190In servitio Mali
The reports came on coarse parchment, each page a ledger of tallies scratched in charcoal or ink, depending on which overseer had filed them. It was just a lot of columns of numbers, counted by hands that could not yet figure out what the counting meant.
Unfortunately, that part still fell to me.
Coal from the galleries of Ered Lithui: fourteen thousand two hundred tons for the quarter. I pulled the ledger from the last quarter out of the pile and laid the two side by side. Twelve thousand three hundred. A gain of nineteen hundred tons, which came to... about fifteen or sixteen parts in a hundred, depending on how you rounded. Not bad.
Nine thousand one hundred tons of pig iron from the Gorgoroth smelters, against eight thousand four hundred. Copper from the southern mines: thirteen hundred and forty against twelve hundred and eighty. Sulfur, I paid little attention to — we had more than we would ever need, and if Orodruin chose to give us even more, it would come free of charge and wrapped in fire.
The first pile of ledgers told a story of growth. The second told a different one.
Accidents in the deep coal galleries: this quarter sixty-one, last forty-three. Replacements for pick and mattock, broken or ground down past use, six hundred and eighty, against six hundred and twelve. Miners killed outright, not counting the maimed: fourteen, up from nine. And if I took the figures for labor and divided them into the output figures, the hours worked per ton of ore taken out had crept from something like fourteen toward fifteen.
I leaned back and stared at the numbers until the parchment swam. The pattern was as old as the mine. The easy-to-reach seams, the ones close to the surface, where a strong back and a sharp pick could rip riches out of the earth with relative safety, were growing thin. Not yet gone, but we were getting there.
The veins that remained had to go deeper into the mountain, through harder rock, into galleries that became hotter and more foul-aired with every meter of advance. More labor went into each ton of coal than the last, and the men and orcs who mined it paid the difference with their bodies.
The answer on Earth had been mechanization. Steam lifts, ventilation fans as big as houses, pumps to keep the water table down…
And I did have something along those lines already. Steam engines were running in crude form—the first pumping engines were already draining the upper galleries—but running a steam engine took coal, and using coal to mine coal was going to start to eat your margins the moment you dug deep enough. There was a depth at which you spent more fuel keeping the mine operating than you extracted from it. That depth was coming, with the patient inevitability of arithmetic.
The ring on my finger grew warm.
Expand. The mountains of the North hold riches that the dwarves barely scratch. Take them. The Grey Mountains lie unguarded—
"Not yet," I said to the empty room. The Ring and I argued about this often enough for it to have become a domestic routine.
It wanted expansion. I wanted to consolidate because the expansion would be something that came later on, when I either judged I was ready for it, or fate forced my hand.
Neither of us was going to convince the other, and the compromise, such as it was, amounted to me doing what I was going to do anyway while it sulked in the background.
So, if I couldn't dig deeper without killing miners faster than the training pipeline replaced them, and I couldn't expand north or west without provoking the very coalition I was spending so much effort to prevent, the answer had to come from wringing more value out of what was already coming out of the ground.
That meant less waste, fewer parts rejected as not fitting. Tools that stayed true because they were made to a consistent specification, not hammered into shape by whoever happened to be nearest the anvil.
In one word: standardization.
I'd been procrastinating because it was the kind of work that would make your eyes glaze over just thinking about the scale of it.
There was no drama to it. Nothing the Ring could dress up as a vision of conquest or glory. It was simply the necessary, numbing work of building a measurement system, building the instruments that system required, getting them out to the workshops that were now eyeballing everything, and then somehow—somewhere training the workforce to use them.
It was that last part that I was thinking about when the door opened, and one of my Dark Númenórean factors walked in. He was a thin man, sharp-featured, with ink-stained fingers and a wary air to him. He carried a leather portfolio under one arm and waited just inside the threshold.
"Speak."
"The measurement training program, my lord. The first cohort's examination results."
I gestured him forward. He placed the portfolio on the corner of the desk, opened it, and stepped back.
Three hundred orcs had begun instruction two months prior. Of those, one hundred and thirty-one had passed the examination, which amounted to proving they could use a measuring instrument without the instructor standing over their shoulder. The remainder had failed outright or been lost to the usual attrition of industrial labor—injuries, reassignments, or deaths in the galleries or on the forge floor.
Of the hundred and thirty-one who passed, the portfolio's annotations suggested roughly forty could handle calipers with any confidence, and perhaps a dozen of those actually understood what they were measuring rather than simply going through the motions of a memorized procedure.
I reviewed the numbers in silence. The factor waited without fidgeting. He was not the sort of man who offered his opinions to the Dark Lord uninvited, which was one of the reasons he still had a head on his shoulders.
"What were the primary causes of failure?"
"The abstract dimension, my lord. The practical tasks — holding the instrument, reading a mark on a scale — those they managed well enough with repetition. But the exercises that required them to connect a reading on the instrument to a physical property of the workpiece, to understand that a number on the scale meant a gear would or would not turn in its housing... that connection eluded most of them. They could use the tool without grasping what the tool was telling them."
I'd expected as much. These orcs had come up through the pits and the forge lines, where quality was a matter of eyeballing something, hitting it with a hammer, and deciding it looked close enough. The idea that a marking on a ruler had a meaningful, binding relationship to whether a machine would function — that demanded a conceptual leap most of them simply didn't have the foundations for. Nobody had ever asked them to think that way before, and building those foundations took time I didn't have.
"Separate them by aptitude going forward," I said. "The ones who can't make the connection don't need to. Build pass-fail gauges for the parts they work with. Slots, holes, pins. The part either fits through the gauge or it doesn't. If it fits, it passes. If it doesn't, it goes back to the line." I tapped the portfolio. "The forty who can handle calipers, keep them in the advanced courses. The dozen who understand what they're doing — pull them out and train them as inspectors."
"It will be done, my lord."
"Distribute the graduates across the workshops. One trained measurer per ten workers. They inspect output and reject anything outside tolerance. And the inspectors rotate between sites — I don't want them settling into one shop and going native. Fresh eyes catch what familiar ones miss."
