized it was a map of the entirety of Wardenreach: from the frosty reaches around the northern villages all the way down to the hotter southern part of the country, divided by a central mountain range aptly named the Sword.
The map wasn’t very detailed and only noted the bigger cities of the country: Ironwatch, Bronzebreak, Winterstone, Crossroads and Greylune.
The roads connecting them as well as smaller towns were on it but had no name label, and villages like Mistpine were entirely absent.
But since it showed the Frostwater as a side arm of the Bronzerun River, he could guess where it should be.
The longer he looked at the map, the less sense it made.
According to this, the place he suspected his home village to be was right south of the country border.
But he knew for a fact that the border was many kilometers north of it, almost as far away as Winterstone.
He shook his head. Perhaps the map was flawed, even though it seemed too intricate in other places to get the shape of the country wrong like that.
He carefully blew more dust away around the city of Winterstone and was surprised to find something written on the map.
Thin lines adorned the region, carefully drawn but clearly not from the same hand as the rest of the map.
The lines went horizontally and parallel to the thicker blue line of the Bronzerun River and were almost straight, just slightly curving downward to the left.
They had tiny arrows on them, and right next to the city, the same pen had written the words “Fall Winds”, “West” and “Ideal”.
Similar lines adorned other places on the map, but most were less straight, squigglier and sometimes labeled with question marks.
He removed the dust from the other hanging papers as well, expecting to see similar maps, but instead found intricate drawings depicting a large mechanical device with leathery wings from different angles.
These were no blueprints, and at least to him didn’t appear to serve a technical purpose.
He turned around and almost bumped into Dagna, who had also taken an interest in the drawings.
Clutched in her hand, she gripped a stack of paper covered with complicated schematics.
“This. Is. Amazing.”
Kraghtol was glad he could hear well enough again to make out the exclaimed words. He had no idea how loud he had to speak to reach her, so he talked like he used to address Mrs. Brott.
“What is all that?”
“I don’t know!” she exclaimed as if she were happy about it. “But it has to be something big and important. Voldrik’s last invention!”
She took a long look at the drawings, running from one to the next, getting more out of breath by the minute.
“Wow. I wonder — no! That can’t be! But it must; that’s the only explanation for all this. Kragh, I think my uncle was trying to fly!”
“Your uncle… flew? You mean like a… bird?”
“Bird? Ah, right, you have those. Yes! Look at the drawings! He was inventing a machine to fly through the air, like a bird. And these,” she waved with the papers in her hand, “are his schematics. Perhaps earlier revisions that he left here.”
Suddenly, Kraghtol got an idea.
“Oh! If that’s true, then these lines on the map… Perhaps they represent the wind?”
Dagna inspected the map that she had all but ignored until now.
“Yes! That makes sense! That must be why he left for Winterstone: because of the ideal winds.”
Her short finger pointed at the words. Kraghtol remembered the forceful gales going through the streets of Winterstone himself.
“Oh, Kragh, do you think he actually made it? Has he completed this wondrous machine?”
“I don’t —” he began apologetically but stopped when he remembered a peculiar expression the old Torven Hawke had used when he talked about the dwarf.
“Actually… yes. I know. I met his… student in the city, and he said that ‘the wings of his dream carried him away’. Perhaps he is even still alive! Dwarves get pretty old, right?”
It was hard not to get infected by Dagna’s enthusiasm, who now almost pressed her nose to the map.
“But if that’s true, and the winds go this way, then…”
It was easy to follow her finger, and Kraghtol understood her well when she broke up, sobered.
“I’m sorry.”
If the wings he had built had carried the infamous inventor west from Winterstone, he would soon have crossed the border into the Wild Lands.
The domain of the orcs, the realm of the savages.
If he really had survived his flight, it was unlikely that his luck had continued after that.
At least no one ever returned from there, save for the soldiers.
Dagna sniffled. It was hard to tell if she was crying or not, but when she spoke, her voice sounded defiant, not sad.
“So what! Maybe he died, but not before completing his great work! He invented a flying machine, for stone’s balls! I want to see any pump engineer do that!”
Her eyes sparkled behind the goggles that still covered them.
“And I have his plans here. His work is not lost! Let’s get them to safety!”
Burying the stack of paper deep within a pocket, she stomped out of the room, and Kraghtol was about to follow, when he noticed something on the ground near the map reflecting the light of her lantern.
When he picked it up, he realized it was a small golden monocle, which must have belonged to the previous owner of the workshop.
Dagna would certainly be happy to have it, so he pocketed it and followed the shine of the lantern into the chaos outside.
He had to squint his eyes almost closed to protect them from the smoke and steam, and a constant hissing and splashing sound filled the tunnel, which he hadn’t heard on his way in.
When he finally went around the corner, he stopped rooted.
Waiting for him there, and already having apprehended Valir and Dagna, were a good dozen red-clad dwarves. The orderkeepers of Bronzebreak.