The announcement was simple.
A notice posted at the facility's causeway entrance and distributed through Greil's network into Munich's taverns and notice boards: bring animal fat to the facility. Lard, tallow, rendered grease — any form, any quantity. It would be weighed at the gate and paid for in coin or grain at a fixed rate, no questions about source or quality beyond the basic inspection the gate staff would conduct.
It was the middle of winter. Work had contracted to its seasonal minimum — construction stopped, agricultural labor dormant, the city's casual labor force spending its days in the particular idleness of people who had exhausted their savings and not yet exhausted their options. Fat was available in abundance as a cold-weather byproduct: butchers clearing storage, households rendering down the accumulated waste of autumn slaughter, the city's meat trade generating more tallow than the candle-makers and leather workers could absorb.
The facility was offering coin for something people had been discarding.
Within two days the causeway approach had a queue.
Jonas managed the intake from the gate inspection point, not because it required his supervision but because the first operational day of any new process was the day most likely to produce the problems that could not be anticipated from the planning stage. He watched the gate staff work through the queue, noted two process inefficiencies in the first hour and corrected them, and by midday had satisfied himself that the intake was running correctly and could be left to Rulf.
The fat went to the laboratory.
He had constructed it himself over the three days preceding the announcement — a standalone building at the far eastern edge of the facility, positioned as far from the main workshop complex as the perimeter allowed. Distance from vibration. Distance from open flame. Distance from the casual foot traffic that moved through the facility's central areas throughout the working day. The construction was deliberately plain — four walls, a roof, a single door with a heavy latch, two ventilation openings positioned to promote airflow without creating drafts that could carry particulate toward ignition sources.
The equipment inside was not what he would have chosen given access to a properly equipped chemistry laboratory. It was what the facility's metalworking and glassblowing capacity could produce in three days of prioritized fabrication — functional, imprecise by the standards he had worked to in his previous life, adequate for what he needed if he was careful and patient and did not rush the process variables that punished rushing.
He had placed guards at a perimeter around the building. Knights on the outer ring, guards on the inner, with explicit instructions that no one entered without his direct accompaniment and no one approached the outer perimeter without being stopped and turned away. The fire mages assigned to the facility's winter moat maintenance — who would ordinarily have worked the eastern section closest to the building — had been redirected to the western and northern moat face without explanation.
The explanations that filled that void were, he was informed by Rulf, considerable.
Seclusion training, said some. A new and more powerful steam engine, said others. Some variation of magical experimentation, said the more imaginatively inclined, which was itself interesting because it was the category of explanation that sat closest to what was actually happening, without being right in any specific way.
None of them were anywhere close.
Nitrocellulose first.
The chemistry was straightforward in principle and demanding in practice. Wood pulp — sourced from the facility's carpentry workshop waste, which produced it in adequate quantity — treated with a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids at controlled temperature, the nitration reaction proceeding in stages that required monitoring and timing and the management of exothermic behavior that could, if poorly handled, produce outcomes that would have made the rumors about magical experimentation look understated.
He worked alone. Not from preference — from the assessment that introducing another person to the process required either explaining what he was producing, which he was not prepared to do, or instructing them to perform precise chemical procedures without explaining why, which was both dangerous and impractical.
He worked carefully. The equipment's imprecision added time rather than risk, provided the process steps were executed with the compensation that imprecise equipment demanded — longer reaction times, more conservative temperature control, additional stabilization steps that a properly equipped laboratory would not have required.
Three days.
The nitrocellulose was done on the morning of the fourth day — stable, dry, stored in sealed containers in the coolest corner of the building. He looked at it for a moment with the satisfaction of a process completed correctly despite the constraints, and then looked at the remaining production requirement.
Nitroglycerin next.
The glycerol precursor was the bottleneck. He had collected the small quantity that the facility's existing fat processing produced as a byproduct, which was insufficient for the volume the propellant program required. He needed a dedicated glycerol production line, which meant he needed a soap production operation running at scale, which meant he needed labor.
