Lira rose without flourish.
She was a small woman in working leathers, her brown hair pulled back into a working knot at the base of her skull, her sleeves rolled to the elbow over forearms that had a low layer of stone dust on them she had not entirely scrubbed off before the meeting started. The smudge of black on her jaw from the morning was still where it had been. She did not appear to know about it. Her hands stayed folded one over the other on the table in front of her.
"My lord. Council." She did not open a ledger. "I will be brief on the parts that don't need numbers and slow on the parts that do."
Harold nodded with a smile. Lira was a favorite of his. Without her, the Landing would not be where it is today.
"Mining first." A small breath. "We have closed all but two of the mines and den-site operations inside the basin floor over the past two months. The risk profile became unacceptable as we mined deeper. We're consolidating the bulk of the operation into secure sites in the mountain passes — one at the south pass into the Silverfin region, one at the north pass towards the blackjaws. Both are guarded by a century at minimum, both run earth crafter shifts day and night, both feed convoys back into the basin daily."
A small finger lift on the table. "We are also surveying the rest of the basin's mountain edge for richer sites. The known good sites we've inherited from the integrated territories are profitable and stable while my survey teams are out looking for better sites."
Bram leaned forward in his chair. "Can we get that survey data, lass?"
Lira turned toward him.
"Of course, Master Bram. I would welcome any help you could provide on this front." A pause. "The demands of the County are great. We are too few to properly feed it."
"Aye." Bram nodded once. "I'll have my chief surveyor with you by the end of the week. We'll find what's there."
"Thank you."
She turned back to the table. "We are not running the mines our sworn lords operate on their own territories. We know what they're extracting and at what rate, but we are not buying their output. Lord Caswell, Lord Brennig, Lord Fitch, Lady Maren and Lady Renna all have working sites. Lady Maren and Lord Fitch operate a joint operation on the ridge between their territories that has been productive enough that we have, in fact, been exporting ingots to Lord Caswell to keep his small forges running."
"And much obliged for the iron, mate," Caswell said, with a small toast of his cup.
"On the basin's own ore demand," Lira continued, "we are not extracting enough to satisfy what Councilor Caldwell, Councilor Beth, and the Imperial Legion are collectively asking for. Part of that is genuine deposit access — the new sites in the passes haven't fully ramped. Part of it is transport. Our wagon fleet can't move what we cut at the rate we'd need to be moving it. Once the river barges are in the water, the transportation problem improves. It is the reason two of the ports are positioned where they are." A small pause. "We will need those barges in the water before next summer, or we will be choking on our own production."
Beth, across the table, nodded once without looking up.
"Tin." Lira's hands stayed folded. "Still short. The Vellan and southern coast purchases Councilor Caldwell mentioned have closed the immediate gap. The basin itself has not yet yielded a good tin seam. The mountain survey is partly aimed at finding one. If Master Bram's people can help us find one, I will be in his debt."
"You'll be in my debt for a tankard," Bram said. "We share these things."
"Done," Lira said with a small smile.
"Good news, the only piece I have today." Lira looked up at Harold. "Our earth crafters' productivity on shaft work is now significantly above what it was six months ago. They don't help us identify ore, and they don't help us extract it, but they cut shafts faster and more soundly than any hand-tool crew could, and shaft work is the slowest part of any operation. We're seeing tunnel safety improvements as well — fewer collapses, fewer accidents, fewer lost crew days."
Hargen, three seats down, had set down his sketch.
He looked at Bram. Bram looked back, pulled once on his beard, and nodded.
Hargen stood up.
He stood up on the bench rather than off it, which raised him to closer to Caswell's seated height, and his boots planted on the wood with a small thump. He swayed once, caught himself with a hand on Caswell's shoulder.
"My lord." His voice came out a half-step deeper than his usual. "Council. I'll keep it short."
"You've all watched a smith work iron. Watched a bar of plain stock become a blade that'll open a man between two breaths. Eh?"
A handful of nods around the table.
"The dwarven smith does that because he knows iron. Knows it past the word for knowing. He's felt it cold, he's felt it hot, he's felt it sing on the anvil when it's ready and sulk when it's wrong, and he's wrecked a hundred bars learning how the hundred-and-first behaves. After enough of it, the knowing settles in. Sinks past the hands, into the bones, into our breath." A blunt thumb came up. "We dwarves call it Insight."
“You humans have it easy.”
"A perk is a gift. Handed down on a plate by your own gods. An Insight is the opposite. It's a debt. You bleed for it, sweat for it, ruin a thousand pieces of stock earning it, and you carry it the rest of your life. Our bodies remember insights." Hargen tapped the side of his own forehead. "Library won't teach it. Sit a young smith in a library for fifty years reading about iron, and you'll get a man who talks pretty about iron, might be able to seduce a bar of iron, but he will never make it his own. Sit him at a forge for fifteen, and you'll have someone else entirely. The forge does the teaching. A book just remembers what other folks bled to learn."
