A lot of new members wanted to give a quick reminder that these chapters will all get edits before posting on RR. I really use y'all to do a common-sense check on all of this before I post there. Generally the chapters I post on RR are better edited and finally got a work flow down so I can get out the best chapters I can. I've learned a tooon since writing book one.
Josh came up off the bench, his dark hair stuck up where he had run a palm through it sometime in the last hour, his shirt rolled to the elbows over forearms scratched in places from the morning's site visits. A yellow chalk smudge ran along his right jaw that he had not noticed. Harold looked at him and noticed that Josh looked…good. He had always been a little pudgy, but Gravesend had transformed him. He was tanned and had firmed up. In his last life he had never found his best friend. It was a blessing every day to be here again with him.
Beside him, Beth rose with the ledger in her own hands, her dark hair pulled back into a clip, her clothes the clean working set she had put on at dawn for this meeting, her boots laced tight to the ankle. She gave Josh a sidelong look that contained marital instructions, and Josh straightened a quarter-inch and grinned at the council.Gods it was good to have them back again.
"My lord. Council."
"I'm going to do the Landing, and Beth is going to do the basin. I'm a simple builder. I dig holes, and I lay stone. Sometimes I lay pipe. I do not, in the words of my dearest wife, leave the Landing anymore."Beth turned and quickly smacked him upside the head.
The table exploded in laughter; even he started laughing before he could stop it. The entire table was in on Beth’s secret except Josh. His joke foreshadowed the reveal coming at the end of the meeting.
"Get on with it," Beth said angrily to him.
"In the words of my very wise wife."
"Get on with it, Joshua.”
Caswell pressed his face into his hand, his shoulders shaking, while Harold kept his own composure on a tighter rein.
"The Inner Wall." Josh held both hands up palm out. "This is the big one. Everything else I'm going to tell you about today fits inside this thing or comes after it."
He picked up a stone from the table and started rolling it through his fingers without looking at it.
"The Landing's current footprint — everything that exists today, the keep, the market, the smith district, all of it — that becomes the inner district after we upgrade to city. The new wall goes around all of it with substantial setback. We are not building a fence. We are not building a town wall. We are building a fortress wall, knowing that the wall will be tested on our City upgrade test."
"The design is two layers." Josh held two fingers up. “The wall: fifteen meters high, six meters thick, with bastion towers at every hundred and fifty meters. A moat in front of the wall, twenty meters wide, that we can flood when we need to and run dry the rest of the time. Compared to the walls around Constantinople, and I did research this before we left. We're slightly taller, twice as thick, with kinda the same-layer concept and a better drainage system. The Theodosians didn't have slimes."
"Who were the Theodosians?" Caswell asked Fitch quietly next to him.
Beth turned a page.
"Current status — the foundation ditches are dug for the entire perimeter of the inner wall. We are stockpiling the dressed stone at three forward depots on the construction line. Quarry production is running flat out, and Lira's earth crafters have been the only reason the foundation ditches are dug at the depth I want them at, because doing this by hand-pick would have taken us three years." Beth turned a page in his notes for him because he wasn’t using them. "Stone laying begins on the wall foundation in two weeks. We expect to be at full perimeter on the inner wall by spring. Bastion towers are summer. We are absolutely not going to be wall-complete by the time we are ready to trigger the city upgrade. I know you said before that it’s fine and that it wasn't until almost the second year that a lord attempted it. I just wanted you to know."
"That’s fine, Josh; we will need this wall in order to stand off the attack. And we need to worry about someone else messing with us during that, too. I want to overprepare as much as possible and still trigger our upgrade before anyone else. " Harold said.
"Any plans for the keep in the meantime?"
"Nothing, my lord, because we are not touching it." Josh flipped the stone through his fingers. "Any additional capacity you need, we will need to build outside the keep. Your home is big enough."
Harold rolled his eyes and waved at him to continue.