The factor bowed, collected his portfolio, and withdrew.
The measuring instruments themselves would need to be produced. A master set, kept here in the tower, against which all field instruments could be periodically checked. Calipers, straight-edges, and gauges, each manufactured to tolerances that ironically required the very skills I was trying to propagate.
A bootstrapping problem as old as precision engineering. You needed precise tools to make precise tools, and you needed trained measurers to verify the tools were precise, and you needed the tools to train the measurers. On Earth, this particular chicken-and-egg problem had taken the better part of a century to resolve, starting with a handful of obsessive craftsmen who'd measured everything they could get their hands on and averaged the results until something approaching a universal standard emerged from the noise.
I pulled a fresh sheet of parchment toward me and began sketching. A base unit of length first, something I could define with enough rigor that it could be reproduced reliably in any workshop. Then derived units for weight and volume. Then tolerance classes — how much deviation from the standard was acceptable for which applications. A gear for a locomotive axle needed tighter tolerances than a hinge for a warehouse door. Codifying that hierarchy was the kind of thing that sounded straightforward until you actually sat down to do it, at which point it became a swamp of edge cases and competing priorities.
I was three pages deep into the swamp when the knock came.
Not the measured tap of a factor or clerk. This was hard, urgent — knuckles rapping with the particular insistence of someone who had ridden a long way to deliver something that couldn't wait.
"Enter."
The messenger was an orc, road-dusty and breathing hard. He carried a leather dispatch case stamped with the seal of the Ithilien settlement authority and dropped to one knee without meeting my gaze.
I broke the seal and read.
Rangers. The Rangers of Ithilien had been growing bolder for months — a burned supply shed here, a slaughtered goat herd there, the kind of petty harassment that was hard to attribute and easy to dismiss. I'd noted the reports, filed them, and waited.
Now they'd escalated. Three settlements along the eastern bank of the Anduin had been hit in coordinated raids. The orc security details had been killed first — throats cut in the dark, arrows from treeline, the kind of clean work that spoke of men who'd been hunting orcs for a long time and saw nothing in it that troubled their sleep. With the guards down, the Rangers had moved on the infrastructure. Granaries torched. Irrigation ditches collapsed with deliberate, targeted sabotage that spoke of men who understood agriculture well enough to know exactly where to strike for maximum damage. Eleven settlers were dead in the aftermath, caught in the fires or killed when they stumbled out of their homes into the chaos. The Rangers had melted back into the forests of western Ithilien before dawn.
Eleven killed. Farmers, mostly. Easterling families who had come west under Mordor's banner because the alternative was debt-slavery or starvation in their own lands. The same kind of people I'd watched break their first soil along the Anduin in the months after the settlement charter was signed — ordinary folk who wanted ten hectares and a chance at something better, and had been willing to plant their futures in the shadow of the Dark Lord to get it.
I read the dispatch again, slowly, and then a third time. The attacks had been professional. Multiple targets, simultaneous strikes, supply infrastructure specifically targeted, withdrawal clean and coordinated. This was Gondor's military operating in territory they still considered theirs, with orders that had come from somewhere up the chain.
The Ring blazed hot against my skin.
Destroy them. Send the Nine. Teach the men of Gondor what it costs to—
I set the dispatch down very carefully and breathed.
I'd been waiting for this.
The Ring would have manufactured something like this months ago — a staged attack, a planted body, something loud and ugly. I'd considered it and moved on. False flags were brittle things. They only held up as long as you could control who asked questions afterward, and that was a poor bet in a world with Gandalf in it.
This was better. The settlers were real, the land empty, and the Ithilien Rangers had just burned eleven unarmed farmers in their sleep. I didn't have to spin that. The action itself spoke louder than any speech or piece of writing.
I pushed the measurement sketches aside and pulled a fresh sheet of parchment to the center of the desk.
A letter. To Turgon, Steward of Gondor. That is, a politely phrased threat: formal, precise, and diplomatic.
The demands had to be carefully titrated. Too humble, and they might say yes, which would deny me the no I needed. Too extreme, and the letter would be dismissed as posturing, not warranting a formal reply. The trick was to make demands that seemed reasonable on the surface, but which in practice were impossible for Gondor to meet without giving up its own strategic position.
First demand: formal condemnation, by name, of the attacks by the Rangers as unprovoked aggression against subjects under the protection of the Lord of Mordor. This was actually sensible, and that was the whole point. It made it harder to dismiss the other demands out of hand.
Second: formal recognition of Mordor's right to maintain and defend its settlements and subjects in eastern Ithilien. The poison at the heart. To accept was to acknowledge Mordor's claim to the land that Gondor still claimed. It meant legitimizing every settlement, every irrigation ditch, every hectare of plowed earth as the rightful extension of a power they'd been fighting for generations.
Third: compensation, paid directly to the families of the slain and to the settlements whose property had been destroyed. A sum calculated down to the last coin — so much for a dead husband, so much for a burned granary, so much per rod of irrigation channel fallen in. The money didn't mean anything to me. For a family that had just lost the person who worked their ten hectares, it was the difference between making it through the season and starving. And that was why it was the cruellest demand of the three, for to refuse it meant that Gondor would not pay so much as a copper to the widows of the farmers its own Rangers had burned alive.
They would refuse, of course. Ecthelion could see the trap in every sentence, and he would refuse anyway, because walking into an obvious trap was still better than the alternative of agreeing to terms that would strip Gondor of its claim to western Ithilien and silence their only active intelligence asset in the area.
A formal rejection of a formal diplomatic protest, through official channels, was exactly the kind of paper trail I needed, the kind of record that said Mordor had sought resolution through words, and been answered with silence.
Of course, no one in Middle-earth cared about paper trails. There were no international courts, no free press, no neutral arbitrators. The paper trail was for me. For the precedent which it set. For the state I was trying to build, one that worked through a documented process, not the unrecorded whim of whoever sat on the throne.
I finished the letter and read it over. I changed a phrase in the second demand to make it a little more insulting. Then I set it aside and drew the map of the Vale of Anduin toward me.
