Bit delayed...so all at once!
"Stirland is currently reliant on importing gunpowder, and dealing with the unreliable quality of Nuln's gunpowder - since the purest goes to those currently in the Elector Count's favour - or paying a hefty premium for powder from Zhufbar," you say, steepling your fingers. "Considering how reliant the Repeater is on good powder, it's a limiter to how much the Army of Stirland will be willing to expand its use."
"Can you get your hands on the proper techniques?" Wilhelmina asks, leaning forward.
You consider it for a moment. "I might be able to get Dwarven ones, but I'd be on the hook for them - that's an uncomfortable position when I'd usually be a continent away from the factory. But I've got an in or two with the Imperial Gunnery School. If we tie it into non-compete contracts I should be able to get Nuln's techniques out of them, and I doubt we'll be able to exceed the requirements of both Stirland and the Undumgi."
"Alright, we'll stockpile any excess niter production for now." Wilhelmina frowns thoughtfully. "The factory will probably have to be in Wurtbad. I can't see Roswita allowing it outside her demesne."
You nod. "We've got a lot of eggs in Blutdorf's basket as it is. And Wurtbad's better located to take in niter from a province-wide network."
"Not what I expected for the EIC, but it's not like gunpowder will ever not be needed," Wilhelmina says, then smiles and pats the hip where a pistol would usually be, though her gunbelt is currently hanging from a hook on the wall. "I like the idea of being able to pull good powder right out of the factory too, instead of paying a king's ransom for the good stuff."
You know...I wonder if we couldn't pay for a Gold Wizard to examine the process and fine tune it up.
Or are most of them too focused on the mystical side of alchemy to bother with the chemical side of it?
"A question for you, Magister," Algard says as he leads you through the halls of the Grey College. "What is the location of the Grey College?"
You've mapped it out, most Grey Wizards do as Apprentices. You have to decide based mostly on guesswork which access points are physical and which aren't to get a solid answer, so most end up with different answers. "Just below the Imperial Mint. I assume to add its defences to our College's, and vice versa."
He smiles. "It's the sort of thing we would do." He stops at a blank section of wall, and your mental map of the Grey College tells you you're on the outer edge of the College - or at least, the portion you know.
You eye it suspiciously for any trace of secret entrances. "'Would do', but not 'have done'."
"To hide something from a Grey Wizard, give them enough false clues to reach a wrong answer that makes them feel clever," he says with a smile. "To hide it from many, have enough wrong answers for them to argue over. Who says any of the access points are physical?"
"Basic logic," you retort. "The College has to be somewhere, so having at least some of the access points be physical is only sensible. Saves magical power and effort, and allows an access point in case of local magical collapse."
Its interesting, because funnily, the lower levels of the Grey College teach a lot of making do with mundane tools, pragmatic procedures and using misdirection to seem more mystical and powerful than you really are.
That sets up Grey Wizards to think in terms of "how would I do this in the easiest but impressive way possible". Observe Mathilde constantly scoffing at the Light order's showmanship.
"The College has to be somewhere," he repeats, his smile widening. "A logical assumption." He places a hand on the wall and it ripples and melts away, revealing... nothing. A uniform field of grey on the other side, stretching as far as you can see in all directions. "The problem with logical assumption is that logic often has nothing to do with our profession."
This is Kragg's face when we said to boil the liquified soil as if it was a liquid. Zhuf logic is a continuous mad-libbing motion.
He walks through the opening and without any visible trepidation you follow suit, walking atop an invisible floor. The wall heals below you and vanishes, enfolding the pair of you in an endless grey void. It's just as featureless to your Magesight as it is to your eyes. "Where are we?"
Interesting. Suggests there's really nothing there, we're just walking through void as part of the fundamental nature of this pocket.
"To everyone else, the border between this world and the Aethyr is as thin as a dream. To those with the right attunement, the border can be a plane in its own right."
If there is a line, or grey area, it could be stretched into a place. Its a liminal space.
He takes a seat on a chair you're certain was not there a moment ago. "It is the source of some of our most potent abilities. This is where objects enfolded within Subtance of Shadow reside, this is the impossible thin and thus infinitely sharp edge summoned by Penumbral Pendulum, this is where the Pit of Shades opens into, creating a wailing as the air itself is crushed. And through Teclis' techniques that I've only begun to scratch the surface of, it can be permanently expanded into a pocket big enough for a College."
So looking through the spell-logic:
-Substance of Shadow - Object or person pushed halfway into the Aethyr but not actually INTO the Aethyr. Selectively tangible as a result. People are easier because they have a presence in both the Aethyr and material world, objects are harder because they are entirely material.
-Penumbral Pendulum - I'm really curious how the aesthetics came about. Why not a giant sword? Why a timepiece? The edge of day and night?
-Pit of Shades - So it opens a hole into a place where nothing can exist. That explains what happens to those sucked into the Pit, atomized and then smeared across the Aethyr and the Materium like a bug on the windscreen, and rain down at random locations. Couple of implications:
--Vampires could eventually reconstitute, but gathering significant amounts of their remains to do so would be difficult.
--Daemons decohere their material form and basically get pressed back into the Aethyr, rather flattened.
--What happens if you hit a mirrorsnek with one?
--It seems theoretically possible to survive the experience. I have no idea who'd be crazy enough to try though.
"It is the Hedge," says Provost Kurtis Krammovitch, and you turn to see him sitting just beside Algard. "And the Hedgewise have been visiting it since before the time of Sigmar."
And there's the Hedgewise and why they get special permissions. Grandfather clause?
Though the way he says it suggests theres a lot more geography to this place than we're seeing in the grey.
"It is the Shadows that give the Forest of Shadows its name," says Lord Magister Walther Kupfer, "stolen by the Goddess Halétha to empower those who are opposed to it."
Naturally, good plae to hide secret realms. Especially if you want the secret realm to run a BIT by storybook logic without dumping mass amounts of the Winds.
Hmm, a forest DOES have a lot of shadow to work with. Every leaf casts one, and the tree itself casts another over the smaller shadows. Naturally Ulgu rich environment all day, especially if it tends to be misty but relatively well lit.
Occurs to me that parking the surface bits of the Grey College in the unmappable slums of Altdorf is another kind of permanently shadowy environment. Hmm. Wonder if at sufficient densities the effect becomes self sustaining. Lots of shadows and Ulguy activities attracts more.
"It is a portion of the Aethyr that has been cut off from the rest, which happens more often than you might think," says Lady Magister Grey.
We think this a fair bit. I'd guess HER knowledge comes from the Chaos Dwarves?
"It is a metaphor, fed by Ulgu until it grew fat enough to visit," says Bursar Wilhelmina von Bucht.
Mathilde: "Like the fish and my boats?"
"It is part of the Grey Vaults, the threshold of Morr's Realm," says Porter Reiner Starke.
Part of.
I'd guess Morr's Realm would be extending from the Aethyr into the border rather than the reverse.
And I'd probably hazard a guess this is where Ranald parks his secret pockets spell too.
"It's simply a novel application of existing principles," says Lord Magister Melkoth.
Uh, Melkoth, you could say that about literally everything, and I'm not sure how novel it is considering plenty of entities had done it.