"Districts. Beth's zoning is done." Josh beamed at her briefly, then scratched the side of his nose and kept going. "When the city upgrade lands and the new wall is in place, the Landing is going to have a forge district, a market district, a residential district in three tiers based on income and craft, a public services district, a knights' precinct, a warehouse and trade corridor, and a small precinct for high-tier crafters that I am going to call the Quenya District."
Beth turned a page. "Joshua."
Josh smiled at her but replied. "It does not actually say Quenya District on the maps before you go look. It says High Crafter Quarter, but my name is better."
"It will be Quenya District in twenty years, you mark my words. Anyway." A breath. "All of this fits inside the new wall."
"Sewer system." A grin. "This is where I get to talk about the slimes."
Bram's head came up off the table.
"I had not been told there were slimes."
"Master Bram, sir, you are about to be delighted." Josh leaned both hands on the table. “Our adventures have been capturing slimes since about six weeks ago, brought them home, did a controlled containment study with three of the alchemists supervising, and we've now seeded a closed-loop sewer system in the central Landing using them as the cleaning agent. The waste goes in. The slimes process it. Clean water comes out the other end. The system is in a two-week test in the residential district, and it is working, my lord. The pipework is half of what a conventional sewer would have required because the slimes handle long-distance transit themselves. Cuts our material costs by sixty percent and our labor by more than that."
"You’ll need to watch them," Harold said.
Josh's grin came down half a step. "My lord?"
“Slimes evolve. Given enough mass to process and enough time to settle, they will get stronger and evolve. It becomes a different kind of slime. Some of those types are still useful. Some of them are very much not. I want a contingency for purging the system if any tier of evolution begins. Are we set up for that?"
"Uhhh we can be," Josh said, and the grin was gone now. "I’m sure the Legion can handle a quick purge or the adventurers can. We will just need to constantly capture slimes from the dungeon."
"Good." Harold smiled and motioned for him to continue.
"No cool slimes," Josh muttered.
Beth turned a page. Josh continued.
"Water supply. The creek that runs past the Landing supplies us comfortably at our current draw. Within a year, given growth, it won't. The plan is to reroute two of the smaller creeks east of us into the main, which gives us roughly triple the flow at our current intake point. The work is mostly Lira's earth crafters and a couple of teams of mine — it's a six-week project once we kick it off, and we're targeting late spring." A look at Lira. "Lira and I have already aligned on the schedule."
Lira lifted one finger off the table, confirming.
"Wells are sunk and paved streets are laid in the inner Landing. Anywhere a person is likely to walk, the street is stone. Anywhere a wagon is likely to go, the street is paved heavy enough to take it. We've laid about four miles of paved street in the past two months. The dwarven crews last night, incidentally, fixed about six locations where the paving had begun to settle, which I noticed this morning; they did beautiful work."
A small noise from Hargen at his end of the table. Approval, possibly. Could have been a swallow of beer.
"Forge district." Josh straightened. "Current site stays. It becomes the elite forge district, the high-tier smiths, anyone working at a level where the work needs the central location and the controlled environment. The mass-production forge complex moves outside the new wall to the south, in the manufactory zone Beth has zoned. That keeps the heavy noise and the smoke and the fire risk outside the residential precinct, and it lets us scale the foundry side without compromising the elite smith side."
"I like that as long as it has a Legion presence," Harold said it before Josh could finish his next inhale.
"Yep. Knew you'd like that one." Josh ticked it off mentally. "New alchemy hall is complete and is stable. I'm mentioning this because we've already had two incidents in the new hall. The first was Miss Elia performing what she described as a controlled atmospheric vent that would have absolutely obliterated the old hall; she died and respawned again. The second was an unnamed alchemist kinda did the same. Neither incident harmed anyone outside the worker's own private room. The compartmentalized design you specified is working, though figuring out how to reinforce that stone was a whole project."
"How is Elia?" Harold said.
Caldwell replied. “She's paid back roughly a sixth of her debt after killing those people over the summer. I expect her repayment rate to increase as her contributions increase.”
Josh continued. "She is at the garden site we'll get to later, with a legion element on her, planning the layout you asked for."
