Game of Thrones: The Impaler of the Blue Fork

Chapter 125: The Yellow Smoke Within the High Walls and the Scholar's Abacus

Deep within the innermost part of the fortress, behind a three-zhang-high wall, a yellowish-green acidic mist, strong enough to melt a throat, filled the air. After the Willow Grove mine disaster, Tywin Lannister had demanded that Bluefork increase the purity of its raw silver by half a grade. To achieve Casterly Rock's stringent purity requirements, Polliver doubled the concentration of the strong acid in the pickling pools.

"Cough cough... Pfft!"

A veteran of the Iron Oath Regiment, who had lost his left leg, knelt by the sedimentation tank, coughing up a mouthful of thick, black, bloody phlegm. The blood clots fell into the bubbling acid, where they were corroded and disappeared without a trace. The veteran's eyes were sunken, and with each breath, his chest emitted a piercing, bellows-like sound.

The head steward, Pollifer, stood at the edge of the high wall, near a ventilation shaft, his mouth and nose tightly covered with a piece of coarse linen soaked in strong vinegar. He held the roster in his hand, looking down at the twelve disabled veterans through the choking fumes.

This is the fourth to fall this month. The high concentration of acid fumes is irreversibly burning away the lungs of these veterans.

"Cough... Butler." The old soldier with the broken leg wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth with a dirty rag, raised his head, and forced a bitter smile onto his sallow face, stained with the smell of acid. "Tell the Baron that I can hold on for a few more days. My youngest son... is eleven years old this year. The Baron promised that if I die inside this wall, he would be exempt from tithes for the rest of his life and would also receive a black mule to pull the plow. This debt must be settled."

"Your name is on the books. Not a penny less," Pollifer gave the coldest assurance.

He turned and walked out of the high walls and iron gates, reeking of a lingering sour stench, towards the muddy bluestone training ground inside the fortress. If the problem of the toxic fog wasn't resolved, the skilled workers inside the high walls would all die within half a month, and the orders from the Western Territory would inevitably be cancelled.

Under the dilapidated wooden shed at the edge of the drill ground, the cold wind, carrying snowflakes, poured in.

Dolan, a scholar from Pentos, was shivering from the cold, wrapped in a thin, tattered linen robe. He held a white ash stick in his hand and was shouting at several frozen, displaced boys on the sand table. Six months ago, he was a respected engineer in the Pentos Chamber of Commerce. After being tricked onto the ship by that fake golden dragon, his daily mission was to teach people to read in this muddy field in exchange for a piece of black bread mixed with sawdust.

"Dolan."

Pollifer's voice interrupted the scholar's curses. Two Iron Oath soldiers stepped forward, grabbed Dolan's arms on either side, and dragged him toward the high-walled restricted area that perpetually emitted yellow smoke.

The heavy iron gate closed behind us.

Dolan stepped into this workshop, designated a death trap, for the first time. The pungent smell of sulfur and strong acid filled his nostrils, making his eyes water. He saw veterans coughing up blood in the poisonous fumes, and baskets of sediment gleaming with a silvery-white metallic sheen. As an educated man, he immediately understood what a hellish place of hidden silver and refining it was; his legs involuntarily went weak, and he collapsed into the muddy water.

Otto Hohenzollern stood beside an abandoned hearth, wearing a heavy gray woolen overcoat.

"How much wheat your life is worth depends on what's in your head." Otto didn't even glance at the shivering scholar. He pointed to the acid bath below, billowing with poisonous fumes. "The West wants purer silver. My men are being poisoned by the acid. Give me a way to get rid of the fumes within three days. Otherwise, this wall will be your grave."

Dolan stared at the veterans, almost unrecognizable from the acid corrosion, his teeth chattering uncontrollably. He knew this grey-blue-eyed lord never joked.

Driven by the instinct to survive, the engineer from Pentos frantically strained his brain. He lay on the ground, ignoring the mud and grime, and with trembling fingers, dipped in the black mud, began to frantically draw lines on the bluestone slabs.

