Weekly Digest 55 - (#176 - #178)

Things Left Unattended

"Lori, lunch time."

Lori blinked, looking up from the ice she had been working on. She immediately became aware of an ache in her neck, and winced, slipping her hand beneath her collar to rub at her nape. Ugh, she hadn't realized she'd been bent over that long… ack, and therewas her back.  Straightening, Lori put one hand on the small of her back and bent backwards, wincing more as she did so.

"Do you want some ice for that?" Rian said with a grin.

Lori flicked her other hand, and the butt of her staff slapped solidly against the side of his leg. Between his winter robe and the fur wrappings around his boots, most of the impact was blunted, but Rian still made a blatantly theatrical show of wincing and briefly hopping on one foot as if the strike had pained him.

"No ice, noted," he said, before looking down at what Lori had been working on, then around at all the others like it.

It was a tube of ice, a bit wider at the base than at the peak, meant for stability and to reduce the possibility of it falling over. No one wanted a container meant for molten metal to tip over and spill, after all. A half a pace high, the hollow inside was just big enough to fit someone's head, its thick sides irregular in a way that annoyed her greatly but which she couldn't afford to correct without wasting time, the whole thing made of bound ice that had been solidified. A small drop of her blood could barely be discerned somewhere on the glass-like, perfectly transparent cone.

The tube was one of a handful she'd managed to make that morning, barely uniform in height and base width, each one bearing a shameful lack of uniformity save for the dimensions of the hollow within the tube. That she had made by using a form made from a piece of wood with a handle she had her carpenters make—well, she'd told Rian to tell the carpenters, who'd probably passed the order down to Riz—on their lathe. It hadn't been the only tool she'd had made in preparation for this smelting work. Some of the rest were still on the boat, not currently needed. The smith had bought his own tools as well, and would probably be doing most of the work when it came time, but she wanted to be ready.

Each tube was imbued, the solidified water maintaining their shape without exchanging heat with their surroundings. As she had every time she'd finished working on a tube, Lori checked their levels of imbuement through the drops of her blood she'd mixed into the ice. Each was reduced from the last time she'd checked of course, and she sighed, switching to imbuing them again. She breathed in out of habit, and for the now relatively miniscule magic she drew in from the air, even as the magic contained in her core filled her through her connection to her demesne. She pushed this magic to the waterwisps contained in her blood through her affinity, reinforcing that affinity even as imbued the bindings—

"Lori? Lori?"

Lori just managed to stop herself from halting the imbuement as her lord dew her attention. "What?" she snapped irritably, trying to pay attention to him and what she was doing at the same time.

"Lunch, remember?" he said. "The bread is here, and the salted meat stew is done."

Oh. Food. Right, right… Lori tried to decide if she could walk while imbuing or whether she should stop until she reached the food, then continue to imbue as she ate. Rainbows, both sounded like bad ideas for different reasons.

She compromised by imbue only one of the least-imbued of the tubes as she followed Rian towards where they were eating, and nearly lost that bit of her concentration as she saw what as there. Her workers sitting around the binding of heat and darkness was completely expected as Rian led her towards a small wooden stool—he must have gotten it from Riz—sitting on the far side of the binding from most of the men. The crowd of children at their edges throwing balls of snow into the binding and laughing when water came out the other side were not. Nor were the adults with the buckets and shovels.

As she watched, two people carrying a pole from which a large wooden bucket filled with snow hung between them walked towards her binding, walking on either side of it as the bucket between them passed through the darkwisps. When they walked out the other side, the bucket was filled with water, which was hurriedly carried over to a barrel and poured in as people put in more snow after it to melt.

Lori sighed. Why was the world filled with idiots?

"Rian, please tell our people to keep those idiots away from our heat source," Lori said irritably. "The imbuement I filled it with was supposed to last all day, but if these fools have been using it to melt water and warm their buckets—"

Even as she spoke, the darkness suddenly disappeared, leaving a pair who had just been about to pass their bucket through where the binding had been to pause, standing awkwardly.

