NOVEL NEXT Chapter 58 - Oil and Ore
Chapter 58 - Oil and Ore
The rest of the day wasn’t bloodless. Other crocs tried to make a meal of harvest teams, and not all of them failed before they were driven off. But by the end of the day, we’d managed to collect 31 chooms of iron ore, and I described the process of a bloom furnace to the ignis boss, Promo, over a dinner of roasted croc tail. It was, by far, the best thing I’d eaten since coming to Rava. Even if the igni couldn’t work fire or ceramics or swing a hammer, they were worth it for the cooking alone.
I spent the rest of the daylight helping the goblins make large jars to store and transport the oil the boglins had brought to trade that was currently held in several leaky skins that Ringo’s advisor insisted were not part of the deal.
They’d figured out a pottery wheel of sorts—albeit one where the clay remained stationary, and the goblins spun around it on a greased bearing. It was quite fascinating to watch, really, especially when they got two or three goblins on the same wheel with different ideas about what they were trying to make.
We were up to 12 chooms of bog oil. The consistency was close enough to kerosene that I hoped it would burn in an engine without additional processing. But first, I still had to make the engine. Tomorrow we’d be building our first furnace for smelting iron ore.
I sat back after dinner and watched the goblins. At some point, the little blue fuzz-balls had adopted graffiti based on the only reference imagery they had: engineering drawings. Flat surfaces within easy reach of a goblin were covered in iconographic schematics of the various technologies we’d unlocked so far. Parsing their art was like watching a chronological progression of our path through the Goblin Tech Tree. Strange way to start a culture movement, but the engineer in me approved.
At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before they developed a pictographic language. I didn’t want to interfere with that process because it’s very rare to see something like that manifest naturally in a primitive culture. Not that anything about the goblins was natural, or even sensical. Hell, I still had only working theories as to how the reproduction of goblins worked. My current working guess was that it had to do with the hot, damp, dark environment created within the sleeping mounds—though the fertilization and growth process was still a mystery. Goblins weren’t just animals, though I had my reservations about classifying them as complex carnivorous plants or myconids without more evidence.
A wave of cheers brought my attention around to several goblins trying to stand a pole upright that had been decorated with croc-knocker bones and capped with the top skull and jaw of one of the beasts. Looking at the stripped skull, it looked less like a crocodile and more like an iguana or chameleon, or something. But the moniker was already lodged in my brain.
The goblins present all took a collective breath and then, for the first time that day, none of them made any noise.
It was actually disconcerting. I looked out over a crowd of puffed out cheeks and bugged eyes as the goblins stared each other down, each daring the rest to be the first to release the breath. I worried they were going to start to pass out.
Eventually, one of them cracked and let out a gasp, which propagated through the crowd, followed by jeers at the half of the goblins that gave up sooner—which then led to a minor civil war as the goblins who couldn’t hold their breath as long began assaulting the rest. It all devolved into chaos within a few seconds as they forgot what they were fighting about and just started biting and punching anything that happened to be close by. Even Promo was wading through the crowd, laying into goblins with his hooked rod, and of course the hobbies were giving it their all even if they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. In the end, the indivisible singular goblin was the great equalizer as their masses rolled over the variants.
All this over a skull on a stick. But, then, I’d never really understood art. I leaned back by the fire, watching the chaos unfold. Sometimes, it was good to be the king.
* * *
“More heat!” I called.
The goblins worked the impellers on the furnace by the light of the rising sun. Promo stood with the other ignis that had been born at the bog camp (now Village Huntsville) the previous night and dumped baskets of charcoal into the bloom furnace. Smoke billowed out the top, along with an acidic tang that I surmised was the bacteria in the iron nodules within the furnace.
Making iron in a bloom furnace wasn’t all that dissimilar to firing ceramics. You needed a chamber hotter than the hottest boil on Satan’s big, red behind, and you needed lots of air and heat.
It took hours for the furnace to melt down all the iron, and I couldn’t even check the progress of it. But we were following the book almost exactly—with a few modifications to account for differences in goblin methodology. But we had to be getting close. I could feel the anticipating building.
Don’t you mean ‘bloom’ furnace?
I felt a rumble start to mount beneath my feet. That wasn’t anticipation shaking the dirt.
My eyes went wide, and I whistled for everyone’s attention. “Get down!” I shouted. “Now!”
Most of the goblins had learned pretty quickly that when I gave an order with urgency that it was in their best interest to comply, so most of them dropped what they were doing and dove for the floor, pressing their hands over their heads to stop any imminent debris. The goblins working the impellers weren’t fast enough, and when the furnace exploded, it took both of them with it, and knocked me to the ground.
Clay chips ricocheted off the brick tower, the trees, and rained from the sky for several seconds. When I looked up, the whole front face of the furnace had erupted outward, carving a path right through the cranking station while—amazingly—leaving the impeller assemblies completely intact.
While I felt bad for the goblins, impellers were a few orders of magnitude more rare. I picked myself up and dusted off my fur. The furnace was a mess, but I could see something glowing under the collapse. I grabbed a wooden pole and moved up, ready to call the whole thing a disaster. But then I saw it: the red-hot glowing billet at the bottom of the furnace.
I wedged the wooden pole underneath and dislodged it. The iron rolled down the base of the furnace, shooting off sparks.
“Promo!”
“On it, boss!” shouted the ignis, grabbing a set of wooden tongs and examining the rough mix of iron and slag. He tipped it over, examined it from all sides. “To the stump!” he declared.
The goblins in the village cheered. They ran to the makeshift forge we’d been able to scrape together. A stump sat in the middle of the area with narrow wooden log sitting above. The goblins who had followed us from the furnace area raced to be the firsts to grab a series of ropes that fed into pulleys that were, themselves attached to the pole. The goblins leapt up and hauled down, and the pole lifted from the stump.
Promo was quick to lever the iron underneath the pole before the thing came crashing back down, compressing the iron and knocking off some of the impurities. The goblins on the lines were pulled off their feet, but they yanked back down and began a see-saw between their weight and the pole hammer. I watched as Prometheus got the billet turned every which way as they hammered it.
Shouldn’t I get an unlock for the forge hammer?
I feel like there might have at least been some difference. But what do I know? I was only bringing my tribe into the iron age.