V.2:Ch.83 (Patreon)

We lifted the cloth at first light. A pale ring clung to the inside of the pot where the water had sat the night before. It caught the firelight in thin, faint silver lines.

Gareth leaned closer. “That’s new.”

“It is.” I took the ladle, scraped a little of it loose, and let the flakes fall into my palm. They were brittle. Fine. Nothing like ash. “Good news.”

He looked from the pot to me. “You want me to fetch the smaller pan?”

“Yes. And fresh water. Not too much.”

He moved at once. The room already smelled like boiled earth, old smoke, and damp stone. We had kept the fire low through the night so the pot would not scorch, only reduce. Another hearth burned in the next room. Another one beyond that. Those were not for warmth. They were there for ash. Every scrap mattered now.

I tipped the clear layer into a smaller pan and left the heavier sludge at the bottom of the first vessel. Gareth returned with water. I added a little, stirred the sediment, and set it back over the heat.

“Again?” he asked.

“Again.”

That earned me a brief look. Tired, but not complaining. He passed me the sieve cloth without another word.

By noon, the rhythm had settled back into place. Boil. Skim. Pour. Filter. Wait. Start again. In the next room, wood crackled in the hearth, slowly dying into the gray powder I wanted. Another bucket sat near the wall where we soaked old ash in water and let the lye-rich liquid settle before straining it clean. It was ugly work. Slow work. The kind that stained your hands and gave nothing back for hours. Still, the pale crystals had formed. That was enough.

Mnex chose that moment to speak.

“You are smiling.”

Barely.

“It still counts.”

We got the first signs. I’ll take it.

“You saw one thin ring in one pot and started dreaming of barrels.”

I kept scraping the inner rim of the smaller pan with the edge of a spoon. Tiny pale needles slid free and collected in the bowl beneath.

I thought we could get twenty. Maybe thirty, if everything held.

“That is funny.”

Shut up.

“For twenty barrels you need a proper works, steady supply, and hands you do not currently have. A great many hands. What you have is one tired count’s son, one loyal servant, and a house that smells like a swamp cursed by an apothecary.”

I breathed out through my nose.

Ten, then.

“If fortune smiles and you do not set yourself on fire first, perhaps.”

That part I did not argue with. By afternoon the first batch had been reduced, strained, and set aside to cool. I moved it away from the fire and covered it with cloth again. Gareth came in carrying a fresh bucket from the ash room.

“The new wash is ready,” he said.

“Good. Slow pour. Leave anything heavy at the bottom.”

He nodded and did exactly that. He still did not know what we were making. Not really. He knew the names of some materials. He knew which steps I cared about. He knew which powders I wanted dry and which liquids I wanted clear. Past that, he asked very little. That trust sat heavier on me than the buckets did.

“We should check the stone room before dusk,” I said.

Gareth gave a short nod. “Masks?”

“Yes.”

He glanced toward the far wall where the strange things sat drying near the open window. Leather straps. Thick cloth. Hardened front plate. Crude, ugly, and good enough to keep a man alive longer than bare lungs would.

“Still hate those,” he muttered.

“You’ll hate coughing blood more.”

“That is fair.”

We let the latest pans rest and crossed the house.

The stone room had gone cold again. I had seen to that twice since morning, forcing the chill back into the walls with my magic until the air inside turned sharp against the skin. The pyrite had burned there through the earlier part of the day. A bitter stink still clung to the crack under the door.

I tied the mask in place and checked Gareth’s straps myself. He stood still while I pulled them tight.

“Can you breathe?”

“Enough.”

“That’s all we need.”

I opened the door.

The smell hit first, even through the layered cloth. Rotten, metallic, sour. The sort of stink that felt greasy. Yellow traces clung to parts of the wall where the smoke had settled and cooled against the stone. Not a thick coat. Not enough to make the work easy. Just enough to promise more if we kept feeding the room.

I shut the door behind us.

“Fast,” I said. “Scrape what you can reach. No heroics.”

Gareth snorted through the mask. “You always say that to me.”

“Because I know you.”