"—then," she continued, suddenly feeling very tired, "the imbuement will have been expended far more rapidly due to the difference in the amount of energy it takes to imbue air with heat as opposed to the amount of energy it takes to imbue frozen water, wooden buckets, rope and poles with heat!" By the end of the sentence, she was just short of screaming, and the children had vacated the area, apparently know better than to be in her presence.

"Oh…" Rian said, voice small. "That… uh… makes sense. You should have told me that."

"I would have thought it wouldn't be needed, given how I specifically warned you of the hazards of this particular binding," Lori said through grinding teeth. "What, after telling everyone how dangerous it was to stick any part of their body into it, everyone decided it was safe to stick literally anything else in?"

"Um… pretty much?" Rian said.

Lori took a deep breath… then sighed. She closed her eyes, and used her fingers to massage her forehead, squeezing from her temples inward. She bent down and picked up the stool. "I," she told Rian, "am going back to my crucibles lest some colorwit decide they would be a good place to piss in, or some children think it would be fun to carry them somewhere, or just fill them with snow. Bring me food."

"Probably a very good idea, your Bindership," Rian said tiredly. "People aren't really used to you here. And the people who do know you will probably not be very respectful. They left, after all."

Lori nodded and irritably began to walk back towards her furnaces.

"Um… about the heat…"

"As you all let it run out of imbuement early, I'm sure you can find your own solution, as you all clearly know better."

"Punishment, got it. All right boys, lunch is interrupted! Go find some wood so we can start a fire!"

Lori did, in fact, have to keep children away from her furnaces, as well as have to deal with a furnace that had somehow been half-filled with snow in the time she'd been gone. At least it hadn't been piss.

She was muttering about all the things she wanted to do to those children's parents for failing utterly in teaching them proper behavior as she finally finished turning the last of the snow into steam when Rian finally came with platter of bread and two bowls of stew. The bowls were only half filled, and most of it was a watery soup that still wafted up heat in her face as she took one of the bowls.

"It's a dipping soup. You're supposed to put the bread into it and let it soak a little for warmth and flavor," Rian said.

"Obviously," Lori said, who had suspected as much. She sat down on her stool, grabbing one of the flat disks of bread from the platter. Rian stood to one side, holding his own bowl and taking from the platter as well. "If you're going to stand, do it over there so you can block the wind."

"Yes, your Bindership," Rian said with a small sigh as he moved to the indicated spot. "Do you want a report or can I eat first?"

"Eat," Lori ground out. "I don't think I can bear to hear anything more right now. Stupid, idiotic, rainbow-brained…" she bit savagely into the bread chewing. The outside had already cooled a little, but the insides were still pleasantly warm, and Lori let out a sigh as she ate. The bread was thick and heavy, but it was bread and tasted so good!

Lori sat in silence, dipping bread into the stew, biting, chewing, using folded bread edges to scoop up bits of meat and popping both bread and meat into her mouth. Her simmering annoyance slowly abated as she ate, so that when she finished all that was left was a vindictive irritation that had already been sated by her previous declaration. When she finished, she took a deep breath, adding the meager magic that filled her lungs to the binding around her hands and face, then let it out, nodding to herself. She held out her bowl to Rian.

"You want me to see if there's any more bread?" Rian asked.

Loi blinked, then looked towards the empty plate. For a moment, she glanced towards her furnaces.

"I'll get them and come back, and you can listen to my report while you're eating," Rian suggested.

"Do it," Lori said.

The bread he bought back wasn't very warm anymore, but that was fine. She altered the binding around her head to warm the bread slightly as it passed through on the way into her mouth, so it wasn't cold when she chewed. Unlike with the heat source earlier, she could adjust for the additional imbuement this consumed, so she didn't suddenly have a cold face.