The field guns had to be in position before the refusal came back, and that meant moving them now. I didn't have many of them as of yet. Each one was still a shop-floor creation, hand-fitted by craftsmen who filed and adjusted each part until it mated with its neighbors, for the standardized tolerances and trained measurers that would allow proper mass production were precisely what I'd been trying to build all morning.
Then again, I didn't need that many of 'em. A handful of guns firing explosive shells would make the point well enough against a garrison that had never known anything more destructive than a trebuchet stone.
I made marks on spots along the east bank. Blends in the landscape with open views over the water. Distance to the Osgiliath garrison—well within range. The guns would have to be moved from their present positions over the rail network, which meant coordinating rolling stock and track schedules with the quartermaster's office, which meant—
Paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork.
I sat back down and gazed at the desk. On the left: the half-finished measurement sketches, a platform for a standardization program that would take months to roll out. On the right, a diplomatic note designed to precipitate a war, and a set of orders for the disposition of artillery to prosecute it. Both written down in plain old ink. Both needing the next outgoing mail car, and the grinding machinery of administration.
I had been working on the gauge tolerances for machine parts all morning and would be working on the kill zones for field guns all afternoon, and the tools needed for both were the same: a quill, a pot of ink, and a flat surface to write on.
I placed the letter on the edge of the desk, sealed with the insignia of the Eye, for the courier. It would go out through a merchant intermediary, one of the traders of the neutral peoples who carried goods between the Anduin settlements and the markets of Pelargir. Closed correspondence, sent as regular commercial mail. The way it was delivered so mundanely was a message in itself. To me, this was merely business. Mordor handled its grievances through proper channels, like any civilized state.
The refusal would take weeks to arrive, which left me with plenty of time.
I filled out the deployment orders—gun positions, ammunition allocations, rail schedules—sealed those up, too, and put them next to the letter.
I dragged the measurement sketches back to the middle of the desk, found my place in the tolerance hierarchy, and continued with my work.
They called the stuff flash-dust because that was what it was and what it did. A grey-white dust that sat in its trays looking about as dangerous as flour, right up until the moment it wasn't, and then the flash was the last thing you'd see if you were stupid enough to still be standing near it.
Golbag was not stupid.
And that was kind of the problem.
He'd come through the reading and writing courses the previous winter, one of the ones they'd picked out of the first literacy classes for further training—measuring, timekeeping, and writing down what you saw in a form the overseers could make sense of. Letters had come first, back at Barad-dûr, then numbers, then the slow, painful business of making marks on a page that meant what you wanted them to mean and not something else. Most of the lads who'd started with him had washed out or been sent back to the pits or the forges. Golbag had not.
He could read a batch sheet. He could fill one in. He could watch a glass and write down what the crystals looked like at each turn, and he could do all of this without some overseer standing over him, telling him what came next.
They'd stuck him in the flash-dust shed for it.
Not asked. Not "would you like to work with the stuff that kills everyone who touches it wrong." Just a new assignment scratched on the duty board one morning, and that was that. The overseers needed hands that could follow the written procedures and keep the batch logs—how long each tray had been drying, what the crystals looked like at each check, anything that seemed off—because the flash-dust didn't give you a second go at getting it right, and if something went wrong, the only way to work out why was to read back through what the dead crew had written down before they stopped being alive.
So here he was. You put the quicksilver in the acid. You waited. You poured in the spirits at the right time, not before, not after. The crystals formed. You spread them on the trays, thin and even, and you waited for them to dry, and if you'd done it all proper, you had a tray of cap-stuff that could be pressed into the little copper cups that made the fire-tubes go off in the rain.
If you hadn't done it all proper-like, or if the crystals dried patchy, or if some clumsy bastard knocked a tray, or if the air went wrong, or if the stuff just decided today was the day—well. They'd scrape up what was left of you outside the berm, or they wouldn't find anything at all, and either way, there'd be a new name on the duty board come morning.
The shed sat by itself, off away from the rest of the chemical works, with a wall of packed dirt and gravel heaped up around it taller than two orcs standing on each other's shoulders. One way in, one way out, a heavy leather curtain across the door.
The rules were nailed to a board just inside, written in charcoal in big, clear letters: one batch at a time, no open flame inside, respirators and gloves on at all times, no running, no banging, and if something looks wrong, you don't wait for it to go boom. Instead, you dump the batch and get out and tell someone after you're past the berm.
The Númenóreans who ran the chemical works had written those rules, and they'd written them clear and they'd written them right, and Golbag had no quarrel with any of it. The tall woman who oversaw the percussion works—one of the Dark Númenóreans, young for the role, with clean pale hands that had never touched quicksilver or flash-dust or anything that left marks—came through on inspection once a fortnight or so, checking the logs and the stores and asking her questions in that flat patient way the Númenóreans had when they wanted something from you.
She never stayed long. She didn't need to. She'd look at the batch logs, look at the stores, ask after the equipment, and leave. Whatever she saw in the numbers told her what she needed to know without getting her hands dirty. Golbag supposed that was what overseers were for.
The procedure sheets were the same as the rules — good, clear, and written by people who knew the craft. Pinned to the wall by each station, each step was laid out plain: what went in, how much, in what order, and how long to wait.
What the sheets didn't cover was what the flash-dust looked like when it was going over. The way the crystals changed color just before they dried too fast—a yellowing at the edges, faint enough that you'd miss it if you hadn't seen it before. Or the way the surface went glassy in patches when the moisture was pulling wrong, or the grain of the stuff turning coarse and uneven on one side of the tray, while the other side still looked fine. You learned to read these things with your eyes, through the mask, shift after shift, and none of it was on the procedure sheets because the Númenóreans who'd written them—even the tall woman with her clean hands and her sharp mind—had never stood over a drying tray long enough to learn any of it.
Some of that knowing had made it into a booklet. Shaglûk—the orc foreman who ran the day-to-day of the shed—had started it a few months back, a beat-up little thing of scrawled notes and rough drawings that lived on a nail beside the drying racks. Tips. Tricks. Warning signs. Things the crew had figured out by doing and wanted to remember. One copy, kept where the work happened, because that was where you needed it.
