Chapter 184: A Blessing

Inside the lavishly appointed guest parlor, Archduchess Isabella of Austria sat near a roaring fireplace.

Her exquisite travel dress was ruined, caked in frozen mud, and her face was pale with exhaustion.

Sitting on a plush sofa beside her were her two younger brothers, Maximilian and Karl.

General Voss stood near a heavy oak table, awkwardly offering a silver platter piled high with warm, spiced sausages and fresh Swabian bread.

Konrad stepped fully into the bright light of the parlor. The Austrian royals instantly froze, staring at the architect of their family’s utter humiliation.

Konrad stopped in the center of the room, squared his shoulders, and offered a bow to the teenage girl.

"Welcome to Augsburg, Your Highness," Konrad said, his voice smooth and remarkably gentle. "I am King Konrad. This is my wife, Queen Katarina. We are profoundly honored to offer you sanctuary in our capital. Because you had the courage to rebel against a dying empire, you have earned my protection. You are safe here."

Isabella stood up on trembling legs and offered a shaky, yet graceful curtsy.

"Thank you, King Konrad," Isabella replied. "We rode for seven days in the freezing sleet. We were terrified Lord Kinsky’s assassins would catch us before the border. But when we crossed the pass and saw your iron giants patrolling the walls... I knew my uncle could never reach us."

Katarina stepped forward. She gently took the shivering girl’s hands. "You must be famished and exhausted from the altitude. Please, sit down and eat. You do not have to look over your shoulder anymore."

"King Konrad!" young Karl suddenly blurted out, his eyes wide as he stared at General Voss’s holstered sidearm. "I saw the Jaegers at the gates! I asked one of them to teach me how to crank a Gatling cart! I want to fight the Emperor’s knights if they ever try to drag my sister back to Vienna!"

Konrad let out a laugh. "You will learn the mathematics of ballistics eventually, Karl. But first, you must eat your bread and build your strength."

Isabella let out a long sigh.

...

A thousand miles to the southwest, within the Royal Armory of Toledo.

"Ghost" Dieter sat quietly on a wooden stool in the corner of the sweltering forge. He currently held the most lucrative, secure job on the entire European continent.

He was receiving a king’s ransom from the Spanish Crown, and a royal stipend from the Kingdom of Alemannia, to do absolutely nothing.

In the center of the armory, fifty of Spain’s master blacksmiths and thirty of the Empire’s most educated scholars were crowded around three massive anvils.

They were attempting to replicate the captured Swabian Pattern-3 Grooved Rifle that the Duke of Alba had recovered from the Alps.

Dieter was sitting in the room under the guise of an exiled Bavarian metallurgy consultant. Princess Elise had deliberately embedded him there for this exact scenario. He did not need to pick locks or assassinate guards. The Holy Roman Empire had invited their most dangerous saboteur directly into their most highly classified military research facility.

"If the internal pressure from the powder charge exceeds the tolerance of our hammered steel, the breech-block will snap off the hinges," Guildmaster Alejandro stated, wiping a layer of soot from his brow.

Master Alchemist Diego adjusted his robes. He looked down at the testing tube with an expression of supreme arrogance.

"I have successfully isolated the ignition sequence of the Swabian primer cap," Diego announced to the room, puffing out his chest. "I have replicated the friction-spark compound without relying on their heretical sorcery."

Dieter leaned forward on his stool, looking at the small brass bowls resting on Diego’s workbench.

"What is your exact chemical composition, Master Diego?" Dieter asked innocently.

"It is an equal synthesis," Diego proclaimed. "I have mixed thirty-three percent raw sulfur, thirty-three percent charcoal, and thirty-three percent crushed glass to provide the necessary friction for the firing pin."

Dieter did not laugh out loud, but inside his head, he was howling with amusement.

Without the highly volatile mercury fulminate that the Swabian chemists synthesized in their sterile laboratories, Diego’s mixture was entirely inert.

If the crude firing pin of a reverse-engineered rifle struck that cap, the crushed glass wouldn’t spark.

It would simply grind the charcoal into dust. And even if they miraculously achieved an ignition, the resulting burn rate would be so slow that the bullet wouldn’t even clear the barrel.

Furthermore, the massive overabundance of raw sulfur would instantly corrode the inside of the Spanish iron, turning their expensive new rifles into brittle clubs within a month of deployment.

Dieter nodded slowly, steepling his fingers with a look of profound awe.

"This looks like a flawless piece of engineering," Dieter stated.

...

The doors of the Toledo armory suddenly groaned inward.

Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alba, strode into the heat of the forge.

"The Emperor’s patience is at an end, gentlemen," Alba barke. "We have drained a king’s ransom to fund this isolation. Have you mastered the heretic’s magic, or must I start hanging guildmasters from the battlements to inspire a breakthrough?"

Guildmaster Alejandro swallowed hard, stepping in front of the workbench. He gestured toward a brass vice secured to the table.

Clamped within its jaws was their painstakingly crafted prototype... a reverse-engineered Pattern-3 rifle, complete with a beautifully carved walnut stock and gold inlay along the iron barrel.

"We are prepared for the inaugural live-fire test, Your Grace," Alejandro proclaimed. "Master Diego has synthesized the primer compound, and we have loaded a perfectly cast lead projectile into the breech. I shall trigger the firing pin to demonstrate the ignition sequence."

Dieter stood up from his stool. He walked backward, putting fifteen feet of stone flooring and a masonry pillar between himself and the workbench.

Alejandro adjusted a pair of gloves and stepped up to the clamped weapon.

