Phoenix Fire

6 - Kaboom

HILD

"God are you sweating? Because I'm sweating." I turned to the boy next to me, flashing what I hoped to be a slightly flirtatious grin.

"Yeah I'm sweating." He replied heavily. 

"Getting a bit hot in here. Would be so much nicer if we were allowed to take off our clothes." I winked at him.

He rolled his eyed at me. "Cut it out Hild, you know I'm betrothed."

"I love how you say that. Oh I am betrothed. The love of my life is waiting for me. Oh what a beauty is she. Oh my sweet betrothed. You talk about her like she has baths in rose petals all day. I mean c'mon man she's moved on. It's been what, five, six months?" I nudged him, "You said she was a beauty, some other guy must have picked her up by now." This may have been slightly cruel but he was going loopy over this girl.

"She's not like that." He said through a clenched jaw as he picked up another huge piece of iron ore and put it on the wagon.

"Sure lover boy." I helped him adjust the rock.

He crouched down next to the wagon and caught his breath. "We could be making swords you know, not down here in the dark hacking away at rocks and sweating like pigs in the summer."  

"You may know how to make swords, but I don't. I'd be a disaster! Me and a vat of hot oil? I'd probably blow the place up." We paused for a second looking at each other.

"We could..." he began.

"Blow the place up." I finished.

We looked at each other in the flickering light of the torches. His steel coloured eyes fixed on me. We were both thinking the same thing. We had to get a job in the forge. 

"What did they say to you? When they first captured you?" I asked him.

"They didn't tell me much, they more wanted me to talk." I looked at his bare shoulders where the lines from his scars ended. 

When he'd been brought in they'd tortured him. He'd never told me what they'd questioned him about and I didn't dare asked. When they'd paired us up the cuts on his back were still raw, and his face looked like a battered cut of beef. They said they had put us together to keep me in check, stop me being so annoying. He was a somewhat stoic guy, not the most cheerful and upbeat man in the world but we found we worked well together.

"How much do you know about fools gold?" I asked, my mind racing with possibilities.

"Not much. Looks like gold, actually a sort of iron thing isn't it? A mineral?" He shrugged. 

I crouched down next to him. "You see, pretty boy, I know a fair bit about blowing things up." I grinned. "Fools gold has a thing called sulfur in it. Now if you melt down fools gold it leaves you with something else." 

"What?" He asked.

"Liquid iron ore. Fools gold is actually made out of iron, you were right. Now my guess is they'll probably have some around here. On the second level, where it smells a bit like bad eggs, do you know what that is?" I felt like I was talking to a 10 year old boy, not a 20 year old man. 

"Again, no I don't Hild." He sighed. He had rings around his eyes. Sleeping on the ground here left everyone in a bad mood. Everyone apart from me, it seemed.

"That is the smell of sulfur. I'm guessing they're melting down some of that fools gold on the upper levels. If you crush it up into a really fine powder it can explode, kaboom. But you have to heat it quite high. Put it into a furnace and let it go to work. We could use the oil to light fires and  the fools gold to, well, kaboom." I wiped some sweat off my face, waiting for his reply.