...did he forget about the event and improvise at the last minute?
"It's a secret, even to us," says Algard. "Ours to puzzle over, and ours to keep." You complete your circuit, and see an empty eighth chair in the circle surrounding you. "And now yours. Take a seat, Lady Magister Weber."
Teclis: "By the way, your College is homework. Let me know when you solve it."
Without a moment's hesitation you do so, happiness and pride radiating through your body. You knew you might be close to earning it, but after the promotion to Magister you half-expected it to be a curt letter or something. But a circle of chairs in a secret pocket-dimension formed by Teclis? This is exactly the sort of thing you had hoped for. Part of the upholstery of the chair springs to life, throwing itself onto your robes and forming the ornamental trimmings that indicate a Wizard Lord of the Empire to those who know the patterns.
Hah, can't have the new Magisters getting bigheaded.
The Lord Magisters are beyond help so its fine.
Interestingly, most people don't know the markings of the rank?
"Don't ask me how long it took to set that up," Lady Magister Grey grumbles. "Eight years wearing the same robe, and you make a new one just as we're about to promote you."
Custom enchantment?
"We had planned to let you season a few more years," Algard says with a smile, "but if you're going into hell, it's only proper you shall do so in the rank you have earned."
Mmm, its basically the final trial for it. Dying trying would be fairly worthy, but succeeding would be better.
Also handy for Magister wrangling!
The local Temple to Esmerelda is a three-sided building placed amongst the fields equidistant between Karag Nar and Karag Lhune, with an entrance on each side for Halflings from the fields, Dwarves from Karag Lhune, and humans from Karag Nar to visit it freely. This is an offer taken up much more often than those unfamiliar with Halflings would expect, for Esmerelda is worshipped by making, supplying, and consuming good food. Some might consider this a trivial sphere for a Goddess, especially one that is the head of a Pantheon, but only if they were very sure where their next meal is coming from. In many of the darker periods in Imperial history, simple lack of food has killed more than disease or greenskins or the forces of Chaos.
Even the humble pie, the much-derided object of worship during Pie Week, has more to it than those that dismiss the Halflings as simple gluttons would realize. In the distant past, long before humanity had come to the Old World, food preservation was poorly understood and starving during the winter was a constant threat. Pottery was fragile, difficult to transport, time-consuming to make, and required access to the right sorts of clays. Granaries were immobile and took a lot of effort to make, and meant all your food was in one place and fire or rot or vermin could take the whole structure in one fell swoop. But encasing food in a shell of flour before you cook it? That was quick, easy, portable, divisible, and if done right, delicious. It was that secret that gained the Halflings a position in the nomadic tribes that predate the Empire, and it's why the human tribes had Halflings among them when they entered the Reik Basin.
Its a wonder why it didn't get more popular - any city is only three missed meals from a riot.
Looking it up, pies could pretty lasting if properly prepared. Makes good rations on the go, you could bake a couple week's rations at one campsite and then just need to warm it up in a campfire for the rest of the week.
The crust would be a wee bit chewy and the pie dry though, if you wanted it to last. Not a bad way to use up the meat from a hunt if you didn't have the means to preserve it for longer, smoking and drying meat is slow.
Pity the relationship didn't survive the ages.
Sigmar should have praised the pies of the halflings.
It's a thick wheat-based soup with beans and vegetables of a sort that had been mildly popular in Altdorf when you were an Apprentice and you've made good progress on it by the time Hluodwica arrives and seats herself across from you, placing a bowl of her own in front of her.
Ah, college student food. Filling, made of stuff which can keep for ages or cheap and goes straight to your waistline.
Its like ramen if you didn't have ramen.
"Magister-" She looks again, and corrects herself. "Lady Magister Weber. Are you enjoying the meal?"
She knows the markings of a Lord Magister.
Subtle
and well informed.
"Haven't had this in almost twenty years," you say. "Minestrone, right?"
"So it's known in the Empire, but that's simply Tilean for 'soup'. They now know it as polus but the basic recipe dates back to their earliest records, from the times when they'd boil spelt in salt water and add whatever vegetables they had on hand, and called it pulte."
Theres a lot of names like that.
Ramen is just "pulled noodles", Chop Suey is just "chopped to bits"
"You study history?" you ask curiously.
"I study food, and food is history," she says, with perfect confidence. "Or at least it is to those of us who didn't have the fortune of being given magical paradises by their Gods. You can't build a city until you have enough food that someone can focus on building instead of hunting or gathering or farming. How many missed meals would it take to reduce Altdorf to rubble?"
You smile. "I was there for the Dunnage Tax riots. Sometimes it seems like you'd barely need one."
*eyes the elves*
Well, I suppose you can make your own paradise.
"Purely a social call," you say, and she nods and takes up her spoon. "As you've just pointed out, the Halflings are important to the Karak, and you lead them. I've been meaning to find the time to get to know you better for some time."
"And unlike our Panoramia, you don't have a lazy winter to fill with socializing," she notes. "Dusk and dawn she said, and it's never far from one of those, is it? Busy as..." She smiles. "Almost said busy as a bee, but even they're lazy as anything when the snows come."
Everything: [Rests]
Mathilde: "I'll make my robe such that so I don't have to rest"
Robe: "*I* still need rest"
"Sow that you may reap, then reap that you may sow," you say with a shrug. "Always something that needs doing."
"That's a Stirlandian saying," she notes. "You're from there, then?"
"Spymistress there for eight years," you say, not inaccurately.
"There's very few of our kind that isn't aware of that. Many a tragedy for us wandered over from the Haunted Hills or the Ghoul Wood, and it seems that course in our history is finishing. But that's not what I asked."
You consider several answers. "Kelham," you say eventually.
"Ah," she says, looking at you with an undecipherable expression. "I thought I heard a trace of it in your accent."
Gentle but persistent probe there, she already had a guess at the answer, so evasions got of course, caught.
"I left when I was ten," you continue, "and have not practiced their traditions in twenty-five years."
After a long moment, she nods. "Carrots and weeds grow in the same soil, and Panoramia and Titus both have nothing but good to say of you. I apologize for bringing it up." You think of the many figures hanging from trees and being beaten with sticks in your earliest memories that you're only mostly sure were straw-stuffed effigies, and nod in acceptance.
...wait a minute. Was she doing a mother-in-law check?
Because I heard a mother-in-law check.
And yeah, I think she heard the unspoken bits.
People who'd burn a child for witchcraft are unlikely to be any better for foreigners, and vice versa.
Adela and Gretel don't have much to contribute, having been busy working their way deeper into the local Gunnery School and the Besiegers respectively.
That speaks...interestingly of future Gunnery School products, with a Bright wizard engineer and radical dwarf engineers for references.
"Do you think it will succeed?"
"Succeed," you muse. "I think it'll find out what happened. I think that if it's necessary, I can make the Expedition turn around. And I think that in the worst case scenario, I can make it home."
"I'll hold you to that." She goes quiet as she considers it some more. "I don't think I can. I've been doing this for seven years. If I went north, my mind would be here the entire time. Are they keeping it in check, have there been any spore outbreaks, is the soil enrichment staying balanced without any ability to gauge it..." She sighs. "I'm sorry."
