Midst Toil and Tribulation: Chapter Twelve

.V.
The Delthak Works,
Barony of High Rock,
Kingdom of Old Charis,
Empire of Charis

    “Well, it certainly looks impressive, Ehdwyrd,” Father Paityr Wylsynn said dryly. “Now if it just doesn’t blow up and kill us all.”

    “I’m crushed, Father,” Ehdwyrd Howsmyn told the Charisian Empire’s intendant in a composed tone. “I’ve shared all of Doctor Mahklyn’s calculations with you, and Master Huntyr and Master Tairham do excellent work. Besides, we’ve had the smaller model running for over two months now.”

    They stood side by side under the canopy of smoke rising from what had become known as the Delthak Works in order to differentiate it from the additional complexes Howsmyn had under construction on Lake Lymahn in the Barony of Green Field. Or, for that matter, the two he was expanding near Tellesberg and the entirely new complex going up outside Maikelberg in Chisholm’s Duchy of Eastshare. No other man had ever owned that much raw iron-making capacity, but the Delthak Works remained the biggest and most productive of them all. Indeed, no one before Ehdwyrd Howsmyn had ever even dreamed of such a huge, sprawling facility, and its output dwarfed that of any other ironworks in the history of the world.

    Howsmyn didn’t really look the part of a world-shaking innovator. In fact, he looked remarkably ordinary and preposterously young for someone who’d accomplished so much, but there was something in his eyes — something like a bright, searching fire that glowed far back in their depths even when he smiled. It was always there, Wylsynn thought, but it glowed even brighter than usual today as he waved one hand at two of the men standing behind them.

    The men in question smiled, although an unbiased observer might have noted that they looked rather more nervous than their employer. Not because they doubted the quality of their handiwork, but because for all of his open-mindedness and obviously friendly relationship with Howsmyn, Paityr Wylsynn was the Empire’s intendant, the man charged with ensuring that no incautious innovation transgressed the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng. He’d signed the attestation for the device they were there to observe, yet that could always be subject to change, and blame (like certain other substances) flowed downhill. If the intendant should change his mind, or if the Church of Charis overruled him, the consequences for the artisans and mechanics who’d constructed the device they were there to test might be . . . unpleasant.

    “I’m well aware of the quality of their craftsmanship, Ehdwyrd,” Wylsynn said now. “For that matter, I’ve already ridden in your infernal contraption of a boat. And I have considerable faith in Doctor Mahklyn’s numbers. But ‘considerable’ isn’t quite the same thing as absolute faith, especially when I can’t pretend I understand how all those equations and formulas actually work, and this ‘engine’ is an awful lot bigger than the one in your boat. If it should decide to explode, I expect the damage to be considerably more severe.”

    “I suppose that’s not unreasonable, Father. I won’t pretend I really understand Rahzhyr’s numbers — or Doctor Vyrnyr’s — for that matter. But I do have faith in them, or I’d be standing far, far away at this moment. For that matter, the model tests for this one have worked just as well as for the single expansion engines, you know.”

    “And weren’t you the one who told me once that the best scale for any test was twelve inches to the foot?” Wylsynn asked, arching one eyebrow and carefully avoiding words like “experiment,” which weren’t well thought of by the Inquisition.

    “Which is exactly why you’re here today, Father.”

    Wylsynn smiled at the man known as the ‘Ironmaster of Charis’, acknowledging his point, and both of them turned back towards the hulking mass of iron and steel they’d come to observe. It was certainly impressive looking. The open triangular frame of massive iron beams — at least twice Howsmyn’s height and almost as long as it was tall — was surmounted by a rectangular, box-like casing. Three steel rods, each thick as a man’s palm, descended from the overhead structure at staggered intervals. Each of them was actually composed of two rods, joined at a cross bearing, and their lower ends were connected to a crankshaft four inches in diameter. The entire affair was festooned with control rods, valves, and other esoteric bits and pieces which meant very little to the uninitiated.