"All right," Rian said, glancing towards her workers, who were now crowded around a fire. The people with the buckets and shovels were gone, off to take advantage of their stolen heat not doubt. "We've got three piles of exactly twenty five carts of ore and are halfway through a fourth, so you and Lanwei can probably get started on smelting. We'll start the afternoon's work once Shana's aunt comes back to keep track. We should hopefully have eight, maybe even nine before we have to stop for tonight, and I'm going to have to find someone willing to keep watch so we can all say no one tampered with the piles while we slept. I don't think anyone is going to, but we need to do it anyway, unfortunately."

Lori nodded. "Then we will begin smelting. Hopefully after three or four tests I can learn enough that tomorrow I can start mass production, perhaps even start using bigger furnaces."

Rian glanced at furnaces she had made, then up towards the dome. "Should we have a roof put up or something?" he said. "Just to maybe avoid potential steam explosions if snow should drop down into the things when they're full of molten metal?"

Lori blinked, then looked upwards herself, towards the dark, snow-covered dome above. Had this been some sort of play or novel, that would have been the moment some snow dislodged and dropped down onto her face. No such thing happened, but Lori could well imagine the possibility.

"I will find some stone to make a roof," Lori said, then took another bite of her bread and swallowed. "But later."

Rian nodded, taking some more bread for himself as well. "We're going to be here a while," Rian said, his tone more casual. "How do you feel?"

She frowned at him. "Cold. Sore. In need of a taller chair." This stool was definitely comfortable for eating on. Her knees were too curled up, and the legs rocked a little on the uneven ground.

"Oh? No urges to declare you're never leaving your demesne again?"

"I always never want to leave my demesne again. However, I have obligations and agreements to fulfill."

"You don't have to start smelting today, you know?" Rian said quietly. "Why don't you take the Coldhold back home, sleep on your own bed, and come back in two days? We should have most of the ore audited then. You don't have to sleep here."

Lori snorted, waving her hand dismissively. "I would still need to be here. I've never smelted ore before, and I need the experience so I can understand the process and begin to make more appropriate bindings for it."

Rian tilted his head, then shrugged. "Fair enough, I suppose."

They finished the bread, and Lori stood up. "Watch over the furnaces," she said, hefting her staff. The wire that ran up its length was cold in her grip, the binding of firewisps around her hands not heating it. "Make sure the children don't come back to play with it. I'm going to go find some stone."

"Try near the mine," Rian suggested, pointing to one side of the location in question. "A lot of what gets excavated is just rock without any ore we can use. They dump that over there."

Lori nodded in acknowledgement, heading in the direction he was pointing to get some stone so she could keep snow and water off her furnaces. Lunch was over, and there was more work to do.

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Preparing To Smelt

Building a roof over her furnaces took Lori an annoyingly long time. Outside of her demesne, she no longer had the control over wisps that she had become used to, and so things she had taken for granted, like turning stone into a fluid, viscous consistency and having it flow to move the mass, were far, far more difficult in River's Fork. If it weren't for her connection to her demesne still giving her limitless power, she'd never have tried to move so much stone so far, as the amount of magic necessary would have been beyond her short of consuming a wisp bead.

Still, she managed to raise the roof, a simple curving stone arch not unlike the baths, shelter and some of the storage sheds back home. It was low, but that was all right. She didn't care about the soil of River's Fork, so once the roof was up, she bound the earthwisps of the ground beneath it, compressing it into walls to support the arch, hardening it into a proper floor, and the excess was pushed aside so that the furnaces could be moved under the roof's protection. It was open at both ends so that the wind would be able to keep the air circulating and any air that resulted from the smelting wouldn't be able to just gather.

It also meant the little improvised smithy wouldn't become outrageously hot. While it would probably be more efficient to give the firewisps a directionality so that all the heat would remain inside the furnace, given the freezing cold around them excess heat was preferred, they just didn't want it to be so hot they couldn't approach the furnaces. The furnaces were made of water after all. If they ran out of imbuement while they were filled with molten metal, 'steam explosion' would be an understatement.

With everything in place, they were ready.

