Although Dimitry gave up the commander’s quarters—the largest tent in the outpost—to the visiting princess, neither he nor Saphiria wasted time sleeping. They spent the night in deliberation. The most pressing issue was Tylo Sauer, the marquis who purportedly sought to oust the archbishop by alienating him from the populace with dispiriting magic. A clever route of attack. Dimitry derived his authority from belief, and disrupting those foundations would leave him powerless. Saphiria thwarted the first wave of sabotage, and unless they struck first, more would come, either from agents operating unseen or through direct declarations of war.

Saphiria and Dimitry agreed on a simple plan. On an upcoming Night of Repentance, Hospitallers wielding bombs, land mines, and black powder rifles would obliterate the heathens rampaging towards Malten.

The maneuver had many goals, two more important than the rest: to neutralize future defamation attempts by solidifying the Hospitallers as a benign force of unfathomable power, and to warn potential aggressors that marching against Dimitry would end in a fiery death. Whether Tylo, another noble, or someone else entirely served as the Church’s proxy, crippling dread would dissuade them and their henchmen from inciting violence. Which militiaman or thug would obey the order to charge towards ‘divine’ armaments?

While Dimitry didn’t assemble the Hospitallers to issue threats to their fellow countrymen, infighting would destroy Malten. Either through blades and gunfire or life in a war-torn land, tens of thousands of voiceless peasants would perish. He had to make his show of force grand. He had to douse the flames of conflict before they could surge.

But first, Dimitry had to develop firearms, train soldiers to use them, and manufacture enough to guarantee the outpost’s survival. Troops armed with theoretical weapons couldn’t defend Malten’s walls, nor could they remain deployed while heathens ravaged the base of operations they relied on for reinforcements and supplies. A secure coastal settlement was the foundation on which his strength could be built.

When Dimitry and Saphiria concluded their discussion, birdsong and the rising chatter of waking Hospitallers pierced the linen walls of their tent. To solve the issues of lacking defenses and offenses, she sent Leandra to call on the required artisans and figureheads, who filed into the commander’s quarters one by one.

Warnfrid the ever-punctual earl stumbled in first, limping on an intricate prosthetic leg. He knelt at the edge of the long table. “Your Royal Highness. Your Holiness.”

“Did you sleep well?” Dimitry asked.

“Throughout the night once more. I still think it odd that your men are not required to recite the gospel when they blunder, but the pain leaves me more with each passing day. Surely this is Zera’s love.”

That again. Dimitry’s followers often whispered about the lack of religious ritual, but with his ambitions to turn them into a people of inquiry, he hesitated to involve mysticism more than necessary. At least until he merged the two into one. Claricia composed a revised gospel for him even now. “As long as you worship Zera in private, you will always receive her blessing.”

“Of course I do. It’s just that if we mandate prayer like the Church used to, morale will—“

“Enough,” Saphiria said. Sitting on the widest chair at the table’s furthest end, her indigo eyes narrowed at the mention of the Church. “Be seated.”

Warnfrid’s gut jiggled as he plopped down beside Dimitry.

Next to enter was Moritz, the stout stonemason charged with rebuilding the heathen barrier. He was joined by Elias, and then by Clewin and Greta for a total of seven around the table with Saphiria at the fore. She looked down from her raised seat like a judge presiding over her court. “Dimitry, tell us why we’re here.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” He stood up. “As of this morning, only eleven days remain until the Night of Repentance. While we’re keeping our magic use low to avoid attracting heathens, with Malten’s enchanted walls directly to our east and sorceresses defending the inlet with voltech rifles, we can never be too prepared.”

“Taking precautions is wise, Your Holiness.” Greta swept her graying braids into a neat ponytail across her shoulder. “The heathens are many and behave strangely. I’ve been fighting them since my adolescence, yet even I cannot predict what they will do. They may organize into a raid and attack your settlement.”

