They did try again. With a much lower temperature. Elrick checked the crucible after a few minutes, but the ingot was still solid.

They buried the crucible again and took turns pumping the bellows. Elrick watched closely for signs that the temperature was actually going up. It was difficult to maintain a slightly higher temperature over a prolonged period, but he did it the best he could without allowing any fluctuations to happen.

They checked the crucible again, and again, and again. On the seventh temperature increase, when Elrick dug out the crucible, the ingot was just beginning to melt.

He made a mental note of the temperature. Without a modern thermometer, he couldn’t just say that it had a melting point of 576 degrees, but he had been mining and smithing long enough now to have developed a very good sense of temperature. He knew how much to pump the bellows, for how long, and what signs to look for. He’d know to pump a little bit harder in the morning or in the evening, and a little bit less during mid-day, with the desert sun high up in the sky.

“We need it just a tiny bit higher,” Elrick whispered, burying the crucible again.

“Don’t burn it,” Jocha whispered back.

The two men nodded, and Elrick took the bellows. He bumped ever so slightly harder, aiming to increase the temperature by something like ten degrees. When he thought he’d held a ten-degree increase for around three minutes, he gestured for Jocha to dig out the crucible.

They both peered in and saw molten slippery bronze.

“Why isn’t it shimmering anymore?” Jocha asked.

Elrick wasn’t listening, he grabbed the tongs and picked the crucible up. He held it over the mold for the shield, and he poured with a quick and confident motion of the tongs.

The molten slippery bronze spilled out to the edges of the mold, then began to visibly harden after just several seconds—during which Elrick didn’t breathe at all.

“It worked?” Jocha said.

Elrick didn’t want to jinx it by saying anything. He instead just grabbed a bucket of water and dumped it on the shield to cool it.

It didn’t crack, and it looked like a shield.

“But it’s not shimmering,” Jocha said.

“It’s not. Can you go find Yaraka?”

“Me?”

“Didn’t you say you’re close with her?”

He laughed nervously. “I said I’m closer to her than any of those dune rats are.”

“So you want me to go get her?”

“You’re the one that she talks to more.”

Elrick sighed and went to go find her.

He didn’t find her until later that night, at which point Elise was already back from the farside of the mountain, her bags full of potion ingredients. Durka had a full chest of neatly chopped lumber which he was going to use to make kegs out of.

“I’ll make you more spigots tomorrow,” Elrick said.

Elise and Durka nodded to them, and he waited for them to leave before he approached Yaraka.

“Jocha and I need your help testing something.”

“Why did you wait for Elise to leave before telling me?”

“Because,” Elrick said, “she doesn’t know she wants me to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Jocha and I made a shield out of the slippery bronze, but we need to make sure it works.”

“Why wouldn’t it work?”

“It’s not shimmering.”

“It won’t work then,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen the Coppersmiths producing slippery bronze armor. It’s always shimmering. You must have done something wrong.”

“Can you at least just test it for us?”

“Fine, but if Elise asks me, I will tell her.”

“Fine.”

When Elrick arrived with Yaraka, Jocha was sleeping on the sand, under the animal skin tarp they’d build for the forge. He must have fallen asleep before the sun had even gone down.

He snapped awake. “Yaraka! Welcome to our forge.” He shot her a toothy grin as he picked up the shield.

“It’s not shimmering,” she said.

Elrick rolled his eyes, but made sure he was looking away from Yaraka so she couldn’t see it. “I know it’s not shimmering. We have to test it though, don’t we? Maybe it still works?”

Yaraka shook her head, but Elrick strapped the shield on. He’d show her that he believed in it.

There was a stack of bronze ingots on the ground, and Yaraka reached down and tapped one with her finger. A tiny little bead separated from the ingot, but this time Elrick knew exactly what spell she was using to do that. She floated the bead up in front of her face, and it hardened as it spun, forming a perfect sphere.

“Why don’t you shape it like an arrow head? It would fly better.”

“I can’t spin an arrowhead,” she said, “spinning at a high speed gives excellent stabilization.”

“I see.”

He was holding the shield up, bracing for impact.

No impact came though, at least not anything more than a little love tap. Yaraka propelled the sphere forward, slower than Elrick walked, until it was inches from his shield.

He looked down and frowned, remembering how the sphere had wobbled violently as it entered the golems’ null fields. If the sphere was still spinning perfectly smooth this close to his shield, it either wasn’t working, or the null field was so weak that it wouldn’t do anything.

The sphere moved the last few inches, and when it made contact with his shield, it started to press into it, like a hot knife through butter.

“Okay,” he said, “so it isn’t working.”

Yaraka pulled the sphere back and guided it inside of the ingot. It melted right back into the ingot.

Elrick looked down at his shield and saw a hole about one-inch deep. The regular bronze had bored right through it.

“Not only does it not work,” Yaraka said, “but it’s weak like all slippery bronze.”

