Maker of Fire

Emily, Healing Shrine of Mugash

Making gun powder, also known as black powder, was easy. The hard part was getting the three ingredients: sulfur, carbon, and saltpeter.

The most difficult was saltpeter, which is an old name for potassium nitrate. There are at least three different ways to get saltpeter. Since bats like caves, I took the bat poop route since there was a lot of bat guano available.

The recipe is simple: I dissolved nitrate-rich bat guano in hot water and added ashes from a wood fire. Wood ashes are mostly potassium carbonate. The potassium in the ash and the nitrate ions from the bat poop got together in the hot water to form saltpeter. The other stuff left in the chemical stew precipitated out as carbonates, leaving the saltpeter dissolved in the water.

At this point, getting saltpeter is as simple as drawing off the solution and evaporating the water away. The stuff left behind is saltpeter. I had dreams of making saltpeter this way. I often had dreams like this, where I remembered some useful recipe from basic chemistry.

Getting carbon was as simple as making charcoal. Charcoal is simple to make though it is hard work. All I had to do was stack up wood in a beehive shape while leaving room at the bottom to start a slow-burning fire. The whole trick to making charcoal is not letting the fire get too hot or burn too fast. It was time-consuming because the fire inside the stack of wood requires attention all the time to keep it from burning too fast. The slow controlled fire drives off the moisture and the volatile compounds in the wood, leaving charcoal behind. Charcoal is mostly just carbon.

Sulfur was the easiest, thanks to the volcanic rift. It formed at the mouths of fumaroles in the volcanically-active areas of the rift. Its yellow color made it easy to find. All I had to do was collect it.

During my first year in my valley, I perfected making saltpeter, charcoal, and bloomery-made wrought iron, among other things. I began accumulating black powder, which is about six parts saltpeter, one part sulfur, and one part charcoal. I packed it into a leather-lined box for storage and used it to break up my magnetite vein.

By year five, I had accumulated a very large supply of black powder. I kept it dry and separated from the rest of my workspace by a wall of limestone. I placed it with my inert solids like sodium and potassium chloride, and surrounded it with my stash of rice, as an added measure to absorb any moisture. The salts and the rice are what I traded my crystals for at Uldlip.

There was nothing else in my cave that could have exploded. The explosion had to be from the black powder. I didn't remember enough chemistry to calculate the energy released by my black powder. I wasn't even sure how much I had since I lacked the means to calibrate my primitive scale.

Though the roof of my cavern was more than a meter thick in places, I was surprised at the destruction when Asgotl first flew over. When I first saw the wreckage of my cave, I was somehow numb to what happened. Everything I made was destroyed. I found one segment of my painfully-created iron ring from my Gramme Machine. The graphite electrodes for the arc light were probably burned.

My matches, of course, were history. There are many different recipes to make matches. I used a mix of antimony trisulfide and potassium chlorate to make mine. Antimony trisulfide is the mineral stibnite. It came from a sulfide-rich vein two ranges away to the northeast. I made potassium chlorate using electrolysis driven by a homemade Gramme generator and a liquid electric cell. All that work I put into making my matches was now just rubble.

My adverse reaction started when I found my cross pein hammer and then my hatchet. I couldn't spot any of my other hammers, my tongs, or my hunk of tempered steel which I used as an anvil. The griffin dug into the rubble and started dragging out body parts. That's when I lost the contents of my stomach.

It was hard to get back on his back to make the trip back to the shrine, but at this point, I knew my home in my beautiful valley was gone forever. All the resources, the bat cave and the crystal cave, the copper minerals and the magnetite, and the sulfur and sal ammoniac from the fumaroles, they remained; but the place I had made my home was gone. My head was a muddle.

Would I have been captured by hostile Cosm if I had succeeded in making glass and avoided burning myself with a steam flash? Probably. It all went back to those two lost children who landed in my valley last winter. I didn't like myself for thinking I should have left them abandoned in the snow.

My thought process was all over the place on the flight back to the healing shrine. If I had succeeded in making glass, then I would have been able to take my next planned step: the creation of concentrated sulfuric and nitric acid. I had a use for those two acids: I was going to make gun cotton, an easily-produced form of nitrocellulose. You soak cotton or any other source of cellulose, like wood shavings, in a mix of sulfuric and nitric acid, rinse it out with cold water, and then let it dry. The result is lovely explosive nitrocellulose. I wanted to make explosive traps and grenades with it, for self-defense, in case my valley was ever invaded by hostile Cosm. The irony was painful.

I was so sunk in my despair by the time we got back, I didn't even react to the ministrations of Twessera and Thuorfosi, as they carried, stripped, soaked, and washed me in a hot bath, wrapped me in a clean nightgown, put me in my bed and charmed me to sleep. I think I must have been more than halfway to a catatonic stupor.

I dreamed of making lye with copper electrodes in a saltwater solution. To do that, I would need direct current, enough to drive the Cl- to the anode and H+ to the cathode. That meant I needed to build a new Gramme machine. I wondered if the shaped pieces of magnetite I had left at the top of the west ridge, up above the tree line, had been struck by lightning yet. It was the only way I had to magnetize the magnetite. Would it work to make a small aperture out of copper if I could get enough copper ore or metal? That had been my biggest problem for the first Gramme machine: lots of iron and never enough copper.

I needed a new Gramme machine for making lye. With sodium lye, I could make much better soap than what they had at the shrine. I could also make more potassium chlorate, which was probably the most important ingredient for matches. Dreams of electrolysis beat out nightmares any day. If I had other dreams, I did not remember them.

---

Emily, Healing Shrine of Mugash

I woke to the smell of toasted oak cakes. There was a plate of them on the side table that Lisaykos had put next to the bed two days ago. There was also a dish with butter and a small knife. There was no one in the room with me though there was a griffin-shaped lump sleeping in the doorway.