    Its very existence was enough to make anyone nervous. Before the Group of Four’s attempt to destroy the Kingdom of Charis, no one would ever have dreamed of testing the limits of the Proscriptions in such a way. Not that there was anything prohibited about it, of course. Father Paityr would never have been here if there’d been any chance of that! But every one of those watching men knew how unlikely the Grand Inquisitor in far-off Zion was to agree about that. All of them also had a very clear notion of what would happen to them if they ever fell into the Inquisition’s hands, and that was enough to make anyone nervous, even if he’d had no qualms at all about the work to which he’d set his hands and mind. And, of course, there was always the possibility that even Father Paityr could be wrong about those potentially demonic bits and pieces. So it wasn’t surprising, perhaps, that most of the onlookers looked just a bit anxious.

    The man standing directly beside it, however, seemed remarkably impervious to any qualms anyone else might be feeling. He’d never taken his eye off of the bizarre structure for a moment — or not off of a sealed glass tube on one side of it, at any rate.

    Stahlman Praigyr was a small, tough, weathered man with extraordinarily long arms and a nose which had obviously been broken more than once. When he smiled, he revealed two missing front teeth, as well, but he wasn’t smiling today. He stood mechanically wiping his hands again and again with an oily cloth, his cap pulled down over his eyes as he stared at the slowly climbing column of liquid in that tube, watching it like a cat-lizard poised outside a spider-rat burrow.

    Now he straightened abruptly and looked over his shoulder.

    “Pressure’s up, Sir,” he told Howsmyn, and the foundry owner looked at Zosh Huntyr, his master artificer.

    “Ready?”

    “Aye, Sir,” Huntyr replied. “Nahrmahn?”

    Nahrmahn Tidewater, Huntyr’s senior assistant, nodded and raised his right hand, waving the flag in it in a rapid circular movement. A bell clanged loudly, warning everyone in the vicinity — and especially the crew clustered around the base of the nearest blast furnace — that the test was about to begin.

    “Anytime, Master Howsmyn,” Huntyr said then, and Howsmyn nodded to Praigyr.

    “This is your special baby, Stahlman. Open her up.”

    “Yes, Sir!” Praigyr’s huge grin displayed the gap where teeth once had been, and he reached for the gleaming brass wheel mounted on the end of a long, steel shaft. He spun it, still watching the gauge, and steam hissed as the throttle valve opened.

    For a moment, nothing happened, but then — slowly, at first — the piston rods from the huge cylinders hidden in the rectangular box at the top of the frame began to move. They pivoted on the cross head bearings where they joined the connecting rods, whose lower ends were connected to the cranks, the offset portions of the crankshaft. And as they moved, they turned the massive crankshaft itself, much as a man might have turned a brace-and-bit to bore a hole through a ship’s timber. But this was no man turning a drill; this was the first full-scale, triple-expansion steam engine ever built on the planet of Safehold.

    The piston rods moved faster as steam flowed from the high-pressure cylinder into the mid-pressure cylinder, expanding as it went. The mid-pressure cylinder’s piston head was much broader than the high-pressure cylinder’s, because the lower pressure steam needed a greater surface area to impart its energy. And once the mid-pressure cylinder had completed its stroke, it vented in turn to the low-pressure cylinder, the largest of them all. It was a noisy proposition, but the crankshaft turned faster and faster, and one of the workmen by the base of the blast furnace began waving a flag of his own in energetic circles.

 

---

 

    “All right!” Huntyr exclaimed, then clamped his mouth shut, blushing, but no one seemed to care, really. They were all too busy listening to the sound coming from the blast furnace — a sound of rushing air, growing louder and louder, challenging even the noise of the steam engine so close at hand. The steam-powered blowers of the forced draft system were bigger and more powerful than anything the Delthak Works had built yet, even for the furnaces driven by the hydro-accumulators, and Howsmyn beamed as Tairham slapped Huntyr on the back while they blew steadily harder and harder in time with the engine’s gathering speed.