You shake your head firmly. "Don't apologize. I asked you to decide. I'm glad you did."
Sank down roots.
Also oh yeah, being able to magically discern the soil nutrient balance is pretty big and nifty for agriculture.
Too much of a good thing can kill a crop, or sow problems for the future.
"Thank you for understanding." She reaches across the table and places her hand on yours. "You know, I've been noticing a pattern," she says a few moments later with a teasing smile. "Dragonbone staff, enchanted flask for firebreathing, dragonscale pauldrons. Should I be worried about the time you're spending with Cython?"
"No," you say simply. "I chose you."
She laughs, then stops when she realizes you're serious. "Wait, really?"
"I mean, we are dating now, aren't we?"
"That's not what I-" She realizes you were playing with her, and you can see her eyes dart around the area to see if there's anything she can throw at you that's not so heavy that it could actually hurt. "I mean, you're attracted to dragons?"
"I'm attracted to clever and interesting," you say with a shrug. "And I guess dangerous, a bit. Beyond that, it's all just..." You wave a hand. "Details, and logistics."
When you make a joke but turns out they were serious.
She considers that. "I'm not dangerous."
"Have you seen the thorn thing you do?"
She cocks her head "I guess put that way, I can kind of see it."
"Evard's Spiked Tentacles of Forced Intrusion!"
At long, long last, the Okral have finished their work, packed up, and returned to Karaz-a-Karak. Though the tension never really eased through their long stay in Karak Eight Peaks, it never came to a head either, which is a relief. Belegar isn't quite looking for an excuse to escalate his feud with Karaz-a-Karak, but he wouldn't turn one away if it knocked on his door either. It's a small miracle that he never received one.
I reckon its a miracle so much as lots of dwarves trying to deescalate and contain the explosions is one.
Some good work there with managing prima donna craftsdwarves
The planned celebration, officially for the reclamation in general but unofficially because the Okral is finally gone, is still some time off as its preparations are put on the backburner in favour of moving everyone around. The growing Clans of the refounded Karak are spreading out into the newly-restored twin peaks of Karags Rhyn and Mhonar, which have been dedicated to Valaya and Smednir respectively. Karag Lhune was far from running out of space, but the logic is that it wouldn't do to leave too much of the mountains empty as it would invite something to fill it. You fully expect to have a nice and long quiet period to put the finishing touches on your preparations for the Karag Dum Expedition.
Nature abhors a vacuum!
Though that sounds like those would be some pretty sparsely populated Karags that'd resemble a horror movie intro scene...
Unfortunately, the sounding of the Citadel's signal horn just as the sun is setting - a design gifted to the Karak by King Kazador Thunderhorn, which says all that needs to about how loud and impossible to ignore it is - dashes those hopes, and as quickly as you safely can you wind down your manipulation of magical energies and rush to the balcony. You're supposed to look to the signal flags first, but your attention is firmly grabbed by the first full demonstration of Gotri's 'honeycomb' hangar design as Karag Lhune's slopes expels its full complement of gyrocopters, each of which circles the mountain to throw itself northwards at all possible speed. You're already developing a suspicion as you tear your eyes downwards to see the signal flags on the Citadel - 'Karaz-a-Karak, army, under attack'.
Ah poop.
Though Gotri's going to earn some quiet approval from speed of deployment.
That deployment time shaved hours off response times and ensured a full wing of gyros on site as needed
With a moment's concentration you expel a cloud of Ulgu in the shape of your coat of arms, and you're hugely relieved to see that of the Angrund clan answer it, and a gyrocarriage is already touching down outside the King's Gates. After it collects its cargo, you're mostly glad and only a little nervous to see it beeline straight in your direction, rather than immediately following the angry swarm of copters north. In what seems like a moment it's touching down on the landing pad on your balcony and you're clambering aboard to see three familiar faces - Belegar, Gotri, and Dreng.
Well, I'd hate to be in command at that touchy moment if the timing was ill.
Man, what wouldn't a halfway decent radio do for leadership...
"Part of the Okral's been attacked," Belegar yells over the sound of the engine. "Skull River, near the southern edge of the Forest of Gloom."
"Forest Goblins?" you say. You really hope it was Forest Goblins.
"Bandits." Even over the engine you can hear the suspicion in his voice.
Bandits.
Press X to Doubt.
No profit in it, hard target, lasting consequences. Unless they were high off their ass on recreationals no bandit would.
"How many casualties?"
"Gotri?"
[Rolling...]
[Rolling...]
"Unconfirmed," he says, double checking some hastily-scrawled notes, "but it sounds like a lot. An entire passenger monitor went down while carrying several hundred passengers, perhaps as many as a thousand. My pilot who was escorting the convoy said there was some sort of explosion below the waterline, then musket fire from the shore. And that's not a good river to go down in." You suppress a shudder at the thought. Skull River is named not so much for the bones that litter its banks, but for the skull-shaped markings on the ravenous swarms of predatory fish that fill it.
Oof.
Also that is one edgy fish.
Too much Shyish or Dhar in the water?
It COULD be a mimicry deterrence thing to look like big eyes in bad light, but these fellows are already super aggressive.
...do they look like they're wearing skulls or do they have printed skulls on the flanks?
"Weber, we're all thinking it. Can you rule out Marienburg's involvement?"
You remember your own suspicions regarding the disease outbreak in southern Stirland. "I can't," you admit. "If it was their agents, they might have mistaken the passenger ships for a supply convoy, bound for the canal."
"Damn," is all Belegar says.
"On top of the river itself," Dreng says, "that's right on the border between Black Spider and Bloody Spear territory. If the explosion attracted their attention they could do even more damage."
Bolded is overlooked during the argument.
The attack looks like it was very well planned out, down to the location - it was not "Lucky strike" so much as "Positioned well to allow as many possible lucky strikes as possible."
If the goblins showed up dwarf losses would have been well and truly maximized, while shore evidence would have been horribly mangled.
...at the same time it suggests the bandits/mercenaries were either not informed of that attribute, or too sneaky to care about the possibility of being attacked by goblins while fleeing dwarf fury.
The latter would not be using muskets.
"Barak Varr's reinforcements should arrive by dawn," Belegar says as the gyrocarriage begins its descent. "Our first priority is to make sure that nothing further happens to them. Second is answers. Third is vengeance. Understood?" You, Gotri, and Dreng nod as the gyrocarriage alights atop the hill, and the four of you clamber out and are instantly met with a crowd of angry, shouting Dwarves.
As the Okral lists its grievances, primarily the apparent death of the leader of Karaz-a-Karak's Metalsmiths Guild, you consider your options for how you can best contribute.
One of a King's worst duties!
Listening to the extensive, annotated grumbling.
Dwarves don't skimp when it comes to building... well, anything, but doubly so for something that Dwarven lives will be depending upon. The passenger monitor may have sunk, but it hasn't broken apart and it remained upright.
No broken back.
Just breach and flood.
"Do the monitors have sailcloth? Or any other very large pieces of fabric?" you say, interrupting the Okral leaders.
"What?" says one of them, bristling, the eldest by the look of his beard, but the others are already looking around for the captains of the beached vessels, and one of them hurries over.
"Yes," he says after you repeat your question. "As back-ups in case the engines fail, and for fothering. Why?"
