The spirit beasts had found the wagons long before any in the caravan had seen them. The long, green grass, already frosted with yellow, simply exploded with noise. Sharp, horse noses, ululating, growling; the sound running through your ears and down your spine, pulling all the threads of your nerves and muscles tight as it went. The beasts weren’t very tall, so it was impossible to see them through the high grass. Still, one could track their movement through the runnels and traces they left as they moved. First there were only a few, then a few dozen, then Mazelton lost count.

Behind them, coming from the direction of the setting sun, were the Two Souled. They moved in a loose swarm, their stubby little cheve only a bit taller than the grass they rode through. The tribes folk themselves were tall, lean limbed and with faces weathered by harsh prairie sun and winds. Even at a distance, their posture was striking. Mazelton might not have been good on a cheve, but he knew plenty who were and the Two Souled were at least their equals. Back perfectly straight, shoulders back, elbows tucked in, one hand loosely holding the reins and the other not too near the bow hanging from the saddle. The real control came from their iron legs, the knees doing most of the steering. The rider wasn’t so much sitting on the cheve as pincering it. Their heels pointed slightly down in their leather stirrups- directly in line with their spine.

Two hundred yards from the camp, they stopped in a neat line. One young bravo rode out ahead, stopping fifty yards from the camp. She drew a lance decorated with strips of bright yellow cloth, and jabbed it into the ground next to her.

Toko walked out with a similar lance and did the same. The two conferred, nodded, and fell back, the lances remaining in the ground. After a short conference with Polyclitus, Toko and the drummer signaled to the caravan that the visit was to be a friendly one, and to stand down.

Nimu caravanners swiftly spread out some blankets and laid wares on them for the visiting tribes folk to peruse. The rest of the caravan was invited to join them with their own blankets… so long as they behaved. Naturally, Mazelton had his own blanket with the Nimu caravanners, the Bliack Trifolium fluttering proudly overhead. He got a lot of business.

The Tribe folk wanted… everything, basically, and were willing to trade a mountain of unpolished cores to get it. From their perspective, the cores were essentially hazardous waste. Being able to exchange them for heat stones, light cores or even insect barriers wasn't just worth it, it was nearly theft! Purification stones were popular too, though heat stones were far and away the most popular choice. That presented a bit of a problem for Mazelton, as he didn’t have many heat stones in stock. They were bulky, and the best of them had a very high concentration of core dust in them to create the heat. There was a bit of discussion, but it was agreed that he would work through the night and make a pile of them out of the cores the Two Souled provided. Tedious work, but easy enough.

Fuel was often in short supply on the plains. The Two Souled often relied on the dried dung of buffalo or cheve. When completely dried and compacted, it burned well enough to cook on. But you would definitely prefer to have a hot stone- no smoke in the tent in winter, no need to look for fuel, just all around better.

Mazelton grabbed a bowl of dinner, somewhat startled to see a Two Souled next to him in line. Apparently, swapping food was a popular trade- the Caravaneers were sick of their own food, and vice versa. The dehydrated vegetables were quite popular. In exchange, the Two Souled offered “dried soup.” Basically little shards of dense, brown, rubbery material that kept quite a long time when properly wrapped and dry.

“Sort of like using kelp sheets to make broth?” Mazelton asked Cookie.

“Same basic idea, yeah, except this just dissolves in boiling water. You don’t fish it out again.”

Mazelton looked interested, and managed to barter a small bag of salt for an equal sized bag of dried soup. The Two Souled quickly slipped away, looking annoyingly pleased about the deal. Mazelton shrugged and added a couple of fingernail sized pieces to the bean soup. It took an annoyingly long while for the dried soup to fully dissolve, but the smell was…

How do you describe a smell? “Brown,” like roasted vegetables or bean curd, no darker than bean curd got, the “brown” of nuts the street vendors toasted on their griddles. A touch sweet, but just a touch, and almost impossibly savory. Like a mushroom stock, but inexplicably different. It wasn’t fatty, really, but the slippery smooth feeling on his lips was like nothing else he could describe except… oily. All of a sudden, the stodgy beans and compressed “vegetables” were born again- contrasting and supporting each other, like little gems glinting on black velvet.

Well. That might be a bit of an overstatement. But it was damned good! He soaked a hardtack biscuit in the broth while he ate the beans and vegetables. When it was finally soft enough to eat, well, nothing was going to make hardtack good, but it was a lot better than usual. Three cheers for dried soup!

Making heat stones, good heat stones, the kind of heat stones that were used in kitchens up and down the Eastern Edge and every other civilized place, was an industrial process. That means big machines and lots of people, he once kindly, and loudly, explained to a visitor from the Southern Archipelago. To which the fellow took offense and tried to demonstrate his masculine superiority by doing a quintuple backflip off of a tower and into the river running next to the city. Mazelton didn’t see the results, having made some interesting new friends and even more interesting narcotics. But the point stood. You needed an absolute tonne of core dust, sieves to clear out the unwanted crud, clean sand, a few minerals, just a tiny smidge of water and vast, vast pressure. Huge pressure compacting everything down into a slab that would heat a home and cook food for years to come.