“True enough. That’s why the first item on today’s agenda is the production of weaponry that can sustain us this month and in the months to come. Elias, how goes the smithy?”

The blacksmith’s bulging trapezius muscles touched his ears when he shrugged. “A log barn is not my preferred choice of housing for working with liquid iron, Your Holiness, but we should be able to make most things there.”

“Unfortunately, a log barn was all we could prepare in time.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. My men will do their best not to set it on fire.”

“Please do,” Dimitry said. “Have you made any progress on flintlocks?”

“Have I?” Elias’ eyes gleamed. “I’m confident I’ll have one working by late spring.”

Late spring? A year had fourteen months, and it was still mid-winter. Four or five Nights of Repentance would pass before Dimitry saw results. He was right not to rely on flintlocks.

“No sooner?” Saphiria asked. “They are vital to Malten’s security.”

His eager smile vanished, and he lowered his head. “Forgive my ineptitude, Your Royal Highness.”

“The blame is not yours. I have seen the schematics. Case hardening wrought iron into mild steel is troublesome, and developing the heat treatment techniques required for suitable springs is no simpler. The complexity of your task would dishearten even the most esteemed metallurgist.”

Elias’ stiff shoulders loosened. Massaging his glossy scalp, he leaned back in his chair and laughed. “It’s like I’m still talking to the late duke. Thank you for understanding.”

“Let’s hold back on the springs for now.” Dimitry disassembled a stack of slate boards and laid them across the table such that their chalk diagrams stood in order. “I want this made.”

Elias leaned in. Brows furrowed, he studied the impromptu schematics. “It’s just a voltech rifle, except with a hole drilled into the barrel like a flintlock, the same flash pan, and a fulcrum with a—wait, is the shading supposed to be magic?”

“Correct,” Dimitry said. “We’re replacing the complicated flint and steel mechanism with an ignia enchanted seesaw. Simple, right?”

“Simple, yes, but if I may be honest, a seesaw doesn’t sound all that comfortable to use during a battle. Also, an exposed ignia enchantment can burn down a village, so it’ll need some shielding. The placing is off, too. The design could use some work.”

“My visions aren’t always clear. That’s where you and Clewin come in.”

“Clewin, Your Holiness?”

Dimitry navigated around the table and stopped behind a young man with a deep scar traversing his shoulder. “My head chemist. At this point, Clewin knows black powder better than me, and you have more experience with flintlocks than anyone else in Remora. I’m confident that you two can perfect the weapon that’ll allow even a common man to smite the heathens.”

“I don’t know if I can live up to Zera’s expectations,” Elias said, “but I’ve been making rifles for twenty years now. Small modifications like these can be ready by evening.”

Perfect. Dimitry wasn’t an engineer, yet even he could rig magic to sidestep the dozens of screws and springs a flintlock required to ignite black powder. All he needed now was an enchantress. His gaze fell to the Fire Leader of the sorceresses. “Greta, may I ask for Katerina’s cooperation? Her skills are paramount to our success.”

“She is yours to command while we remain, but I must remind you: while I do not wish to hamper Zera’s ambitions, my sorceresses will leave for Malten in three days. We must help with the preparations for the Night of Repentance.”

Greta’s departure was an inevitability Dimitry had dreaded. His people needed protection until they could produce magic-assisted rifles, and from then on, they would need an enchantress to maintain their arms. He couldn’t do anything without enchantments. Fortunately, the princess was on his side.

“I understand your expedition abides by a contract with my mother,” Saphiria said.

“It is as you say, Your Royal Highness.”

“As there are no specific dates to abide by, you will not be in the wrong to delay your exodus. At least until the coastal territory can defend its borders.”

Greta rose from her chair and knelt on a single knee. “Your Highness, I implore you; we cannot remain. I fear a raid may strike the city sooner than last month.”

Saphiria paused. Caught between her wish for an expanded kingdom and the safety of her home, the girl bit her lip. She shot Dimitry a sorry glance.