"Water...there's a flood control channel outside!" Dolan pointed to the direction of the water flowing outside the wall, his voice hoarse. "Dig a ditch to bring the water in. Build a waterwheel, connected to wooden teeth and a rawhide bellows. The river water will turn the waterwheel, and the bellows will suck all this damned poison gas out!"

Pollifer stared at the sketch in the mud, his mind racing, searching for loopholes in the cost estimate.

"The wooden leaves can't stop the strong acid from evaporating. They'll rot in half a month," Pollifer pointed out the major flaw.

"Wrap the blades in sheet metal! Apply a thick layer of rust-preventing grease to the bearings!" Dolan shouted as if grasping at a straw. Then, looking at the residual liquid carelessly dumped into the waste pit, he offered a suggestion that would tempt any accountant: "You're wasting expensive strong acid! Just build three stepped sedimentation tanks, and the high-concentration acid can be filtered and reused twice, cutting costs in half!"

Otto looked at the rough yet meticulous blueprint of the waterwheel bellows on the ground.

"Stop work for two days." Otto turned to Polyver and gave the order, "Gather all the idle carpenters in the territory and dismantle the old watchtower on the south slope to get the timber. Tell One-Eyed Cole to stop forging spears and work through the night to forge the iron bearings. Build them according to his blueprints."

For the next two days, the area inside the high walls turned into a frantic construction site.

The carpenters, enduring the lingering acid fumes, sawed and pieced together the massive logs. Several apprentices suffered burns to their hands and feet from the acid mud, but could only continue working by biting on a rag. The one-eyed blacksmith Cole carried his anvil directly outside the high wall, and his red-hot hammer worked day and night, hammering out a set of fine iron bearings coated with thick animal fat.

A breach was dug in the flood control canal, and the turbulent river roared and poured into the high wall.

A massive, two-story-high wooden waterwheel creaked and groaned as the water pounded against it. Hardwood gears on the central axle meshed with connecting rods, driving four enormous bellows on the ceiling, each made of several layers of raw cowhide.

"Whoosh—Pfft!"

A powerful airflow cut directly into the top of the acid pickling tank through the clay pipes. Deadly yellowish-green toxic fumes were whipped up by the gale and ejected from the high walls through the newly opened exhaust vents, dissipating in the winter wind.

The view above the acid pickling tank became clear. The eight surviving disabled veterans threw away the rags covering their mouths and breathed in the cold, acid-free air. They looked at the enormous, monstrous wooden waterwheel overhead with awe in their eyes. The efficiency of the raw silver refining process was restored with the help of water power.

Two days later, on the second floor of the stone tower.

In a spacious guest room with a fireplace next to the lord's study.

Dolan washed away the grime that had accumulated over the past six months in the hold and mud, and changed into a soft, warm woolen robe. He sat in a velvet-cushioned armchair, a glass of expensive Qingting Island red wine in his hand. On the table in front of him was a plate of fragrant charcoal-grilled meat.

"Your promise has been kept." Pollifer placed a brass key on the table. "From today onward, you no longer need to share a dormitory with those vagrants, nor do you need to teach the peasants to read. This room with the fireplace is yours. You are now the foreman of the Blue Fork River workshops."

Dolan took the key and looked at the gaunt butler in front of him.

"Lord Dolan," Polliff said, looking at him, throwing out a further bait, "Since a waterwheel can pull such a large bellows, if we connect it to the heavy hammer of a blast furnace, could it replace thirty blacksmiths? If we pave the tracks in the Willow Grove mine with hardwood, could we double the speed of those vagrants pushing their carts?"

Dolan swallowed the red wine in his mouth. In this remote territory where no nobles looked down on his origins, he found an absolute sense of dominance as an engineer.

"Give me enough iron and raw cowhide." A glint of fanaticism ignited in Dolan's eyes. "I can replace all the blacksmith hammers in Blue Fork River with waterwheels. The blueprints I've drawn up will allow those eight hundred displaced miners to produce 20% more raw ore every day."

Outside the window, William Charlton stood by the flood control canal.

He looked at the heavy, turning waterwheel and listened to the muffled rumble coming from inside the high walls. He didn't ask how much wood the waterwheel had cost; he only saw that Pollifer had raised the projected silver production from Willow Grove by another 30% in his ledger.