Demesne 106 - The Ice Boat Prototype (Patreon)

Building the ice boat prototype did not, in fact, take all morning.

They needed a place they could use to assemble the ice and form the boat, and for ease Lori opted to use the area directly in front of the dungeon. It was in front of the river anyway, it was relatively flat, and it needed to be compacted anyway.

"Your units of measurement are atrocious," Lori said, as she peered down at the piece of wood Rian had handed her with a sketch and large scrawled dimensions on it. The drawing was clearly not to scale. "Why are you using stri? No one uses stri, it's just something that pads out the scale between a pace and yustri. "

"It exists, I'm going to use it," Rian said.

"So do measuring things in half-paces," Lori said, shaking her head. "Well, come on. This is your idea, you help me measure out the mold." She glared again at the numbers. "And turn this into paces, will you?"

Rian sighed, but took back the wood, drew out a burnt wooden stick from somewhere—he kept that in a pocket? Poor Umu— and began to convert the measurements while muttering to himself.

Once that was done, they began to measure out the dimensions for what was essentially an oversized block of ice. Lori had considered making a hole and pouring water into that, but that was stupid. That was the sort of method you would use for mass producing a specific shape. As this was only a prototype, they could afford to form it by hand. The lines they were measuring on the ground were so they'd have an easy reference for the dimensions. Once the lines were in place, Lori depressed the ground and compacted the material so that the lines would remain clear, especially the lengthwise center line.

"We'll need clear ice," Rian said as she gathered water from the river, waterwisps giving the fluid unnatural cohesion and viscosity. "It's the most structurally sound, since it won't have bubbles weakening it, and we'll need a benchmark test to see how well it holds without reinforcement."

"Do you actually know what you're doing?" Lori asked dryly even as she began binding the airwisps out of the water. This was unusual enough from her usual work that some people, especially the people waiting in line at the Um—thankfully only three pairs or so, instead of the comically long lines when it had been first established.

"A little? I mean, it makes sense that impurities would weaken a substance," Rian said. "And, well… air means bubbles in ice, which means gaps, like rotten wood. And rotten wood is weaker than whole wood. So the logic follows."

"And your idea to put wooden planks in the ice? How are those not impurities?"

Because the wood itself will also be structurally intact," Rian said. "The wood will act as structurally reinforcement against lateral stresses, something to keep the ice together instead of just snapping. Its bone inside muscle or… ah, fibers inside baked bricks. Even if something managed to crack the ice, the wood beneath should help it keep its shape. I'm not sure if we can build it to be self-repairing, I don't know enough about magic, but pouring water over the crack so it will freeze solid to repair the damage is a nice image."

Lori considered that. The binding for such a self-repair function… no, it would be unfeasible. The water being added to the cracks would need to be claimed somehow, or else it would never properly solidify into ice. Though perhaps she could do a test to detect gaps in the bound wisps…

"Magic doesn't work that way," she said instead. Then she began making ice. "Do not touch the ice unless I tell you to, or your flesh will freeze to it and probably become frostbitten."

Rian whistled, raising his eyebrows. "It's that cold?"

Height wasn't a problem, since they could just trim it down. So she made the whole thing out of a whole block of ice, three paces wide, five paces long and nearly two paces high. It was solid and completely clear with a bluish tinge, the only thing keeping it from slipping along the hardpacked ground the little bumps of packed earth sticking out at the edges to keep it hemmed in, and how it had frozen onto the ground it was on.

It stayed clear, if blue, as she kept it bound, not really acting like ice. Ice, unbound ice, interacted with the firewisps in the world, drawing them in and leaving the area around it cold as a result. Ice created by taking waterwisps to solidify water did not. While it was technically cold, it did not spread that cold into the world. With the binding removed carefully, it remained solid, but now exchange of heat could happen, and the surface began to frost over as stray waterwisps in the air settled and solidified because of the cold.

"I can feelthat," Rian said, sounding astonished. "That's cold."

"Still thinking you can build a boat out of this?" Lori said dryly.

"If we can keep it solid, we can keep it solid in the presence of heat," Rian said. "That means that cold will be survivable."

"We?" Lori said pointedly.

"Sorry, I mean you, most powerful, intelligent and hardworking Binder."

Rian needed new words of flattery.

The center of the ice—the keel, as Rian kept referring to it—was supposed to come to a point and be three-quarters of a pace higher—or as the case would be once it was turned around and in the water, lower—than the sides of the boat. Lori used a stone knife blade pulled from the ground, firewisps, a length of cord and Rian to score lines from the keel to the side of the boat, then made the ice part along those parameters, making what was essentially a squat triangle on top of a block. Another pass, and there was a gradual slope on one end that would be the front. Even to her inexperienced eye, it was something barely boat-shaped.

"Okay…" Rian said when that was done. "That looks good. Now how do we flip it…?"

"It's supposed to float, isn't it?" Lori said as she directed her awareness away from where they were.

"It should—oh, that was a rhetorical question," Rian said, stepping back from the crude ice boat as if afraid of getting wet. The water that had risen up from the river enfolded the block of ice as Lori bound it once more to solidity so that it would stop drawing in heat again. For a moment, it stayed stuck on the ground until Lori tweaked the binding a little, and a thin layer of ice turned back to water, which immediately turned to slush again but it released the block.

The block of ice meant to be a boat heaved, rising in the malformed, rounded water Lori had surrounded it with, slowly rising but not bobbing to the 'surface'. Ah, right. Cohesion and viscosity combined into powerful surface tension.

"Let's take this to the river, shall we?" Lori said as if she'd always meant to do that.

They nearly lost the boat. Lori barely remembered to raise stone bars in its path from the river bed when the current took it, and she and Rian both winced hard at the sound of impact.