Lori had assisted in smelting metal before, back when she had been a student earning beads for school supplies or, in her later years at school, for magic to digest for extended exercises that required a lot of binding. She had melted scraps of copper, bronze, brass, lead, tin, pewter, jasada, magan, iron and steel back into stocks and ingots, ready to be reused and made into new things. The latter had been difficult, given how hot it had needed to get, and she had actually taken turns with another whisperer to maintain that binding, the two of them switching out imbuing it and keeping the contact wire they were using from getting too hot to touch by making ice to cool it.

However, those had been refined metals, already purified by previous processes and only needing heat to melt. Ore, by definition, was unrefined, alchemically impure metal, which significantly changed the temperature it would melt, as well as affecting its structural integrity and durability. Lori didn't know how to purify those. She was a Whisperer and Dungeon Binder, not an alchemist… or a blacksmith.

Fortunately, they had those in her demesne.

The smith she'd be working with was introduced to her by Rian as Lanwei. He was clean shaven, muscular from repeatedly carrying heavy things for most of his professional life, he had worked with Whisperers before, he knew how to smelt raw ore into useable metal, and, most importantly, he wasn't the talkative sort. They had already worked together before, refining one of the ferrous dragon scales into some of the tools they'd be using for this. She also didn't need to explain the particulars of the furnaces made of ice to him. While furnaces were normally made out of special clays, quartz, or other minerals that were durable in the face of extreme heat, she'd used bound ice as a perfect insulator before with the blacksmiths. As long as it didn't run out of imbuement to keep the binding active, and no one decided to trying using a hammer on the furnace while it was in use, it was perfectly safe. Or at least, as safe as any other furnace could be.

They had other tools as well, brought over on from the Coldhold. A mortar and pestle, the wood still light and new from having been freshly formed on the carpenters lathe. Buckets, which she knew there were never enough of. Ceramic ingot molds, which she'd hopefully be able to fuse back together if and when they cracked from the heat. A ceramic crucible, which like the mold had been made by the potter earlier that week with her help. Tongs for the crucible. A metal rod with a wide spoon at the end. The wand that Lori had commissioned the smiths to make for this occasion, with her assistance.  Personally, Lori didn't think they'd need all that just yet, but then she wasn't a blacksmith. Perhaps he felt more comfortable with all the tools nearby.

Lori watched as the blacksmith poured large pieces of charcoal into the furnace, part of her concentration on the binding of the furnace they were using, sending more magic to imbue it. Unlike the binding of firewisps, the binding of waterwisps keeping the furnace solid was a static thing, the imbuement draining at a steady, predictable rate, so no external force on it would consume its reserves any faster, but Lori still worried. The others she also imbued so that they would continue to keep their shape and not start melting if her mind were absent for too long. She could fully imbue them later so that they'd last through the night, but for now she just had to have them last through the afternoon…

A cart load of ore lay outside the little smelting hut, already recorded in the accounting. The pile lay on a trough made of solidified dirt, so that none of could get lost or go to waste. It was a bright, vibrant green, and Lori could understand why it would be used for dyes. She'd seen that shade of green before. Next to it were four of the buckets, all filled with ore that the smith had ground in the pestle. He hadn't been idle while she had been working, preparing the materials for when she was ready. The buckets of ground ore went into the furnace on top of the charcoal, and the smith stepped back, nodding to Lori. It has her turn.

Lori gripped her staff, sighing and wishing she'd remembered to put a coal in her coalcharm. She'd let a lot of habits she'd used to maintain slip ever since she'd become a Dungeon Binder. The bits of quartz imbedded into her staff were still, not buzzing with lightningwisps held ready as they would have a year ago. Well, she had other options. Lori reached inside the furnace, picking up the largest piece of ore she could reach, about the size of a finger joint. Carefully, she altered the binding of firewisps around her hands, imbuing it as she did so. The cold piece of ore in her hands began to grow warm as the firewisps began to affect it, and soon it was as warm as the air around Lori's hands, filled with firewisps of its own.