    “Well,” Wylsynn said loudly over the sound of the engine and the blowers, “it hasn’t blown up yet, at any rate.”

    “I suppose there’s still time,” Howsmyn replied, still beaming. “But what say you and I retreat to the comfort of my office while we wait for the inevitable disaster?”

    “I think that’s an excellent idea, Master Howsmyn. Especially since I understand you’ve recently received a shipment from Her Majesty’ favorite distillery back in Chisholm.”

    “Why, I believe I have,” Howsmyn agreed. He looked at his employees. “Zosh, I want you and Kahlvyn to keep an eye on it for another — oh, half an hour. Then I want you, Nahrmahn, and Brahd to join me and the Father in my office. I think we’ll all have quite a few things to discuss at that point.” He flashed another smile. “After all, now that he’s let us get this toy up and running, it’s time to tell him about all of our other ideas, isn’t it?”

    “Yes, Sir,” Huntyr agreed with just a shade less enthusiasm than his employer, and Howsmyn bowed to Wylsynn.

    “After you, Father.”

 

---

 

    “I must confess I really did feel a moment or two of . . . anxiety,” Paityr Wylsynn admitted ten minutes later, standing at Howsmyn’s office windows and gazing out across the incredible, frenetic activity. “I know the design was approved by Owl, and I know his remotes were actually monitoring quality control all the way through, but all joking aside, it would’ve been a disaster if that thing had blown up! Too many people would’ve seen it as proof of Jwo-jeng’s judgment, no matter who’d attested it. I hate to think how far back that would’ve set the entire project, not to mention undermining my own authority as Intendant.”

    “I know.” Howsmyn stepped up beside him and handed him a glass half-filled with amber liquid. “And, to be honest, I’d've felt better myself if I’d simply been able to hand Zosh a set of plans and tell him to build the damned thing. But we really needed him to work it out for himself based on the ‘hints’ Rahzhyr and I were able to give him.” He shrugged. “And he did. In fact, he and Nahrmahn did us proud. That single-cylinder initial design of theirs worked almost perfectly, and the two-cylinder is actually a lot more powerful than I expected — or, rather, it’s turned out to be a lot more efficient at moving a canal boat. Propeller design’s more complicated than I’d anticipated, but with Owl to help me slip in the occasional suggestion, they’ve managed to overcome each problem as it made itself known.

    “But the really important thing — the critical thing — is that I’ve got a whole layer of management now, here and at the other foundries, who’re actually coming up with suggestions I haven’t even so much as whispered about yet. And best of all, we’ve documented every step of the process in which Zosh and Nahrmahn — oh, and let’s not forget Master Praigyr — came up with this design. We’ve got sketches, diagrams, office memos, everything. Nobody’s going to be able to claim one of Shan-wei’s demons just appeared in a cloud of smoke and brimstone and left the thing behind him!”

    “Oh, don’t be silly, Ehdwyrd! Of course they are.” Wylsynn shook his head. “Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s never let the truth get in his way before — what makes you think he’s going let it happen now? Besides, when you come down to it, that’s almost exactly what did happen. I mean, wouldn’t you call Merlin one of Shan-wei’s ‘demons’? I use the term in the most approving possible fashion, you understand. And while I’d never want to sound as if I’m complaining, just breathing out there does put one firmly in mind of ‘smoke and brimstone,’ you know.”

    “Yes, I do know,” Howsmyn sighed, his expression suddenly less cheerful as he gazed out at the pall of coal smoke which hung perpetually over the Delthak Works. It was visible for miles, he knew, just as he knew about the pollution working its way into Ithmyn’s Lake despite all he could do to contain it. “In fact, I hate it. We’re doing everything we can to minimize the consequences, and I’m making damned sure my people’s drinking water is piped down from upriver from the works, but all this smoke isn’t doing a thing for their lungs. Or for their kids’ lungs, either.” He grimaced and took a quick, angry sip from his glass. “God, I wish we could go to electricity!”