He needed it now rather than in a week's time, because the laboratory's stabilized nitrocellulose had a finite optimal processing window and he preferred not to discover experimentally what happened when he exceeded it.
He left the laboratory locked, left the guard detail in place with standing instructions, and went to find a horse.
The horse was a good one — one of the facility's administrative animals, saddled and brought around by the stable hand within ten minutes of his request. He rode out across the causeway into the open road, the winter fields on either side grey-white under old snow, the city walls visible in the distance through the flat February air.
He was thinking about glycerol yields.
The saponification process was chemically reliable, but the glycerol separation efficiency varied with the fat quality and the process temperature, and he was still calibrating his yield estimates against the actual inputs the Munich fat collection was producing, which were more variable in composition than he had initially modeled. He would need to build the variance into the production calculation and adjust the collection volume upward accordingly—
The sound arrived before the object did.
A deep, fast whoosh — the displacement of substantial mass through cold air at speed, coming from the left and above, from the treeline at the road's edge. His reaction time was what it was, which was good. The horse's reaction time was irrelevant, because the horse was the target.
The log was perhaps eight feet long and thick as a man's torso. It had been thrown rather than launched — the specific arc of something propelled by muscle rather than mechanism, at a velocity that spoke to the quantity of muscle behind it. It caught the horse across the skull with the flat sound of catastrophic structural impact, and the horse dropped instantly, and Jonas was airborne for approximately one second before the snow-packed road arrived.
He took the impact across his left shoulder and hip, the kinetic buffer absorbing the momentum before the ground could fully translate it into injury, and rolled to a stop face-up in the snow with the sky grey above him and the dead horse three meters to his right.
He lay there for a moment.
He ran a rapid inventory. No injury beyond superficial. The ability had absorbed both the throw's ambient kinetic energy when it passed close enough to register and the landing impact. He was charged. He was also, he noted with the specific tiredness of a man who had been awake for three days doing precision chemistry and had been looking forward to an uncomplicated ride into the city, not remotely interested in a fight.
He raised his hands. Both of them, palms outward, the universal gesture of a person who was communicating that they were not reaching for anything.
"I'm sorry," he said to the sky, at the volume of a man addressing whoever was in the treeline without turning his head to look. "If it's money you want, you should know I rarely travel with much. Take what I have and let this be the end of it."
A pause.
Then a laugh — short, contemptuous, the laugh of someone who had found something funnier than they had expected and wanted the person they were laughing at to understand they were being laughed at.
"My days." The voice was large, the way very large men's voices were sometimes large — carrying the specific resonance of a chest that had more space in it than usual. "So this is the prodigy I keep hearing about. The boy who built the island. Groveling in the snow, begging not to be robbed."
Jonas lay in the snow with his hands up and looked at the grey sky.
He did not recognize the voice. He did not need to recognize it to understand what the voice communicated — the particular quality of amusement that came from a person who was entirely confident in their position and was enjoying the gap between their expectations and what they had found.
"Pathetic," the voice said, with the satisfied delivery of a man who had been saving the word.
The snow crunched. Footsteps, heavy, approaching from the treeline without hurry. A shadow fell across Jonas's field of vision — tall, broad, backlit by the flat grey sky.
"Sorry, young master." The tone had shifted slightly — still amused, but with the professional overlay of someone remembering they had a job to do. "I've been instructed to bring you in. Alive if possible." A pause, and then the addition that communicated more about the speaker than about the instructions: "Though I'm flexible on the details."
Jonas looked up at the silhouette above him.
He thought about the plasma beam. He thought about the solar lance. He thought about the full charge the kinetic buffer had absorbed from the log throw and the landing impact combined.
He thought about a facility with a locked laboratory containing stabilized nitrocellulose and instructions he had given that were adequate but not indefinite, and about the soap production timeline, and about the glycerol yield calculations he had been mid-way through when the log arrived.
He was, he concluded with the specific irritation of a man whose schedule had just been disrupted by something entirely avoidable, going to have to deal with this.
He lowered his hands.