"I need the entire submerged vessel cast into moon-shadow. And at least one river bank, ideally both."
"What? Why?" says the captain.
"Do it," says Belegar firmly.
There's grumbling, but it's accompanying the scattered Dwarves moving to do so, likely glad to have something productive to do.
I learned a new word today. Fothering. Neat.
Belegar: "Trust me you don't want to know why unless you're a Runelord. Zhuf logic works. Zhuf logic is very distressing."
It doesn't take long for sailcloth and ropes to be fetched from the beached vessels, and very quickly a spiderweb of ropes tied to trees and rocks and spikes hammered into the ground begins to form as you explore the layout of one of the vessels, trying to get a feel of where you'd be most likely to find access, while its captain tells you as rapidly as he can of what would have likely occurred in the ship after the explosion - what would have been sealed, what would have been opened, where survivors might be.
Thats some impressively quick work to raise an improvised canopy in essentially no time at all.
I suppose when you're worrying about friends and family trapped in a wreck and there is some hope of recovering them...you could be very enthusiastic.
You could simply step through the hull of the ship with Substance of Shadow, but if any survivors inside have a lit lamp or any other source of light - unlikely, but possible - that would cause your messy and probably painful death.
Protector: Notification - Loremaster Mathilde Weber risked death by horrible mangling to rescue dwarves.
Once that's done, under your direction Dwarves throw long chains towards the ship, one end secured to the shore, so that hopefully no part of the ship is far from a gleam of Chamon that will lead to dry land and safety.
Its really quite neat how acute her senses have to be to use those chains, through walls, as guiderails
And with that done there's nothing left but to have the Dwarves row you out to the funnel, centre yourself, wrap yourself in the magic of Substance of Shadow, hold your breath, and cautiously lower yourself into the water.
It's a disconcerting experience. The water surrounds you but does not touch you, so you drop through it as if it was air, landing on the top of the sunken deck with a reverberating clang. Then you let yourself drop through that surface as well, knowing that you're positioned just right to fall into the central corridor of the topmost enclosed deck, which would certainly have flooded and thus would be filled with water and, more importantly, darkness. And though the darkness prevents your magical protection from vanishing and leaving you halfway embedded in metal plating, it also means you've only your Windsight to navigate by, which is as disorienting as you feared.
Fun think: From the dwarf perspective she just vanished from the boat.
Above ground, every day the land is illuminated by the Hysh-rich sunlight, swept by the weather of Azyr, and pulses with Ulgu at dawn and dusk. The water knows nothing of any of that. There's traces of natural Ghyran in the river itself as flowing water resonates with the Wind of life, but water cut off from the flow stagnates quickly and fades into magical inertness. The only magic around you is the faint Chamon residing within Dwarven steel and, everywhere you look, tiny daggers of Ghur flitting about, full of ravenous hunger and gathering in clouds around pockets of Shyish. Magesight has many advantages over conventional vision, but one that it lacks is depth - regular sight has two eyes, but Magesight only has one soul, so with Chamon on every side it takes utter concentration to make out any details.
Hmm, theres a trick that could be used by moving around to simulate binocular vision using a single viewpoint.
Odd that the Ghyran in still water just vanishes. Is it tied to the motion or to the water I wonder...with life being in constant internal motion.
With rising discomfort in your chest you move down the corridor, running your hand down the wall. The corridor is filled to the ceiling because there's a hatch in the roof, but each room connected to the corridor has an ovular doorway, and even if they were open - which they easily could have been in the rush to escape the sinking ship - there'd be an air bubble in the ceiling. You're proven correct, and take a few deep breaths with relief before pressing on.
Protector: Notification - Loremaster Mathilde Weber risked death by suffocation to rescue dwarves.
You don't have much hope for finding survivors on this uppermost deck as anyone up here could have easily reached the deck and swam for it, but you check it anyway, both to be thorough and to acclimate yourself to this strange new environment. You find many reasons to be glad for the peculiarities of Substance of Shadow, as its selective intangibility lets you refill your lungs without having to bring yourself into contact with the water that surrounds you, leaving your robes dry and your passage through the corridors unencumbered, and not least of which because you're sure that if you could see the water, it would be red with blood. You have to push past several bodies who by their silhouette of Shyish are all but skeletonized.
Holy shit those fish work fast.
Just how starved are they?
It's on the next deck down that you encounter the first sealed door, and find yourself hesitating before it. You can't open it without water and hungry fish flooding in, almost certainly dooming anyone who might be inside. But you won't help them by stepping through the door and being fused with it as some lantern or candle on the other side shatters your spell. You concentrate your Windsight as much as possible, straining to see any hint of Aqshy on the far side, but you're not entirely sure you'd be able to see the Aqshy of a candleflame on the far side of a wall of steel.
There could be nobody inside. There could be someone inside who's dry and safe and perfectly fine to wait for Barak Varr's forces to arrive and perform a more conventional rescue. Or they could be neck-deep in freezing water and on the verge of hypothermia. What are the chances that whoever's inside has a light source? One in ten? One in five? Fifty-fifty? How do you weigh an unsure chance of death against the equally unsure chance that whoever's inside needs immediate assistance?
You move on.
*marks down on list of things to practice when we have time*
Seeing through walls. Got it.
The individual rooms, you remind yourself, are not your primary objective. Your exploration of one of the beached ships revealed that these monitors are dual-purpose, and when they're not holding passengers they hold cargo. So just above the bilge are the cargo holds, equally capable of holding row after row of crates and barrels as they are of holding row after row of passengers sitting on wooden benches. They're where most of the Dwarves would have been, and unless the deck hatches were open or breached, that's where the largest air pockets would be.
Also load wise, the most sensible place to put them. Empty cargo holds and fully loaded cabins would shift the center of gravity higher, making for a more rocky ride
You make your way down several ladders and pause at the final one, which would lead into the aftmost cargo hold. It's sealed. Why would it be sealed? During normal operation, it's left open to allow air to circulate, especially with hundreds of Dwarves inside. After the explosion, Dwarves escaping would have left it open. It would be sealed if water was entering through it, but the explosion was near the front of the ship, and the doors between cargo holds are kept sealed while moving so that one being breached won't fill all of them. The only scenario it would be sealed is if water started pouring in from above. That would prevent anyone from being able to climb out, but the hatches are designed to still be easily closable in any scenario.
You knock on the steel of the hatch and after a few long moments a rapid, almost frantic hammering responds from many hands at once.
Quick thinking on their part to seal themselves in before the flooding gets too bad.
You picture the cargo hold of the beached ship you explored, the row after row of wooden seating. At least a hundred, probably more.
That shifts the odds.
You mutter a prayer with the last of your breath and drop through the hatch...
[Rolling...]
And fall with another clang into a pitch-black room, filled with a babble of Dwarven voices as they try to scramble away from whatever just dropped into the room.
"I am Loremaster Weber of Karak Eight Peaks. I am here to rescue you."
Just cooly concluded that the risk of instant death, put up against more than a hundred lives, is worth trying.
Also terrifying on the dwarf side. They're at the bottom of the river, there is a knocking and then an invisible thing just leaped into the room through solid walls.
It'd be a horror story if not for the last words.
