“By now the end of the Months of Demons had been almost three months ago,” Lehman didn’t waver in his duty. “The King has sent me to escort the Prince back to King’s City.”
“When will you leave for Border Town?”
“We will set out tomorrow morning.”
Traveling at a regular pace, they should arrive at Border Town in three days, while my Knight will move through day and night, and should be able to deliver the message after only one night and day. This way His Royal Highness should have enough time to prepare to deal with them. I, Petrov, can only do so much.
When the group reached the stronghold’s barracks, Petrov stopped, “This is the place where the Duke’s Knights were stationed, so staying here you should get a good rest, dinner will be sent later to you. As for Sir Lehman,” Petrov looked at Lehman Hawes, “there will be a hearty dinner prepared for you, please be sure to attend.”
“Thank you for your generosity, Sir Petrov,” the latter laughed.
After dinner, when Lehman returned to camp and stepped into the central tent, he was immediately surrounded by several people.
“What’s the situation?” He asked.
“We are surrounded on all sides by people who are keeping a close watch over us. They have also stationed around a hundred troops at the gates, but most of them don’t possess a whole armor, so they should belong to the city patrol,” one of his men reported. “It seems that the Lord doesn’t trust us.”
“At least it appeared that our intelligence was correct, the information I gathered at the banquet also confirmed this point,” Lehman spoke in a hushed tone. “After the Duke was defeated, most of the Knights were arrested and brought to Border Town, so there aren’t many Knight’s left for them to use in combat.”
Before he had arrived here, he had gathered detailed intelligence about the current situation in Longsong Stronghold. The task given by His Majesty was very simple, which was, to discover the reasons for the Duke’s loss, and then to take the appropriate measures to take gain control over the Western Territory as quickly as possible.
“What’s with those who took that medicine…?”
“They will soon reach their limit,” said the other, “as long as we give them pills, they will do anything.”
The messenger group was also only a pretext, of their team of fifty, the numbers of real Knights were only counted at thirteen, the other were mercenaries disguised as knights. Under the influence of the church’s pills, they were more obedient than the loyalest of hounds, while at the same time being even more ferocious than demonic beasts. They were also the key to Lehman’s plan in capturing the gate. According to his plan, a 1,500 people strong militia were slowly nearing the stronghold and as long as they opened the gates, the city would fall into their hands.
“Hand out the pills, then have ten men stay behind to deal with the patrol and send the others to the East Gate.” Lehman finally gave his orders.
Chapter 193 Castle Bathroom
The theater performance was a great success. Within the last two weeks “Cinderella” had been performed three times, many of the citizens had even seen it more than once. If the first performance was the needed propaganda and announcement to attract so many people to come watch, the next two plays were completely self-sustaining. There were even citizens who came to the City Hall and asked when the fourth performance would be held.
Getting such a respond, Roland was naturally overjoyed; they were all so completely attracted to the story that almost no one raised any objections as to why Cinderella got help from a witch. Wait until “The rooster crows at Midnight” gets played next month, which was almost a special performance for the impoverished commoners, it was still unknown how the serfs would view the treatment and assistance of the witches during the drama.
Another thing that pleased Roland was that the crew had settled down in town and even accepted the existence of the witches — after the third performance, Irene took the initiative to find Rolland, and had asked him from where the unexpected “sound accompaniment” had come, so Roland then introduced Echo to her.
With Nightingale’s secret observation, they discovered that although Irene was clearly surprised, she didn’t show any resentment or disgust. After she regained her composure, she seemed to be very curious and peppered Echo with many questions, even making her demonstrate her magical sound several times over. The result being that Echo soon joined the theater group, becoming the master of music who was orchestrating from behind the scenes — in order to avoid the possibility of any accidents, Irene alone paired up with Echo when they did a sound rehearsal, withholding it from the knowledge of the cast. There was no doubt that the musical accompaniment would soon reach new heights at the upcoming performance.
Another matter that made him jubilant, was that the castle would soon step into the era of tap water.
The towering water tower stood tall and upright in the castle backyard. Its body and framework was made out of welded iron, giving it a triangular shape. Attached to the top of the tower — with a diameter of two meters and a height of three meters— was an iron bucket. The water valve within the bucket made it very convenient to control the water level. The tower was welded by Anna and afterward covered by a rust-proof coating by Soraya, and finally, with the help of Hummingbird’s magic, they eliminated most of the weight in order to install it on the previous erected cement base.
Due to the height of the castle, the water tower in the castle backyard was even higher than Redwater River’s river bank, with a height of 12 meters it was almost level with the castle’s peak. In order to prevent the tower from collapsing, Roland surrounded the tower by a wall and in this way connected the tower with the castle.
The steam engine was set up outside the backyard and used to supply the water tower with water by pumping up water from the well in the castle’s back garden. Taking a closer look, it could be seen that it was already the third generation of the steam engine, with the biggest improvement being the great reduction of the working noise.
At each connection point of the steam engine, a spacer was equipped — the light blue spacer was drawn with Soraya’s sky coloring, making it soft while also being very though, significantly reducing the machine’s vibrational noise. The inside of the cylinder and the piston’s edge were covered with a grass coloring, which lessened the leakage while at the same time also improved the operational efficiency. Components that were prone to tremors, such as the exhaust pipe, had been entirely replaced with coated hoses.
In order to prevent that the steamer from getting scorched and drenched by sun and rain, as well as for further noise reduction, Roland built a small house around it, and had Soraya coat all of the inner walls with a honeycomb design, which was used like a porous sound-absorption material. The practical test showed that even during the night, the noise of the machine would be so faint that the people sleeping inside wouldn’t be woken up.
However, Roland’s attempt to automatically feed the steam engine failed. He originally envisaged that the steam engine would be regulated by a fly ball which would control the valve in the wood box. As the steam pressure dropped, the fly ball was meant to open the valve, so that the firewood in the wood box would roll into the furnace, but that way the regulator would have to do a lot of work, otherwise with the weight of the fly ball alone it couldn’t drive the valve.
After a lot of deliberation, Roland finally decided to give up. At the beginning, the wood box would have to be filled to the maximum, and when it was used up it had to be filled again by a workforce anyway, in that case would be better to arrange for staff to just fill the water tank with water each day.