Good rules on the board. Good procedures on the wall. And a booklet full of the knowledge that filled the gaps between them.
Golbag followed all three, and he'd been following them for months now, and nothing had gone bang, and that was the trouble. Because nothing going bang had a way of making a body careless. Not all at once. Not so you'd notice. But the sick tight feeling in his gut that had kept him up nights when he'd first started on the line—that had gone loose, gone quiet, gone down to a dull itch he could mostly put out of his mind if the shift was going smooth.
The lads still wore their gear. Still followed the steps. But there was joking now, where there hadn't been before. Laughing in the shed, where laughing had once seemed like tempting the stuff to wake up.
Then Shaglûk had built the wall.
The targets kept going up. More caps were always wanted, and the shed could only dry so many trays at once. The right answer—the one on the board outside, written by the Númenóreans who understood why it mattered—was to build another shed. New berms, new foundations, new blast walls. Weeks of work.
Shaglûk had looked at the weeks and looked at the targets and done something else. He'd had a wall of brick run down the middle of the shed, splitting it in two, and put a second set of drying racks in the new half. Same building, same roof, same floor. But two lines now, separated by a wall you could put your fist through if you hit it right, which Shaglûk reckoned was near enough the same as having two buildings.
He wasn't thick, Shaglûk. He was good at his job, which was keeping the line running, the numbers climbing, and the overseers off his back. He'd read the rule about separate buildings, and he'd looked at his wall, and he'd figured separate is separate. He didn't understand what the berms were really for—not to stop fire, but to eat the force of the blast—and nobody had explained it to him that way, and if they had, Golbag wasn't sure he'd have understood it.
Shaglûk solved problems he could see. The targets were a problem he could see. What a shockwave did to a shared foundation was not.
Golbag had looked at that wall, and his guts had gone cold. He didn't have the words for what was wrong with it. He just knew. The way you knew when meat had turned before you smelled it. The way you knew when a tunnel roof was going to come down before you heard it creak. Something deep and old was telling him the wall was a bad idea, that there was something wrong about the arrangement, and he should not be in this building when both lines were running.
He hadn't said anything. You didn't tell your foreman his business.
So, the wall went up. The second line went in. Production climbed... and nothing seemingly happened.
And the nothing that happened was the worst of it because it made Shaglûk right and Golbag's gut wrong, and the next time his gut told him something, he'd think twice about listening.
Four trays were drying in the morning when it happened, two on each side of Shaglûk's wall. Shaglûk was on the far side with six of the crew, overseeing the second line. Golbag and one other on the near side.
He checked his trays. Color's right. Grain's right. Spread even. He pulled the batch log toward him and scratched the time and color good, grain even, no wet spots in his careful square letters, and set the pencil down. Nothing to do now but wait.
His bladder had been at him since before the last check. He'd been putting it off because leaving the shed meant pulling off the respirator and gloves and going through the curtain and out past the berm and coming back in and putting it all on again. But the trays were set and the times were noted, and there was nothing to do about them for a good while yet.
He pulled off the gloves. Hung the respirator on its peg. Pushed through the curtain and walked out past the berm into the grey morning air.
Krûg was already there. Sitting on an overturned crate against the far side of the berm with his pipe going, which was why he was out here—no flame inside, not ever, so every orc who smoked had to come out past the dirt wall to light up. Krûg had been doing it three or four times a shift since before Golbag started on the line. Quiet sort. Didn't talk much. Didn't need to.
Krûg nodded. Golbag grunted back, turned around, and started unlacing.
"Batch going alright?" Krûg asked, not looking up from his pipe.
"Same as the last one. Sitting there doing nothing, looking like flour."
"That's the best kind."
"That's the only kind, as long as you want to keep your skin on."
Krûg sucked at his pipe and said nothing for a moment, which was his way of agreeing. Somewhere off past the berms, the chemical works clanked and hissed, the same noise it always made.
Golbag was midstream and thinking about nothing much at all when the world came apart.
There was no warning. No sound that built or gave you time to think, "that's bad, I should move."
Just a gust of hot air against his back and a noise so big it wasn't noise anymore, it was everything, and he was face-down in the gravel with his ears shrieking and dirt in his mouth and his trousers round his knees.
He rolled over to see what had happened, and his jaw nearly fell to the ground.
The shed was gone.
Not on fire.
Not fallen in.
Gone.
It had been reduced to a hole in the earth ringed with splinters and scorched dirt, and above it, a column of black smoke was climbing into the sky like it had somewhere to be.
Golbag just lay there and stared at it.
He turned his head. Krûg was flat on his back ten paces off, pipe still in his teeth, eyes open, looking at the sky like he expected an answer.
He pulled his trousers up. His hands did it without him. The rest of him was still in the gravel, looking at a hole where eight orcs had been standing, where Shaglûk had been standing, on the far side of his wall that was supposed to make things separate.
He got up. He looked at the crater. He looked at the spot where he'd been standing moments ago, which was now part of it. He looked at Krûg. Krûg looked at him.
Neither of them said a damn thing.
The tall woman came before the dust had properly settled.
Golbag had seen her walking the edge of the crater with two of the lower overseers in tow, her face showing about as much as it ever did, which was nothing. She counted what was left of the drying racks in the rubble. Spoke quietly with the overseers. Looked at the two surviving orcs sitting on the ground outside the berm, covered in grit and staring at nothing, and then walked over with that long unhurried stride she had, and crouched down in front of Golbag.
"How many batches were drying?"
"Four." His voice sounded strange in his own ears, tinny and far off. "Two each side of the... of the wall."
"The wall." She said it flat, not a question. "Who ordered the wall built?"
"Shaglûk."
"...And where is Shaglûk?"
Golbag looked at the crater and then back at her. She followed his gaze and nodded, once, and that was the end of that. Nobody left to answer for it.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I need to know what your crew knew."
"They're dead."