You climb partway up the hatch's ladder - rematerializing inside water is ill-advised - to release the spell, and then fold Ulgu into a simple light. In a ring around you, shivering and miserable and wet and waist-deep in water, are scores of Dwarves staring at you in confusion and hope. And on the far side of the hold you can see an open door, and more Dwarven faces peering through at you from the next hold.
You allow yourself a moment of relief and happiness before you get to work.
Waist deep. Yeesh, they'd not have lasted, thats what, a third of the air supply leaked out before they sealed the port?
'Rescue' is easier said than done, but there are few problems that arbitrary amounts of Dwarven artifice can't make easier and this proves to be no exception. A series of pulleys is set up with a chain threaded through them, and one of them is affixed to a boulder that is sunk right outside the cargo hold. Through sheer muscle-power the chain is pulled by a team of Dwarves so that it constantly rotates at a steady speed. In theory, anyone affected by Substance of Shadow in such a way that they are not subject to gravity that then grips onto the chain will be pulled through the water and onto the shore and moonlight will first fall upon them as they dangle slightly above the ground. At that point gravity would reassert itself, the Dwarf lets go, and they can be lead away to warm up and recover. Then comes the next one, and so on. The Dwarves inside are lined up roughly in order of how badly they need to go ashore, with the wounded and frail first under the stern direction of their Guildmaster. It's all ready to begin.
Dwarf-torrent-crafter!
The only bottleneck in this basic machine is you.
Chain-casting is very strenuously warned against by the Colleges. Much as someone who says the same word over and over will soon find themselves garbling it, someone casting the same spell over and over is in extreme danger of garbling that, with much worse consequences than some mangled syllables. But here and now, there's no real choice in the matter. With the cargo hold as flooded as it is and the river filled with snowmelt from the mountains, the only reason there's still survivors is the legendary toughness of Dwarves. But even that can't last until dawn, and until more mundane methods of rescue are able to reach them. So there's nothing for it but to do your best to not garble.
As with combat. Its best not to get stabbed, but if you have to get stabbed...do it.
With a small lantern brought from the shore on the far side of the compartment and a stack of benches casting your half of the compartment into shadow, you take the first Dwarf's hand, envelop the pair of you in
Ulgu, and pull him through the hull of the ship. It only takes a moment to recognize the moving
Chamon of the chain and you place the Dwarf's hand upon it, and it only takes a few grasps for the spell to recognize his intentions and for his hand to make contact with the metal. They disappear into the Windsight-obscuring murk of the water and you step back through the hull, step atop another stack of benches to be out of the water, and release the spell.
And repeat.
And repeat.
[Rolling...]
And repeat.
You can't claim to have done it all perfectly. Several times the spell escaped your control and you were unable to discharge it in time, and your ears are plugged with wax, a milky film is covering your vision, and your muscles ache in a way they shouldn't. But these are the most minor and temporary of manifestations of magic run amok, and after what can't have been much more than two hours but felt like a lifetime, the compartment is finally empty of living Dwarves - an unfortunately necessary qualifier, as three Dwarves heavily injured in the initial blast did not survive the wait.
Three dead, even prioritizing those most in need of medical attention. I guess they died in the intervening time, probably already beyond saving when we arrived, if they were bleeding out from the blast itself..
You hesitate before leaving the compartment for the final time, thinking of the sealed rooms above. It was pure luck that the lanterns in the compartment you dropped into had fallen off their hooks in the initial blast, and the compartment was too flooded for them to be relit.
Thanks Ranald for not splinching us here.
"That's the last of them in the passenger holds," you say to the waiting Dwarves. "There's still some sealed compartments, but I can't access them without risking breaching them. They'll have to wait for Barak Varr." You try not to pay too much attention to the expressions of those that were waiting. Though you saved more Dwarves than you could have hoped and there's still some possibility of rescue for the others, there were still plenty that died long before you arrived. Not everyone is coming out of this with a happy ending. Instead you seek out Belegar who's deep in conversation with the leaders of those present, including the one you had rescued from the sunken ship.
Belegar notices your approach and wraps up the conversation before coming over to you. "Near as I can tell, there were about five hundred and fifty aboard the ship when it went down," he says. "Only twenty reached the shore. You just added three hundred and twelve to that tally."
"Not a bad night's work," you say, trying to resist the urge to speculate how much larger that number would be if you'd cleared every compartment.
Belegar feels...validated, I think, of his statement to prevent further loss?
Three hundred longbeards saved from an untimely death, who would have died terribly otherwise.
Mathilde feels like she could have done better. Workaholic overachiever that she is.
He's squinting at you in the lamplight. "Are you okay? Your eyes look odd."
You shrug. "It's temporary. I had to do a lot of magic in a short time."
"If you need to rest, you've done your share and then some. One of the gyrocopters brought word from Barak Varr's incoming reinforcements, they're fully equipped for rescue and retrieval, and Dreng is leading a band of volunteers from the Okral to try to track down the ambushers, more to keep their minds occupied than in the hopes of actually finding them. Everything's in hand."
You shake your head. "I've got enough left in me to at least search the shoreline for anything the attackers left behind."
"You're sure?"
"I'm the only one that can usefully do so right now. Could be something they left that'll be washed away by dawn."
Though Belegar doesn't press the issue, he does assign a few of his Hammerers to go with you. In case any of the ambushers are still out there, he says. You don't try to argue. You think you're still more or less okay, but if you're wrong, you'd much rather be carried back than pass out in the river mud.
He's getting better at reading wizards.
Belegar: *Spotting a miscast sign* "You okay?"
Mathilde: *downplaying it* "Its temporary"
Belegar: "You can rest if you have to"
Mathilde: "Don't worry, its a simple search"
Belegar: "Well, take some Hammerers."
"So they can carry you back if you keel over"
A few minutes later
Mathilde: *dives into ice cold river so that the evil fish will commit suicide on her to pick out shrapnel from the riverbed.
Belegar: *Has a minor headache*
To the eyes, the banks of the river are an indistinguishable mess of mud and tangled vegetation in the moonlight. Magesight makes it much easier to pick out the details, as the vegetation thrums with Ghyran while the mud only glows faintly with it. Picking out something out of place is as easy as looking for the inert silhouette amongst a background of jade.
Hmm, how DOES mud count for Ghyran? Theres soil but its wet. Theres life but its mostly simple animals. Theres water but its not moving.
This strategy quickly pays off, as not far behind the sunken ship you find a length of thick rope leading into the water. It has a series of knots tied at regular intervals towards the end, and judging by the marks in the mud the current has been tugging at it insistently. The Skull River will have to go without this piece of detritus. With the help of the Hammerers you overcome the weight of water and mud and reel it in. It ends abruptly, and after wiping the mud off the end you frown at it. It's heavily frayed and feels stiff to the touch, more so than the fibers in the rest of the rope. So you suspect this was used to hold the explosive in place while the ambushers waited for their prey. You don't see any Aqshy. So no Bright Magic was involved in the explosion, and this confirms the reports that it happened under the waterline. If either or both of those were the case, the Aqshy in the explosion - either directly from a magical component, or drawn in by the moment of detonation - would have been embedded in the rope with such force that it would take days or weeks for it to fade.
