Hajin ran his thumb over the edge of the slate board, feeling the chalk dust stick to his skin. He sat across the table from Marrick, watching the exhausted scribe drag his pen across another page of regional tax records.
The tally listed roughly ninety surviving men who knew how to swing a pickaxe. Not a single one of them knew how to build a forge capable of melting anomaly-grade iron.
"The southern village has three carpenters," Marrick said, not looking up from his ledger, "but two of them are missing fingers from the mine collapses, and the third is past his seventieth winter. We have raw lumber arriving from the caravans tomorrow, but no one to cut it into defensive stakes."
"What about the masons?" Hajin asked, staring at the bleak numbers written across the slate.
"We have men who can stack rocks," he replied, dipping his pen into the inkwell, "but stacking rocks is not building a wall. A single catapult will shatter an unmortared wall in ten minutes."
