Flerring gave a nod and opened one of the double doors that led into the building. “Careful what you touch,” she said, “We don’t keep a lot of powder in the main building, but you can never be too careful.”
They entered what looked to have once been an immense stable capable of housing almost a hundred head of horses. The stalls were filled with raw materials, their doors marked in white chalk telling what was stored inside. They passed dozens of them filled with barrels and boxes of sulfur, saltpeter, charcoal, glycerol, nitric acid. Everything was packed in sawdust and straw, which was strewn all about the place.
“This looks incredibly unsafe,” Adamat commented.
“We keep everything separate,” Little Flerring said. “None of the ingredients are particularly dangerous on their own.”
“Lots of straw. Seems an immense fire risk.”
“No flames allowed within fifty feet of the building. We do all our work during the light of the day.”
Adamat noticed she had left her blunderbuss outside. It did seem they were quite careful. “What can you tell me about blasting oil?”
“I’ll let Dad do that,” she said, pausing beside one of the stalls. She gestured inside to a makeshift office.
An old man sat at an all-too-small desk in one corner. He was bent over with age, his hair gone gray, but he still had shoulders half a hand wider than SouSmith’s. The outer-stall wall had been given a large window, and the man hunched over a book. Adamat instantly noted the man’s hands – or, that is, the lack thereof. Immense arms now ended in iron caps. One had a dual hook for grasping, and the other a flat piece of steel in the shape of a paddle.
“Dad, you’ve got guests,” Little Flerring shouted. “Dad!” She gave SouSmith and Adamat an apologetic look. “He’s very hard of hearing.”
“Eh?” The big man turned toward them. At the sight of strangers he got to his feet, and Adamat almost took a step back. Flerring the Elder – Flerring the Fist – was immense. He towered over Adamat and made even SouSmith look regular-sized. The left side of his face was burned and scarred, making it look lopsided when he smiled. “Is that SouSmith?” he asked loudly.
“Fist,” SouSmith said, nodding.
“Fist?” Flerring shook his handless arms at SouSmith. “Not so much anymore.” He gave a long, almost mechanical chortle.
The two big men made their greetings and Adamat introduced himself. Flerring the Elder led the whole group around the corner to part of the barn where the stalls had been removed and a comfortable sitting area installed, including several sofas, armchairs, and the entrance to an ice cellar, into which Little Flerring disappeared, only to emerge a moment later with a bottle. She poured them all chilled wine while her father talked.
“Blasting oil,” the big man said, shaking his head. “It was our first big discovery. We’ve done well over the years, creating specialized powder for the Adran army and the Brudania-Gurla Trading Company, but blasting oil was going to make us stupid rich.”
Adamat sat up at the mention of Claremonte’s company. “You do business with the Trading Company?”
“Everyone does,” Flerring said. “And you’re naïve to think they don’t. The company is our biggest source of saltpeter. We have other sources, of course, but they control just about all the import business. Where was I? Oh, yes. Blasting oil.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“Eh?”
Adamat repeated his question loudly.
“It’s a liquid mix of…” – Flerring paused – “Well, I’m not gonna give out trade secrets.”
“I understand,” Adamat said sympathetically. “What can you tell me without giving up too much? Does it explode similarly to gunpowder?”
“It’s a high-velocity explosive. Far more destructive than gunpowder. It doesn’t take much, either. A glass ball or tube of the stuff no bigger than my stub here” – Flerring wagged one arm – “is enough to crack stone. We planned on revolutionizing the mining industry with it. Just didn’t work out in the end.”
It didn’t take an inspector to see an awfully significant gap between “going to make us rich” and “didn’t work out.” “What happened?” Adamat asked.
“We had a chemist named Borin on our payroll,” Flerring said. “Nice lad, very smart. I’d thought about trying to marry him to Little here.”
Little Flerring made a face as she handed her father a wineglass. “That wouldn’t have happened, Dad, and you know it.”
“Thought about it, is all I said, hon.” He hooked the wineglass deftly and took a sip. “Anyway, Borin came up with the blasting-oil recipe about two years ago. Spent every waking moment since working to stabilize it. It was too volatile, you see. Killed two of our mixers in an accident early on. It explodes by shock rather than by flame, which makes it damn near impossible to transport.”
Shock. Now that was an interesting tidbit. Adamat thought about his theory that the explosives had been thrown into Ricard’s headquarters. “So you haven’t sold any?”
“Of course not! You think I’m in the business of blowing up my customers? I’ve learned my lesson with explosives.” Flerring gestured to his scarred face with the metal paddle fixed to his left hand. “That’s why we fired Borin, actually. He wanted to see the blasting oil put to practical use, so he sold a couple samples to a mining company.”
“So he did sell it!”
“Yeah. Little found out, and we agreed we couldn’t trust him anymore. We drew up a contract that let us keep a percentage of the profits if he wound up selling the formula to another company and we parted on good terms. That was only about two weeks ago.”
Adamat was on the edge of his seat now. He had something solid. Someplace to take this investigation. If Borin still had his formula and had sold it to Ricard’s attempted murderers, he could track them down. “Can you point me to him? I need to speak with Borin.”
Flerring exchanged a glance with his daughter. “He’s over there,” he said, waving his hook vaguely to his right. “And over there. And there.”
Little Flerring chuckled in an exasperated manner. “That’s unkind, Dad.”
“Look, I tell all my mixers and chemists that if they blow themselves up, it’s their own damn fault.”
“Don’t make sport out of the dead, Dad.”
Adamat felt his heart fall. “Borin’s dead?”
“Very. About as dead as a man can be this side of angering a Privileged. Best as we can guess, he was packing up his samples of blasting oil and dropped one at his foot. You might have seen that grease spot over by the river on your way in?”
“Yes.”
“That used to be a very sturdy stone building. It’s where our chemists worked. That building was built to survive any size explosion. It could have lasted through an artillery bombardment. Took out Borin and all of our ongoing experiments. There weren’t even pieces of Borin left after that, and we’re still finding bits of stone everywhere we walk.”
Adamat leaned back in his seat and let out a sigh. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Flerring shrugged. “It set us back, but our people keep good notes. It destroyed every bit of the blasting oil we had left, which I think is a damned blessing.”
“Dad…”
“Don’t you ‘Dad’ me.” Flerring shook his head at his daughter and turned to Adamat. “I’ve put a stop to all research on the blasting oil. Burned all but one copy of the notes, and only I know where the last copy is. Infernal stuff isn’t going to get us all killed while I’m still alive. Once I’m dead, my girl here is welcome to blow herself up as quick as she wants. But not before that.”
A dead end. Dead as Borin. There was no way to know if Flerring was telling the truth about any of this without the chemist to corroborate. Maybe Flerring killed Borin to cover his tracks. Adamat could bring in a dozen officers and tear the place apart, but that was the last thing he had time for. And SouSmith might not forgive him.