    “At least you’ve given them decent housing, as far from the foundry as you can put it,” Wylsynn said after a moment, resting his left hand on the other man’s shoulder. He didn’t mention the schools, or the hospitals, that went with that housing, but he didn’t need to. “And I wish we could go to electricity, too, but even assuming the bombardment system didn’t decide to wipe us all out, daring to profane the Rakurai would be the proof of our apostasy.”

    “I know. I know!”

    Howsmyn took another, less hasty sip, savoring the Chisholmian whiskey as it deserved to be savored . . . or closer to it, at any rate. Then he half-turned from the window to face Wylsynn fully.

    “But I’m not thinking just about health reasons, either. I’ve done a lot to increase productivity per man hour, which is why we’re so far in front of anything the Temple Loyalists have, but I haven’t been able to set up a true assembly-line, and you know it.”

    Wylsynn nodded, although the truth was that his own admission to the inner circle was recent enough he was still only starting to really explore the data stored in Owl’s memory. The AI was an incredibly patient librarian, but he wasn’t very intuitive, which hampered his ability to help guide Wylsynn’s research, and there was a limit to the number of hours Wylsynn could spend reading through several thousand years of history and information, no matter how addictive it might be. Or perhaps especially because of how addictive it was.

    “I know you and Merlin’ve been talking about that — about ‘assembly-lines,’ I mean — for a while,” he said, “but I confess I’m still more than a little hazy on what you’re getting at. It seems to me you’re already doing a lot more efficient job of assembling things than I can imagine anyone else doing!”

 

---

 

    “Not surprising, really,” Howsmyn replied, looking back out the window. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot longer than you have, after all. But the truth is that all I’ve really managed so far is to go to a sort of intermediate system, one in which workmen make individual, interchangeable parts that can be assembled rather than one in which a group of artisans is responsible for making the entire machine or rifle or pair of scissors or disk harrow or reaping machine from the ground up. My craftsmen produce parts from templates and jigs, to far closer tolerances than anyone ever achieved before, and we’re using stamping processes and powered machinery to make parts it used to take dozens of highly skilled artisans to make by hand. They can produce the components far more rapidly, and I can put more of them to work making the parts I need in larger numbers, or making the parts that take longer to make, so that I’m turning out the optimum number of parts to keep the actual assembly moving smoothly, without bottlenecks. But each of those fabricating processes is separate from all the others, and then all the pieces have to be taken to wherever the final product’s being put together and assembled in one place. It’s not bad for something fairly small and simple, like a rifle or a pistol, but the bigger and more complex the final product, the more cumbersome it gets.”

    “And it still makes your workforce many times more efficient than anything the Church has going for it,” Wylsynn pointed out.

    “Yes, it does, and more and more of my fellow ironmasters are starting to use the same techniques. Some of them are clearly infringing on my patents, of course.” Howsmyn grinned at the intendant, who was also the head of the Imperial Patent Office. “I’m sure several of them — like that bastard Showail — wonder why I haven’t already taken legal action. Wouldn’t do to tell them how happy I am about it, now would it?” He shook his head. “Eventually, I’m going to have to take some action to defend the patents, if we don’t want them asking questions about why a mark-grubbing manufactory owner such as myself isn’t complaining about people robbing him blind. But even with the new techniques spreading, we’re still a long way from where we could be. And frankly, we need to crank our efficiency an awful lot higher if we’re going to compensate for the sheer manpower, however inefficient it may be, the Temple can throw at the same sorts of problems now that it’s finally starting to get itself organized. According to Owl’s SNARCs, Desnair and the Temple Lands are beginning to build new water powered blast furnaces and rolling mills, for example, with Clyntahn’s blessings and Duchairn’s financial backing. It won’t be long before they start improving their drop hammers, too, and however good that may be for Merlin’s overall plans, it’s not the kind of news the Empire needs. We’ve got to stay as far ahead as we can, and that’s especially true for me, since my foundries and manufactories are the Empire’s cutting edge. That’s where a real assembly-line would come in, if we could only make it work.”

