Chapter 15: Chapter 15 – In Hammer Did Hitz A Warehouse Run

Borrowing a lab meant, in this case, heading to the north of town—to Hammer, where the warehouses and loud crafts were. And while we walked, we talked, going back over the list of Classes to winnow it further.

“The thing is,” I mused out loud, “I want to create, right? That’s the whole reason why I’m not taking Technician.”

“A creative endeavor.” Kan’s rolling baritone was smug, and I glanced over at Kelly to see her sticking her tongue out at him. “Ah, my friend, be not so discomposed.”

“Scribe and Librarian, struck. You were right.” Her eyes flickered to me, then went back doggedly forwards. “I got all caught up with the relaxed and intellectual and didn’t keep the other stuff in mind.”

“So with Herbalist struck—” I had rapidly come to that conclusion, based on how lethal wandering into the Forest was likely to be— “that leaves Mathematician, Scientist, and some crafting stuff? Plus anything totally magical.”

“Yeah. And we can’t really have you try most of them this morning, like I said, but alchemy? Alchemy, we can just borrow Hitz’s lab for.”

Kan stopped in his tracks at that—I almost ran into him, it was so abrupt—and turned to stare at Kelly. “Just borrow Hitz’s lab.”

“Yeah!”

He boggled at her as she kept walking. “Just borrow Hitz’s lab. Hitz’s.”

“Come on, Kan! We aren’t made of time.”

We picked up the pace as he muttered under his breath, something rapid and venomous in a language I didn’t understand. I paid him no attention; we were approaching a muted cacophony of industry, and even the sounds of it were fascinating.

The hammering of metal was the loudest of it, but it was far from the end-all. Between the tink-TANG-TANG-TANG-TANG of the strike pattern—Kelly informed me cheerfully that the lighter sound was the blacksmith herself, and the louder ones were her two strikers—there was a roaring wind from what she called Forge Row that provided a three-toned drone as a backstop to the clear day.

Underneath, layered atop, and competing with that there was a whole range of other noise. Saws, shouting, some sort of work song coming from younger voices in response to a cadence from an older voice, two different high-pitched grinding wheels, and the snapping of fabrics in the wind, shockingly loud for what it was, formed an astonishing din.

And yet, according to Kan, this was a pale shadow of what the noise could be. The enchantments that the village maintained in the vicinity of Hammer, he explained, dropped the sound levels by up to sixty decibels, for the loudest of them.

Unfathomably louder, those strikers hammering on metal would have been otherwise. I couldn’t comprehend it on a gut level, but that was fine. I appreciated it, and made a mental note to praise whoever was responsible.

“Every one of these is technically a standard workshop, but they can make whatever changes they want. See that?” Kelly pointed to a building, slate-gray like every other building in Hammer, each with windows at the tops of the walls that ran the entire length but were only about six inches tall. “That’s the Stone Team’s place.”

“Entirely unchanged from its fundamental design, and in respect to venerable tradition, a showcase for our subtler talents.”

Kana wasn’t kidding. Those gray walls were absolutely covered with incredibly fine ornamentation, done in a variety of high relief styles. There were intricate geometric patterns, murals of people—presumably the stone team—erecting buildings, fractal curlicues, and more.

“I have no idea how to evaluate it. It’s very impressive,” I reassured him solemnly, “and I’m sure you’re a very good stone team.”

That got an almost startled laugh out of him, mood fully restored, and an uninhibited giggle out of Kelly. “As you can see,” she managed in the midsts of her laughter, “all the other workshops are plainer, but changed. Make some guesses!”

“Glassblower’s workshop.” I pointed to the next workshop down, keeping my voice totally serious. “If I have the right of it, what with the glass being blown outside, and the pieces left to cool.”

“I’ll allow,” Kelly retorted haughtily, “as you might be right in that regard.”

“The next two are both working with wood, but uh, there’s a barrel above one of the doors and there isn’t above the other.” It wasn’t a sign with a barrel on it; it was simply a barrel, about three feet tall, that looked like it had been pushed into the stone of the building a few inches and left to just sit there. “Cooper and carpenter?”

“Cooper and carpenter. And then the other carpenter! Sure, they could share a workshop, but we have plenty of them!”

I grinned, as much at Kelly’s enthusiasm as at anything else, and we kept walking.

The variety of work being done was overwhelming, and we didn’t have time for me to linger a while at every building. Kelly was on a mission; she took us briskly past the carpenters and the brewer, past the blacksmith and the leatherworker and the tanner. There were a few other workshops that I didn’t quite catch or parse, and then we were at her destination.

“Hitz! Hitz, open up!”

The door she was banging on was inlaid with a simple drawing of a building, with a wagon and a few people out front. 'Dynamic Storage' was written near the top, and there was a subtle brick-like pattern running along the bottom of the walls, but otherwise it was starkly plain.

"Hitz! I got business and we gotta get it done so I can get–"

The stomping of a heavy tread cut her off, and she waited with a sudden shift to patience. The door slid open, disappearing into the wall, smooth and nearly silent in apparent defiance of the nature of stone, and I gawked.

Everyone I'd seen in Kibosh had been in perfect health, hale and hearty, with even the Matron moving with a surety that belied her age. Hitz, though, assuming this was Hitz, was scarred to shit, with a leg that terminated at the knee and had a blueish metal prosthetic at the end.

"Like what you see?"