"Please don't be broken, please don't be broken, please don't be broken," Rian said repeatedly as Lori pulled the boat back towards them using the stone bars to push it into place.

"It's fine," she said. Well, she assumed. It was… really hard to tell for sure since it was completely transparentsIt was still whole, and her binding had been keeping it solid. "It's fine. And it's floating."

It was… technically. A long strip of transparent, glass-like ice bobbed out of the water in a line, with an unnaturally sharp edge. Water lapped over it, not freezing because of her binding.

"That does not look sufficiently buoyant for our needs," Lori said flatly.

"That's because we need to do phase two first," Rian said. "Hollowing it out." A beat. "Well, turning it over and THEN hollowing it out." Another beat. "Um, can you turn it over and put it back where we started? Please? Your most patient and scholarly bindership?"

That was not what she meant about new flattery, but she'd take what she could get.

The boat—well, block of ice, it wasn't a boat yet—was turned the right way up and brought back to shore, where it was rested on some stone she raised out of the ground to keep it in place and even. Then Rian—using the cord, his writing plank as a relative straight edge and Lori's stone knife—began to score lines along the relatively flat top of the boat, defining a space where the ice needed to be removed. The space ended well back from the angled front—"Let's not risk poking a hole in it just yet"— but did encompass most of the boat.

He then scored a line on the side showing how deep the ice to be removed should be.

"Um, will that be a problem?" he asked as if finally realizing how much of the ice needed to be removed. "Can I help with anything?"

"Yes," Lori said as she made a block of stone rise up out of the gorund next to her so she'd had somewhere to stand on that would let her see all the scored lines. "Watch the level."

Hollowing out ice was nothing like working with stone. For one thing, water, unlike stone, will settle down to a perfectly flat, even level. That meant she didn't need to smooth anything out when she hit bottom, just turn it back to ice again.

She was in the middle of making section of ice in the middle of the block turn into water and move over the side and onto the ground when Rian suddenly started laughing.

"What?" she asked. She wasn't wondering whether it was a joke at her expense. Not at all.

"R-remember when we first started talking about making a boat and sending it to Covehold?" he said, still snickering.

"Yes, this plan has been greatly delayed, hasn't it?" she said.

Rian ignored that. "Remember my first idea for making a boat?"

His first idea? Yes, he'd had an idea. What had it been…

"You wanted to hollow out a tree…?" she said, the bizarre detail coming to mind.

Rian started chuckling again. "I mean, it's not a tree, but…" He gestured at the block of ice. That she was hollowing out.

Lori rolled her eyes and continued following the scored lines as her only lord snickered to himself

She really needed to find someone to appoint as another one. He might be losing his sanity.

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Lori managed to finish hollowing out the ice a little past mid-morning. By then it actually looked like a boat.

"It actually looks like a boat now," she said as she looked over the hollowed out piece of ice now actually riding above the water.

"A barge, anyway," Rian said.

"A barge is clearly a sort of boat."

Rian didn't press the issue. He was giving the new boat a look of… dissatisfaction. "You know, I just realized this might be ill-advised," he said.

"Really? Making a boat out of ice is ill-advised?" Her sarcasm should been a thick sludge that covered the ground.

"We should have put some wooden boards on it," Rian said. "Otherwise we'd slip trying to get on and off. If we plan to use it as a boat, we need to test what happens when we use it as a boat. That means getting on it." He frowned. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"You truly want to go through with this?" she said.

"It's the best we can do, unless you want to try building a boat out of stone," he said softly. "So far, nothing has come up to say this is a completely bad idea. A risky idea? Sure. Very risky. The boat we use will need to be built with care and planning and you'll have to keep it full of magic constantly over a long distance so it doesn't fail, but that just makes it difficult and desperate, not actually bad. We need a boat, and ice is a material we can use thanks to you. Even if the boats we used aren't made completely of only ice, ice will definitely be a component. It lets us seal gaps in the wood that we have no other way of waterproofing, at the very least."

Rian gestured at the ice boat. "Look at it. It's stupid, it looks cold, but it works. It's clearly floating, after all. If the carpenters build a wooden box to those dimensions, and then we put it inside this, we'd had a functional boat for as long as the ice lasted! And if you do the blood thing, it'll last for as long as you want it to last. I mean, we'd have to be careful of it bumping into things hard, but that would be true of any boat we make!"

"We've been beaching Lori's Boat," Lori pointed out.

"Yes, and you have no idea how terrifying I find that, which is why I'm trying to find a way for us to make out own boat," Rian said.

For a moment, Lori stood in silence, staring at the boat.

"We need to do this, Lori," Rian said quietly. "We can only put it off for so long. One way or another, we need to go back." A beat. "After all, it's part of your agreement with River's Fork."

Lori twitched. That last comment stung, colors consume him.

She took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh.

"Fine," she said. It wasn't a tired word. It wasn't particularly resigned. Just… said. "Fine. But we do one last thing first."

"Which is?"

"We need to test to see what happens to bound ice outside of the demesne for several days," Lori said.

Rian winced. "Ah… good point. Yes, let's definitely do that first. Thinking about it, I really want to know if Iridescence can grow on this… "

They both looked at the boat, made of solidified water.

"Yes, let's definitely test that," Rian repeated vehemently.

Slowly, Lori nodded, still looking down at the ice boat. "I'll get some stone. If I put a thin layer on the bottom, that should give you some footing, right?"

Rian blinked at the abrupt change in subject. "Uh, maybe. Yes, it should as long as it's rough enough, it think," Rian said. "And thick. Wouldn't want it to crack under me, after all."

Lori nodded, still thoughtful. "Let's get some stone, then…"