“Mmm,” he turned to Adeline. "Can you get a message to her that I expect a meeting with her next week."
Adeline nodded formally. "My lord."
"The Mews." Josh moved on. "They’ve expanded. Doubled the existing one. We can train the small birds and the handlers here, and we will, but for the proper Mews — the one we need for the massive birds and for the future riders — we need a different site entirely. The current site is too constrained. Especially after one of the birds killed a crafter. We've identified two candidate sites outside the new wall on the western slope. I will bring the recommendation to council inside the month."
"Market." A breath and a quick look to Beth. "Expanded substantially. We are getting regular trade from Veridia and Haven, occasional trade from Dalen's Hold, and the first wagons from Three Rivers arrived two weeks ago. Beth's zoning has created three sub-markets in addition to the main market, and Councilor Anil has worked with us on planning for large market days and seasonal festivals. This includes the large arena you wanted eventually constructed and the theatre."
"Good," Harold nodded. He looked at Anil briefly, who inclined his head a degree.
"Warehouses going up along the trade corridor on the east-and-south roads. Honestly, my lord, the warehouse district is becoming one of the busiest precincts in the Landing — Caldwell's trades are flowing through there at a clip I would not have predicted six months ago. We've doubled the original allocation, and we'll be at full capacity within a quarter. Beth has set aside additional zoned space for further expansion."
He took a breath.
"Bathhouse. We want to expand. We don't have the manpower for it. It goes in the queue."
"Academy site." Josh looked at Anil. "Beth has zoned an excellent site for the future Citizen University outside the new wall by about half a day — south slope, drainage, room for halls and grounds and lecture spaces. We absolutely cannot start construction on it for at least a year. For Councilor Anil's administrative academy in the meantime, we have two of the original halls in the inner Landing that are nearly empty, and we are combining them into a single building with a courtyard between them, plus a refitted hall for instruction. We can have Anil's academy operating in those buildings by the end of next month."
"By the end of next month is acceptable," Anil said.
"Barracks." Josh thumped his hand on the table once. "Almost tripled in space. Most of the manpower has come from the legion themselves — the legion's fortification builders are not bad, and Colonel Hale has been generous about loaning them out to us — but the fine work has been mine. The new barracks are enough to house three Cohorts and include a large practice field and various areas for other instruction."
"Sanitation." Josh spread his hands. "Hygiene, clean water, slimes. Fantastic creatures. They cut a lot of structural redundancy out of our builds, and they have, so far, been the single biggest hidden contributor to the basin's drop in sickness."
"Some of my builders are leaving for Lady Bethel's order." Josh's voice dropped. "I have blessed every one of them. I'm planning to send a couple of full crews up to the site she's chosen as soon as the foundation work begins, on a rotation. Some of my people have asked for leave to go visit the area — quietly, on their own time, with their families. Said they wanted to see where the order will be." A small grin. "I think we all underestimate how loved Lady Bethel is across the County."
"Hmph," Bethel said as she sipped her tea.
"On the crews themselves." Josh moved on briskly. "I run fifty construction teams of six members each. About three hundred builders under my hand. Most of them have construction-related perks now — stone-set, true-line, load-sense, that family — and the perked teams are completing in days what unperked crews used to take weeks to do. Most of them have gone through a few rotations in my Archmage program, and it's helped a ton. People are really starting to learn to manipulate stone and earth. Some fire, but that's a lot rarer. Not much air or water yet though."
He thumped the table again.
"All Landing construction is going up in stone. Per your standing directive, my lord. Wood for fixtures and floors where the load tolerance allows. Stone for walls, foundations, and roofing."
He drew a breath.
Thessa, who had been listening to most of this with her arms folded across her stone-dusted apron, leaned over and rapped her knuckle hard against the side of Bram's head.
Bram came up out of the cup he had been raising to his mouth.
"Right," Bram said. "Right, aye. Master Josh."
