Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 568: The Dry Distillation Tower

“The bronze tube isn’t aligned with the pin on top.” Sylvie pointed at the detonator in the playback image, tilting her head to examine it from the correct angle. “The contact axis is off.”

“And the spring?” Anna’s pen was already moving. “Both sides of the iron plate?”

“The left spring has failed.”

“Left side.” Anna wrote it down and moved to the next question without pausing. What material? What failure mode? Which direction was the plate biased at impact? She covered the page in precise shorthand, cross-referencing each answer against the previous notes until the pattern of failure became a map of corrections.

They fired two more rounds that afternoon. Both failed.

Roland declared the testing done for the day.

For Summer and Sylvie, this was the end of it — they could walk back to the castle for afternoon tea, or wander the Convenience Market, or do whatever the afternoon offered. They had spent their quota of magic power. The day belonged to them now. For Anna and Agatha, the test firing of howitzer shells was a line item on a schedule that contained many others. Anna still had fuse corrections to machine, and the steam turbine assembly waited on the North Slope. Agatha had the chemical plant.

Roland had intended to follow Anna to the North Slope backyard when his guard Sean appeared with a message from City Hall: Lesya, Vice Minister of Construction, requested his presence at the Furnace Area. The first dry distillation tower was complete.

Ten towers were planned, positioned around the furnace cluster at the foot of the North Slope mine works. The furnace area itself had grown past any early conception of it — what had begun as a cleared space of less than a thousand square meters had spread along the mountain’s base into a wide industrial corridor, its perimeter marked by the smoke of iron-making and the constant noise of steam engines. Without Roland’s prohibition on cutting trees near the town, the northern slopes would have been stripped bare years ago. As it was, a visible bald patch had appeared at the mountain’s crown where the logging crews worked daily.

It did not trouble him. Leaf maintained the essential vegetation. The Impassable Mountain Range would not notice one bald spot on one of its outlying ridges. What had been forest at the foot of the mountain was now the most logical building site in the region, and the dry distillation towers were only the beginning.

Lesya was waiting at the tower entrance — older than Roland remembered him looking, with the permanently squinted eyes of a man who has spent decades reading plans in poor light. He bowed and launched immediately into his accounting.

“Per your specifications: double-layer construction, refractory bricks throughout. The upper layer has provisions for an iron gate, the interlayer has provisions for a mobile iron plate, and the side furnace has provisions for a copper pipe and chimney connection. All of the masonry is finished. The metalwork is not — I was uncertain who could fabricate those components.”

Roland ducked his head and stepped into the tower.

He spent several minutes inside, working through the walls with his hands, reading the construction the way an engineer reads a structure: joints, alignment, the distribution of seams. In the Quest Society’s era, this quality of craftsmanship was assumed. In Neverwinter, it had to be built person by person, year by year, from people who had never seen what excellent looked like.

Lesya’s walls were excellent. The bricks were cut and laid with consistent spacing. The vertical seams ran in a staggered pattern — no two layers shared a joint line — the signature of a mason who understood both the structural argument and the aesthetic one. The inner surface was even. Roland ran a hand along it. Solid.

“This is very good work,” he said when he emerged. “I’ll arrange the casting of the gate and plate. For now, continue with the second tower — just leave the metal provisions open as you did here.”

Lesya hesitated. For a moment Roland thought he was going to ask about the timeline. Instead: “Your Majesty — could you tell me how this furnace operates?”

“You want to work in the coking plant?”

“No.” He shook his head vigorously. “But I built according to the drawings, and for the parts that were unclear, I used my judgment. If I understand the function — what each element is meant to do — I can build the second tower faster, and I can correct the places where my judgment may have been wrong.”

Sensible. Roland found himself liking the old mason quite specifically in that moment. “Dry distillation of coal,” he said. “You’ve seen charcoal burning — this is the same principle, scaled up. The lower layer burns. The upper layer bakes. Both layers are filled with coal.”

“Baking coal… with coal?”

“Exactly. Heat without air. The result is coke — it burns hotter than raw coal, which makes it superior for steel smelting. And the process generates several useful byproducts. Those pipes on the tower wall aren’t exhaust channels — they collect the byproducts.”

Lesya frowned at the pipes, reassembling his understanding of what he’d built. “And the small furnace at the side?”

“No air is allowed in the upper layer during distillation — otherwise the coal simply combusts and you’ve made ash, not coke. The small furnace burns limestone.” Roland pointed at the connecting passages. “Limestone burning produces carbon dioxide in large quantities. It’s a non-flammable gas—”

“I know what that is,” Lesya said. “We covered it in the night class.”

Roland paused and looked at him. Scroll’s curriculum, then. Working its way out into the city. “Good. The carbon dioxide travels through those connecting passages into the upper chamber and displaces the air. No oxygen, no combustion — only heat. The coal bakes slowly into coke, and the byproducts migrate out through the collection pipes.” He shrugged. “The limestone itself is readily available — the same off-white stone used for cement, common up on the slope.”

Lesya nodded slowly, making connections between what he’d built and what it was for, his expression the expression of a man whose judgment is being validated or corrected piece by piece. He seemed satisfied with most of the results.

Roland walked back through the Furnace Area at the end of the afternoon, and paused.

The brick furnaces stood in rows along the mountain’s base — a red forest, dense and ordered, the stacks of each furnace trailing smoke in three colors: gray, white, black, braided together above the complex in a column visible from the city wall. Steam engines turned over the conveyor belts in a continuous mechanical pulse, moving ore and charcoal toward the blast furnaces. The mine track ran from the slope to the furnace gate and back, the wagons moving in an unhurried constant cycle.

From the right angle, it could have been a scene from a different century.

He stood there for a while, watching workers move between the furnaces in rough-spun clothes with tools over their shoulders, the outdated equipment and the advanced machinery sitting next to each other in the pragmatic tolerance of a city that built what it could and made the rest work. When the steel plant finished — when the forge came online — this place would be Neverwinter’s industrial heart. Ore from the mountain, smelted into steel, shaped into components, transported to the workshops. The entire chain of transformation, rooted here at the foot of the slope.

The power to refine — that was always the beginning of everything.

He stood until the light changed, then turned back toward the city.

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