Building a heat stone production line took years of careful design, investment, maintenance and of course, easy access to immense quantities of dust. Or if you were the Ma clan, you pulled the relevant plans from a clan archive, swapped polished cores for the materials, used the Clan as your labor pool, and started tidying up all the loose hot dust in your vicinity. Not that others hadn’t tried, of course. Very basic technology, and certainly no secret. But the costs tended to be prohibitive, and even the successful lines tended to shut down after their owners spontaneously shed their own skins and dissolved into screaming heaps of tumors and brittle bones. Briefly screaming, thankfully.

People always complain about health and safety until they are the ones hurt. The Ma clan tended to loundly tut about that as they took over and dismantled the dangerously defective competing lines. Just look at these accidents. You wouldn’t think it could happen to a person sixty kilometers away, sitting at a table full of witnesses who saw nothing. But it does. All the time.

But Mazelton didn’t have any of that so he winged it with a sack of crummy little unpolished stones, probably from hunted animals. Grind them down in a carefully designed mortar and pestle (dust control being a major feature), then mix with clean… ish… sand sived from the stream, a bit of water, a touch of clay then form it into bricks. Then, while keeping it in its wooden frame, get an auroch to stand on it for a bit. Was it as good as a six tonne industrial drop hammer? No. Was it going to have to do? Yes. Mazelton thought about trying to pad them or something, maybe line a wooden frame, then realized that a: he didn’t have the wood or nails for that, b: he wasn’t a damned joiner and c: eighty percent of the profit from this exercise was going to Nimu. So fuck it, really. Enjoy your heat stone, don’t drop it, bang it, or put anything too heavy on it. All sales final. Good luck.

He only slept for two hours that night. His customer service mindset was not fully engaged come dawn, when a cold nose sunffled him into consciousness.

The creature was waist high, as Polyclitus had said. Tail was about as long as Mazelton’s forearm and not too wide- a few inches across, most of which was fur. The coat was short and dense, a tawny gray, mottled with lighter and darker patches. Pointy, triangular ears perched on a pointy triangular face. He hadn’t tied his tent closed last night. The spirit beast clearly figured that was a good enough invitation.

Mazelton held very still. Partially because he wasn’t completely awake, and partly because he had the immense urge to just hug the crap out of the beast. He just knew that rolling around with it on the ground would be the very best thing ever, and if he had any treats or snacks the beast might like, it would be his honor to offer them. But he didn’t feel like catching a beating first thing in the morning, so he held still. The beast finished sniffing at him, sat down, sneezed, let its tongue hang out like it was laughing, then stood up again and wandered away.

An inexplicable feeling of profound guilt sank down on Mazelton. It seemed untethered to anything he could think of. At least, he hadn’t done anything that he was feeling guilty about in the last few months. Before, sure, but not recently. Something to do with the beast? But he had never seen one before, so how could he have wronged it? He shook it off and stumbled off for breakfast.

The pile of hot stones, already uncomfortably warm and getting hotter as the sand absorbed the heat from the cores, were duly swapped for a large sack of unpolished cores, some feathers, some dried berries Mazelton didn’t recognize and, horribly, hides. They were treated, somehow, to shed water better and not to shrink. Apparently you could use the hides for all sorts of things. If you were some kind of damned monster, forsaken by Father Sun, Mother Moon and the Dusty World alike. In the daylight, Mazelton could see that the Two Souled made their tents out of these flayed skins. It made him sick. It made him even sicker when he realized that they were wearing it for clothes too.

He might have been a little forceful when he told them that, no, he couldn’t build them heat weapons. He went back to his tent and took his time packing up, hoping the tall bastards would piss off by the time he struck the tent.

Apparently the trade session had gone so well, they would be traveling together for the next few days. And they would bring more bands over- this was just a small clan within a much bigger tribe. A tribe that would really want cores. And rifles. And ammunition.

Every time Mazelton saw the spirit beasts, he felt an immense sadness and guilt. He envied the Two Souled- the animals were superb spiritual beings, far, far superior to their tribal “guardians.” He was starting to wonder if they were using some sort of magic to affect his thoughts. It would explain the human servants they employed.

He quickly mixed together some blood, salt and ash, then rubbed it on his glabella. Nope, still affected. Not a curse.

The Two Souled seemed to be taking an unwholesome interest in his wagon, too. There was always somebody riding nearby. From what they said, they didn’t have a polisher legacy, and attempts to copy the carvings on cores didn’t seem to work well. Which is why they were so happy to have him visiting their lands! Incidentally, they had heard amazing things about heat weapons, could he demonstrate?

The day was not going well at all.