"I know they're dead. I need to know what they knew before they died. The things that aren't in the procedure sheets." She watched his face. "How you tell when a batch is turning. What the crystals look like when they're going bad. What the new crews from training won't know."
It wasn't really a question. Golbag thought about the green lads he'd seen come through the barracks, the ones who could recite the procedure sheets front to back and still couldn't tell good flash-dust from bad if you put it under their noses. They'd mix it right and spread it right and watch their glasses like they'd been taught, and they still wouldn't know the look. The yellowing at the edges. The way the grain went coarse on one side. The glassy patches.
"No," he said. "They can't."
"Then I need what's in your head. And his," she added, nodding at Krûg, who was still sitting in the dirt a few paces off with his unlit pipe in his hand, looking like he hadn't quite come back from wherever the blast had sent him. "Everything the crew learned by doing. Everything that was in the foreman's booklet."
"That burned with the rest."
"I know. That's why I need you to write it again."
The new sheds went up in the weeks that followed, and they went up right. Four of them this time, each behind its own berm, each far enough from the others that if one went up, the dirt would catch it before it reached the next. The way it should have been from the start.
But the separating that fixed the dying broke something else, and Golbag only began to feel the shape of it as the green crews started their first shifts.
The old crew had worked shoulder to shoulder in one room. What one orc figured out, the rest knew by the end of the shift. A trick for spreading the dust more evenly. A way of reading the drying speed by the look of the surface. A glance that meant something's off, watch it. All of that had passed between them just by being near each other, watching, working.
Now each shed was its own world. Four crews learning the same lessons one at a time, making mistakes the others had already made, and none of them knowing it because there was a dirt wall between every shed and no way for the knowing to get from one to the next.
Except on legs. Golbag's legs.
He hadn't been told to do it, not at first. He'd just started walking between the sheds because the green crews were going to get themselves killed, and nobody else who knew enough was still alive to stop it. Kicking a tray out of some fool's hands because the spread was too thick and the middle would cook before the edges dried. Grabbing a lad by the scruff because he was reaching for the iron scraper instead of the wooden paddle, and iron on flash-dust was how you got turned into a smear.
It was during one of those rounds that he stopped short in the third shed and pointed at a tray on the middle rack.
"That one. Dump it."
"Looks fine to me," the crew leader said, squinting.
"It's not. See the edges? Going yellow. And the grain's gone coarse on the near side."
The crew leader leaned in. Stared. Didn't see it. "I don't—"
"Dump it. Now."
Golbag couldn't have explained it in words that would make sense to someone who hadn't been there. A dead orc had once pointed at a tray that looked just like that one and said, "See that, the colour there at the edge? That's it going over." And Golbag had looked, and the look had gone into him and stayed, and now the dead orc's knowing was in Golbag's eyes, and that was all there was to say about it.
They dumped it.
The days bled together after that, one shift into the next, one shed after another, the same corrections and the same arguments and the same green lads making the same mistakes. Production came back slowly. The crews could follow the procedure sheets well enough, but they couldn't read the stuff. They didn't have the eye for it yet, the feel, the sense you grow after enough shifts of standing close to flash-dust.
They worked carefully, which was right, but careful and knowing were different things, and the difference showed in the reject pile. Batches were dumped early out of nerves. Batches left too long because the glass said there was time left, and the glass was the glass even when the crystals were saying different. Cap output dropped and stayed dropped and wouldn't come back until the new crews grew their own feel for it, and there was no rushing that.
Golbag and Krûg worked on the booklet between shifts, scratching out what they could remember by lamplight in the back of the supply shed. It came hard. They hadn't written the first one and hadn't read it carefully enough to put it back together all proper.
There were gaps—things Shaglûk's version had covered that neither of them had paid mind to because those hadn't been their steps. The bit about the crystal grain was thin. The bit about what to do when a batch went wrong was mostly Golbag guessing, pieced together from a half-remembered lesson by a dead orc he could barely picture anymore.
"What about the colour thing?" Krûg said one evening, frowning at the page. "When it goes sort of... yellowish. Round the edges."
"That's the drying too fast."
"Right, but how d'you write that so some lad who's never seen it knows what to look for? 'Yellowish' could mean anything."
Golbag stared at the page. He had a picture in his head — the exact shade, the way it crept in from the edges of the tray like a stain spreading through cloth. Putting that into marks on a page was like trying to draw a feeling.
"Pale yellow at the edges," he wrote, finally. "Like old bone. Dump it."
It wasn't right. But it was close enough, maybe, for someone who was paying attention. They kept at it, night after night, and the booklet grew, and it was not a good booklet, but it was what they had.
Copies were made—three, one for each shed and one kept off-site, because storing the only copy next to the thing that could destroy it was a mistake you only needed to make once.
Krûg died before the season turned.
New crew in the third shed, struggling with uneven drying. Krûg went in to show them how to fix the tray spacing, the same thing Golbag had done a dozen times already. Something went wrong. A hot spot nobody caught, or a tray shifted too hard, or the stuff just decided. The report afterward had its reasons, and its neat thinking, and none of it brought Krûg back.
But what Krûg had known was still in the booklet. Not all of it, not perfect, but the trick he'd worked out for reading crystal grain by lamplight was on page fourteen in his own hand, and the crew in the second shed used it every shift without knowing whose hand had put it there.
The booklet didn't carry names.
Only knowing.
After that, they pulled Golbag off the line.
The order came from up the chain, above the local overseers, above even the tall woman. Someone had looked at the dead count and the output numbers and the booklet and worked something out.
The flash-dust works had lost its first crew whole, then one of the two orcs who'd survived, and what was left was one orc who knew the stuff by feel. Putting him back on a drying shift was betting the whole operation on his luck, and the operation had shown twice now what it thought of luck.
So Golbag got a new job. He walked the sheds. He trained the green crews. He inspected the work. When something went wrong and nobody died, he wrote it down. When something went wrong and somebody died, he wrote that down too, fixed the booklet, and trained the next crew.