Reverting the binding in her hands, she claimed and bound the firewisps in the ore as she put it back inside the furnace. Her hands still inside the tube, she began to form the binding. Firewisps, anchored to but not—and this was very important—part of the binding of waterwisps that solidified the material of the furnace. She moved her hands, the firewisps trailing after her as she made a rising spiral inside the tube, the firewisps anchoring to the sides of it in her wake. Carefully she imbued the firewisps, and the air inside the tube began to grow warm.

Lori extricated her arm from the furnace slowly, then stuck her staff inside. Careful not to let the steel-shod butt of the staff touch the ore piled at the bottom, she smoothly switched from binding the firewisps with one hand to binding the firewisps through the metal wire running down her staff which pressed into her other hand. Taking, deep, regular breaths even though she didn't really need to because of her connection to her core, she imbued the firewisps, binding them to slowly radiate heat.

The heat spread through the tube, warming the ore beneath the firewisps she had anchored and bound. Contiguous with her binding, she claimed the firewisps in the ore, making them part of her binding as the heat slowly progressed downward. Eventually, the heat reached the charcoal and the air around it, and then finally the bottom of the tube, and Lori anchored the firewisps into place. With the firewisps now completely filling the interior of the furnace, she aligned them into a lattice.

There were gaps, of course. The charcoal's internal changed temperature slowly, but that was fine. She didn't need to change their internal temperature, she only needed the charcoal to get hot enough to start partial combusting, and of that the outside was fine. She imbued the firewisps through her staff wire as the firewisps maintained their temperature. While she couldn't feel it through her clothes and the binding that warmed her hands, there was probably a mild updraft coming from the opening of the furnace as the air in the furnace grew warmer than the air above it.

Finally, once she thought the firewisps were sufficiently imbued, she carefully deactivated them, then drew out her staff. The wire under her hands was warm as she looked around, shrugged, then stuck the staff into one of the nearby, unused furnaces for lack of anywhere else to put it where it wouldn't fall. While she coulduse her staff for what she was going to do next, it was mostly made of wood. Sticking it into a vessel intended to be heated such that metal would melt was inadvisable, at least not without a binding to protect it from the heat. Given how busy they were likely to be, maintaining such a binding was likely to be forgotten.

Which was why she had commissioned a wand.

A pace long, made from part of the anatass dragon scale they had found—because why not, when they had no other use for it—the metal rod was as thick as her finger, and was blue from end to end, a deliberate aesthetic choice after it had been forged. A wooden grip long enough for both her hands was at one end, a metal strip running down the length of the grip to give her a contact point to conduct magic through. At the other end was a blunted, rounded point. The whole thing had a noticeable weight that was still lighter than her staff, and more importantly it was a metal conductor that was very unlikely to catch fire, quite unlike her staff, the grip easily replaced.

Lori pick up the wand from where she had placed it next to the wooden tube-form and other tools she'd prepared for herself, placing her thumb on the contact strip just to be sure. It had been a while since she'd used a wand—she'd used them in some of her jobs where using a staff wasn't practical—and so she handled it carefully as she placed the tip inside the furnace's opening. The wand made contact with the binding of firewisps, and she activated it, imbuing the binding as she did so.

She increased the heat slowly, giving time for the heat to spread within, letting any moisture warm and evaporate to avoid the possibility of a steam explosion. Despite the lack of directionality to the binding, between the open nature of the temporary smithy, and the breeze, the air didn't become all that hot yet. Eventually, Lori drew out her new wand and, as a test, stepped outside the smithy and tapped the tip that had been just inside the furnace onto some snow that had fallen from the dome. The snow melted, sizzling into steam, and Lori nodded in satisfaction.

The materials were preheated. It was time to truly begin.

Thrusting the tip of the band back inside the furnace, she altered the binding slightly, and activated the firewisps at the bottom of the furnace, imbuing them as she caused the heat they were generating to spike up sharply.

Through the transparent side of the bound ice furnace, one of the coal began to glow with heat.

