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As they left, Silk lagged to question Mucor. “You told us you could fly in the rain,” belatedly he opened his umbrella, “but they couldn’t. By ‘they’ did you intend the Fliers?”
She only stared.
“Is that why it rains after they’ve flown over? Because they somehow prevent it when they’re present?”
“Answer him, dear,” Maytera Marble prompted, but Mucor did not speak.
As they splashed along a rutted path between sodden wooden structures that could easily have been barns, Swallow remarked, “I wish you had better weather for this, Calde, but I hear the farmers need rain pretty badly.”
Silk could not help smiling. “They need it so badly that the sight and sound of it fill my heart with joy. All the time we were in your foundry I was listening to it, and the finest music in the whorl couldn’t have moved me half so much. I don’t suppose Chenille or Maytera like it — I know Oreb here doesn’t, and I’m a bit worried about Mucor, whose health is frail; but I’d rather walk through this than the clearest sunshine.”
Swallow opened the door of another ramshackle building, releasing a puff of acrid smoke and revealing a large and dirty canvas screen. “Foundry work’s pretty crude, Calde. In the old times they knew a lot we don’t, though I’ve spent a good part of my life trying to learn their secrets. What I’m going to show you now’s closer to what you might have seen on the Short Sun Whorl. But before I do, I’ve got to warn you. You mustn’t look at the process. At the blue welding fire, in other words. The light’s too bright. It can make you blind.”
Silk shook his umbrella. “Smiths join iron by heating and pounding it. I used to watch them as a boy. I wasn’t blinded, so what you’re doing here must be a different process.”
Chenille tossed back wet raspberry curls. “Better make sure Oreb doesn’t watch either, Patera.”
“I certainly will.” For Swallow’s benefit, Silk added significantly, “At times we all look at things we shouldn’t. Even birds do it.”
Swallow blinked and abandoned his study of Chenille’s damp gown. “Sometimes people think we do it different because we’re working with steel instead of iron, but that’s not true. We use this method because it works on pieces your smith couldn’t have welded, because they’re too big to be hammered.” Light showed above the canvas screen, brilliant enough to make the rafters cast sharp shadows on the underside of the roof.
“One of our men’s making a weld now. We’ll wait here till he’s through, if it’s all right with you, Calde. Then we can go in, and I’ll show you what he’s doing and how he does it. He’ll be welding up a thorax plate, I think.”
While her remaining hand closed the black umbrella she had shared with Mucor, Maytera Marble gave Silk a significant look.
He nodded. “I want to see it. In fact, I’m very eager to, Director. You spoke of thick pieces in co
“Three fingers.” Swallow held them up.
“I want mine thicker. Six at least. Can you do that?”
Swallow looked startled. “Why…? Could we weld them, do you mean? We could, but it would take longer. It would be a lot more work.”
“Then do it,” Silk told him.
Oreb whistled.
“Put it in our contract, six-finger thorax plates. What was the other piece? Below the thorax plate?”
“The abdomen front plate?” Swallow suggested.
“That’s it. How thick is it?”
“Three fingers, too, Calde.” Swallow hesitated, his eyes thoughtful. “Do you want them thicker? I suppose it could be done, but it may take us a while to find steel that thick and work out a way to bend it.”
Oreb exclaimed, “No, no!”
“We ca
Swallow nodded.
“Then make my thorax plates and abdomen front plates out of two pieces of the steel you have, each three fingers thick. Maytera here could make me a robe from doubled cloth, if I had need of such a thing. Why couldn’t you do this?”
“We can, I think.” Swallow cleared his throat. “There’ll be problems. With all respect, Calde, welding steel isn’t as simple as sewing, but think it could be done. Can I ask…?”
“Why they need it? So they can fight the Ayunta
“Launchers,” she supplied.
“Exactly. Launchers shooting missiles.” Silk collected his thoughts. “The heads still trouble me. You say you can’t cast them from iron?”
“No, Calde. We usually paint them black. Nearly always, because it makes the eyes and teeth show up better If we could cast them from iron we wouldn’t have to paint them or touch up scratches, so we’ve tried it. Iron won’t make castings that detailed, not till we learn more about casting it, at any rate.”
“Too bad!” The light above the screen had vanished; Oreb flew up to peer over.
“Yes, it is,” Silk confirmed.
“But you’re worried about strength, Calde. Resistance to slugs and that sort of thing. And to tell you the truth, iron wouldn’t be a lot better. It might even be worse. Cast iron’s a wonderful material in a lot of ways, but it’s pretty brittle. That’s why we use steel plate for the abdomen and so forth.”
“Patera? Director?” Maytera Marble looked from Silk to Swallow and back. “Couldn’t the talus hold something in front of its face? A piece of steel with a handle like an umbrella?”
Silk nodded. “And look over the top. Yes, that could be done, I’m sure, Maytera.”
“There’s one other possibility, Calde,” Swallow offered hesitantly. “This is from the old days too. But it was done right here, I understand, though it was before my time. We might try bronze.”
Silk looked around at him sharply. “Isn’t that what they are now?”
Chenille shook her head. “It’s brass, Patera. Remember when I held that piece up? He said brass.”
“Bronze would be a lot stronger, Calde.” Swallow cleared his throat again. “Tougher, too. I mean real bronze. This is kind of hard to explain.”
“Go ahead,” Silk told him. “I’ll make every effort to understand you, and it’s important.”
“Let me start with iron, maybe that will make it clearer. You and I talked about iron. Casting it and so forth.”
Silk nodded.
“What people call iron’s really three different materials, Calde. The commonest is just soft steel, any steel that doesn’t have a lot of carbon in it. People call that tin when it’s rolled out as sheet metal, and sometimes it’s plated with tin. Most people have never seen a real chunk of solid tin.”
“Go on.”
“When you watched that blacksmith making horseshoes, that was what he was using. He probably called it iron, but it was really soft steel, iron with just a little touch of carbon. If there’s gobs of carbon in it, it’s cast iron, the melt we pour in the foundry. You can’t pound cast iron the way a smith does. It’ll break.”
“I remember that you said it was brittle.”
“That’s right, it is. It has lots of uses, but you can’t use it for armor or a hammer head, or anything like that.”
Swallow took a deep breath. “Number three’s wrought iron, and that really is iron, though there’s generally some slag in it, too. We start with cast iron and burn all the carbon out, when we want some. It’s pretty soft, and it’ll take almost any amount of bending. Mostly it’s used for fancy window grills and that kind of a thing.”