Spring dragged into summer, stretching the days longer—and my composure along with them.
The passage of time made me nervous and jumpy.
I wanted to do more with the time I had, to push ever forward. But there was only so much I could do. Figuring out the exact ratios of the best cement mixture kept me busy for a few days, but other than that, all I could do was wait for the other projects to run their course.
Between the army, the blast furnace and the textile mill, as well as the construction of a new residential area and a cement kiln, I was already stretching my population and resources to their limits.
Meanwhile, the guilds kept piling on more and more excuses about why my ore, charcoal and parts weren’t arriving. Bandits raided their every caravan, miners rebelled in the Erz Hills every other day, and all of the master craftsmen in the capital got conspicuously sick one after another…
It was more than clear they were just stalling after hearing that the Count was raising another army.
However, with no real political or economic leverage, I could do little but sit and force a smile every time one of their couriers came along with a fresh list of excuses.
Finally, one day I decided it was enough. If they weren’t going to give me my parts, I would make my own.
But three sleepless nights taught me exactly where my limits were.
It was time to pull an old man out of his retirement.
***
My first thought when Lili gently rolled her father into the audience room was that she was playing a trick on me. The man sitting in the makeshift wheelchair looked like a badly drawn sketch of the man I met in the forge only a few months prior.
Otto’s stout face had become visibly wrinkled and gaunt, his eyes hollow, with none of the spark they carried before. Even his bushy beard was thin and lifeless. And instead of his worn apron, he was dressed in a simple grey tunic which was noticeably tightened around the right side of his body.
“I brought him as you requested…” Lili announced with a despondent tone. She too looked gaunt and worn out. “But I don’t know how much it will help. He has just been wasting away ever since losing his arm after Erik— I mean, after the fire.” Lili briefly glanced at Erika, whose face betrayed nothing at her slip. “These days, he only gets up for me to feed and bathe him. Last time he was outside was when you fired that big forge. But I think it only made it worse…”
It was indeed much worse than I had thought.
“Did he have any more complications after the—?”
“I think it’s his arm. He can’t live without holding his hammer.” Lili rambled on as her eyes met mine with a desperate plea. “Can you fix it? Please? Surely, you have some new method, some new technology to make it whole again. If it’s expensive, I saved up all my—“
“No. It’s impossible. I am sorry.” Erika flatly declared before Lili could finish. Both our eyes turned to her. “I tried it. Experimented. On… animals. Even if you sew it back on and manage to stop the bleeding, the arm just becomes a rotting lump of flesh. Unusable. It’s certainly the same for humans.”
A knot in my stomach briefly made itself known at the unexpected revelation. I knew how great Erika’s hunger for knowledge was, but I never expected she would go so far as to work on live animals. Still, it was commendable how committed she was. And useful, too, since by now she probably knew more about anatomy than I did. Personally, I’d get squeamish dissecting frogs in biology class.
“It is true.” I nodded along. To be truthful, limb reattachment was actually something in the scope of modern medicine, but in this world, even with all my work, it was likely centuries away. And I didn’t have the heart to give them false hope about it. “However, it does not mean everything is just over and done with!”
I got up from my cushioned chair and approached Otto. He was staring at the floor half-asleep, likely not even registering our conversation.
In movies and comics, this would be where the main character slaps some sense into a withering old man. However, I held too much respect for the blacksmith, so I instead got down on one knee, meeting Otto’s distant gaze. It took a moment, but eventually his eyes found mine with a strained slowness. There was recognition there, but also something else. A deep weariness that went beyond mere physical exhaustion.
“Otto,” I said softly, placing a hand on his remaining one. “I need you.”
I had rehearsed a speech all morning, something about legacy and purpose, but now, looking into those hollow eyes, I struggled to follow the lines.