Crap. At the very least, Malten’s overwhelming vol usage would attract most of the heathens. He just needed to survive the month.

“And the enchantress necessary for his armaments?” Saphiria asked.

“Katerina is required in Malten. Raina’s team struggles to weave the walls with protectia alone, and it is policy that an expedition must never leave a sorceress behi—“

“The wall is important, yet without a heathen barrier, the future is lost. You will make an exception. The enchantress stays.”

“Your Highness…” Greta looked up at Saphiria, but her quiet plea was met only with an unyielding stare. The aged woman then turned to Dimitry. Her wavering eyes carried desperation and guilt—the vestiges of a motherly commander who had lost countless subordinates in an endless war.

“She’ll be safe here,” Dimitry reassured her and those in the room who would stay the month. “Holy armaments have obliterated the heathens before, and they’ll do so again. I promise.”

“Yesterday’s demonstration lets me believe it’ll be so.” Greta stood up, and despite a conditioned physique, her advanced age showed as she lumbered out of the tent. “I will go tell Katerina.”

Dimitry took no pleasure in parting the woman from her charge, but now that he had secured an enchantress, he could invest in long-term research. “Clewin, we’ll be proceeding with that.”

“Naval mines and land mines?”

“Yes. And hand grenades. I want you to make them more powerful, using iron casings if necessary, and, more importantly, I need you to work with Elias to create an automatic trigger that reliably sparks the black powder on contact with an enemy.”

Clewin scratched the gray hair behind his ear. “You mean with ignia?”

“If an enchantment is what it takes, that’s fine. Katerina will be there to help you.”

“Dunno what a mine is,” Elias said, “but if all you need is a spark, working on the flintlock has made me quite familiar with flint and steel. Might have to get clever with the mechanism, though.”

“I leave the specifics to you,” Dimitry said. “Can you handle it?”

“A new holy weapon, huh?” Though Elias wore the unassuming guise of a poker player, his flexing pectorals took turns punching through a thick woolen tunic. “I look forward to the challenge, Your Holiness.”

Clewin bared a vindictive grin. “We’ll murder every heathen bastard to the last. I can’t wait to see them drown in their own blood.”

Hearing the chemist’s unhinged remark gave Dimitry second thoughts about leaving him in charge of black powder. Oh well. At least he was motivated.

“So that’s the face of the new crusade,” Warnfrid said. “Heathens dying far away without some kid having to risk his limbs. Looks like the world is changing once again, just like it did with seals and canisters thirty years ago.”

“Thing is, seals aren’t effective unless a mage is using them,” Elias said, "but even a kid can throw a bomb. If mines and rifles are the same, this’ll be bigger. A lot bigger.”

Moritz crossed his thick arms over his chest. “I’m just hoping they’ll be enough to protect Malten’s walls. Patching them up got real old real quick.”

“Keeps you employed, at least.”

“I’d rather know my grandkids’ll have a home tomorrow than keep my job. Maybe that day’s finally coming.”

Saphiria watched the men delve into the implications of black powder technology with greedy indigo eyes. Though she had never verbalized it, her focused gaze and the eagerness with which she had spoken of land mines all night had revealed her ambitions. The girl wasn’t here just to help Dimitry deal with Tylo. She needed weapons for her royal knights and sorceresses so they could better defend Malten.

Dimitry hesitated to give away his technology. Not because he distrusted Saphiria, but because every extra hand that explosives passed through further risked them being reverse-engineered by an antagonistic party. Their functioning had to remain a secret. Right now, he relied on the queen’s craftsmen to produce each weapon, but once mines and grenades grew in complexity and efficiency, he would compartmentalize their manufacture into many isolated steps so that a single snitch couldn’t leak all the secrets. But there was a lot of work to do before then.

To avoid wasting his time and the potential productivity of highly skilled artisans, Dimitry interrupted their conversation. “With the weapons handled, we’re moving on to the last matter: coastal fortifications. We’ll need a wall from which to throw bombs and shoot rifles.” He glanced at Moritz. “How long will it take you and your masons to rebuild the heathen barrier?”

