"England reminds me more of the Tiers, it's a huge island, ocean on all sides and not much bigger than the Tiers seem to be. There's enormous pride in the Navy there, shipbuilding traditions going back centuries. They say 'it takes three years to build a ship, but three hundred years to build a tradition'..."

They can pass the time well enough in this way, though she also spends some time working in the evening- Using tools and parts in a small storage pack.

And soonish... The ocean spire. It's been twelve days. By how fast things were going when she left, a path ought to be clear by now, though that's if there weren't any issues moving the equipment back down and they didn't use up all the abrasive solution she made and nothing else went wrong.

Locating it from this side could be a little tricky - the passage isn't that wide yet, and there's a lot of Oldwall.

But instead there's a couple of her helpers sitting on the rustbank throwing pebbles at a target below.

"Engineer! You ended the storm!"

She perks up! "Good to see you two! No, Kohl did! I was just there for the fight! How goes the cutting? It looks like we could keep it up for a decade and not be done!"

"Well, we got the first passage through, obviously, and the doors move smooth. We've made more passes to widen it up for carts, and Journeywoman Ghazar's plotting how we want to cut a path down to level ground. But when we heard the storm stop, she said we should wait on cutting that part, check with you on the fluid and whether the angle changes it."

"I'll have to take a closer look to be sure, but cutting down will mostly have the problem of grit and water building up at the bottom. Might have to haul the whole rig out into the open and go outside in?"

She stomps demonstratively with Tallboy. Huh, funny how natural it feels to do that...

"Well, maybe tomorrow. I'm rather tired from all the travel, honestly. Still, excellent work! I don't know how to send out the news- I don't do birds, I'm planning on something much better once I have time to gather some things and make some tools-"

"Oh, she got a bird. There weren't any in the Crossing or by the Mountain Spire that knew Sentinel Stand, so she sent it to Iron Hearth. I think she said that you would either be going there or here, and probably the same for Fatebinder Kohl.  --The way should be big enough for your Tallboy, if you want to come in, ma'am. The way up's not too bad."

"I definitely do. I miss Lethian's Crossing and my workshop." She looks at Kleobis. "You coming as well?"

"Probably just for the night and then I'll head back, but sure. Will be nice to see somewhere that isn't this - blasted wreck of a landscape."

"I bet it'll be nice in a decade. I hope, anyway. Safe travels if I don't see you again before you go, and thank you again."

Back into the Spires, then!

She will spend the rest of the evening making the rounds of the other Forge-Bound, making good on whatever favors she called in, in her hurry to leave, and looking over whatever metal from the cut remains unclaimed and plotting improvements and fixes to the whole apparatus with Journeywoman Ghazar.

Other than amounts she claimed in advance, the small iron pieces have mostly been claimed, but there's a few large... 'plates' is putting it too generously, 'wads' is a little too harsh... agglomerations, which are almost as twisted as Barik's armor, which have been left aside until someone wants to try to smooth them out and remove impurities. Most of her favors are no longer outstanding, though, nice pieces of iron to work are probably the closest thing to a standard currency of Forge-Bound favors. And bronze there's been less siphoned off, there's plenty available, most of it is organized as neatly as could be arranged in the entrance hall near the cutter.

Re-working all this scrap will be a nice test of her plans for a whole damned steel mill... Blast furnace, and possibly an oxygen furnace if she can manage it... She can use the relatively plentiful bronze as structural material for all the dozens and dozens of tools she wants to make, where wood won't do... Only a few pieces like drill heads and hammers and the like really need to be tool steel... Ohhhh, she is feeling sparky. But also tired, very tired. She'll content herself with some work on the water jet cutter- Fixing a few leaks, improvements on the ability to control the exact pressure and flow rate- And putting Tallboy into the workshop, though not doing anything repair-shaped yet.

And then ordering all her favorite foods at the Mistress, though continuing to only mildly drink. And then sleeping for, like, twelve hours. That'll be nice and distracting from the sticky feeling of guilt, and the smell of carnage and battle.

How's the mood in the Crossing overall? What do merchants think? Have they found many of her requested weird rare ores/minerals?

The mood's pretty good! The smiths are happy to have more iron, and pretty pleased the cutter was working. (She'll hear that several of them have taken some of their spare time to watch it in use, they don't quite understand it and that makes it fascinating to a lot of them.) The merchants are happy that a new trade route is opening up and it runs straight through their town. And everyone's talking about the Edict ending - stories are pretty garbled, but everyone's quite sure that their two local Archons were involved, and whatever dissent there was before on the 'are they Archons' front is either gone or so reluctant to admit it exists as to appear gone.

A couple merchants have leads, but nothing that's deliverable yet. On the other hand, Meroujan is back from his survey of Vendrien's Well, and he seemed pretty pleased with his results. He'll probably be near the base of the falls, if she wants to seek him out.

After a good night's sleep and a slightly shaky wake-up routine of spear drill, she will, at least.

"Engineer!," he says, and gives a Forge-Bound salute*, "I've had a productive span. I hear so have you."

*The saluter raises their hammer arm up, taps the fist to their head, then turns it sideways slightly higher (as if holding the tool  over their head) and brings the fist down to their waist. Most recognizable with a tool in the hand, but practical empty-handed. (Not particularly common, they're not the right variety of formal for salutes.)

She has a wrench to salute with! She doesn't use it much without mass produced cheap bolts, but it's rather emblematic.

"Like half of it was travel! I need to make something faster than Tallboy, imposing as it is. Though I'm proud of the water cutter- Turning the Blade Grave to good use will be wonderful."

"And the land under it, too, it sounds like. I found you some good seams of coal. Nothing sizable with the other metals, but a couple deposits where you could probably get a twentieth the mass of Tallboy before it was played out, a few span of mining apiece. Plenty for tools, probably not enough for 'industry'."

So, something like fifty or a hundred pounds of various rarer metals. That's plenty to be getting on with in the medium term.

"Alas. I knew it would be a long road. The coal will be handy, though- Any of them near good iron too? If there's a place with a decent amount of iron and coal right next to each other that's my place unless it's completely untenable some other way. Want me to buy lunch and then talk through all the details?"

"Not a huge supply of iron, but yes, near the south edge of that long fold on the east side there's coal and iron within a couple miles, could run a nice straight cart path for them. Let me grab my sketch and I'll meet you at the Mistress?"

"I guess it's probably too loud to be overheard and it's not like any of this is top secret. See you in a minute."

And in a minute he's sat down next to her. The sketch could reasonably, if ambitiously, be called a map, but it's primarily a memory aid, tracking what he saw and noting travel times and occasionally angles measured from the Spire. Like he said, results were solidly good, though not great.

"What do the options for mining these look like? I'm not really at the point where I can make a linear miner yet, just got back, really. Maybe in a span or two. And these mostly aren't that big..."

"We're mostly limited to unskilled labor for actually getting it out of the stone, unfortunately. I can help a great deal with the surveying, and the extraction of the ore from the slag, but there's not much to be done with the pick and shovel. That's backbreaking work, too - normal practice is to use condemned prisoners, and no one will work the mine voluntarily without a staff healer, for any wage."

"...No. I've... Killed at least one person at Sentinel Stand, probably, by stepping on them even. I know I can't change this everywhere, but I will not use forced labor. Not myself, not directly, at least. I guess I'm building mining machines."

He nods. "Understandable. I avoid checking in on mines when they're being worked, because seeing the poor bastards come out of a pit or shaft at the end of a shift is... enough to distract me for fists and fists."

"It doesn't go away because you don't see it." She sighs. "But I would also rather not see it."