Interesting, when looking back at this - theres no Dhar embedded in the char?
Did it wash away after hours of drifting in the river?
Or was Mathilde just too tired to notice
It doesn't take long to find what you expected to on the other side of the river - another length of rope tied to a gnarled tree. Pulling that up as well reveals similar fraying and singeing to the other end, and an identical lack of Aqshy. So they use the tree as an anchor and hold the rope at the other end. The explosive charge is either weighted or heavy enough to sink on its own, but not all the way to the bottom because it's being held in place.
PROBABLY packed full with powder I think, since powder isn't that heavy, any air in the barrel would make it tend to float without adding a weight to it.
Probably DID add a weight to it anyway, its water, it'd be easy to ensure the barrel is oriented correctly by adding a lead plate to the "down". Bouyancy would handle the rest.
This simplifies the detonator a bit.
The first ship in the Okral's convoy arrives, and... it explodes. Somehow. Set off by the musket fire? No, it exploded below water. By a pull on the rope? Too easy for it to have been set off by the pull of the river. On impact? That has possibilities. You've read books on Dwarven chemistry that mentioned chemicals that could be ignited by impact or by mixing them with other chemicals or even on contact with water. But while anyone with gold can get their hands on a barrel of gunpowder, those chemicals are significantly more exotic, with much fewer sources...
Mathilde's lack of experience with explosives show:
-Musket fire would not ignite gunpowder anyway, not unless it struck metal and threw sparks AFTEr breaching the barrel.
-Impact fused chemicals would be very unreliable, because this is a fast moving river and things collide at much lower velocity in the river.
-Its POSSIBLE to use an orientation sensitive mix(i.e. beaker positioned above reagent so that a spill triggers it) and use other means to ensure its facing the right way up, but it does mean if the barrel is carried wrong it'd explode in their face while planting it.
With a summoned knife you prick your finger and allow a drop to fall into the river, and after a moment you activate your Robes and dip your hand in after it. The blood has already attracted the attention of several fish and it takes only a few seconds for you to feel the slight pressure of powerful jaws closing on even more powerful Aethyric Armour, and then blood blooms in the river as the Rune on your belt returns the chomp twofold to the fish. You withdraw your hand, double-check that it's unmarked, and then take a breath, summon Branulhune, and jump over the side.
That actually looks kind of fun.
I wonder if Kragg expected "jumped into a river full of piranha trusting that the Belt would kill them all and her armor would keep her from dying"
Over the course of several dives you retrieve several fragments of metal, and when your lungs start to ache you dismiss Branulhune - which disappears with an odd flash of light that it's never displayed before, which is a puzzle for later - and allow the buoyancy of your still-full lungs to bring you back to the surface.
Silencing function for the cavitation pop.
Say, that brings to mind a question.
What DOES happen if you cast Substance of Shadow on an item underwater?
It'd immediately stop interacting with the water. The water rushes into the new void. Cavitation pop and flash.
Light dispels Substance of Shadow.
Object now occupying the same space as water.
When your teeth are no longer chattering, you confer with Belegar and Gotri.
"Steel," Gotri is saying, "not the worst I've seen, but definitely not Dwarven. If I had to guess, I'd say Tilean or Imperial."
"They're all curved back on each other," Belegar observes. "Every one."
"Hoops," you say, "around an exploding barrel."
Gotri turns the fragment over in his hands. "That would cause these stress patterns," he concedes.
Estalia not mentioned, so I'd guess they have better stuff?
"Barrel full of gunpowder - or something else - hanging from a rope, one end of the rope tied to a tree, the other held by the ambushers. It's heavy enough to sink and it's held below the waterline, either to avoid the monitor's armour or to prevent it being seen or both. If they had a particular target in mind they could give it enough slack for the barrel to sink to the bottom and allow non-targets to pass by unharmed. When this monitor arrives, it hits the barrel and it explodes. Don't know the exact mechanism."
"I could think of a few ways to do it," Gotri says after a moment, "but it would require very careful manufacturing, and not minding terribly much if it explodes prematurely."
Thinking about the rope.
One end is secured to a tree(small team?), then the barrel is carried across, along with the other end of the rope. The barrel is dropped off in the river and they keep rowing, and disembark. The barrel is either in the right spot from the start, a large excess of rope and a lot of bumping is involved, or multiple back and forth trips will be needed to set this up.
So that suggests that if it didn't explode prematurely, it probably wasn't an engineering or chemical impact fuse. Theres enough barrel handling over water that its practically asking to blow at some point.
How long does it take to divert a river? Months? Years? Decades? You don't know. But you now know how long it takes to divert half a river, at least if you're Barak Varr: about a couple of hours. With extremely precise driving it lines itself up so that its bow is almost touching that of the sunken ship and its stern is on the verge of running aground, and somewhere inside the massive vessel, a certain series of valves that are very rarely turned are turned, and water floods in. With an almost stately grace it settles lower and lower in the water until it touches the river bottom, its top decks still well clear of the surface.
Huh, did they develop this type of boat specifically for temporary diversion of river? It seems very well engineered and practiced, so I'm kind of wondering...why?
The water level on one side of the wreck begins to sink as it rises on the other, and working with coordinated grace, hundreds of Dwarves begin to fill and stack sandbags to further increase the discrepancy. By the time the first hour is over the top of the wreck is piled high with sandbags to keep all the water on one side and not the other, the river has receded enough on the dry side for some wary Dwarves to start bludgeoning beached fish, and water from inside the ship has begun to pour over the massive hole in its front.
Are those fish that vicious or did the dwarves want their pound(heh) of flesh?
"Dead center of the bottom corridor," says the Grandmaster of Barak Varr's Slotchokri, the Riverine Shipwrights, speaking loudly to be heard over the rushing of the nearby river. "And the blast radius was large enough to partially open up the corridor above and the compartment below. They couldn't have found a more crippling shot if they tried."
"We see this sometimes, from-" a moment of hesitation from the Grandmaster of Barak Varr's Skarrenokri, the Oceanic Shipwrights. You turn to him, and find his eyes on you.
"She knows," Belegar grunts.
"The Frurndar have weapons that strike below the waterline. We've begun armouring against it, but..." He shrugs. "You can only put so much weight on a ship. More steel below the waterline means less above it. The Slotchokri were thought to never need to protect against more than an errant boulder."
Chaos dwarf torpedoes.
Sounds like they hadn't figured out torpedo bulges yet, but then its not exactly dwarf style to use LESS material for more protection.
"We'll explore whether that was in error later," King Byrrnoth says. "Focus on this."
...I hope the designer doesn't take it badly.
"A barrel of an explosive substance was held in place by rope," Gotri says. "One side tied to a tree, the other held. The ship hits the barrel, the barrel explodes. Possibly some sort of impact trigger mechanism."
"Gunpowder?" One Engineer says.
"Must have been a hell of a lot of it for a hole that big," says another.
"I'll be able to say how big the barrel was as soon as I get the metal back to my workshop," you say. "From there you should be able to determine whether it was gunpowder or something..." Your voice trails off as you stare at the jagged edge of the hole.
Considering a Hogshead sized(not very big, its about a regular pig head size) barrel was used, that's an understatement. You'd expect a blast like this from several barrels worth of gunpowder.