The booklet got thicker. Other hands added to it—margin notes scratched in by orcs who'd learned something the hard way and put it down so the next poor bastard wouldn't have to.
By midwinter, it didn't look much like the scraggly mess he and Krûg had turned in. It was stained and battered, and it contradicted itself in places, and one page was mostly gone because someone had bled on it. It was also the most important thing in the flash-dust works, and every orc on the line knew it.
His skill with letters had put him on the worst job in Mordor. The same skill, after everyone else had died around him, was what pulled him off it. Somewhere up the chain, someone had worked out that what was in Golbag's head was worth more than what his hands could do on the line, and the only way they'd come to that conclusion was by watching everyone around him die first.
The letter from the Lord of Mordor came to Minas Tirith in the hands of a wine merchant.
He was a Dorwinion trader, a stout man of middle years with sun-darkened skin and the easy manner of one accustomed to passing through many lands without troubling the lords of any of them. He had come upriver from Pelargir with a cargo of the dark vintages that Gondor's nobility favored, and among his bills of lading and customs declarations, there was a sealed envelope of pale vellum, addressed in a hand of uncommon elegance to Turgon, twenty-fourth Ruling Steward of Gondor.
The trader presented it to the customs officer at the river gate with no more ceremony than he might show a receipt for cask duties. He had been asked to carry it, he said, by a factor in the Anduin settlements who dealt in grain and livestock. He did not know its contents. He did not ask. Sealed correspondence between merchants and their associates passed through his hands often enough that one more was hardly worth remarking upon.
The customs officer, recognizing the address if not the seal, sent it upward through the layers of the Citadel's administration. It passed through three pairs of hands before it reached Ecthelion's desk among the afternoon's dispatches.
Ecthelion broke the seal without particular urgency. The wax was black. He registered that first, and then the device stamped into it—the eye, lidless and wreathed in flame, rendered with a craftsman's care that sat ill with everything he associated with that symbol. He had seen it scrawled on orc shields and burned into siege engines. He had never seen it used as a seal on diplomatic correspondence. He unfolded the vellum and read.
He read it again.
Then he rose from his chair and carried the letter to his father's chambers.
Turgon had not left his rooms in a fortnight. The twenty-fourth Steward of Gondor sat propped in a chair beside the window, wrapped in furs despite the warmth of the season, and the light that fell upon his face showed plainly what three years had cost him. He had been old when Ecthelion first began shouldering the weight of governance in his stead. Now the flesh had drawn tight over the bones, and the hands that had once gripped a sword lay folded in his lap like nesting birds, too frail for anything but rest.
His mind, though, had not yet followed his body into its long retreat. The eyes that turned toward Ecthelion as he entered were sharp, still, and missed nothing—not the set of his son's jaw nor the letter held at arm's length as though it might bite.
"What has come?" Turgon asked, his voice thin but steady.
Ecthelion placed the letter on the table between them. "A diplomatic protest. From the Lord of Mordor."
Turgon's brows rose, though whether in surprise or grim amusement was difficult to say. "From Sauron himself? Addressed to me?"
"To you by name and title, written in Westron of a quality that would shame half the scribes in this Citadel and delivered through a Dorwinion wine merchant as though it were an invoice for a shipment of barrels." Ecthelion sat down across from his father. "It arrived among the afternoon's post. Between the grain tallies and a requisition for mules."
The old steward reached for the letter with fingers that trembled only slightly. He held it close to his eyes and read in silence, his lips moving faintly over the words. When he had finished, he set it down and stared at the far wall for a long moment.
"Read it to me aloud," he said. "My eyes tire, and I would hear it spoken. Sometimes the ear catches what the eye forgives."
Ecthelion took the letter back and read.
To Turgon, Steward of Gondor, Warden of Minas Anor, from the Lord of Mordor: Greetings.
It is with regret that I bring to your attention a matter of grave concern regarding the conduct of armed men bearing the banner of Gondor in the lands east of the Anduin.
On the nights of the fourteenth and fifteenth days of the month of Nárië, three settlements established under my authority along the eastern bank of the river were assailed in coordinated attacks. The assailants, identified by survivors as Rangers bearing the livery and arms of Gondor, slew the guards set to watch over these communities and thereafter put granaries, storehouses, and dwellings to the torch. Irrigation works serving the surrounding farmland were deliberately collapsed. Eleven of my subjects perished in the fires and violence that followed, among them persons who bore no arms and offered no resistance.
I do not presume these attacks were undertaken at your personal instruction, for I would think better of the house that has long held the stewardship of the Dúnedain. Yet they were carried out by men in your service, with weapons you furnished, in a manner that bespeaks coordination and command rather than the impulse of rogue actors. The responsibility, therefore, rests with the stewardship, however it may have been delegated.
In the interest of preventing further harm and preserving such peace as may still be preserved between our realms, I set forth the following terms:
First, that the Steward of Gondor formally condemn these attacks as unprovoked aggression against subjects dwelling under the protection and authority of the Lord of Mordor, and that the men responsible be identified and made to answer for their deeds.
Second, that the Steward acknowledge in writing, under his seal, the right of the Lord of Mordor to maintain, govern, and protect his settlements and subjects in the lands east of the Anduin, and that Gondor henceforth respect this right as it would wish its own respected by its neighbors.
Third, that compensation be furnished directly to the families of those slain and to the communities whose livelihoods were destroyed, as follows:
To the family of Meydah, daughter of Hurash, farmer of the Anduin settlement of Talith Gelin, whose husband perished when the granary in which the harvest was stored was set alight: forty silver pieces.
To the family of—
"Each of the dead is named," Ecthelion said, lowering the letter. "Family, settlement, circumstances, and the sum attached."
Ecthelion set the letter down. The room was quiet save for the distant sound of the city below—carts on cobblestones, the calls of vendors in the lower circles, the ordinary noise of a capital that did not yet know what had arrived among the afternoon's post.