"When we start building our own hold, you send me yer best crews. I'll take 'em in for a season. They come back to you knowing what stone wants. There's no one better with stone than dwarves, lad, and I am long past pretending the modesty about it."
Josh's mouth opened, closed, and opened again. Beside him, Beth put one hand flat on his back at the small of his spine for a beat and took it back.
"Master Bram, sir," Josh said, "I’ll be the first to come help."
He looked across the table at Harold, then down at Beth, who had her ledger open to a fresh page and was waiting on him.
"That's the Landing, my lord."
"Beth. All yours, beautiful."
Josh sat. The bench creaked under him, partly. He pressed two fingers against his temple briefly and reached for the cup of water Beth had gotten him, and drank it down.
Harold knew he was nursing a hangover, and he contained his smile before turning to Beth.
Beth turned a page.
"My lord. Council. I'll be covering the Basin."
Beth set the ledger flat on the table in front of her and laid her left hand on top of it. Her voice came out composed and unhurried.
"I'm going to start with the city upgrade, because that's been coming up a lot. We have not yet met the infrastructure metric for city upgrade."
Caldwell's coin stopped on the back of his hand.
Beth turned a page. "Specifically. The system measures infrastructure as a composite — paved roads, sanitation, water management, public works, defensive works, statues, reliefs, fountains. The features of a settlement that make it a good place to live."
A small pause.
"We are going off your best guess for what is needed to upgrade, and we are quite a bit off of that in the infrastructure category. We have engineered water flow but not a single fountain. We know in theory how the Romans and Greeks built theirs, and several of our crafters have read the relevant texts, but no one in the basin has built one." She let her eyes go up the table to Bram. "Until now, I suppose."
Bram lifted his cup an inch off the table.
"Lass. Yer wantin' fountains."
"We're wanting fountains, Master Bram."
"How many?"
"Three to start. One in the central market, one in the main courtyard, one in the warehouse district, and one outside the front gate."
"Yer not goin' to get small fountains. We dwarves, like to build big."
"I am not asking for small fountains, Master Bram," Beth said, looking down at where he was sitting.
"Aye." Bram set his cup down. "Send me what you want, and I will pass it to my people."
"I'll have a brief to you by tomorrow. With the locations and the water lines."
"Bring it." Bram nodded, dabbing the beer from his mouth with his beard.
Beth turned another page. "On the broader culture metric the system measures alongside infrastructure — the answer is the same. Our construction in the Landing has been focused on purpose rather than beauty. The arena and theatre that Councilor Anil and Councilor Josh have planned will further close the gap when they're built. We can afford some effort toward beautification now that the practical infrastructure has caught up."
"Coastal watch towers." Beth's pencil moved across the page in a quick check mark. "Six of the planned twelve are complete. The construction is going faster than I had estimated because of the Legion, and the towers are simple enough that the crews can run them on rotation without oversight."
"Three Rivers." Beth turned the next page. "The port construction is underway. The site is the most significant single project in the basin outside the inner wall. The water at the convergence is deep enough to take large-hull ships at full draft. The rivers above the convergence are wide enough that two ships can pass side by side under sail, which is the standard our shipbuilders are going to need. We have the boatyards going in along the north bank. The dry docks are going into the area we fought the Thresher King."
A small page. "Three Rivers is also going to be our main civilian port. The military naval facilities are being built at Lord Henri's coastal village, where the harbor is narrower, more defensible, and easier to lock down."
Henri smoothed his small mustache once, but he looked satisfied.
"Splitting the military and civilian ports gives us redundancy and gives us the option to hide some of the naval program while everything that needs to move through Three Rivers does so in broad daylight."
"Town upgrade candidates." Beth let the phrase sit. "Haven, Veridia, and Three Rivers are all approaching the threshold. Haven is closest — population, administration, and infrastructure all sit within striking distance of the upgrade. I expect Haven to qualify first. Veridia follows, and Three Rivers is on a steeper curve because port construction is pulling its population up fast, but the infrastructure piece will take longer than the population piece."
"Population is going to explode," Anil murmured.