The last trickles of bloody water have just finished emerging from the frontal compartment, and without that steady stream of Shyish you think you can see a trace of something, something that fire and water haven't quite washed away. Embedded in the steel here and there are what you'd call splinters if they weren't so pulverized. Magically speaking, many types of live wood are very mutable and can absorb just about any magical energy that it finds itself surrounded by, for better or worse. Dead wood retains these properties to an extent, so prolonged exposure can leave a mark. You wouldn't be surprised to see Ghyran from the river or Shyish from the dead Dwarves in the pulp, but you're not seeing that. Lurking inside the wood pulp is the very faintest touch of Dhar.
"Traces of Dark Magic," you say. "Not from the trigger mechanism, a Dhar trigger wouldn't have lasted long enough for the wood to absorb it. It's from the explosive substance. And I only know of one explosive substance that would radiate Dhar."
"Skaven blackpowder," Belegar says, and you nod. The atmosphere wasn't exactly jovial before, but it darkens even further as hands tighten on weapons.
A mark against the "made on the spot" argument at least, is that the powder's been in the barrel for a long time.
Weird sidetrack thought - Skaven might not have much of a domestic barrel industry come to think of it. It requires a lot of wood, well fitted and bound. They live in environments where all wood has to be looted or imported.
And it'd be so much easier to yoink whole barrels from the Empire than to work them into barrels. Making barrels is specialized skilled labor to get a watertight fit.
The beginning of the Council meeting is dedicated to touring the work of the Okral, which you suspect is being treated with a great deal more respect than would have been the case if their trip home had been uneventful.
It did work wonders for relations with the new spin on things!
Also toured are the exterior Sentinels and Morzund's Wall, a series of walls and watchtowers that keep a wary eye on the gaps between the southern Karags where the terrain isn't quite difficult enough to fully dissuade a determind attacker on its own.
Hmm...should put a whole bunch of traps there.
Not toured, but definitely important, was the great deal of work put in to the tunnels below the Karak, mapping their extent, exterminating anything left in there that shouldn't be, and collapsing, filling, and barricading until what was left presented as defensable and patrollable an underground perimeter as possible.
Really, the tunnels need to be occupied as much as possible. Uncomfortably much room for a breach to pass unnoticed unless somebody passes every inch at least once a day.
Barak Varr and Karaz-a-Karak are both performing their own investigations, including the former hiring a Jade Wizard to interrogate the river and trees, so hopefully between the three different avenues of investigation the truth of the matter can be uncovered.
Interrogating the tree the rope got tied to would be nice.
That said, IIRC trees and rivers are kind of bad at differentiating one kind of ambulatory meat from another.
You spend some time considering a shadow-based delivery mechanism, since you've found so much success with Burning Shadows and Substance of Shadows, and after all 'Fog Path' is just a working title. But for something intended to be used on the move, having to control local light levels to properly use it would be too big a handicap. So you instead turn your attention to Universal Confusion, which hasn't seen any real use since you learned it almost five years ago but did manifest quite promisingly as a billowing cloud from its interaction with your Mantle of Mist Arcane Mark. That has quite a pleasing mental image to it - a rolling carpet of fog emanating from your person and covering the landscape ahead. You dig out your notes from when you learned it and get to work.
Mathilde: "Aesthetic!"
[Fog Path delivery mechanism: Learning, 2+28+5(Library: Ulgu)=35.]
It does not go well.
You'd thought it would serve perfectly well as a delivery mechanism. It covers the ground in a near-uniform carpet of opaque fog and hides obstacles from the eyes, so why not hide obstacles from the legs too? But though it's trivial for you to billow out fog, controlling its flow and weaving a spell into it proves to be as frustrating as... well, as frustrating as trying to herd fog would be to someone who isn't a Grey Wizard.
I think hiding the legs from the obstacles might be a better symbolism?
Because fog tends to turn non-obstacles into obstacles, which might be the impediment here.
[Attempt to work around it: Learning, 69+28+5(Library: Ulgu)=102.]
A more dramatic person would have dramatically crossed out all the accumulated notes on your chalkboard. You are more sensible and simply move to the next one, as you might still need to refer to those notes later. But you have been looking at it all wrong. You've gotten hung up on using fog as a mechanism. No wonder you're getting nowhere. Fog isn't a mechanism, it's a medium.
(Okay, you're compelled to admit that fog might still be used as a mechanism, but you've hit a wall on that front so for now you're disregarding the possibility altogether.)
So step one, emit and corral the fog to where it needs to be, step two, have the delivery mechanism flow through it. Doing two moderately difficult things versus doing one slightly more difficult thing... probably isn't a great trade-off, but it's better than failing entirely.
Clunkier, and a lot more effort to manage hmm...using fog as the mechanism AND the medium would be much more elegant.
If only Mathilde could land on the right metaphor.
Days turn to weeks as you map out this alternate path, and eventually you're left with all your notes properly transcribed into a notebook and with nothing left to do but to take it for a ride and see what happens.
[New delivery mechanism: Learning, 45+28+5(Library: Ulgu)=78.]
[Putting it all together: Learning, 19+28+20(Grey Tower)+5(Library: Ulgu)=72.
[First cast: Req 50, Learning, 31+28+20(Grey Tower)-20(first time)=59.]
The inside of your Room of Dawn and Dusk isn't typical casting conditions, but you're glad you opted to do it there rather than anywhere else. As roiling fog fills the room and the identifier flows unsteadily through it, looking in vain for any interruptions in the smooth floor below you, you exhale shakily and let the spell dissipate. If you had done it in less ideal conditions, or if you didn't have your Staff to make channeling the fog that much easier, that spell would definitely have ripped itself out of your control. You now know the final few pieces to make it more reliable, and over the coming days you test it in a variety of conditions.
[Horrified Elder Race Noises]
Johann has been buried in maps and frequently absent as he tries to nail down specifics. Tale of Metal is a very useful spell, but as he frequently complains, people are rarely considerate enough to mention their name and precise location while crafting. The barrel hoops prove especially frustrating as the cooper neglected to even open a window in his workshop, leaving Johann to spend fruitless weeks trying to narrow down a location based off the colour of the wood and trying to identify an accent in the cooper's mutterings. In desperation he turned away from the cooper and towards the steel itself, and though he remains tight-lipped about this stage of the investigation, he comes out of it claiming with complete confidence that the steel was smelted in Morlenfurt, a Reikland town on the foothills of the Grey Mountains. He also gives you the dimensions of the barrel in question which matches that of a hogshead.
Must be extra frustrating to try to solve it by visual cues when he's blind huh?
But Breach the Unknown comes through. Wouldn't be surprised if the Gold College has the composition of every Imperial metal source written down.
The lead ball that was shot at the ship takes him on an equally frustrating journey. Cheap shot of questionable quality is still made with molten lead poured into moulds of metal or sand, but the modern method is to use shot towers, where precise amounts of molten lead are allowed to fall a great height and naturally form a round drop before plunging into water and being near-instantly quenched. While a triumph of modern engineering, this also means that the 'creation' process lasts only a few seconds and is contained within a featureless tower, though thankfully there are enough windows for ventilation that he is able to get the lay of the land around it, one glimpse at a time. There's only so many shot towers in the Empire and each is known to its administrative apparatus so that if necessary they can be pressed into service of the Empire's military, so while the task is a tedious one, it's also a finite one. He eventually finds the shot tower that matches the one that he saw: Kreutzhofen of southwest Wissenland, the crossroads of the Vaults, which stands at the intersection of passes leading to Tilea, Bretonnia, and the Border Princes.