“What?”

“Slippery bronze barely does anything against regular bronze. It’s good at stopping magic, and very bad at stopping swords, or in this case, little balls of metal. A normal bronze shield would have been a lot harder to bore through than that.”

Jocha ripped the shield out of Elrick’s hand and studied the hole, frowning at it. “You saw them making the stuff, Yaraka, how did they do it?”

“I don’t know anything about smithing,” she said, “it looked like how they always do it. A lot of grunting, pumping, and pouring.”

“Great,” Jocha said, “big help.”

“You’re welcome,” Yaraka said, completely ignoring his sarcasm. “I’ll be off now.”

She turned her back and walked away, leaving Elrick and Jocha with a useless shield. It didn’t dissuade Elrick though, he just needed to experiment with different temperatures.

Jocha started pacing back and forth after she was gone. “She’s going to tell Elise.”

“Then let’s melt this shield down and try again. We won’t get in trouble if we show her that we can do it.”

They melted the shield down, using the same temperature Elrick had established as the melting point, and poured it into an ingot mold.

It still wasn’t shimmering even after it hardened.

“I’m going to try a higher temperature,” Elrick said.

They got the ingot and the crucible back under the sand, and they pumped the coals until they were a bit hotter than before.

Elrick checked the molten ore and frowned, because it wasn’t shimmering. “We’re still going to pour this one,” he said.

“Why?” Jocha said, “it’s not shimmering.”

“Because maybe it needs to cool before it shimmers. If we go too hot, we burn it again, and then we’re down two ingots instead of one.”

“Or maybe we already broke it,” Jocha said, “and no matter what we do, it won’t shimmer again.”

“Maybe,” Elrick said, but we have to test it slowly. Gradually. We need to be able to repeat results.”

Jocha grumbled, but he still helped, and they poured out another shield. It hardened, but didn’t shimmer.

“Melt this down,” Jocha said, “and put the ingot on the bottom of the pile. Hopefully Elise never notices we—”

“No,” Elrick said, “we try again.”

He forced Jocha to try over and over, and after several hours and almost a dozen failed attempts, they poured out a shield, and as it hardened, it began to shimmer.

Elrick fistpumped, and Jocha collapsed to his knees in relieved exhaustion.

“What are we celebrating?” a voice asked.

They looked up and saw Elise. Jocha jumped up to his feet, and Elrick crossed his arms.

“I just forged a shield out of slippery bronze,” Elrick said, looking down at the shield—still in the mold.

“We did,” Jocha said, voice meek for once. He wasn’t sure if he should be trying to take credit, or if it was better to have been coerced. He was probably hedging his bets.

“So you used up our priceless slippery ingots, thinking you could make better use of them than I could?”

“You were just going to sell them,” Elrick said, “and whoever bought them from you would profit from them. Now that we can craft with them, we reap the full rewards.”

“So we have a slippery bronze shield,” Elise said, “do you think it’s going to be easier to sell a bunch of shields than it would be to sell the ingots? My connection in Rakote wanted ingots, not shields, not swords, not armor. Ingots. Now we’re an ingot short.”

“Two ingots short,” Jocha whispered behind Elrick, not loud enough for her to hear.

“The ingots were a one-time thing,” Elrick said. “We got lucky—”

“Lucky! We barely got out alive.”

“And whose fault is that?” Jocha asked.

“I spared you both!” Elise said, jabbing her finger at both of them in turn.

“I guess I should be kissing your feet then,” Jocha said, “thank you ever so much for not slitting my throat.”

“Elise,” Elrick said, trying to defuse the tension. “Think about it. We can use this to make ourselves immune to magic. We’ll have a huge advantage when we start raiding the river. And it might be harder to sell this stuff, but it’s worth more. We can try selling piece by piece—or bartering with the Kalhu.”

“One chest’s worth,” she said, her anger cooling. “You can use one chest to craft with. If I don’t see serious results from it, then the rest is going to be sold. If we are short money for passage to Antium because of this, you two are not coming with us. Understood?”

They both nodded, and after Elise was well out of sight, Jocha turned to Elrick and hissed under his breath. “What was that you said about her not being in charge for long? I don’t like taking orders from women, at least not from so many of them all at once.”

“Once we start raiding the river, everything will fall into place. We’ve got too much preparation done and not enough action. As soon as Elise sees us reaping the rewards of our work, she’ll come around to our side.”

“You think I ever have a shot with her?” Jocha asked.

“A shot with her?”

He shrugged. “You know. A shot. Like shooting my shot right up into her, if you get my drift.”

“She hates you.”

“That makes it hotter, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t think you have any chance.”

“I’ll bet you I do.”

Elrick was never big on gambling, but this felt like a free win. “Sure. Let’s say...thirty gold?”

Jocha laughed. “None of us have any gold.”

“We will soon enough, well, I will, you’ll be paying all of yours straight to me.”