    “How does that differ from what you’re already doing?”

    “In a proper assembly-line, whatever’s being built — assembled — moves down a line of workstations on a conveyor belt, or on a moving crane — or, if it’s a vehicle of some sort, on its own wheels, perhaps, once they’ve been attached. What matters is that it goes to the workmen, rather than the workmen coming to it. As it passes each station, the workman or workmen at that station perform their portion of the assembly process. They connect a specific part or group of parts, and that’s all they do. Whatever they’re building is brought to them. The work force is sized so there’s enough manpower at each station to let that part of the assembly be done in as close to the same amount of time as every other part, so that the line keeps moving at a steady pace. And because each group of workers performs exactly the same function on each new assembly, they can do their part of the task far more efficiently . . . and a hell of a lot more quickly.”

    “I see.” Wylsynn sipped from his own glass, frowning, and rubbed one eyebrow. “I hope this doesn’t sound too obtuse, but why can’t you do that?”

    “I can do something like that with relatively small items, like pistols and rifles. I have runners on the shop floor who wheel cartloads from one workstation to another. But to do that on a true industrial scale, I need to be able to locate machine tools — powered machine tools — at the proper places in the assembly process. Before Merlin, we really didn’t have ‘machine tools,’ although I’d been applying waterpower to as many processes as I could before he ever came along. Now my artisans’ve invented a whole generation of powered tools, everything from lathes to drill presses to powered looms and spinning machines for Rhaiyan’s textile manufactories. In fact, they’ve leapfrogged a hundred years or more of Earth’s industrial history — largely because of the ‘hints’ Merlin and I have been able to give them. But all of them are still limited by the types of power available — they’re tied to waterwheels or the hydro-accumulators by shafting and drive belts. They aren’t . . . flexible, and they are dangerous, no matter how careful my managers and I try to be. The steam engines are going to help, but we still can’t simply locate machinery where we need it located; we have to locate it where we can provide power to it, instead. Electricity, and electric motors, would give us a distributed power network that would let us do that. Steam and waterpower don’t.”

    “Um.”

    Wylsynn nodded slowly, thinking about all of the patent applications he’d approved over the last four years. Probably two thirds of them had come from Howsmyn or his artisans, although an increasing number were coming from Charisians who’d never heard of the Terran Federation. That was a good sign, but he hadn’t really considered the problem Howsmyn had just described. Probably, he reflected, because he’d been so busy being impressed by what the ironmaster had already accomplished.

    Like the steam engine they’d just observed. Thanks to Owl — and Merlin, of course — Howsmyn had completely bypassed the first hundred or hundred and fifty years of the steam engine’s development back on long-dead Earth. He’d gone directly to water tube boilers and compound expansion engines, with steam pressures of almost three hundred pounds per square inch, something Earth hadn’t approached until the beginning of its twentieth century. Oh, his initial engine had been a single-cylinder design, but that had been as much a test of the concept as anything else. He’d moved on to double-cylinder expansion engines for his first canal boat trials, but no canal boat offered anything like enough room for that monster they’d just watched in action. Still, the boat engines had been a valuable learning exercise . . . and even they operated at a far higher pressure — and efficiency — than anything attainable before the very end of Old Earth’s nineteenth century.

    The advances he’d already made in metallurgy, riveting and welding, and quality control had helped to make those pressures and temperatures possible, but Safehold had always had a working empirical understanding of hydraulics. That was one reason Howsmyn’s hydro-accumulators had been relatively easy for Wylsynn to approve even before he’d been admitted to the inner circle; they’d simply been one more application — admittedly, an ingenious one — of concepts which had been used in the waterworks the “archangels” had made part of Safehold’s infrastructure from the Day of Creation. But the compact efficiency of the engines Howsmyn was about to introduce would dwarf even the hydro-accumulators’ impact on what Merlin called his “power budget.” So perhaps it wasn’t surprising Wylsynn had been more focused on that increase than on the even greater potentials of the electricity he still understood so poorly himself.