So...uninformative by dint of basically being the geographically nearest shot tower.
Other than the mercenaries being above average quality to splurge on it.
"It's a matter of conditions," he says, leafing through his notes. "You know the Colleges, 'assume a perfectly spherical ball of Chamon in a magically inert plain' and all that. Skaven engineering doesn't work that way, at least not the stuff that ends up widely used. They assume that their equipment is going to be poorly maintained and stored in the damp by incompetents before it's dragged onto a battlefield, and often intersperse their notes with extended rants on the subject. That's what the warpstone is for. When used with a warplock trigger mechanism it makes for a much more reliable means of ignition than a snaphance or a flintlock, and even with mundane mechanisms, finely-ground warpstone is ignitable, and detonates hard. So if the blackpowder is damp it still works as long as any of it is dry enough to ignite, because that sets off the warpstone which forces even wet powder to ignite, and makes it go off all at once instead of in a wave. So for a relatively small amount of warpstone, you get a more reliable ignition and a more efficient explosion than blackpowder on its own."
The difference between a physicist and an engineer.
Engineers know the users are going to do something dumb to their device.
And funny enough that gunpowder seems to be the ONE thing that warpstone makes more reliable rather than less.
I suppose warpstone already LOVES destroying things by default
"How easy is it to create?"
"Depends how much you care about others. The Skaven have a process to make it much less radiant and therefore more efficient as well as safer to handle and use, but if you don't care about that you can just use the raw stuff. Grinding and mixing it would do terrible things to whoever does it, and you wouldn't want to be downwind of it when it ignites, but it could be done. The only tricky bit would be getting the warpstone in the first place."
You grimace. "Any way to tell if the explosion used refined warpstone or raw?"
"Not unless you were there to see it."
...wait a minute.
The refined warpstone is safer to use. That means any warpstone token, made of refined warpstone, could be processed into warpstone powder fairly safely?
"Damn. You turn up any other type of explosive that would radiate Dhar?"
He shrugs. "Nothing solid. There's accounts of various Chaos Dwarf weapons that would radiate all kinds of malign energies, but they tend to have more exotic effects than just exploding. The Zombie Pirates of the Vampire Coast are said to use some sort of altered gunpowder, and I could easily see it having some sort of necromantic component that would radiate Dhar. Cathay are said to use both Dark Magic and blackpowder."
Too vanilla to be any of those yeah.
What the heck kind of zombie gunpowder though...
"The list of possible suspects is long enough without venturing outside the Old World. Johann says the barrel was a hogshead, does that fit the results?"
He drums his fingers. "It's all variables. I have a decent idea about what sort of steel the monitor would have been made out of, but not the thickness or the design. How tight was the barrel bound? How much pressure did the depth of the water exert? How close was the barrel to the hull when it exploded? But with all that said... yes. It would fit."
"It matches logistically too. It'd be unwieldy to carry, but easy enough to move around with a rowboat or a cart or even a wheelbarrow. Good work, Max."
I think we could get the pressure calculations if we had more time to. No luck o nthe rest.
The final stop on this tour is with the Hochlander's reports. Warpstone, or wyrdstone as it is known to the ignorant, is highly illegal to trade in but very profitable to those willing to take the risk, as the gullible believe it to have all sorts of mystical properties, and those that know more than they should can use it to power all sorts of forbidden magics. The Hochlander's first step was confirming that that's just as true as ever and indeed it is, and he leaves a trail of burning pyres as his Witch Hunter contacts follow in his wake.
So basically, whoever wants warpstone could get warpstone.
Well, past tense. Hochlander burned those trails good.
The second step is to investigate the cottage industries of the Empire, where second-rate blackpowder is made to a thousand different recipes which often owe more to guesswork and superstition than chemistry. He comes out of it with a frankly terrifying list of additives that might grace the weapon of anyone who cheaps out on blackpowder, and though some are of dubious legality and one or two result in still more pyres, none seem to have hit on ground wyrdstone as an additive.
This also makes sense. These cottage industry gunpowder manufacturers are cheaper than the properly done powder, and warpstone isn't cheap so they wouldn't be using those when they could mix in other stuff.
I'm curious how non-warpstone additives led to pyres. Using ground human bone or something?
The third step is the most dubious and requires reading the Hochlander in on the Conspiracy of Silence: see if any can be acquired more directly. There's ample evidence that some humans are in league with the Skaven as Cults worshipping the Horned Rat crop up from time to time and need to be burned out. Considering the ambition and duplicity that Skaven are capable of, and, admittedly, the ambition and duplicity that humans are capable of, it's not all that outrageous to think that there might be some crossover between the black markets of the Empire and the black markets of the Under-Empire.
This comes up bust, though the Hochlander does make some new friends among Witch Hunters, Excisemen, and one of Algard's Hands from encounters where both are trying to bait the other into admitting something incriminating - good thing you made sure he has all the right documentation to prove that he really is acting on official orders. Either the theoretical black market crossover is even better hidden than you thought or it doesn't exist.
...Excisemen meaning Roswita, Algard AND the Witch Hunters are digging up Skaven connected black markets. The question Why arises.
But he does find something in parts of Reikland - blackpowder circulating among criminal organizations, said to be more reliable and produce a harder-hitting shot than regular blackpowder. His investigation is unable to find exactly who the ultimate supplier is, but all the trails seem to point in the direction of Ubersreik, where the Skaven undercity was recently exterminated. Not quite collusion with the Under-Empire, then. Just ordinary corruption. You make sure to pass the information on to where it needs to go to begin a formal investigation and sit back to collate your information.
And is promptly answered.
Because Ubersreik should NOT be leaking Skaven gunpowder.
I have a suspicion that someone just stole the warpstone TOKENS instead though. It'd be easier to steal than enough barrels to sell.
You could fit the necessary warpstone tokens in a pouch or pocket to make a lot of barrels and you could make a barrelload of 'kicked' powder for a couple of coin tokens.
So. One hogshead of what was very likely warpstone-infused gunpowder. Its source could be Ubersreik, or it could be made by someone with knowledge enough of the Skaven to replicate their gunpowder and the contacts and wealth to acquire wyrdstone enough for a hogshead worth. The barrel was hooped with Morlenfurt steel, which is just north of Ubersreik, and the bullets of the ambushers came from Kreutzhofen. Probably not Skaven, then. Someone of a mind to suspect Marienburg could draw a line directly south from Marienburg to Ubersreik for the powder, to Kreutzhofen for the equipment, to the Border Princes for the lackeys, and then to the Skull River for the ambush. Someone of a mind to clear Marienburg could quite reasonably point out that anyone in or around the Empire with money and contacts could have made this happen.
As brought up, this route is something an Imperial would think of. Marienburgers would go by the river route if they were.
Smells super fishy.
Might be the dead piranha stains.