Nodding, Lori reverted back the binding of firewisps to what it had been before, continuing to imbue as she began increasing the temperature.

Inside the glass-like tube, more and more coals began to glow, and smoke began to rise.

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Smelting Copper

In retrospect, while using a perfect insulator as the material for a furnace was greatly advantageous, having a completely transparent material proved to be slightly problematic when the ore inside started to glow with heat. She'd needed to integrate a binding of lightwisps to the structure of the furnace to blunt the amount of light passing through, so that they could still see the progress of the smelting process, but withoutgoing blind. It would have been the most annoying thing she'd had to do all day, as binding lightwisps was normally doing by channeling magic through one's eyes, which… was seldom safe.

Fortunately, the radiance from the furnace reached a point that its glow could penetrate her skin, reminding her of something Rian had pointed out once. It was… a new sensation, passing magic through her eyes to align them with lightwisps, then instead of using that magic to claim and bind lightwisps running just under the surface of her skin to her hand, where she claimed the lightwisps that were passing through the skin of her extremity. It was far more convenient than bringing things close to her eye.

The binding of lightwisps was simple, a mere reduction in intensity so they could still see what was happening inside, though in more muter orange tones. Once that was done, all and the heat from the furnace was stabilized, Lori took a step back and allow the blacksmith to get to work. All she was there for, really, was to maintain the heat and the furnace. The smith had to do most of the real work.

As she watched, the smith slowly added in more and more crushed ore, using a poker to stir the conglomerating mix of charcoal, ore and what was probably slag. She deactivated the binding when he did this so that the poker wouldn't be forcibly heated to the temperature over everything else inside the furnace, ruining the temper. The smith covered and uncovered the top of the furnace with a thick metal plate—so that Lori could still imbue and adjust the furnace's bindings as needed—to control the flow of air, keeping the charcoal from properly burning. Normally, this would have been to affect the temperature of the furnace, but as the heat wasn't being generated by combustion, in this instance it was to keep the air away from the coals so they would produce the alchemical gas needed to separate the copper from the slag. Most of what he was doing seemed to be agitating the contents of the furnace to encourage the copper to sink down, adding more charcoal and ore as needed.

After what seemed far too soon, all the crushed ore had been poured into the furnace, and through the transparent walls, Lori could see shapes distorting, saw them break apart from the heat, exploding and striking the metal plate on top of the furnace. Each impact made her flinch, and she was glad the pieces were so small. That had probably been intentional.

It was a surprise to Lori when she looked outside and saw how dark it had gotten. At first she thought that they had worked until night, but as she stepped out of the little smithy to check, she realized the gloom had been caused by the dome and the angle of the sun. It seemed her estimate of 'three or four' tests had been overly optimistic. Outside the dome, snow had begun to fall, the clouds obscuring the sky further contributing to the twilight.

The workers seemed to have finished carting the ore into new piles and were cleaning up, the fire they'd been using for warmth burning low as Rian spoke to the woman who was keeping track of the progress on behalf of Binder Shanalorre, gesturing at the eight piles of ore. There was still some ore left in the trough of solidified dirt. She'd have to cover that, just to make sure none of it got misplaced or covered in snow…

"Will you need me to adjust anything else…" Lori faltered briefly, looking around wildly finally spotting the note to herself she'd written on the ceiling, "…Master Lanwei?"

The blacksmith paused, possibly thinking it over, more probably surprised she'd remembered his name. "I'll need you to let the furnace rest, your Bindership," he said.

"Will that be soon?" she said.

The blacksmith looked at the contents of the furnace, stirring it slightly with his poker. "A little bit more, your Bindership."

"Then I'll leave you to it while I deal with this," she said, stepping out.