“Need me? No. No one needs me anymore.” A thin sound came from the back of Otto’s throat. “I am half a man. Less than half. I cannot swing a hammer. I cannot work the bellows. I cannot even take care of my own daughter... Go find another blacksmith for whatever it is you need.“
“You're right,” I answered. Otto's eye flickered. He had not expected agreement. “You can't swing a hammer nor can you work the bellows. But I didn't call on you to do any of that. What I need is your knowledge and your experience. And that is something none of the other blacksmith has.”
“Flattery,” he grumbled between coughs. “Don't.”
Instead of answering, I reached into my coat and drew out the thing I'd spent three miserable nights making. An iron rod as long as my forearm, cut all around its length with a spiralling thread. It was one of the most important parts for any future machines: a leadscrew.
Or at least what was meant to be one.
“This is why I need you,” I explained as I set down several failed pieces on a table in front of Otto. “Without it, we cannot go any further in our development. And for the life of me, I can't make one precise enough.”
For a long moment he didn't move. Then, slowly, his hand raised from the armrest and clasped around one of the rods.
It was instinct. Muscle memory. His thumb ran down the thread once, twice, and something behind his eyes stirred. An ember catching a draft.
“The pitch wanders,” he muttered. His thumb stopped a third of the way along. “Here. You started clean, then your hand got tired and crowded the turns. It's tighter at the top than the bottom.”
“...Yes.” It had taken me a week to even notice that much.
He turned the rod against the light, squinting down its length the way Wolf or Dietrich would stare down an arrow. “And it's not true. You can see the bow in it.” He pressed a thumbnail into the metal and it bit far too easily. “Too soft. This would round off to nothing inside a fortnight of real work.”
It was almost, almost, the old Otto. For half a breath, the gaunt, hollowed old man in the chair was gone, and there was only a craftsman, offended by shoddy work, reaching for the right tool to put it right.
But then his thumb found the empty air where his right arm should have been. And the ember went out.
He set the screw down with a care and leaned back into his wheelchair as if he had just finished a day of hard work. “It's good work you're chasing. I can see that.” The flatness had crept back into his voice. “But you need two hands to cut a screw like this. Holding the stock, working the file, checking the lead as you go... It's a two-handed job and then some. Find a younger smith. Maybe that lad from Eisdorf. Good enough apprentice, he was.”
“I don't want the lad in Eisdorf. I want the best. I want you.” I crouched lower, so he could not look past me. “It's work that needs a sharp eye, a deft touch, and patience. Not strength or two hands. For that there are clamps, jigs, an apprentice to be your second hand and do exactly as you tell him. We will figure that part out. But you are the only one who can make sure it comes out right.”
A moment of silence passed. I held my breath, waiting for him to scratch his beard, mumble something and then agree to help like he did when I first met him.
The nod never came.
“No.” He closed his eyes.
“But you are the only one who can do this! And you will be paid well, too. And, and—think of everyone else you would be helping and passing your knowledge—”
“I'm tired, Prince Karl. Let an old man live his final days in peace.”
Well, damn it.
I didn't know where else to go from here. I laid out the problem, the solution, and the reward. The answer was more than obvious. It had worked on the poachers. On the elders. On a whole village. Why was this one man refusing to budge?
Before I could find another angle, Lili stepped past me.
“Father.” She knelt at the side of the chair and took his hand. “Please. You don't have to swing a hammer. You heard Karl. You'd only have to look and feel. To teach. You're still the best there is, I know you are.” Her voice climbed, bright and fragile, trying to carry them both. “Just come down to the workshop. Once. Please. We could—“
“No, Lili. It is over for me.” It was gentle. That was the worst of it. He turned his hand over and folded it around hers the way a father quiets a frightened child. “You're a good girl. The best a man could ask for. But you can't mend me with kind words, and I'll not have you breaking your heart trying. Let it be.”
Her mouth opened then closed. The brave face she had been holding up since Rand started cracking, and she said nothing at all. Instead, a single tear rolled down her cheek. Then a second one. And another.
