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“We’ve got another fifty in from Louisiana,” Rog says, and Gothmog tucks a fresh wad in his lip, nodding.
“Valuables?” The hammers are finished falling for the day, but he could still hear them ringing, like an echo. Something caught in his ear.
“None, sir. They came last night, barely clothes on their backs. These were from a plantation as owed Master Bauglir.”
Bauglir’s family home was in Virginia. Not the proper south, but he had ventured and learned there. Met Gothmog there. It’s all of apiece. All information Gothmog keeps like a deck of cards.
He shrugs in answer to Rog’s proffered deuce. “There’s shanties to hold them, out by the railroad. Underground is crowded like an egg is full of meat, and the quarters is full.”
Rog leaves him. Gothmog considers spitting out the chew, however fresh, and lighting a pipe, but it’s a warm night.
They’ve been constructing steadily for a month. This isn’t a damned foolish mountain blast like Bauglir played out in February—a venture that left him with hollow rock and soil cellars, topped off by a hastily patched-up series of halls and chambers framed in steel, wood, and imported marble, of all things.
Unless Gothmog is a fool—and he isn’t—the whole kit will crumble in a year. Bauglir hasn’t an eye nor an ear for land.
If his palace falls, Bauglir may need the fortress at the foot of the mountain. Eye or ear or not, Gothmog will see that done.
Three long, low buildings to serve as slave quarters, for the thralls he keeps close. A high, heavy wall. A guard-house, a proper one, not one of those caved-out holes with water dripping from every ceiling.
The wall is half-finished; the barracks are yet unroofed. Two weeks more will be enough; for now, workers, free and slave, keep to hastily thrown-up shelters. The sun beats hot, the whip cracks often.
But fifty more—Gothmog taps the blade of his bowie against his knee. He’d been whittling as well as chewing, afore Rog came in. Time to think. Now, he has even more to mull on. Even as he sends them to build Bauglir's railroad, he wonders if Bauglir has pondered how much of the compound is Gothmog's preference and design.
Irrespective of that, Bauglir must have something planned. Something the East hasn’t sent money for. Maybe he wants to storm Mithrim by force, and needs men more willing to die than the Regiment. They’d gotten right skittish, what with Feanorian and his sons abroad. Even death and the redhead taken hasn’t done much to conquer that little slip of land, the narrow bridge.
Gothmog doesn’t much care, save for how it will line his pockets. To the railroad they go.
He straightens up, tucks his knife away. Stalks to the edge of his shanty-turned-cabin, looks at where the sun is climbing the sky.
From the south, a rider.