She stepped back in to leave her wand behind and grab her staff, grabbing some lightwisps from the furnace, binding part of them to the head of her staff for light. The rest, she imbued and hung in the air to illuminate the piles, because it was too colors dark. The snowfall that was one of the reasons for that darkness had left a nearby dusting of snow. It wasn't particularly thick or dense—the snow had just fallen, after all—but it was better than nothing. By the time she was done gathering all the nearby snow into one cold ball of slush that glowed after over the cold, hard mud, the sun was barely a suggesting behind the hills to the east, and Lori the lightwisps on her staff as bright as she could endure, the sphere of radiance blocked in a little wedge towards her face so she wouldn't be blinded.

Lori just threw the slush on top of the pile of ore and solidified the water. Slowly, since unlike back home she couldn't just mitigate the sudden burst of firewisps squeezed out of the water by the process. She looked over the pile and nodded. No ore would be misplaced, and when the imbuement ran out, the cold of the ice itself would keep it solid through the night. Lori turned back head back to the covered smithy and jerked to a half as her staff remained embedded in the ice shell. Oh. Right.

She sighed.

After managing to detach her staff from the ice, she returned to the smithy to find the smith in the middle of holding a metal spoon over the open top of the furnace, preheating it to get rid of any moisture on the surface. On the ground next to the furnace was a bucket-like ceramic pot, i's open mouth wider than its base, with two long 'ears' for lifting, one of the tools they'd been carrying along on the Coldhold. It was never good to rely on someone else for buckets, after all.

"Your Bindership," he said, nodding to her. "Can you deactivate the heat so I can scoop out the slag? Then we can work on getting the copper out."

Lori nodded, and after anchoring the binding of lightwisps to the ceiling, she slipped her staff back inside one of the furnaces and grabbed her wand, touching the tip to the brim of the furnace to do just that. The contents of the furnace continued to glow, but that was merely from its own heat. "Firewisps deactivated," she called out.

The smith nodded in acknowledgement, and began using the heated spoon to scoop things out of the furnace. The familiar debris of slag was drawn out from the furnace and tapped into the bucket-like ceramic pot, where it quickly cooled down enough to stop glowing. This was deceptive, as they'd still be more than hot enough to cause droplets of water to flash into steam on contact, and the blacksmith was very careful to keep everything but the end of his spoon away from the inside of the bucket. Smoke and a strange, alchemical smell were rising from the bucket, though thankfully the slight breeze passing through the smithy kept it from lingering. The bucket had clearly been heated beforehand, as it wasn't making any distressing cracking and snapping noises. The glowing coals soon followed, what were left of them, tapped out on the ground to glow for longer than the slag.

"How are you two doing?"

Lori blinked, turning to see Rian stick his head into the smithy, one hand up to keep the light out of his eyes. "Progressing. The metal is cooling now, I think."

Rian nodded. "How are you doing, Lanwei?"

"Just getting the copper now, Lord Rian," the smith said. "There's not a lot of it. Only a third of the ore I put in seems to be copper. Maybe only a quarter."

"That… doesn't sound good?" Rian said, exchanging looks with Lori, who frowned.

"I'll know more when I can weigh it, my lord," the smith said. "And perhaps it was just a bad batch. Quality can vary. Your Bindership, is there any way to let more light back into the furnace? I can't see what's inside."

Lori nodded, tapping the outside of the furnace and deactivating the binding of lightwisps around it, the new, strange feeling of channeling magic over her outer skin making her tentative as she did so. Yes, she definitely needed to try this more. It was much more convenient than putting things close to her eye. Some of the things she hadn't understood in class at the time finally made sense now, and explained why so many of her classmates had been faster than her at forming bindings of lightwisps…

She shook her head, clearing it of such petty details as the blacksmith put aside his poker—also putting it into the tube of an unused furnace—before taking his tongs and carefully reaching inside the still-hot furnace. What he drew out was a large, slightly smoking mass that looked barely distinguishable from the slag he'd been removing save the fact it was large and solid. It even had a glowing coal stuck to one side.

"Is that it?" Rian asked.

