The first lesson of the Ironfields is sound. Not the screams of men, which fade into the background as easily as the hiss of steam, but the rhythm. The percussive slam of a thousand hammers striking anvils, the groan of overburdened pulleys, the volcanic roar of molten iron pouring into casts. It is a symphony of subjugation, a mechanical heartbeat that governs every breath, every swing, every drop of sweat that evaporates before it can hit the scorched earth.
Dawn in this place is not a promise of light, but a shift in the colour of the smoke—from the impenetrable black of night to a bruised, ashen grey. Chains clanked around my ankles as they herded us from the holding pens toward the processing block. The air, thick with ash and the metallic tang of blood, coated my tongue. It was a physical weight, pressing the breath from my lungs.
I was shoved forward into a line. Ahead, a brazier glowed with malice. An overseer with a face like a slab of raw meat held a branding iron, its tip a malevolent orange eye. When my turn came, two soldiers grabbed my arms, pinning me against a soot-stained wall. I did not struggle. Resistance is an inefficient expenditure of energy. The brand hissed against the flesh of my forearm. The smell was familiar—the searing of my own skin. I watched, detached, as the crude numerals burned their way into me: 47-B. A designation. A variable in a vast, brutal equation.
They threw me into a work crew hauling ore carts from the deeper shafts. The raw iron was heavy, its edges sharp. My body, already weakened from the journey here, protested immediately. Muscles I didn't know I possessed screamed in rebellion. The cartwheels grated against the uneven tracks, every inch a battle. Within the first hour, my vision swam with black spots. My legs gave out, and I collapsed, the contents of my wheelbarrow spilling across the path.
The lash was immediate and precise. It split the skin on my back, a line of fire that jolted every nerve. Pain is a motivator, a system of control. I understood it. I rose, reloaded the ore, and did not fall again.
But while my body laboured, my mind worked. I did not see a hundred suffering slaves; I saw a hundred interlocking parts of a poorly optimized machine. The old man who took three short breaths for every heave of his pickaxe tired faster than the one who took one long, deep one. The crew on the eastern smelter always had to wait ten minutes past the noon bell for their slag pots, a clear inefficiency in the scheduling. I memorized the patterns. I noted which guards drank from their waterskins most often, their vigilance dulling in the afternoon heat. I listened to the cough and sputter of the steam-hoists, cataloguing their unique ailments. The Ironfields were a system. And any system, I knew, could be understood. Any system could be exploited.
Inside the main forge, the heat was a living entity. It baked the air until it cracked, and the light from the furnaces cast the world in shades of orange and black. Here, slaves—their bodies slick with sweat and grime—poured rivers of molten metal into moulds for cannonballs and armour plates.
I was on slag duty, hauling away the impurities that floated to the surface of the smelted iron. It was brainless work, leaving my mind free to observe. A young boy, no older than myself, was working a smelting lever when it snapped. The sharp crack was lost in the din, but the sudden halt of the mechanism was not. An overseer descended upon him, his voice a gravelly roar. The boy was dragged away, his pleas swallowed by the forge's symphony. The broken smelter was abandoned, a dead cog in the machine, awaiting a mechanic who might arrive in a day, or a week.
During our brief midday rest, when the other slaves huddled in the slivers of shade, gulping their meagre water rations, I approached the silent machine. The overseers ignored me, focused on the functioning sectors. I ran my fingers over the break. A clean sheer, caused by metal fatigue. The fulcrum pin was worn, creating improper torque. A simple, predictable failure. I memorized every bolt, every gear, every point of stress.
That night, the barracks were a tomb of exhausted whispers. Sleep was a luxury I could not afford. When the guards changed shifts—a predictable lull in their patrol pattern—I slipped out. The forge was quieter now, its fires banked to a sullen glow. I moved through the shadows, a ghost in my own private laboratory. I found a length of discarded binding wire and a cracked crucible shard. With the residual heat from a nearby furnace, I carefully melted a small pool of slag, using the shard to guide the molten material into the lever's fracture. I wrapped the join with the wire, twisting it tight. It was a crude repair, an ugly scar on the steel, but the geometry was sound. It would hold.
The next morning, the day-shift overseer barked at the crew to ignore the broken smelter. Then he saw it functioning. He stared, grunted, and made a note on his slate, likely crediting the non-existent night-shift mechanic. He did not notice the boy with the fresh brand on his arm, silently watching, calculating. This became my secret work. A jammed conveyor belt would mysteriously un-jam overnight. A pulley that squealed in protest would be silenced with a careful application of rendered fat. I wasn't fixing things for them. Compassion is an illogical variable. I was optimizing the system. A more efficient crew meant fewer breakdowns. Fewer breakdowns meant fewer beatings. Less pain meant more energy for the work that mattered: observation.
