Rewrite That Witch
CH012 · Rewrite
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Chapter 12: Firing

Roland stood at the kiln in the backyard and waited.

The brick building he had designed for cement production was fifteen meters long, four meters wide, and built with a deliberate asymmetry: the front door wide enough to wheel a barrow through, the rear door barely a man’s breadth — a door meant for one person only. Anna’s door. A half-wall enclosed the yard, and Carter’s men guarded both entrances, their loyalty the kind that didn’t require examination.

The production process itself was simple enough that Roland could recite it in his sleep. Grind limestone to powder, blend it with clay and iron dust, calcine the mixture, grind the clinker a final time with gypsum. The raw materials were common. The iron was harder to stockpile. The critical difficulty was heat — specifically, sustaining a temperature near the melting point of iron without an infrared thermometer, without a thermocouple, without anything built after the first century.

In this era, an ordinary open furnace bled heat faster than it generated it. Maintaining twelve hundred degrees was not merely difficult; it was essentially impossible by conventional means. A high-temperature resistance furnace would require firebrick, and firebrick was its own project. A blast furnace could reach the right temperature but its chamber was too narrow for calcination. The months before the Demons’ arrival were not long enough to solve all of that.

So his kiln had no heating system. He was relying on Anna entirely.

The limestone and clay had been slurried together and spread evenly inside the chamber. The knights locked the front door and withdrew. Anna went in through the back. Her fire baked the slurry until it fused with the iron powder, particle by particle, at a temperature no furnace in the kingdom could produce.

Roland’s jaw was set. He had been telling himself for days that cement was only the first step, that the wall was only the first step after that — but the reasoning felt thin now, standing in the cold, waiting. If the calcination failed, three months would vanish and the wall would remain the fantasy Carter’s men probably already thought it was.

“Your Highness.” Carter appeared at his shoulder. “Can this material truly bond stone?”

“The Graycastle alchemists say it can.” Roland spread his hands. “We’ll know shortly.”

The art of alchemy enjoyed an inflated prestige in the kingdom — not undeserved, as a point of social engineering. Nobles kept alchemists on retainer the way they kept astrologers: for the feeling of standing at the edge of the unknown. Roland had cited their authority freely. Carter didn’t question the source; that was enough.

Through the soot-darkened window the last of the flame guttered and went still.

He sent Carter out of the yard before going to the back door himself. Anna emerged into the cold air, her face gray with dust. The wet processing had kept the particulate low, but the calcination itself produced a hot pall that had clearly settled on her — her hair, her eyelashes, the creases at the corners of her eyes.

Roland draped his robe over her shoulders and handed her the water cup before she could ask.

“The slurry changed into powder,” she said, and coughed once.

He waited until the kiln cooled enough, then wrapped a wet cloth around his head and went in with a shovel. The heat hit him like a physical wall — his skin tightened and his lungs balked at the first breath. He worked fast: one shovelful, two, then out. The interior would cause heat shock within minutes.

Back in the cold air, he spread the powder flat on the ground and pressed his fingertip into it to check the temperature. Ash gray. Lighter than he had expected, because he had omitted the iron powder in this test batch.

“What is it for?” Anna had changed back into her witch’s clothes. She was watching him.

“Houses. Roads. Bridges.” He looked up. “If this works, people in Border Town will live in walls that wind and rain cannot take apart.” He reached up and touched the top of her head, lightly. “It only works because of you.”

Her breathing changed — or he thought it did, a quickening too slight to name.

He mixed the powder with sand at three different ratios and had Carter spread the mortar between bricks, two bricks per test, nine tests total. The hardening time would be approximately four hours, but Roland was conscious of the instability inherent in a first batch. He set the tests aside, covered them with cloth, and left them for the night.

The next morning they went out at first light, all three of them — Roland, Carter, Anna.

The mortar had set. The bricks were bonded. In the corners a white effloresce had formed where mineral salts had migrated to the surface, but when Roland crouched and scraped it away with his thumbnail, the cement beneath was solid and cool. He pressed his finger into the surface: nothing. Dragged a nail across it: no mark.

Carter tried to lift the bonded pair. They did not separate. He put his knee against them and shoved. Still nothing. He kicked the join from the side until the contact with the ground broke, but the two bricks held to each other. He drew his sword by the hilt and struck the corner of one brick. A chip of brick broke away. The join did not.

“Yesterday it poured like a candle.” Carter turned the bonded bricks in his hands, genuinely puzzled, the way a man is puzzled by something he cannot disbelieve. “This morning it is stone.” He looked at Roland. “With this material we could wall the entire border in five years. As long as we have enough—”

“That’s not what it’s for.” Roland stood. “A tall wall cannot stop an enemy who is already inside it. I would rather give every family in Border Town a room that a winter storm cannot flatten.”

Carter was quiet for a moment. In all his years guarding the fourth prince — the gambling, the late nights, the unfortunate incidents with the daughters of minor lords — he had never heard him say anything like that.

Roland did not notice the silence. He was already thinking about the next batch, the next ratio, the rate of production, how many kilns he could build before the Demons came. Science and technology were the first productive force. He had believed it abstractly for a long time. Standing in the cold yard with the bonded bricks in his hands, he believed it in his chest.

And here, in this town, the witch was the first technology of all.

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