Turgon was quiet for a long moment. "The first demand is reasonable," he said at last. "That is why it is there. And the third wraps the knife in silk—silver paid to Sauron could be refused with dignity, but silver paid to the widows is a different matter entirely. He has placed the second demand between the two, shielded on both sides. We cannot carve this letter apart and answer each piece separately. We accept all three or refuse all three, and the reasonable demand and the merciful one are there to make the refusal as ugly as possible." His fingers drummed once on the arm of his chair. "Gossamer threads."
Ecthelion leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "If we accept, we acknowledge his sovereignty over eastern Ithilien in our own hand and under our own seal. Every settlement, every furrow, and every rod of irrigation channel becomes the lawful holding of the enemy by our own admission. And if we hand over Rangers for doing what we sent them to do, every captain east of the river will draw his own conclusions about what his steward thinks of his service."
"And if we refuse, we hand Mordor exactly what this letter was written to obtain." Turgon's voice was quiet. "A formal grievance, formally rejected. He sought resolution, and we answered with silence. Whatever follows, he will say we were given the chance to make it right and chose otherwise."
"And the refusal will cost us."
Turgon closed his eyes. For a moment, he looked every one of his eighty-eight years, and Ecthelion felt the familiar ache of watching his father diminish by degrees, each day carrying away some further portion of the man who had once seemed as permanent as the tower itself.
"There is no answer to this letter that serves us," Turgon said at last. "Only answers that cost us less or more. And the one that costs us least is the one that was written into the letter before we ever broke the seal."
Ecthelion nodded. He had known the answer before he climbed the stairs to his father's chambers. He had known it the moment he read the second demand. But there were decisions a man needed to speak aloud, if only so that the weight of them was shared.
"We refuse," he said.
Ecthelion folded the letter and tucked it into his belt. He stood and then paused.
"The merchant who carried this is still in the city, lodged at the river gate, awaiting clearance for his return cargo."
Turgon opened his eyes. "You are wondering whether to send the refusal back through him."
"I was, but I have decided against it." Ecthelion's voice was flat, deliberate. "The letter came to us dressed as commerce. If we send our answer back the same way, we accept the fairytale that this is a matter between equals to be settled by correspondence and intermediaries. I will not play that game."
Turgon studied his son's face. "Then what will you do?"
"I will dispatch the refusal to the garrison at Osgiliath. They will deliver it across the river themselves." He met his father's gaze. "Let it go by the hand of soldiers. If Mordor wishes to pretend this is diplomacy, let our answer make plain that we see it for what it is."
The old steward was quiet for a time. Then he inclined his head, a gesture so slight it might have been mistaken for the tremor of age.
"Go, then, my son. Do what you believe is best."
Ecthelion bowed his head and left.
The refusal, when it was written, consisted of a single line beneath the seal of the Steward.
Gondor does not treat with the servants of darkness.
The wraith had been waiting for eleven days.
It stood beneath the restored colonnade of the eastern ward's river gate, robed and hooded and still as the stone around it. No shelter had been erected. It needed none. Rain fell on it and wind moved its cloak, and neither produced any response that the orcs of its escort could discern. It simply stood, facing west across the water, and watched.
There was a great deal to watch. The Gondorians had been strengthening their positions along the western bank for months, piling stone and timber into the shells of buildings that had stood empty since the city's fall five centuries prior. New palisades, fresh-cut timber, watchfires that burned through the night. They were building against the threat they understood—assault by boat or bridge, the ancient pattern of war along the Anduin. The wraith saw all of it, and what the wraith saw, its master knew.
The guns had arrived three days after it. Four pieces were wheeled into prepared emplacements along the eastern waterfront—earthen berms, timber-reinforced embrasures, and overhead cover against anything the western bank might lob back, the whole of it faced with stone and rubble to match the surrounding construction. The work had been done weeks before the wraith arrived. The guns slotted into positions that had been dug, measured, and sighted for them in advance, their muzzles aligned on the points the wraith had marked. From across the water, even with sharp eyes and clear weather, the emplacements would look like one more stretch of the restoration work that had been reshaping the eastern wards for years.
Then it waited.
The arrow came on the eleventh morning. It rose from the western bank in a high arc, catching the light for a moment at the top of its flight before dropping toward the eastern shore. It struck one of the escort orcs in the throat, just above the collar of his steel cuirass, and the orc went down without a sound, dead before his knees folded.
The orcs around him flinched. One raised his musket toward the western bank, but the sergeant—a scarred, thick-armed creature with the red eye branded on his pauldron—barked a word, and the barrel dropped. They had been told to expect this. The moment of alarm passed like a ripple through still water, and then the squad was moving with the efficiency of long practice. Two orcs dragged the body behind the nearest wall. A third began unbuckling the cuirass and belt, wiping the blood from the steel.
The wraith crossed the pavement to where the arrow had pinned a fold of the dead orc's cloak to the earth and pulled the shaft free with one gauntleted hand. A scrap of vellum was bound to it. The wraith tore it loose and held it up before the darkness of its hood.
A single line, beneath the white tree and seven stars of the steward's seal.
Gondor does not treat with the servants of darkness.
Across the leagues, through the bond of shadow and sorcery that bound the Nine to their master, the Dark Lord's will pressed back—cold, unsurprised, and immediate.
The wraith let the vellum fall. The sergeant caught it before it touched the ground, knowing without being told that the physical document would be wanted for the archives. He tucked it into his dispatch case and retreated.
The wraith turned toward the gun line. "Fire."
Down the line, from the nearest emplacement, a black flag went up.
Soon, the guns roared.
Across the river, the men of Gondor had watched the arrow fly with the grim satisfaction of soldiers given a task that suited their contempt.
Captain Hallas had selected his best archer for the task. "Put it where it will be noticed," he'd told Dorlas, the lean Ithilien ranger on detached service who could split a reed at a hundred paces and never shut up about it. The arrow needed to cross four hundred yards of open water in a crosswind. It did not need to hit anything but the ground.
Dorlas had put it through an orc's throat.
The men on the wall had seen the distant shape crumple, a tiny figure folding in on itself at the edge of sight, and a ragged cheer had gone up—the first sound of open satisfaction the garrison had permitted itself in months.
