Mae frowned when Vaenuth told him, over breakfast, that they sought white lead. They were eating a small meal of eggs and a flax porridge, with a very thin ale, at a table in Mae’s own house. It was unclear if he was the leader of the town, or just the look out who had been tasked with handling visitors. Vaenuth didn’t even know if the small settlement received any other visitors, or if her caravan was the first to warrant a host.
The big man at the end of the table finished his mouthful. “We cannot sell our white lead. It is too hard to procure. And too important”
“I came all this way for it,” she told him. Banno and Pressip were both at the table, as well as Mae’s wife, a small, silent woman with her greying hair in a bun. She remembered Kivrad speaking about the white lead and his plan to sell it for the production of makeup. “What do you even use it for, all the way out here?”
Mae laughed sarcastically. “I will show you,” he decided, with pursed lips. “Once we finish this meal. I trust you will trade us some supplies for your keep while you are visiting here?”
“Very well,” Vaenuth said. The rest of the meal was a little silent.
“Did you have any trouble with the lizards?” Mae’s wife asked.
Vaenuth smirked and nodded. “We did. We lost eight of our group,” she explained. “I myself was captured, but we managed to get free.”
“You’re very fortunate,” Mae said. “Though you have my condolences for your fallen warriors.”
Banno nodded his head in thanks. “Do you have much trouble here with them?”
Mae’s wife started to nod, but Mae put his hand on hers and she fell silent. The big man finished washing down a mouthful with ale and then said, “We see them roaming around sometimes, and they make journeys out of our walls much more risky. But they never bother us here directly.”
“That’s good,” Vaenuth said.
After their meal, Mae led Banno and she through a few of the streets in the direction of the dark plume of smoke they had seen from outside the walls. “Our smithy,” he said, as they rounded a corner. The building was a small, squat place, barely tall enough for the height of a man of Banno’s size. The smoke rose from behind the building, and Mae led them through a small workshop to the rear door of the structure. Inside the smithy, Vaenuth saw a variety of tools, a heavily-worn anvil, and a table of works-in-progress. There was a box of nails, a hand saw blade without handles, a hammer head, and a few horseshoes, though she hadn’t yet seen any animals in the small town.
“This is Hawth,” Mae said, as they exited the building. “He’s our smith.”
The man wore a pair of grease-stained trousers and a scorched leather apron. He was past his prime, with his heat-blasted hairless skin hanging around his firm muscles. He was in the midst of forcing his hands into elbow-tall gloves. “Good mornin’,” he said to them, with the same off-putting accent that Mae held.
“I saw a saw blade on your table,” Vaenuth said. “Are there trees growing anywhere nearby? There’s enough wood around the town for it.”
Hawth paused, and glanced at Mae. When the man nodded, Hawth stopped putting on his gloves and looked at Vaenuth. She was wearing her white binding today, but not her sandy robe. Her shoulder and arm tattoos were visible, as was the top of her two brands, on her back. No one had commented on any of it, but Hawth glanced over her ink before saying, “You look like you’ve seen lots of the world, but none seen what’s out here. The Logren Rivers run north and west, to the sea. And aye, there are forests there. And peoples too.”
Vaenuth blinked. “I’d think someone in Numa’nakres would have figured that out by now,” she said, skeptically.
“It’s true,” Hawth said. “But it don’t matter. I must tend to my furnaces now.”
“She wants to know what we use the lead for,” Mae said.
Hawth had bent over near one of the ovens. The clay blast furnace was not as large as many that Vaenuth had seen, but it had a metal-framed clay door and a chimney that was spewing out all sorts of heat. “What don’t we use lead for?” he asked.
“You use it for tools?” Banno asked.
“And blades, and nails, and buckles,” Hawth said. “And horseshoes, and your little jewelry bits, when we can spare some. And—”
“That’s enough,” Mae said, with a smile. Hawth seemed content to go on and on. The blacksmith pulled open a furnace and gingerly pulled forth a tray of ingots. “We use nickel to add strength to the metal, but lead is much easier to procure. There’s a quarry two days from here.”
“Not iron?” Banno asked. He was confused by their metalwork, for he knew a bit about the trade.
“Ha!” Hawth laughed. “Southern foolishness…”
“They say the Yurna Mountains supply the world’s iron,” Mae explained, “But we’ve yet to find any there. It’s a five or six day journey to the foothills. We use the lead to live, and I cannot sell any of it.”
Hawth opened a nearby shed and filled another one of his smelting trays from a crate of rocky, brittle lead. “We remove the lead first, add the nickel later,” he told them, when he shoved the ore into the furnace he had vacated. Then, he removed the gloves and returned to his smithy, wiping the slick sweat from his forehead with the back of one ashy hand.
Vaenuth shook her head. “Is there no price, steep as it may be?”
“None,” Mae said. “We lost two men on our last venture to our lead quarry. We cannot spare any. If you’d like, I will explain the location for your scouts, or we could negotiate a fare for one of my men to take you there, and you are welcome to mine more yourselves.”
“I’ll have one of my scouts come by with a map,” Vaenuth said, with a crestfallen voice.
Mae nodded. “I apologize,” he said. “But it’s the way it is.” He shook hands with her, and bid her come speak with him if she had any other bargaining interests. He left her at the intersection of two streets, between abandoned buildings. Again, Vaenuth had to wonder why their population had faded away. Surely they had not built more houses in the hopes of expansion. This wasn’t a tourist destination even with a vibrant imagination.
“What now?” Banno asked. They started walking back toward their street of guest housing. “Are we really going to go mine a few wagons-full of that stuff?” They had done manual jobs before, but this was a larger scale.
Vaenuth shook her head. “Not with all that back there, in their shed. A few wagons right there.”
“What are you suggesting?” Pressip asked.
Vaenuth looked at her two trusted friends. “Send Crann to speak with Mae. Then meet me with Tagg in my house, to plan. We’re going to steal that lead.”