The fifty master blacksmiths and thirty erudite scholars surged forward, crowding around the table, eager to witness their own genius unfold.

"A word of caution, Your Grace," Dieter called out, locking eyes with the Duke of Alba. "I suggest you join me by the wall."

Without a word, the Duke took a dozen measured steps backward, joining Dieter in the shadows of the archway.

Alejandro took a deep breath, gripped the lever they had fashioned to mimic Konrad’s firing pin, and pulled.

The snapped forward. The iron pin struck the brass primer cap laced with Diego’s crushed glass and excessive sulfur.

There was no sharp, supersonic crack of Swabian ballistics. Instead, a muffled hiss echoed from the breech, followed by a catastrophic failure.

Because the powder burned far too slowly, the energy had nowhere to go...

The crude weld running the length of the hand-hammered iron barrel instantly sheared apart under the immense pressure.

With a screech of tearing metal, the rifle peeled open like a rotten fruit.

A cloud of yellow sulfur smoke erupted across the workbench. The brass vice fractured into three pieces, clattering against the floor, while the lead projectile simply rolled out of the ruined breech and dropped onto the stone.

The eighty assembled masters were thrown to the floor by the concussive back-blast. They writhed on the ground, coughing, their robes and faces covered in greasy black soot.

Standing safely behind the pillar, Dieter reached up and brushed a stray speck of ash from the lapel of his doublet.

He turned to look at the Duke of Alba.

"As you can see, Your Grace, the carbon content of Castilian iron is simply too brittle for this application. Furthermore, the ambient humidity of the Tagus river valley prevents the powder from achieving instantaneous combustion. You must order your smiths to fold the steel fifty additional times to purge the invisible impurities, and the powder must be baked in the sun for no less than a month."

Alba hacked a cough into his gauntlet, waving his hand to clear the yellow smoke drifting toward them.

"This is an absolute disgrace," Alba hissed, glaring at the coughing scholars crawling on the floor.

"But we do not yield," the Duke roared, stepping forward. "Alejandro! Diego! Get off the floor and clean this disaster up! You will forge a thicker barrel by sunrise!"

Alba turned sharply back to Dieter. "Return to your quarters, consultant. It is the end of the month. You will draft your scheduled espionage dispatch to Princess Elise in Augsburg. Inform the Swabian witch that our foundries are collapsing. Make them believe the Holy Roman Empire has abandoned the rifle."

"I shall draft the deception as you command, Your Grace," Dieter offered a bow.

Leaving the sweltering, foul-smelling armory behind, Dieter ascended the stairs and stepped out into the air of the Alcázar’s upper courtyards.

He made his way to his lavishly appointed guest suite. Two heavily armed Spanish halberdiers stood at rigid attention outside his oak door.

Once inside, Dieter slid the deadbolt into place. He withdrew a sheet of parchment, a finely sharpened goose-feather quill, and two distinct glass vials.

The first vial contained a simple citrus-acid wash... the decoy invisible ink that Lord Kinsky’s counter-intelligence network had supposedly "broken."

The second vial contained an advanced Swabian chemical reagent.

It was a specialized alkaline phenolphthalein solution, utterly transparent when dry, which would only reveal its vibrant crimson text when Princess Elise sprayed it with a specific acidic aerosol back in Augsburg.

First, Dieter dipped his quill into the Swabian reagent.

’To Her Highness, Princess Elise,

The Toledo guildmasters are currently locked in the royal armory beneath the eastern towers. They are blindly testing a disastrous thirty-three percent sulfur ratio. Their hand-welded barrels are rupturing at a fraction of our operational pressure.

However, do not celebrate their incompetence. They have the capital to fail ten thousand times. Through force attrition, they will eventually stumble upon the correct metallurgical tolerances and the seventy-five percent saltpeter ratio. The timeline is accelerating. You must ensure the traction engines are deployed before the spring thaw.’

Dieter set the quill down, waiting patiently for the alkaline solution to dry.

Once the parchment appeared entirely blank again, Dieter picked up a second quill and dipped it into the citrus decoy ink.

Right over top of the hidden Swabian text, he drafted the lie the Duke of Alba wanted him to tell, utilizing a basic substitution cipher that the Spanish cryptographers had long since cracked.

’The Spanish are remarkably foolish. In their arrogance, they managed to detonate the captured Pattern-3 during a live test, ruining the prototype. The academics are weeping, and the Emperor is humiliated. The Duke of Alba has scrapped the reverse-engineering initiative entirely. You may rest easy; Toledo poses zero technological threat to the Kingdom of Alemannia.’

Rising from his velvet armchair, Dieter cracked the door. He passed the sealed parchment to the armored halberdier stationed in the corridor.

"Be a good lad and deliver this to the Duke’s courier," Dieter instructed with a smile. "It contains the misdirection His Grace requested."

The guard nodded, taking the letter and marching down the hallway.

Dieter knew exactly what would happen next...

The guard would hand it directly to the Duke of Alba. Alba would hold the parchment over a hot candle, read the visible citrus-ink lies, smile with grim satisfaction, and then secure it aboard a fast ship bound for the Swabian network in Genoa.

The Iron Duke would never comprehend that the truth of Alemannia was resting right on top of his clever ruse.

Dieter closed the door and threw the deadbolt.

He laced his fingers behind his head, staring up at the painted frescoes on the ceiling.

Compared to the headache of actually forging a working rifle, Dieter decided that sitting in a luxurious Spanish fortress and watching arrogant scholars accidentally blow off their own eyebrows was the greatest blessing the new world had ever bestowed upon him.