The noon sun was a merciless hammer. Our overseer, a brutal man named Havel, stalked the line. Havel was a system unto himself—a simple one, predicated on fear and violence. He wore flawed plate armour that rattled as he walked, and its vents hissed steam in the oppressive heat. Poor thermal regulation.
He caught an old man syphoning condensation from a steam pipe into his mouth. Havel didn't shout. He simply uncoiled the whip from his belt. The other slaves froze, heads bowed. I did not. I watched Havel. I noted the way his weight shifted, how the arc of his whip slowed by a fraction of a second in the thick, superheated air. Each lash was a study in applied force. The old man did not make a sound after the third blow. When it was over, Havel kicked the body aside and moved on. The machine of the Ironfields barely shuddered.
I felt nothing. The man was dead. Cause: thirst. Secondary cause: Havel. Tertiary cause: a flawed system that did not adequately hydrate its organic components. It was a data point.
Later that day, a pressure valve on a steam conduit near Havel's watch post finally gave way. It had been hissing a warning for weeks, a high-pitched frequency I had logged in my mind. The pipe burst with a deafening shriek, spewing a jet of scalding steam. Havel wasn't fast enough. It caught his sword arm, cooking the flesh inside his gauntlet. His screams were high and thin, a stark contrast to the forge's deep bass. He staggered away, clutching the ruined limb.
The other slaves whispered that it was justice, the mountain's spirit punishing a murderer. I saw only the inevitable result of entropy. I murmured to the man beside me, a man whose face was a mask of terrified awe. "Poor maintenance."
The barracks at night stank of blood, oil, and despair. In the darkness, I worked on my true experiments. I had smuggled out bits of discarded material—a chipped gear tooth, a shard of high-quality ore, a broken spring. By the faint light filtering through a crack in the wall, I used a sharp stone to shape them. I was not making repairs now; I was creating.
I scratched a wire across a piece of lodestone I'd found, magnetizing it. I balanced it on a sliver of wood floating in a cup of water. A compass. Useless here, but a proof of principle. I built a tiny escapement mechanism from a spring and two gear teeth. It ticked, a fragile, miniature heartbeat in the palm of my hand.
An old man on the bunk next to mine watched me. His name was Elias, and his hands, though scarred and calloused, still held a shadow of former dexterity. He saw the intricate little device in my hand. "Curiosity gets men killed here, boy," he whispered, his voice a dry rustle.
I didn't look up from my work. "So does ignorance."
He was silent for a long moment. "What are you building?"
"An answer," I replied.
That was the beginning. Elias, it turned out, had been a master engineer for the royal foundries before the usurper Karath had seized the throne and enslaved all those with knowledge he deemed a threat. He saw something in my crude experiments, a flicker of the mind he once was.
In a hidden corner of the barracks, during the precious hour of rest, Elias would speak. He didn't use paper; that was a death sentence if found. Instead, he drew in the dirt with a stick. He showed me diagrams of the old Latverian forges, complex marvels powered not by brute slave labour, but by hydraulic gears and precisely calibrated steam pressure.
"We built beauty from metal once," he rasped, his eyes distant. "Clocks that tracked the heavens. Automatons that played music. Karath sees only instruments of war. He has no imagination." He looked at me, his gaze sharp. "He believes machinery is just brute force. He doesn't understand that true power lies in the union of science and something… else. Mysticism, the old ones called it. We just called it a deeper understanding of the world's patterns."
The idea resonated within me, a perfect, crystalline chord. It was not mysticism. It was a higher form of logic. A system so complex it appeared to be magic to the uninitiated. This was true control. Creation in a world that knew only destruction.
Elias tested me, quizzing me on pressure ratios, tensile strengths, the melting points of alloys. I answered his questions before he finished asking them, my mind racing ahead, connecting principles he hadn't yet explained. He stared at me, a strange light in his tired eyes. He wiped the diagrams from the dirt, erasing the evidence of our conversation. "You see the connections," he whispered, a hint of awe in his voice. "You could build more than tools, boy. You could build a nation."
I lay on my cot that night, the snores and whimpers of sleeping slaves a meaningless drone. I stared at the grime-caked ceiling, but I did not see it. In my mind's eye, I saw diagrams of impossible intricacy, gears turning pulleys, diverting steam, channeling power. The rhythmic clang of the distant night-shift hammers was no longer the sound of my prison. It was a pulse. A metronome for my thoughts.
My gaze fell to my arm, to the crude brand that marked me as property. 47-B. A label. A shackle meant to define me. I touched the raised, scarred flesh, then the crisscrossing network of older scars on my back. They think these marks mean ownership. The thought was as clear and cold as steel. But marks can be rewritten. Systems can be broken. Chains can be reforged.
Beneath my thin, filthy mattress, my fingers closed around my latest creation. It was a small, interlocking metal clasp, forged from a nail and a piece of scrap. It served no purpose. It was useless here. But it was mine. It was the first cog in a new machine. A machine that would one day tear the Ironfields down to their foundations.