“A long time, Your Holiness.”

“How long is a long time?” Dimitry asked. “Two months? Three?”

“It’s a bit complicated,” Moritz said. “Can I show you something?”

The conference disbanded at the princess’s command. Clewin and Elias left to develop black powder weapons, and Warnfrid tagged along to learn more about the rifles he would train the Hospitallers to wield. To rule out the Church’s direct involvement in recent events, Saphiria rounded up her royal knights and court sorceresses and traveled along the shore, searching the remnants of long-abandoned temples and the snaking cellars beneath for operatives.

Hoping she would avoid Precious’ underground faerie conditioning pit as he had warned, Dimitry trekked to the beach of the inlet where a heathen barrier once stood. Gulls squawked overhead, sand crunched beneath his boots, and rainbow-glowing voltech rifles crackled from the piers, targeting crawlers and carriers as they rose from the ocean depths. Soon, those heathens would become his problem.

Moritz crouched beside Dimitry. The stonemasons’ guildmaster appraised rubble and rummaged through stone until finally picking up two adjoined dark-speckled rocks. “See this, Your Holiness?”

“Granite?”

“I mean the crap, uh, the stuff holding the bricks together.”

Dimitry examined the coarse and milky sediment between the truncated granite fragments. His father had owned a construction company. Of course he knew what it was. “Mortar.”

“Yeah,” Moritz said. “Limestone mortar. It’s the binder we use to repair Malten’s walls, and it’s what the Church used to make the heathen barrier centuries ago.”

“I’m guessing that’s the problem? We can’t get enough mortar in time?”

“Kinda. The old quarry is close by, so getting the actual lime isn’t the hard part. It’s the preparation that’s troublesome.”

“I’m listening.”

Like a resident doctor struggling to summarize the danger of irregular insulin dosing intervals to his first diabetic patient, Moritz sucked in a deep breath. “Alright, so first, we quarry the lime and cook it in a kiln to make quicklime. This’ll take a couple days at most. No issue there. Then we submerge the quicklime in water. Now that’s a snag. You’ll be waiting a month or two before it becomes slaked lime good enough to lay bricks with.”

“It’s not like I expected everything to happen overnight,” Dimitry said. “Should I tell my men to start amassing charcoal and water?”

“That’s not it.” Moritz held out the granite brick sample in a calloused hand. “Try breaking off a piece of mortar, Your Holiness.”

“What for?”

“Just so you know what we’re working with.”

Dimitry scraped the surface with his nail, and a chunk of lime popped off. “It’s brittle.”

“Yeah, and this is lime at its strongest. Normally, it can take a few charges from a carapaced devil, but the hardness comes with time; months and months after the bricks are laid.”

“We’re talking about half a year before the barrier is built and becomes sturdy?”

“No, Your Holiness. Longer. The thing with slaked lime is that we couldn’t use it now even if we had some. The frost will freeze the water inside the putty until it cracks. You don’t want that happening to the heathen barrier. We can start building mid-spring at the earliest.”

At this rate, the colony would go defenseless for over a year. “Why did Her Royal Majesty send you here if she knew we couldn’t start the construction for months?”

“Well,” Moritz said, “she told me to quarry and cut granite ahead of time, but in truth, I think she was hoping Zera would send you a vision that’ll let us work faster. Frost is the reason I’m not back in Malten, repairing the collapsed northern gatehouse. We can’t do anything here or there.”

Dimitry sighed. The queen was using him as an idea machine.

Still, her idea deserved consideration. A blank relic remained from the day Dimitry raided Waira’s cache. What best to use it on? He had hoped to reproduce clear glass—a material with applications ranging from optics to chemistry equipment—but perhaps he should go a step further and involve other construction materials as well. Namely, Portland cement.