"Did you see that?" said one of the watchmen, leaning out over the parapet. "Dropped one of the bastards. Dropped him clean at four hundred yards, in a crosswind, I'd like to see the man who—"
"Get your head back behind the wall," Hallas said, though without much heat. He allowed himself a moment of it—the relief of doing something, of sending something other than a report upriver.
"Think they'll send anything back across?" Dorlas asked, still standing at his firing position with a second arrow nocked. "A reply to the reply, as it were?"
Hallas shook his head and squinted across the water. The river was broad here, broad enough that the eastern bank dissolved into a grey wash of stone and shadow at any distance past bowshot. He could see shapes moving over there—small figures shifting among the buildings—but nothing that told him what was happening. Someone picking up the body, maybe. Someone reading the message.
He was still watching when the eastern bank lit up.
Four points of fire, blooming white, and suddenly along the waterfront where no fire had been a moment before. Not the brief spark of the fire tubes he'd grown used to—each one was a great belch of flame and smoke, far larger than anything he'd seen the orcs discharge, erupting from positions he hadn't known were there. He had time to open his mouth, to draw half a breath, and then the sound hit him like a wall, and the river wall came apart in four places at once.
Hallas was on the ground before he understood he'd fallen. Dust and grit in his mouth, the taste of stone, and a ringing in his ears so loud it swallowed everything else. He couldn't see—the air itself had turned grey.
More impacts were felt through his palms and chest rather than heard, the ground shuddered beneath him like something alive. Somewhere in the murk, a man was screaming, not words, just a raw, high sound that went on and on.
"Off the wall!" someone was shouting. "Get off the wall, get down, get—"
The ground heaved again. He didn't hear the second volley so much as feel it—a pressure that went through him, through the stone, through everything. Something massive fell somewhere nearby, a grinding roar that he felt in his teeth. He pressed his face into the rubble and covered his head with his arms, and the world shook and shook and would not stop shaking.
Then it shook again. Or still. He couldn't tell if it was a third time or the second time still happening. There was a sound like a mountain breaking, and something rained down on his back — dust, gravel, fragments of something — and the screaming from before had stopped, which was worse somehow than when it had been going on.
Then nothing.
He lay there. The stones were still beneath him, and that seemed important, that the ground had stopped moving, but he couldn't organize the thought into anything beyond the raw fact of it. His ears were gone. Not ringing — gone. The world had gone to a single high tone, thin and piercing, like a blade laid flat against the inside of his skull.
He could see dust. He could see his hands, and there was blood on them, and he did not know whose it was. He tried to move his fingers, and they worked, and that seemed like it should matter.
Something touched his arm. He flinched—a full-body spasm that sent pain through his ribs and shoulder—and then there was a face in front of his, grey with dust, the mouth open and moving. Hallas stared at it. The mouth kept moving. He could see the shapes of the words, but they came from very far away, from the bottom of a deep well, and only fragments floated up to where he was.
"—tain. Captain. Can you—"
He tried to say something. He didn't know if sound came out.
Someone hauled at his arm, and Hallas found himself upright, or partway upright, propped against something that might have been a wall. The world tilted and steadied and tilted again. There were shapes in the dust. Some of them were men. Some of them were parts of men. He saw a hand on the flagstones, still gloved, attached to nothing, and his mind slid off it the way a foot slides off a wet stone—he saw it, and it did not connect to anything he was able to think about.
He looked for the watchtower, and it was not there. There was a mound of rubble where it had been and a settling cloud of dust above it, and he stared at the space where it should have been for a long time before the absence registered as real.
A man was sitting against a pillar nearby. His eyes were open and looking at nothing in particular, and Hallas thought for a moment that he was dead, but then the man blinked, slowly, like someone waking from a dream he couldn't quite leave.
The ringing thinned eventually. Or his mind learned to hear around it. Sound crept back in layers—first the crackle of fire, then the river, then the wounded. Someone was calling for water. Someone else was calling a name, over and over, the same name, and getting no answer.
He did not know how long he waited for the next blow. The ringing in his ears ebbed and swelled and ebbed again, and through it he could hear men calling out, some for aid, some for names that did not answer.
But yet, no thunder came.
No second wave of that terrible, sourceless destruction, and no black shapes swarming across the water.
Just the river, and the wind, and the sound of stones still settling in the places where walls had stood.
After a while, someone came and pulled him to his feet, and he let them.
It was only much later, when the dust had settled, and the dead had been counted, and the living had been pulled from the rubble, that Hallas understood what had happened at the river.
Not the how of it, for that was beyond his reckoning still. But the shape of the thing.
They had fired, and then they had stopped, and then they had done nothing at all.
They had broken Gondor's answer over the garrison's heads like a man breaking a stick to prove that he could
…And then they had simply gone back to whatever it was they did on the far side of the river.
There was nothing, not one thing in all the long years of Hallas's service, that had frightened him more than that.
A/N:
Okay, yeah, so this one took a while to come out, and I didn't actually manage to fit everything I wanted into it, especially because I changed my mind halfway through writing regarding the dwarves and again decided to push their introduction into the story further back. I do have the shape of their introduction figured out now, though, worry not.
So interestingly, this chapter didn't have as much of a singular focus as the previous one (which was centered around agriculture) in the end, but instead it was divided somewhat between standardization, institutionalization of knowledge, and diplomatic maneuvering. I was originally planning to solely focus on standardization and the painful maturing process of Mordor's chemical industry. However, at the same time, I realized that I need to start slowly inching towards actual armed conflict with the overarching plot, since that was kind of the whole selling point of writing this story for me originally, alongside the whole technological uplift that comes with mechanized industry.
Hopefully the length of this is enough to compensate for the long waiting time. I don't know if I can vouch for the quality, so you be the judge of that.
Either way, while you're here, drop me some feedback. It is, as always, greatly appreciated. For now, I'll probably go work on something else again. I'll see y'all in the next one (whenever that comes out). Peace. Like Quote ReplyReport Reactions:Phantomtitan13, MxReader01, Bbk and 263 others