My eyes felt scratchy and my nose felt all plugged up. I sat up and got out of bed. I pulled the dressing robe off the arm of the chair where it was draped, put it on, and went to see if I could navigate around the lump so I could visit the necessary.

I had to prod the lump and wake him up. If I tried to climb over him, he would have woken anyway. He looked as tired as I felt when he shuffled out of the way of the door. I found myself thinking about urine collection to make phosphorus compounds while using the Coyn-sized necessary. Given a large enough volume, the process of deriving chemicals from liquid waste streams would take less time. Halfway back to the bedroom, I realized I was thinking of possibilities that involved living with people on this side of the rift valley. It took my breath away. I was actually thinking of doing what I vowed I would never do.

This place was a trap. Even if I had met the only handful of Cosm who were decent people, Foskos remained a place of profound evil and injustice. Given the imbalance of power between magic users and those without magic, some form of benevolent despotism would be tolerable, but Foskos was hardly that benign. The breeding farms, the chained gangs of farmworkers, and the so-called pleasuring houses were beyond any toleration.

"Are you alright?" Asgotl asked, watching me from where he was sitting in front of my bedroom door. "You just went completely white." I thought about it and then nodded slowly.

"Seriously? You don't look alright to me. I really wish you could talk. Just looking at you, it's obvious there's a storm of thought going on behind those eyes, but you're the only one who knows what you're thinking."

I shrugged and stepped over his talon to get through the door. I hardly ate yesterday and right now I had a hole in my stomach I needed to fill before I did anything else. Then I would give some thought about where to go from here now that I was homeless. Maybe it was time to give some serious thought to either traveling to the land of the Sea Coyn or trying to learn how to speak again and then traveling to the land of the Sea Coyn. As I started to sort my options, I fell back asleep without meaning to.

---

Imstay King, Yuxviayeth region

Imstay was tired of the sullen faces of the conquered farmers, the ones who hadn't vanished. Some families just up and disappeared, leaving the growing winter wheat in the field just a rotation or two before harvest.

He meant to leave this valley to his youngest cousin, who did not have lands or a title yet. The good farmland of this valley would be productive; however, his young cousin would also be responsible for keeping the road open between the east and west sides of the mountains and for shipping grain west to the cities along the Salt River. This wasn't a sinecure.

He was looking over the map of the area with Bobbo, trying to decide the best places for roads and bridges when a messenger bird flew in. He unrolled the linen strip, read the message, and swore.

"Something wrong?" Bobbo asked. Out of all of Imstay's officers, he was the smartest. Just over 40, his brown hair was speckled with white. What he lacked in magic and height, he made up with strength, prowess, and intelligence.

"The cave where the maker of fire lived exploded. The event was witnessed by four scouts. The two scouts who were at the cave died in the explosion. The fire that started has now burned over the range and into the Valley of the Aspen River to the east, destroying timber stands. Two days ago, a griffin with a Coyn rider stopped at the explosion site and then flew east."

"The was something inside that cave and the scouts must have meddled with it," Bobbo stated. "There is no burning earth or seeping tar in those mountains, so cave gas is unlikely."

"That we know of," Imstay inserted.

"Yes, that we know of, but we've known those mountains for a long time. The flats are too wet to farm and there is no road across the Great Cracks to bring timber back. Other than a handful of trappers, no one lives there. That raises two interesting questions. What was in that cave that exploded, and how could a Coyn ever ride a griffin?" Only the strongest magic users could compel the obedience of a griffin or roc eagle.

"It's possible if the mount's owner has enough power to command it," Imstay pondered. "The griffin may have been owned by someone from Foskos; it could have been from another kingdom like Impotu or Junu; the rider could have been a Cosm child of precocious talent; or Coyn and the griffin were free agents. Is there any other possibility I missed?"

"Yes. The scouts could have made a mistake in their observations. I think that's probably the best explanation. I advise that you interview the scouts before making any conclusions."

"I will think about it," Imstay frowned. "So where is that Coyn?"

"The trade fair at Uldlip starts in 36 days," Bobbo pointed out. "Move scouts there to look for a female Coyn who can't talk and is wearing leathers or skins. Then pick her up after the fair breaks up."

"What if she's affiliated with the Sea Coyn? Taking a Sea Coyn violates the treaty. We can't afford to lose the trade fair, even if they are Coyn."

"There are several possibilities," Bobbo leaned back in his chair. "One, she goes to Tuleen and you give up on your instant fire. Two, we raid the boat she's on and kill all witnesses, and erase all evidence. Three, we conquer all of the Salt River from Black Falls to the Tuleen caravansary at the Salt River Sink. Four, we negotiate with her for the knowledge to make instant fire. Five, we capture her quietly in Uldlip."

"I like options three and five," Imstay smiled at the thought of owning the trade route.

"You would, but option three can't be achieved in the short term."

"So, I will send men to capture her at the trade fair, if it can be done. If not, we will let her go for now."

"You could ask the Queen to find this Coyn for you," Bobbo pointed out, though he knew the king would not consider it. The Queen would favor negotiation and following the terms of the trade fair treaty. Imstay would favor just taking what he wanted. The two rarely agreed over means. Personally, Bobbo preferred whatever would achieve one's desired ends.

"She will refuse, so why even bring it up?"

"Just considering all options," Bobbo said truthfully, ever hopeful that Imstay would grow out of his small-mindedness someday. His king was not unintelligent; however, instead of looking at what was best for the kingdom as a whole, Imstay erred in treating Foskos as something to be exploited for the benefit of his family and his favorites.

Imstay selected a fresh strip of linen and wrote his instructions on it: "capture the maker of fire at or near the trade fair but only if it is done in secret."