He stepped down off the bench more carefully than he had stepped up onto it, walked the four paces to the granite wall behind Harold's chair, and laid his palm flat against the stone.
The granite covered his hand.
It took it cleanly to the wrist, the stone parting around his palm and closing around his wrist, holding there, and Hargen turned his hand inside the rock. When he removed it, a hand-shaped map of the basin was set into the wall. He wiped his palm against his beard. “This is my insight into stone for I am primarily a smith.”
The room had gone very still as some tried to get a better view of Hargens' creation.
"That, then." Hargen pointed back at the basin without turning to look at it. "Stone is stubborn. I'll admit it freely — after bashing my head against it for fifty-some years, I'll grant stone is more stubborn than me. Stone wants to move along its grain. In mass. In slabs. The way a river would carve it if a river had a few centuries to spare. I move it the way it wants to be moved. That's the whole of my Insight — bulk, weight, the moving of stone in the quantities it agrees to move in. In turn, my hits will generate a lot more mass and power than you might expect."
He held up his other hand.
"You want a stone rose carved fine for your wife's grave, find yourself a finework-hand or that lass that carved that fine carving over there, some dwarf who's spent his life learning the small. I'll move you a wall, close you a tunnel, lift a road's worth of slab off the bedrock and set it across a river quiet as you please. Fine work, you'll get a brick where you asked for a sculpture, and we'll both be embarrassed."
A short laugh from Caswell, Hargen's face stayed calm.
"So that's the shape of it." He looked at the council. "Insight has a shape. Mine's wide. A smith's might be narrow and sharp. A brewmaster might be the breath of a barrel and the patience of yeast." He thumped the wall behind him with one knuckle. The wall did not appear to mind. "My people will teach yours. Earth crafters first, since Lira's section is who'll move with us most. We don't get the perks you humans do. Dwarves are different. We grow stronger by the Insights we earn. Your perks are a system handing things to you on your accomplishments. Our Insights are a road we walk. Different than cultivation. Cultivators can both learn the same thing and get different outcomes. We learn how the world works; it can be taught, but it has to be learned by each person personally."
He looked at Bram.
Bram nodded.
"Any of yer crafters want a longer answer," Hargen finished, "I'll have a forge by the end of the week, and the door's open. I'll have ye swinging a hammer inside the hour."
He climbed back down off the bench more carefully than he had climbed onto it, sat down beside Caswell, who clapped him once on the back.
Harold did not speak for a beat.
Lira's hands had not moved from the table. She inclined her head a degree toward Hargen, who returned the gesture from his bench, and she went back to her brief.
"Farming." A small finger lift. "We have approximately forty-four thousand acres under active cultivation across the basin, with the largest concentration centered around Veridia and spreading east along the lower river valley. We have crews still clearing fields. The clearing rate has slowed since the spring rush but has not stopped."
"Summer yields enough food to feed approximately seventy thousand people for the year." She looked at Anil. "Roughly seventeen thousand more than the basin's current census. The surplus accounts for spoilage, garrison rations, the open invitation arrivals between now and the next harvest, and an emergency reserve held in the Landing's silos for distribution if we lose a section of the harvest to weather or to monsters."
"Good number, Councilor," Anil said quietly.
She turned a small page in her head. "Seed stock for next year's planting is in. Councilor Caldwell's spring buying has padded the stockpile beyond our budget, which means we can also support the smallholder farms coming. We've authorized about 300 new family farms across the basin over the past six weeks. Each one is on a five-year loan from Councilor Caldwell's office at favorable terms, repaid in crop share rather than coin until the loan closes."
"What are we growing?" Harold said.
"Wheat, barley, oats in the grains. Beans and root vegetables in the staple line — turnips, beets, carrots, parsnips. Cabbage and a hardier Gravesend variant of cabbage the integrated villages call bell-cabbage that holds through frost better than the Earth strain. Onion, garlic, leek. Squashes of three kinds. Apple orchards in the upper basin slopes are being developed. We have an experimental block of our own Gravesend grains; the southern villages have been growing."
"What's it called?"
"We call it grey-corn, my lord. It's red. Don't ask me, ask the villager who grew it."
Caswell laughed quietly into his cup.
"Last on the farming side." Lira's hands folded back. "Rock chickens. We've placed coop networks across the cultivated fields. They are the small grey fowl native to the basin — hardy, productive, indifferent to predators of their own size, and useful in three ways at once. They eat the insects that would otherwise eat the crops. They fertilize the soil at a constant rate. And they lay eggs that don't quite taste like your own Earth chicken eggs but are close. The co-op network has significantly reduced our pest losses. They are, in my opinion, the best thing the basin has going for it agriculturally."
"Livestock?" Harold asked.