"Three new towns by the end of the year. Each one places three new steles. I have provisional site recommendations for nine new villages we could attach to those steles when the time comes. I'd like the Count to review them before any are committed."
"Send the brief tomorrow," Harold said.
"My lord."
"The land we control is large. The population we have is not large enough to fill what we control. We are going to keep growing into our own borders for years. The villages we found next will be focused on claiming the new land within the Basin."
Harold looked thoughtful but nodded once.
Beth turned a page.
"Mining sites on the passes. The construction at both pass sites is progressing more slowly than in the rest of the basin because the populations there are heavily skewed toward miners and away from the supporting trades. They have ore. They do not have bakers, herbalists, or any of the third-shift trades that turn a mining camp into a settlement. I have been working with Councilor Anil to balance the assignment of new arrivals into those sites."
"The Adventurer guild." Beth glanced at Mark and Evan. "Our agreement is that initial construction of guild halls in new villages and towns falls to the host settlement. Maintenance and expansion are the guild's responsibility. We have laid the foundations and built the first halls."
Mark inclined his head. "We’ll just pay you to expand them."
"Manufactory site." Beth set a small finger on the page. " The river falls site north of the Landing, where the upper river drops before it levels into the basin. The river is ideal for water-powered mill work — we can run hammer mills, grain mills, saw mills, and bellows for the foundry from the same flow. Josh has the build plans done. Five months to full operation if our resource pipeline can supply the site at the rate assumed by the plan. Less if we can cut transport time, which the river barges will start to do as soon as they're in the water."
She let that sit.
"River survey for canal planning." Beth's voice came down a quarter degree. "I started the survey six weeks ago. The deeper my surveyors go, the more I find I do not actually know what's under our basin. The rivers we've mapped are tunneled — old tunnels, monster tunnels, natural tunnels, several that are clearly made but by what, my surveyors cannot say. The basin floor itself appears to be riddled below the surface."
The room had gotten quieter.
"You told us, my lord, that the Deep Dark only connects to the surface in certain places. I have no reason to doubt you. I do have reason to doubt that the places you know of are the only places. My surveyors have been attacked three times in the past month by monsters that do not normally surface in the basin — by anything, anywhere, by ordinary patrol records. The monsters came from the tunnels. We have lost two surveyors and four legionaries on those attacks. I have a map of the contact points."
She slid a folded sheet across the table. Adeline rose, walked it to Harold, and stepped back two paces.
Harold opened it. He looked at it for a long beat.
"Tribune," Harold said.
"My lord."
"This goes on Margaret's wall when we move to her section. You and her work the response together. We bottle the entrances and man them."
"My lord."
Beth turned a page.
"Legion training site. Already under construction by the legion's own fortification crews with two of Josh’s attached on the fine work. The site is a small valley in the mountain spurs north of the basin, naturally defensible, with a stream through it for water and a slope. The plan is for a permanent training installation that will, in a decade, look more like a fortress than a camp. Colonel Hale will be happy with the site."
"Roads and bridges. Five main radials out of the Landing, one to each of the basin's quadrants and one to the south coast. The branch lines tie the existing towns and villages into the network. Bridge designs are stone for permanent crossings and timber-deck for the lighter ones. All bridges will be built with sufficient height to allow barges but not warships, per your instructions. No one will be able to send warships up the rivers."
A small laugh from Caswell, somewhere down the table.
"Way stations on the roads. I have decided not to plan as standalone construction. The villages we found next will sit along the road network at fifteen- to twenty-mile intervals. They will be the way stations. We get a settlement and a station for the cost of one construction footprint." A look at Caldwell. "This was the answer to your way station question, Councilor."
Caldwell tipped his cup at her.
"Pass surveys are complete." Beth's mouth pulled flat. "The grading work to make those passes wagon-passable on a sustainable basis is going to be the worst piece of construction we do in the next two years. The terrain is steep and varied, the seasons are short, the stone trolls are frequent, and the rock-snakes appear to nest in any disturbed grade we leave overnight. The convoy from the swamps, as bad as it was, was the easy part of the route. The full upgrade is going to require legion support on every shift."