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"Morning’s ease! Sophie, this is Hitz, they're Kandashi born. They have a… problem that stops them from getting healed, okay? Hitz, Sophie. She's a Traveler, be nice."

Their face was drawn in a scowl, but I was pretty sure that was just, well, how their face was. "Honestly," I said with a grin, "the pinpoint burns on your arms are a cool look, the prosthetic is gorgeous, and I've always kinda dug muscles with scar tissue."

"Really." Their single word grunted sentence was a masterclass in skepticism, and I grinned wider.

"I'm almost entirely into women, but if that weren't true, I'd wait to kick you out of bed till the morning. Even with the grease fire scars. That must have hurt like a motherfucker. Sorry if I stared rudely."

Their grunt this time had more of a note of amusement. I was, conveniently, entirely telling the truth, and I recognized what kind of person they were immediately. Proud of their life and the road they’d walked, they were the type to treat their scars like trophies and memories.

"Hitz.” Kelly sounded like she thought this was tremendously awkward, and I shared an eyeroll with the Kandashi, making a mental note that I should learn what that meant. “We need to borrow your alchemy workshop. Sophie needs to. The real one, she’s not an apprentice. She’s, uh, Mumki?”

"She know the fuck anything is? Or gonna shatter it all?"

"I know to use the round bottom flasks on the distillation rig's flame, if that's what you're asking." I smiled thinly at them, something deliberately about halfway to a sneer and halfway to picking a fight. “What’s that word you just used?”

“A Rank. Expert.” They shot a look at Kelly, amused and derisive. “Shitter, System, different words.”

“Shitter?” I squinted. “You having me on?”

There was something almost smirk-like in their eyes. “Same Shita.”

“The Theurgist’s System,” Kelly interjected smoothly, “manifests differently in every society. Kandashi have a different society, and… well, a language unrelated to Shemmai.”

“Hey, listen.” I glanced inside the door, and then frowned. I couldn’t… see anything, my eyes were just sliding off the space inside the doorway. It itched in my head, itched with a feeling like I was remembering something that hadn’t happened yet. “I need,” I continued after a moment, trying to get myself back on track, “to take a shit. Can I come in and use your toilet?”

Kelly’s eyes went wide, and she started to say something. Hitz beat her to it, though, with a grunted laugh and a wave towards the door. “Go. Rightmost path.”

I walked in, moving with purpose. Kelly was half-explaining and half-apologizing behind me, something about gut microbiota, while Hitz made amused noises that I’m pretty sure was them leading her on. The explanation made perfect sense—no sense in wasting the energy to fully reformulate my innards when they could just kill it all off and replace it with a seed colony—but my gut was informing me that it had consequences.

Those consequences had me striding through a disorienting magical doorway.

I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing in the moment of stepping through the threshold. I had a flash of being able to see where I was about to step, but it was an array of different places I was about to step.

Rightmost path. Between the thought and the moment my foot hit the polished wood floors of every next step I could take, I touched something through the System, feeling a sense of connection to my surroundings. It let me choose, or chose for me, or something; my foot touched down on wood, in a cavernous and entirely empty warehouse about ten times the size of the outside of Hitz’s building.

The world spun momentarily, but there was no nausea, and everything snapped into place without any residue of dizziness. There was, I saw, a door in the right-side wall about five feet ahead of me, and I booked it.

It was… unpleasant. The best that could be said for it was that the seats were comfortable, there was no chance of missing the target, and there was neither residue nor smell. Actually, that was a lot of upsides to taking a shit somewhere with magical toilets, but there was still the major downside of, well, the kinds of bowel movements you get when your GI tract has gotten annihilated.

I need to up my diligence about hydration, I thought to myself with deliberate good humor.

My first time using a toilet in Kibosh had been in the middle of the night, mazed by sleep, confusion, and an emotional crash. This time I could appreciate the craft that went into it, the sheer level of aesthetic diligence that went into a toilet in a warehouse, and I put the thought aside because I just didn’t feel like processing that thought.

Sure, shoving stuff aside like that was a terrible idea, but I could always gibber later. Eventually. When I didn’t have someone standing around waiting for me to be done with my attendance to nature’s call.

The enchantments—or spells, or whatever they were—left not only the bowl I was sitting over but also me without any residue, cleaner than the most thorough bidet without so much as a square of toilet paper. There was a similar setup for my hands off on the wall, a space delineated by two right-angled brackets in opposite corners of a notional square; I stuck my hands in the space, and after a few moments of a mild tickle and a less-mild itch they were clean and sanitary.

Bless you, Lord our God, yadda yadda, who commands us with respect to the not-exactly-washing of our hands, I thought to myself wryly.

Then I shoved that aside, too. Reconstructing the traditions of my mother and father—and their mothers and fathers before them, to the hundredth generation and beyond—would have to wait its turn.

The door on the way out was exactly where it ought to be, and led to the outside without any shenanigans. Hitz was gone, and Kelly was waiting for me with an impatience that she probably thought was well-disguised and a concerned, compassionate mien that was either genuine or incredibly well-constructed.

“Everything’s settled. Come on!” She grabbed me by the arm, half-dragging me back towards the door. “We’re gonna make something! It’s going to be great, no matter what we make.”

I let her guide me back to the spatial distortion, trying to suppress my awareness of how it felt to have her arm wrapped around mine.

A moment later, any such thought fled my body as I stepped into wonderland.

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