"Substantial." She looked at Caldwell. "Councilor Caldwell's spring buying brought in eleven hundred head of cattle, eighteen hundred swine, twenty-three hundred sheep. We will winter all of them comfortably. The basin has mild winters by most reckonings — frost rather than freeze on most days, a few weeks of heavier snow at the higher elevations — and our barn-and-pasture rotation gives us better winter survival. We expect a strong spring barring any new events."
"Logging." She turned a small page in her head. "Per your standing instructions, my lord, we are not clear-cutting any of the basin's forest. We are selective-cutting on a sustainable rotation. The rule has slowed the lumber pipeline for Councilor Beth's construction crews. The fact that you've directed the majority of new construction toward stone has mostly offset that, though the timber line is still tight for ship construction and for the secondary work where we want wood instead of stone."
She paused.
"None of our farmers or earth crafters has developed a perk that accelerates plant growth. We have farmers who can cut a furrow straighter and faster than anyone on Earth. We have crafters who can move and shape earth. We do not have what you would have called a green mage on Earth. The forest grows at the rate the forest grows."
"Noted."
"Transport." She lifted her eyes back to Harold. "We keep coming back to this. The basin's economy is currently bottlenecked on its draft animals and its lack of river barges. The Tatanka shortage Councilor Caldwell described affects every wagon route I run. The barge program is the single highest-leverage investment we can make to break the bottleneck."
Harold nodded.
"Mine security." A small page turn. "Each of our two active mountain mining sites is guarded by a century of legionaries on rolling rotation. The Centurion's deployment has been excellent. The reason for the guard is that several of the deep tunnels have run into hives of monster activity at depth — pit-trolls, deep-shrikes, in one case a colony of something my surveyor would not name on the page. We have had to abandon three sites in the past four months. We collapsed the tunnels behind us and retreated."
She paused for a beat.
"One point of clarification, my lord."
"Last summer, we found a deep tunnel near the south village and mine. We brought you the survey, and you instructed us to seal it and forget about it for the season." Her hands stayed folded. "The tunnel showed substantial gem and crystal deposits in the walls of the upper passage. The crystal was clear, the gem deposits were varied. The survey team that brought us the report has been asking about that tunnel for months. With your permission, I would like to know if we can put a team back in it."
Harold's hand had been on the table.
His hand did not move. But he closed his eyes for a long second, and then opened them, and when he spoke his voice had a different weight in it than it had carried through most of the morning.
"You can put a team in it. With conditions."
"Conditions? My lord."
"Tribune Cess."
Cess came up off her bench with her notebook already open.
"My lord."
"Prepare an operation. The Knights full deployment — supported by the mobile ballista. I want that tunnel cleared. All the way to the bottom." Harold opened his hand on the table. "Coordinate with Master Mark and Master Evan. The Guild provides support. The operation will be the largest combined deployment we've run except for the Thresher King."
"Yes, my lord."
"The thing at the bottom." Harold did not look down the table at anyone in particular. He was looking somewhere in the middle distance. "The lower chamber is the size of a large town. There's an underground lake in it that covers most of the floor. The lake glows. The plants on the shoreline are bioluminescent, soft blue and soft green. The lichen on the ceiling glows white, in a pattern that — if you stand at the right point in the chamber — looks like a sky of stars. It is a natural wonder of Gravesend. I want to clear that natural wonder. I want that perk."
"In the water, there is a creature. It looks like the Earth animal called an axolotl, except that it is approximately the size of a small drake, and it has been alone in that lake for a long time. It is extremely dangerous." Harold's eyes came back. "Kill it. The perk for adventurers is a limited water-breathing perk that any adventurer who participates in the kill can absorb. Mark, Evan — work with Cess on the parties. It's a perk you want."
"Oi." Caswell's chin came up off his palm. "I want in."
Harold rolled his eyes.
"Sure, Lord Caswell. If any of the lords in this room want in on the kill, you may petition Tribune Cess for a place in the formation. Although—" he tipped a half degree of his head toward Caswell, dry as anything he had said all morning "—it will take you away from your Grail Quest. Which I had assumed you wanted to make some progress on. Given that it has your name on it."
"Hmm," Caswell admitted, after a beat. "That is fair, Count. Bloody hells."
"Bloody hells," Harold agreed, dry.
Lady Renna had been listening with both hands flat on the table in front of her. She lifted them now.
"My lord."
"Lady Renna."
"My Grail Quest was to find a natural wonder of Gravesend. I had thought I would have to leave the basin entirely to begin looking. It would seem the basin is sending the wonder to me instead."
Harold's mouth pulled a quarter inch.
"Then you'll go with the operation, Lady Renna."
Lira had been waiting through this with her hands folded again. Harold tipped his cup at her.
"Sit, Councilor. Thank you."
"My lord."
He turned toward the couple in the room.
"Councilor Josh. Councilor Beth."
The two of them came up off the bench together.