    Especially since electricity’s one thing we can be pretty certain would attract the “Rakurai” if the bombardment platform detected it, he thought grimly. We’re lucky it doesn’t seem to worry about steam, but I don’t think it would miss a generating plant!

    He shuddered internally at the thought of turning Charis into another Armageddon Reef, yet even as he did, another, very different thought occurred to him. He started to shake it off, since it was so obviously foolish. Even if it had offered any useful potential, surely Merlin and Howsmyn would already have thought of it! But it wouldn’t shake, and he frowned down into his whiskey glass.

 

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    “How’s the development coming on that ‘hydro-pneumatic recoil system’ you’ve been working on with Captain Rahzwail and Commander Malkaihy?” he asked.

    “Pretty well,” Houseman replied. “We had a little trouble with the gaskets and seals initially, and the machining tolerances are awfully tight. We have to do more of it with hand tools, hand-held gauges, and individually fitted pieces than I’d really like — the templates in the different manufactories aren’t as consistent as I could wish, even now — but I suppose that’s inevitable, given how recently we got around to truly standardizing measurements. Amazing how much difference there was between my ‘inch’ and, say, Rhaiyan’s! That didn’t matter as long as we were only worried about what we were making, and not about how well parts from our shops would fit anyone else’s needs. And those machine tools people like Zosh and Nahrmahn have been putting together still aren’t quite up to the tolerances I’d prefer. They’re getting there, and quickly, but we’ve still got a ways to go. Why?”

    “But your fittings and steam lines and air lines are holding up? Meeting the pressure levels you were describing to me last month?”

    “Yes.” Howsmyn eyed the cleric narrowly. “It’s still more of a brute force approach than I’d really like in some cases, but they’re working just fine. Again, why? You’re headed somewhere with this, Paityr.”

    “Well, I know you and Merlin deliberately steered Master Huntyr and Master Tidewater towards reciprocating engines because you want them for ships, and I don’t really disagree with your logic — or with what I understand of it, any way. But I’ve been thinking about how they’d actually work. The turbines, I mean. About the way steam pressure would drive the vanes to provide power.”

    “And?” Howsmyn prompted when Wylsynn paused.

    “Well, what if instead of steam, you used air? And what if instead of turning the turbine to produce power, you used air power to turn something like a turbine to do work?” Wylsynn grimaced, clearly trying to wrap the words around a thought still in the process of forming. “What I mean is that the machines you’d run with electric motors if you could . . . Couldn’t you power them with compressed air, instead? If you built air lines to the workstations you’re talking about, couldn’t you use air compressed by steam engines — like the way you’re powering the forced draft on your blast furnaces — to drive the ‘machine tools’ your ‘assembly-line’ would require?”

    Howsmyn stared at him, his expression completely blank. He stayed that way for several seconds, then shook himself and sucked in a huge breath of air.

    “Yes,” he said, almost prayerfully. “Yes, I could. And without all that damned shafting and all those damned drive belts that keep crushing hands and arms no matter how careful we are! My God, Paityr.” He shook his head. “I’ve been so focused on other aspects that this never even occurred to me! And it would be a perfect place to develop turbines after all, too. Running compressors, high RPMs would actually be good!”

    His dazed expression was fading rapidly into a huge grin, and he punched Wylsynn on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger the priest.

    “You can’t run a turbine efficiently at low RPMs, and you can’t run a propeller efficiently at high RPMs. That’s why Domynyk and I went for reciprocating engines. They run a lot more efficiently at those lower RPMs, and trying to cut the reduction gears we’d need to make turbines work for the Navy would’ve put an impossible bottleneck into the process. Either that or we’d have to run them at such poor levels of efficiency fuel consumption would skyrocket. We’d be lucky to get half as many miles out of a ton of coal. But for a central compressor to power a manufactory full of air-powered machine tools, the higher the RPMs the better! I wasn’t worried about that when we were talking about powering the blast furnaces or pumping water out of the mines. I was too busy thinking about the need to get the Navy’s engines up and running, so of course we concentrated on reciprocating machinery first! After all, turbines were mostly the way to power those electrical generating stations we can’t build anyway — it never occurred to me to use them to power compressors! That’s brilliant!”