She turned a page.
"Cement and concrete. Josh."
Josh half-rose off the bench, nodded at Beth, and sat back down briskly.
"We have a site for cement and concrete production east of the Landing. I have completed my testing, and we have a mixture that holds for road work, port foundations, and lighter building work. We are going into production next month." He held up one hand. "And."
"And," Beth sighed.
"And we have eight crafters now with a perk called compression — they can take a quantity of cut stone, hold it, and compress it into a single block that is significantly denser than the original. We have tested compressed stone blocks against our standard concrete, and the compressed stone is roughly five times stronger in every test we've run. The perk does not work the same way on poured concrete — it needs to set, and it seems to require a coherent stone substrate. Even our tricks with visualization don't seem to work as effectively."
He spread his hands.
"For now we're researching. We are not redoing existing builds with the compressed-stone technique. The focus is getting structures up at speed to support the expansion. We accept that some of what we build today will need to be rebuilt in a decade years with better methods. Better that than no buildings now."
"I don’t like it, but I agree," Harold said.
Beth turned a page.
"Communication. We are building the falcon and hawk relay tower network across the basin. Eight towers complete, six in progress, four to go. When the full network is operational, a message from any town in the basin reaches the Landing within two days. Faster with the right perked bird and a good wind. The Mews expansion Josh covered earlier ties into this — the relay network is one of the reasons we need more bird capacity than the current Mews allows."
"Alchemists garden site." Beth's finger touched the page. "Selected, surveyed, and Miss Elia is on site as Josh mentioned. The location is the mountain notch near the legion training valley, with elevation variation from above the snow line to a small basin pocket that sits below sea level. We are planning to flood the lower pocket into a freshwater pond approximately three hectares in surface area, with the surrounding terraces given over to growing zones at varying altitude and temperature. Miss Elia tells me she will be able to grow plants there that no one in the basin can currently grow. You sent me a list of things you need to be able to grow, and I about tore my hair out figuring out all the conditions you need."
A short laugh from Caldwell into his cup.
"Farmland projections." Beth turned the next page. "Future planned farmland will cover approximately sixty percent of the basin's cleared usable area when the build-out is complete. The remaining forty percent is split between forest preserve, town and village footprint, mining and manufactory sites, roads and infrastructure, and the watch and military installations on the coast and the passes."
"Sixty percent? That seems like alot." Harold asked.
"Yep, sixty percent. With the Verdant Mushroom relic, it would be a shame not to take advantage of our increased rate of plant growth."
"We’ll need it with our population, My Lord," Anil said.
Harold nodded and motioned for Beth to continue.
"Zoning." Beth set both palms flat on the ledger. "The Landing has been zoned in detail. Every parcel inside the new wall has an assigned purpose. We have begun selling residential parcels to families who want to build their own homes, on a controlled release that protects the long-term plan. The same zoning rules have been pushed out to every town and village in the basin — the village heads have copies, the town administrators have copies, Councilor Anil's office has the central registry. We are not letting anyone sell land that the plan needs."
She paused.
"On the larger land question. For now, the County retains formal ownership of all unparceled land in the basin. The lands the integrated lords held before they swore have been retained by them, with a few exceptions where my office reassigned a parcel for the basin's strategic benefit and Councilor Caldwell compensated the lord for the value. I have, per the Count's standing instructions, zoned out estate lands to be sold to the nobility and other people who can afford it, and I have set aside additional estate sites in the basin for future sworn lords as the empire grows. Those sites will be parceled out as the lords are seated. Until they are parceled out, the County holds them."
Harold nodded once. He was the one who instructed her to build it that way.
"I think that's the basin, my lord."
Beth sat and laid her head on Josh.
“Alright, it’s starting to get late, and I know you have a large section with Councilor Margaret, then we need to get into my plans for the future. Let’s try to keep the questions to a minimum so we can get through this.”
Margaret rose.