We worked in silence. Knife edges, flat scrapers, little taps into waiting bowls. The yellow came away in dusty curls in some places, in thin crusted patches in others. Some fell to the floor and mixed with grit. Some held together long enough to be worth keeping.

The room wanted you to linger. That was the dangerous part. The mind started telling lies after a while. Just one more patch. One more corner. One more handful. It never felt deadly in the moment. My throat burned anyway.

When Gareth coughed behind the mask, I pointed to the door and he did not argue. We stepped out into the corridor and pulled the masks off at once. He bent over, hands on knees, dragging air into his chest.

“That,” he said between breaths, “is foul.”

“It will get worse before it gets better.”

He looked at the bowl in my hands. Powder flecked with bits of dirt and stone.

“For that?”

“For that.”

He stared another moment, saw I was serious, and only sighed.

Back in the workroom, the smell of boiled lye water felt almost pleasant after the stone chamber. Almost. We returned to the pots.

By the second day, the whole house had fallen into division. This room for boiling the white earth and reducing the liquor. That room for ash and filtered wash. Another room for drying scraped sulfur on flat trays, far from stray flame. The covered side chamber for coal.

The oak charcoal came first. Dense stuff. Hard to break, harder to grind fine. The juniper charcoal crumbled faster, though it gave off its own sharp scent when crushed. Gareth used a small hammer and mortar for the larger pieces. I took over when he moved to the pans. We traded tasks whenever one of us got too deep into the tedium and risked growing careless.

By the third day, my sleeves had gone gray with dust. Black settled into the lines of my palms and under my nails. Gareth looked worse.

“Say something honest,” I told him when he came in carrying another tray of crushed charcoal.

He set it down and wiped his brow with the back of his wrist. “Honest?”

“Yes.”

“This looks like work for six men.”

I almost laughed. “That’s honest.”

He squinted at the covered pans near the wall. “Did it work again?”

I pulled the cloth from one of them. This time the crystals had grown clearer. Thin pale needles clustered along the inner surface and spread in little fans where the liquid had cooled undisturbed. Not enough. Still precious.

Gareth let out a low whistle. “Better?"

“Much.”

He reached toward them, stopped short, and looked at me.

“Can I?”

“With dry fingers.”

He pinched one loose and held it up to the light. “Looks too pretty for all this misery.”

“That’s usually how these things work.”

He handed it back. We kept going.

Another batch on the fire. Another batch cooling. Another scraped clean and dried. More ash water filtered through cloth until the liquid ran clear enough. More trips to the stone room after I chilled the walls again and fed the pyrite burn in measured turns. More bowls of yellow scrapings. More charcoal under the hammer until the powder felt soft between gloved fingertips.

At night I dropped onto the narrow bed in the small chamber near the kitchen and slept like a dead man for three or four hours before getting back up to check the pans.

On the fourth day, Gareth caught me staring at the line of vessels near the window.

“What?”

I rubbed a thumb across my brow and came away with soot. “I was counting.”

“How far off are we?”

I looked at the trays. The drying sulfur. The bowls of charcoal. The gathered crystals. All of it still too little. Too far.

Mnex answered before I spoke aloud.

“Nowhere near enough for the fantasies you had.”

I know.

“You are learning. That is nice.”

One day I’m going to drown you in a bucket.

“You need more than one bucket for that.”

Gareth was still waiting.

“Farther than I want,” I said at last. “Closer than we were.”

He accepted that. “I’ll take closer.”

On the fifth day, the first real mistake nearly happened. I had just come back from the stone room with a fresh bowl of sulfur scrapings when I smelled heat where there should not have been heat. Not flame. Dry warmth. Wrong warmth. I set the bowl down and crossed the room fast.

One of the charcoal trays sat too near the hearth. Not close enough to catch, but close enough to make my stomach tighten. I moved it at once and turned to Gareth. He had frozen halfway through lifting another pot.

“I know,” he said.

“You saw it too?”

“I saw your face.”

I exhaled through my nose and forced my shoulders to loosen. “Then next time do not wait for my face. Move it before it becomes a problem.”

He gave a short nod and reached for the pot again.