    “I’m glad you approve,” Wylsynn said, rotating his punched shoulder with a cautious air.

    “Damned right I do!” Howsmyn shook his head, eyes filled with a distant fire as he considered opportunities, priorities, and difficulties. “It’ll take — what? another five or six months? — to get Zosh and Nahrmahn headed in the right direction to put it all together, but by this time next year — maybe sooner than that — I’m going to have a genuine assembly-line running out there, and I’ll be able to put it in from the very beginning at Maikelberg and Lake Lymahn!” His eyes refocused on the priest. “Our efficiency will go up enormously, Paityr, and it’ll be thanks to you.”

    “No, it’ll be thanks to you and Master Huntyr and Master Tidewater,” Wylsynn disagreed. “Oh, I’ll gracefully accept credit for pointing you in the right direction, but what Merlin calls the nuts and bolts of it, those are going to have to come from you and your greasy, oily, wonderfully creative henchmen.”

    “I don’t think they’ll disappoint you,” Howsmyn told him with another grin. “Did I tell you what Brahd suggested to me last Tuesday?”

    “No, I don’t believe you did,” Wylsynn said a bit cautiously, wondering what he was going to have to bend the Proscriptions out of shape to permit this time.

    Brahd Stylmyn was Howsmyn’s senior engineering expert, the man who’d designed and overseen the construction of the canals for the barges freighting the thousands upon thousands of tons of coal and iron ore Howsmyn’s foundries required down the Delthak River. His brain was just as sharp as Zosh Huntyr’s, but it was also possessed of a bulldog tenacity that had a tendency to batter its way straight through obstacles instead of finding ways around them. The term “brute force approach” fitted Stylmyn altogether too well, sometimes, although there were also times, to be fair, when he was capable of subtlety. It just didn’t come naturally to him.

    “Well, you know he was the one who laid out the railways here in the works,” Howsmyn said, and Wylsynn nodded. Like many of Howsmyn’s innovations, the dragon-drawn railcars he used to transport coal, coke, iron ore, and half a hundred other heavy loads were more of a vast refinement of something which had been around for centuries but never used on the sort of scale he’d envisioned.

    “He did a good job,” Howsmyn continued now, “and last five-day he asked me what I thought about laying a railway all the way from here up to the mines. I told him I thought it was an interesting idea, but to be honest — given how much we were already moving with the canals open, especially now that we’re able to get steam into the barges, we were unlikely to be able to move enough additional tonnage, even with dragon traction, to justify the diversion of that much iron and steel from our other projects. That was when he asked me why it wouldn’t be possible to take one of our new steam engines, squeeze it down, and use it to pull an entire caravan of railcars.”

    “He came up with that all on his own?”

    “You just called my henchmen ‘wonderfully creative,’ Paityr,” Howsmyn replied with a broad, proud smile. “And you were right. I thought I might have to prod one of them with the suggestion, but Brahd beat me to it. In fact, he was practically dancing from foot to foot like a little boy who needed to go when he asked me if we couldn’t please divert some of our priorities to let him build his steam-powered railway.”

    “Oh, my.” Wylsynn shook his head. Then he took another long sip of whiskey, lowered the glass, and his gray eyes gleamed at the industrialist. “Clyntahn’s going to burst a blood vessel when he hears about this one, you know. I guarantee it, this time, and I really wish we could have the opportunity to watch him froth when he does.”

    “We won’t be able to watch,” Howsmyn agreed, “but I’m willing to bet we’ll be able to hear him when he finds out.” The ironmaster raised his glass in salute to the intendant. “Maybe not directly, but I can already hear the anathematization crackling down the line towards us. Makes a nice sizzling sound, doesn’t it?”