The stock racks of the royal smithy's lowest tier held everything the mountain worked with, and Kaelira walked their rows with three hundred dwarves tracking her every step.
What stopped her sat in the open, because down here it didn't need guarding: a short rack standing apart from all the others, holding a handful of metals that drank the forge-light and gave nothing back. She drifted toward it with the tour forgotten, and when her fingers stopped a polite distance from the nearest core, Brokk answered before she could speak.
"Adamantite. Raw cores, unrefined." The First Hammer's voice took on the flat tone of an old wound. "The best of our mines only give up a ton of it in a good decade, and the crown reserves every gram, by the same council that counts anvils. A master petitions for the right to attempt a working the way you'd petition for a duchy. Old Dain there has asked the crown every year for the last twenty years."
"Twenty two," Dain corrected, from his bench.
