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general Girl Friday. He collected Mytron, the priest of Tranth, all the
master-craftsmen in Tarr-Hostigos, some of the craftsmen's guild people from
Hostigos Town, a couple of Chartiphon's officers, and a half dozen cavalrymen
to carry messages.
Charcoal would be no problem-there was plenty of that, burned exclusively in
the iron-works in the Listra Valley and extensively elsewhere. There was coal,
from surface outcroppings to the north and west, and it was used for a number
of purposes, but the sulfur content made it unsuitable for iron furnaces. He'd
have to do something about coke some time. Charcoal for gunpowder, he knew,
ought to be willow or alder or something like that. He'd do something about
that, too, but at present he'd have to use what he had available.
For quantity evaporation of sulfur he'd need big iron pans, and sheet metal
larger than skillets and breastplates didn't seem to exist. The ironworks were
forges, not rolling mills. So they'd have to beat the sheet-iron in two-foot
squares and weld them together like patch quilts. He and Mytron got to work on
planning the evaporation works. Unfortunately, Mytron was not pictorial-
minded, and made little or no sense of the diagrams he drew.
Saltpeter could be accumulated all over. Manure-piles would be the best
source, and cellars and stables and underground drains. He set up a saltpeter
commission, headed by one of Chartiphon's officers, with authority to go any
where and enter any place, and orders to behead any subordinate who misused
his powders and to deal just as surmarly with anybody who tried to obstruct or
resist. Mobile units, wagons and oxcarts loaded with caldrons, tubs, tools and
the like, to go from farm to farm. Peasant women to be collected and taught to
leech nitrated soil and purify nitrates. Equipment, manufacture of.
Grinding mills there was plenty of water-power, and by good fortune he didn't
have to invent the waterwheel. That was already in use, and the master
millwright understood what was needed in the way of converting a gristmill to
a fireseed mill almost at once. Special grinding equipment, invention of
Sifting screens, cloth. Mixing machines; these would be big wine-casks, with
counter-revolving paddlewheels inside. Presses to squeeze dough into cakes.
Mills to grind caked powder; he spent considerable thought on regulations to
prevent anything from striking a spark around them, with bloodthirsty
enforcement threats.
During the morning he managed to grind up the cake he'd made the evening
before from what was left of the first experimental batch, running it through
a sieve to about FFFG fineness. A hundred grains of that drove a ball from an
8-bore musket an inch deeper into a hemlock log than an equal charge of
Styphon's best.
By noon he was almost sure that almost all of his War Production Board
understood most of what he'd told them. In the afternoon there was a meeting,
in the outer bailey, of as many people who would be working on fireseed
production as could be gathered. There was an invocation of Dralm by Xentos,
and an invocation of Galzar by Uncle Wolf, and an invocation of Tranth by his
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priest. Ptosphes spoke, emphasizing that the Lord Kalvan had full authority to
do anything, and would be backed to the limit, by the headsman if necessary.
Chartiphon mad 'e a speech, picturing the howling wilderness they would
shortly make of Nostor. (Prolonged cheering.) He made a speech, himself,
emphasizing that there was nothing of a supernatural nature whatever about
fireseed, detailing the steps of manufacture, and trying to give some
explanation of what made it explode. The meeting then broke up into small
groups, everybody having his own job explained to him. He was kept running
back and forth, explaining to the explainers.
In the evening they had a feast. By that time he and Rylia had gotten a rough
table of organization charcoal onto the wall of his headquarters.
Of the next four days, he spent eighteen hours each in that room, talking to
six or eight hundred people. Some of them he suffered patiently if not gladly;
they were trying to do their best at something they'd never been expected to
do before. Some he had trouble with. The artisans' guilds bickered with one
another about jurisdiction, and they all complained about peasants invading
their crafts. The masters complained that the journeymen and apprentices were
becoming intractable, meaning that they'd started thinking for themselves. The
peasants objected to having their byres invaded and their dunghills forked
down, and to being put to unfamiliar work. The landlords objected to having
their peasants taken out of the fields, predicting that the year's crop would
be lost.
"Don't worry about that," he told them. "If we win, we'll eat Gormoth's crops.
If we lose, we'll all be too dead to eat."
And the Iron Curtain went down. Within a few days, indignant packtraders and
wagoners were being collected in Hostigos Town, trapped for the duration,
protesting vehemently but unavailingly. Sooner or later, Gormoth and Sarrask
would begin to wonder why nobody was coming out of Hostigos, and would send
spies slipping through the woods to find out. Counterespionage; organize
soonest. And a few of his own spies in Sask and Nostor. And an anti-Styphon
fifth column in both princedoms. Discuss with Xentos.
By the fifth day, the Wolf Valley sulfur-evaporation plant was ready to go
into operation, and saltpeter production was up to some ten pounds a day. He
put Mytron in charge at Tarr-Hostigos, hoping for something better than the
worst, and got into his new armor. He and Rylla and a half dozen of
Harmakros's cavalrymen trotted out the gate and down the road from the castle
into Hostigos Gap. It was the first time he'd been outside the castle since he
had been brought there unconscious, tied onto a horse-litter.
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