"Once you get the slag off, Lord Rian," the smith said. He carefully put down the mass and reached into the furnace again, pulling out another similar mass. That was set down next to the other one too, then the tongs were set aside and he grabbed one of the buckets. The smith stepped out for a moment and returned with the bucket full of snow. Taking the tongs in hand again, he set the smaller of the masses in the bucket. Sizzling sounds immediately began to come from the bucket, the mass starting to sink down as its heat melted the snow into water, then flashed it into steam.

While this was happening, the smith placed one of the demesne's few copper-mesh screens over the slag bucket, then set all other tools aside as he readied the mortar and pestle. Lori, for her part, deactivated all the binding on the furnace save for the one keeping the ice solidified, conserving most of the imbuement for tomorrow. A little would be consumed just to keep the binding together, but at least this way she wouldn't need to rebuild the binding.

The smith moved the large mass to the mortar, then grabbed the pestle. "You might want to back away Lord Rian, your Bindership, piece sometime go flying and might hit you in the face."

Rian immediately took two steps back, while Lori stepped sideways to put the smith between the mortar and her as he began to pound away. From the sound of it, the mass was much softer and more brittle than the ore, and after a seemingly brief time, both chunks had been smashed. Setting aside the pestle, the smith picked up the whole mortar in a show of strength that made Lori's arms and legs ache just watching him and carefully tipped the contents of the pestle onto the copper mesh.

Dust and debris poured out, the former slipping through the screen into the bucket full of slag, the latter bouncing on top. Every so often the smith put down the mortar and sorted through the debris, tossing some aside and pouring the rest into another bucket. Eventually, the mortar was empty.

Lori stared into the bucket that was perhaps a three-quarters full of nuggets and spiky debris. Maybe two-thirds. "This is all the copper we were able to extract?" she said. Next to her, Rian tilted his head for a better look.

"I'm afraid so, your Bindership," the smith said. "It's still not completely pure either. There's slag there that we'll need another melt to get out, and the bucket has a lot of air. That batch didn't have a lot of copper in it. Sometimes it's like that. Maybe it was ore from the edges of the seam."

Lori frowned harder, then turned to Rian. "Is all the ore like that?"

Rian sighed. "I really couldn't tell. I'm not an ore expert. But going from what's left of the pile of ore you had to work with…" He shrugged. "Some of the other ore is greener, some less so. I'll have to take a close look tomorrow." He looked around, then sighed. "Do you two mind if we use this place as a guard post for the one who'll by staying up to watch over the ore? They'll also be able to watch the tools, since it's a bit late to bring them all back to the Coldhold." He sounded frustrated and annoyed, a very rare state of affairs for Rian.

The smith glanced towards her. "I don't mind, Lord Rian, though it's going to be a little cold for them."

"For me, you mean," Rian sighed. "I didn't really do much, so the others need sleep more than I do."

"No," Lori said instantly. "You keep the tally. I won't have us needing to repeat because your too tired to confirm the count. Pick someone else." A thought occurred to her. "Perhaps someone who stayed on the Coldhold. They didn't do anything."

Rian hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. It was a mark of how tired he probably was—record keeping was tiring, no matter what anyone said—that he didn't really try to talk press his idea. "Well… if you insist, your Bindership." He glanced around. "Though it might be cold for them… "

Lori waved a dismissive hand. "I'll make a binding for them. As long as they don't stick anything into it, it should last until morning." She'd need to put something over the opening to hold in the heat. "The two of you clean up while I do that, so we can all get to dinner."

"Yes, your Bindership," the both chorused. Both sounded tired, probably for different reasons, but there was no helping it. The work wasn't over until everything had been cleaned and put away.

Ignoring her hunger—she did not feel a gnawing in her stomach, she'd eaten at lunch—Lori set about doing just that.

She really wished she was in her demesne. Her nice, warm, brightly lit, comfortable demesne, with her bed, her almanac, her game boards, and someone to crush utterly…

Lori shook her head, glaring at the open back wall of the smithy and started to rub her hands together to create enough firewisps to start a new binding. She'd made an agreement, and she was keeping it!

But next time… nexttime… any agreement was going to include she could do everything from the comfort of her own demesne!