“You are right.” Erika suddenly spoke, her voice mild, almost kind. She had stood so still through all of this that I'd half forgotten she was there. “Rest, then. Lili will manage. Taking care of your body, worrying about your mind, managing the finances of the whole realm… She's young. She'll hold.” A pause. "For a while, at least."
Otto's head came up. At first he said nothing. Just stared at his daughter—at the wet tracks on her face, the shadows beneath her eyes, the candle-burns dotting her sleeve.
“Lili.” His voice broke on it. “Is that true?”
She scrubbed at her face with the back of her wrist, and the gesture undid whatever was left of her composure.
“I don't care about the work,” she choked out. “I'd do it forever and never breathe a word of complaint, I swear it to the Suns. That isn't—“ Her hands closed around his one and gripped tight. “What I can't bear, Father, is watching you go a little further away every day. You're still here, but you keep slipping somewhere I can't follow. And I am so frightened that one morning I'll come to wake you for breakfast and you'll just—be gone. Like Mother.”
“Lili, I—“
“You said you can't take care of me.” She pressed his knuckles to her forehead. “I'm not asking you to. I only need you to stop leaving. To climb out of that bed and try at something—anything. To stop wasting away. It doesn’t have to be Karl’s task, but just have it be something." A wet, cracked little laugh fell out of her. “Just try. Please.”
As Lili finished talking, the small room had gone very quiet. Not even breathing could be heard.
Otto looked down at his daughter's hands wrapped around his, and whatever wall he had built—of pride, of shame, of plain exhaustion—did not so much fall as quietly dissolve.
His thumb moved against the back of her hand. Once. Twice. Then his eyes moved past her, to where the screw lay on the table
“...Fine. Give me back that screw, then,” he said, rough and low. “And a proper file. That thing of the prince's is fit for nothing.”
For a heartbeat no one moved. Then Lili threw her arm around her father's neck. Otto bore it stiffly, patting her back with his one hand and grumbling something about minding his bad shoulder.
I let out a breath I hadn't realised I'd been holding.
“I'll need a proper bench. Like the one I had in Rand,” Otto demanded, once Lili released her grip somewhat. “And good iron. And that apprentice from Eisdorf, if he can still come.”
“You'll have all of—“
“But first, I will go have a talk with my daughter and then rest.” He grumbled into his beard as Lili was already pushing him out of the room. “This was already too much for an old man…”
I caught a glimpse of Erika’s gaze as the two left down the stone hallway. Her eyes had settled on the empty sleeve, the pinned fold of it swaying as the chair rolled away.
“That was a cruel thing to do to her,” I said, once the chair had rolled out of earshot. “Letting Otto watch his daughter collapse into tears like that.”
“It was what they needed.” She didn't look away from the empty doorway. “Everything was already there. She wanted him out of that bed more than she wanted to be spared the tears. You heard her say so. They just needed a small push. And this way, she'll have her father back by shortwinter.”
It sat badly with me. But I had no words to refute her. She wasn’t wrong, and I was me who wanted Otto back in the forge.
I guess all’s well that ends well.
For a moment, Erika said nothing. Then, lower: “But you are right. It is a poor way to hand her father back to her. If I'd done my work right, she'd have had him whole. I'd not have needed to be cruel at all.”
“You did everything you could,” I offered.
“I know.” She said it flatly, without looking at me. No comfort in it, but no doubt either. "That's the part I can't stand. Every step clean, everything right, and he still lost it.” For a brief moment, her jaw tightened.
“It is beyond anyone. For decades, probably—”
“It's beyond me. But I will do better.” She turned at last, boring her eyes into mine.
I didn't ask what next. There were questions about Erika's work I had already decided I would rather leave unasked. She would probably tell me all about it if I asked, but I had no wish to hear about her cutting up live deer and boars.
She understood and gave a small nod, then went after the others.
Left alone in the room, I looked down at the rough screw, still lying where Otto had set it down.
A true screw made a true lathe.
A true lathe made a true bore—straight and clean, the whole length of a barrel.
And a barrel was a thing I had been waiting a very long time to make.