After that, we split the room harder. Sulfur in one corner. Charcoal in another. Saltpetre vessels against the far wall. Open flame only where it had to be. Every tool back in its place when done. Every surface wiped clear before the next task began. The work got slower. It also got safer.

By the sixth day the first cooled liquor from the earlier batches had given us the best crystal crop yet. Pale, narrow, and clean enough that I almost trusted them. Almost. I spread them on cloth and let them dry while fresh liquor took their place in the pans.

Gareth watched me sort them by hand.

“You really expected barrels?”

I looked up.

He shrugged. “You mutter when you forget I’m nearby.”

Of course I did. “That was before I started respecting how hateful this process is.”

He huffed a laugh and crouched beside the tray of crushed juniper charcoal. “What happens when all this is done?”

“A worse stage starts.”

“That bad?”

“Probably.”

He sat with that for a second. “Do I want to know?”

“Eventually.”

He nodded once. No more questions.

That evening I went back into the stone room alone for a final scrape before dark. The mask pressed hot against my face. The air inside felt stale and poisonous even before I shut the door. Yellow traces marked the colder sections of stone again. Not rich. Not generous. Enough.

I worked fast, filled half a bowl, and stepped back outside with my eyes burning. I leaned against the corridor wall and ripped the mask free.

Mnex laughed softly in my head.

“You do realize the truly amusing part is still ahead.”

Mixing it?

“Keeping your eyebrows.”

I spat to clear the taste from my mouth. “I hate you,” I muttered.

Gareth looked up from the nearest table. “What?”

“Nothing.”

He nodded and left it there. Long ago, he had decided my private habits were safer left alone.

By the seventh day, Falcon’s Rest no longer felt like a retreat house. It felt like a crude workshop forced into the shell of a country manor. Buckets lined the walls. Drying cloths hung over chairs. Mortars, pestles, bowls, scrapings, soot, ash, and filtered liquor had taken over half the ground floor. The servants would have cried if they saw what we had done to the place.

I looked over the collected materials one last time before nightfall. Not enough for grand plans. Enough to begin. That was the truth of it.

Saltpetre crystals lay drying in shallow trays. More waited in covered dishes where later batches still cooled and shed their pale needles. Sulfur sat in wrapped packets after careful scraping and second cleaning. The charcoal had been reduced to fine dark powder and kept sealed as best we could manage. In the next rooms, fresh ash still gathered from controlled fires, because I had no intention of wasting the days ahead.

Gareth came in carrying the last bucket from the hearth room and set it down with a groan. His wrists were black with soot, and even the front of his shirt had gone gray from ash.

“If we keep going at this pace,” he said, “I’ll be dead before your pirates are.”

“You can rest after.”

He stared at me for a long second. “That was cruel.”

“It was practical.”

“Worse.”

Outside, evening settled across Falcon’s Rest. Cold light faded from the windows. The house creaked around us, full of heat in some rooms and stale chill in others. For the first time in days, I allowed myself to stop counting what we lacked and focus on what time could still give us.

These materials were not finished. They still needed drying. Settling. Care. Days more, at the least. Rush that part and the whole thing turned useless at best, lethal at worst.

That part was fine. While they dried, I could turn to the next problem. Honey. Spirits. Adhesion. Burn time.

I rested both hands on the table and looked down at the trays.

“We’ll hold here,” I said.

Gareth sank into the nearest chair without shame. “Hold?”

“For now. We keep the fires going where we need ash. We watch the drying trays. We do not rush the next part.”

He closed his eyes for a second. “That sounds close to mercy.”

“Do not get used to it.”

A small smile tugged at his mouth anyway.

I looked toward the dark window. By the time another two weeks passed, these powders would be ready for the stage that mattered. The dangerous one. The stage that would decide whether all this labor became a weapon or a ruinous mistake.

Mnex spoke again, softer now.

“You are already thinking ahead.”

I have to.

“Yes. And this time, try to keep the face attached to the skull.”

I rubbed my soot-stained brow and let out a tired laugh.

No promises.

The next fourteen days would decide the rest.