The work was hard.
The 3 fishery dwarves had set up a rotation schedule. One would haul fish, while the other two cleaned and dressed... then when the batch was done, the one fetching would rotate to the next in the queue.
Weird and his new partner in crime set up a similar arrangement, one digging out the kiln chamber, while the other rested while making large coil-based pots from the excavated clay body.
Hours passed, and slowly, the nasty pile of dead fish vanished, to be replaced with neat rows of stoneware clay vessels drying in the sun. Weird was just putting the finishing touches on the anagama's chimney flu, when hugo showed up, asking if he could help. He suggested helping the fisher dwarves haul the wheelbarrow.
He didn't seem very enthused by the idea, but decided to give it a try, and before long was towing the cart instead of pushing it like normal. The lack of grasping appendages meant he had to be hitched to the barrow like a horse, which was the source of the protest, but the rate of fish removal greatly picked up. He would likely end up doing a lot of hauling that way if he wasn't careful. Weird doubted that he would be unhitched after the fish were all processed. There was a lot of stuff that needed hauling.
"Do ye really think il' work?" Asked Rikod, for what seemed the 100th time. The potter was used to working with much smaller kilns, much like egyptian ones. Huge, multi-community ones like anagama were not used in dwarven culture, and naturally, the dwarf had no experience with a technology completely alien to this universe. He was clearly quite interested in the idea, but also suspicious if it would work.
"Its worked for thousands of years." Weird said. "Its a very ancient design. This is actually a really primitive way of building one too. The better ones are made of fired firebrick, but this will have to do."
"But it'll take forev'r ta dry oot!" Rikod protested, and he was right. Leaving the kiln to dry by its own devices would take weeks, which they didn't have. Instead, he would have to be reckless, and slowly heat it to dry it out. It should work if done slowly and carefully, but it would be painfully easy to destroy the kiln walls.
"We'l have to slowly heat it wet to be of any help fixing the fort." Weird admitted. Rikod's eyeballs bugged out of his head.
"Ye cannae be serious!" He protested, and he was right. It was seriously tricky business heating wet ware. It tended to explode at worst, and crack horribly at best unless you were super paranoid.
"I think I can control the heating good enough to keep it from cracking out inside." He said, but he really wasn't too sure of that either.
"This I gotta see..."
-------
It was nice being in clean dry clothes, but he still felt like he had mud caked in his hair. The pigtail glove hummed along, as he delicately puffed bouts of fire into the stoke hole in the front of the wet clay kiln. He had to keep the temp below boiling, but still good and warm inside, and let the clay release its water at a faster than normal rate, but in a uniform and controlled fashion. A thin whisp of steam curled out of the hole he had dug into the top of the hill. What you couldn't see was the long flu inside at the back of the kiln it was connected to. From the outside, all you could see were the wet-brick front, and the vent hole on the top. Slowly but surely, the kiln dried and gassed out. He controlled the temp by carefully regulating when he shot fire in, and closing the input hole again.
He and rikod just sat there as the shadows grew long on the horizon, waiting for the kiln to dry and then reach bisque temp safely, and chatting about this and that.
Turned out Rikod had 2 daughters, and a wife. He was curious why weird was staunchly against settling in with a fine dwarven woman and having little ones of his own. He didn't seem to be able to grasp that his wizard co-worker just had no interest, but finally chalked it up to just being a wizard thing. They discussed different firing techniques, and how the technique he was using on the kiln was similar to raiku ware, another approach and technique Rikod had never even heard of, let alone tried. Salt and soda glazes came up too, and Rikod asked him how he knew so much about ceramics, while dedicating so much of his time to so many other skillsets. Weird didn't really have an aswer to that... he just had so many interests, that he didn't feel happy without a bunch of irons on the fire. Rikod chalked that up to being a wizard thing too.
The sun slowly began to set, and the temp inside the empty kiln had risen slowly and nearly imperceptibly, but now it had reached a point where weird simply let it have it, and the brick on the front walling up the opening save for the tiny fuel hole was blazing a beautiful crimson in the cool night air.
He wondered how the others were holding up. He couldn't leave the kiln. Firing an anagama took 8 to 12 hours. He would be there all night. He had wanted to test his enchantments in a more controlled setting, but so far it had held up well. He didn't want to stress it too far though, and did his best to use it only on its lowest rate of conversion, which turned out to be just about right for driving the kiln.
It was gonna be a long night.
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