Dimitry had used cement when he helped his dad expand his childhood home. The mortar dried quickly and held well. He could also add the stone corpses of heathens as aggregate to make concrete. Houses, roads, walls. The applications were endless. He could build a real city.

But would medieval technology and the informational tidbits Dimitry picked up from his father suffice to reproduce cement? Flintlocks had proved a pain in his ass, and magic measures might not be enough for him to circumvent the gaps in his knowledge this time. He would wait and see the severity of the heathen situation before committing his last relic to a barrier, especially when the alternatives included high explosives like nitroglycerin and TNT.

However, if Dimitry went with cement, he had to be ready. Although tough, collecting cut granite would take too long. He needed a more expedient building material. “Can you make clay bricks?”

Moritz pulled back. “Clay bricks?”

“Yes.”

“I guess I can, but why would you want clay when you can have stone?”

“Because I think Zera might decide to send me a vision soon.”

The mason’s eyes widened. “Clay bricks it is, Your Holiness.”

Dimitry and Moritz had spent the afternoon organizing laborers. Masons dug deep in search of high-quality clay deposits, woodworkers carved rectangular brick molds, and lumberers cleared stumps to vacate space for a process Moritz called ‘weathering’. Apparently, exposure to freezing temperatures and thawing snow purified snow. While Dimitry didn’t understand the science, Moritz assured him that soon, workers would blend the putty with water and sand to form raw bricks, then fire them thousands at a time inside massive kilns.

Not long would pass before Dimitry accrued the building materials necessary for the heathen barrier and a small town, and to keep his options open, he also collected the much sturdier granite. Everything proceeded smoothly. All that remained now was for him to choose a mortar.

Absently watching his workers, Dimitry weighed the pros and cons of using the relic on cement or waiting for limestone.

As he stood there, a sooty-faced apprentice arrived to relay a message: “Y-Your Holiness. Elias says it’s ready.”

His response was, “already?”

Head down and incapable of looking Dimitry in the eye, the kid followed him to a wide barn whose hastily assembled log walls and bark roof protected blacksmiths and their rust-prone equipment from the rain and snow. Bellows huffed, hammers clanged, and tongs pulled charcoal from the blistering bowels of platformed forges.

Dimitry navigated the crowded interior and paced his breaths, forcefully exhaling whenever the acrid stenches of scorched metal and burnt sweat became overwhelming. Except for those too focused on the red-hot iron pieces in front of them, men knelt and raised an arm to Celeste as he passed, then resumed beating ingots into bowls and pots and pans—each unique shape a step on the path to discovering the perfect black powder mine.

Elias stood at the workshop’s furthest end, a red-robed sorceress on one side and a chemist on the other. He glanced back at Dimitry, smirked proudly, and stepped aside, revealing a device that lay on the anvil between Clewin and Katerina.

A voltech rifle.

Or it had been a voltech rifle. Now, a hole pierced the barrel’s side, a welded iron tray below the opening and the orange-glowing tip of a lever hovering above.

“That’s an ignia enchantment?” Dimitry asked.

Onyx eyes gleaming with satisfaction, Katerina grinned, and the mole on her upper lip rose with the movement. “Yes, Your Holiness. We designed it to be as efficient as possible. Cheap, quick to weave, and the trace amounts of vol I used shouldn’t attract too many heathens.”

Anticipation bubbling in his gut, Dimitry lifted the weapon that would save more lives than a lifetime of medicine ever could. He squeezed the trigger—an iron stick pivoting over a nail protruding from the stock—and the enchanted edge tapped the flash pan, which already contained the residue of spent black powder. “It works?”

Clewin leaned against an upright tool rack and beamed a triumphant smile. “Well, you told us not to shoot it yet, but the fire spread to the touch hole like Your Holiness said it should.”

Elias watched Dimitry as if seeking an appraisal for an obvious masterwork. “Well? What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Dimitry pressed the butt to his shoulder and aimed down the barrel. “I think it’s time we give it a go.”