The ironworks of Belovar had never been quiet, but emergency production had changed the sound of them. Labor normally had rhythm: a beginning, a middle, and an end. This was different. The furnaces were being fed through rest bells. Hammer crews stretched into third shift, then folded back toward first before their bodies understood where night belonged. 

The Empire’s new quotas had arrived with stamped seals, fresh tablets, and two Kharkun superintendents who spoke of efficiency with the clean confidence of men whose beards never caught coal dust.

On an infirmary cot behind the linen screen, Nadya Vek closed her eyes and felt the forge continue through the stone beneath her ribs. 

Hammer. Draw. Hammer. Turn. Hammer. Breathe.

She had not slept properly in seventeen days. She knew the number because she had marked each shift in the injury ledger, and after the ninth day she had stopped trusting memory alone.

Nadya’s braids were pinned tight beneath a linen wrap, the practical style of any forge medic expecting blood, flame, and grasping hands before shift end. Her apron was stiff with ash, salt, and the brown ghosts of workers who had bled more than they admitted. By the start of third shift, her shoulders ached from hauling water and her eyes stung each time the furnace doors opened.

Now, a boy from press-line two sat on her bench with his left hand in his lap, trying not to look at the split across his palm.

“Open,” Nadya said.

He opened his fingers too quickly and winced. Nadya gave him a look.

“It’s nothing,” he said, hissing through his teeth.

“Then give it to me and I’ll throw it away.”

He gave one short, breathless laugh. Even that small sound meant he still had room for fear to move, and fear was easier to treat than pride. Outside the infirmary arch, the hammer hall lifted into song. The approved version began with the cadence bell.

One iron for the mountain.

One breath for the flame.

One hand for the Empire.

One song for the same.

The song was older than the border. Kharkun crews knew it in mountain halls, Zakharun crews in river forges, rail works, and towns like Belovar. Every dwarven child raised near iron knew some piece of it, though no two towns kept the same words for long.

Belovar had its version. The Empire had made one of its own. Nadya’s grandmother had sung a gentler version while scrubbing slag dust from her father’s collars.

The Imperial version was the only one approved now, printed in worker primers, painted above tool racks, and taught to apprentices before they were trusted with tongs. Though it came from Anvagorod, it did not sound foreign. It sounded almost right, and that was the trouble.

The boy on the bench mouthed the first line with the hall. His eyes fixed on the archway.

“Closed straight or pretty?” Nadya asked.

He blinked at her. “What?”

“Straight is useful. Pretty is for men who plan on waving at balconies.”

That earned another laugh, smaller than the first. She set the first stitch while he was distracted, then set the second before he remembered to be brave.

Outside, the song moved with the hammers. The cadence lead stood where the floor marks crossed between the four main crews, one hand lifted, palm closing and opening with each strike. Old Tovahk, his voice like gravel in a bucket, had done that work longer than Nadya had been alive.

When the crews dragged, Tovahk slowed them to catch their breath. When younger workers rushed the fall, he put his heel down and pulled the room back around him. He knew when a turn should be held half a beat, and when pride needed to be interrupted before bone was broken. Fewer crushed fingers came from Tovahk’s shifts than anyone else’s.

The boy flinched at the fourth stitch.

“You’re listening out there. Don’t follow the hammer,” Nadya said. “Follow me.”

He swallowed, then nodded.

The hall turned the verse again. Tovahk’s hand opened. The crews answered. Heat rolled through the archway in a visible shimmer, carrying metal stink, coal smoke, wet wool, and the sour edge of bodies past rest.

One iron for the mountain.

One breath for the flame.

One hand for the old road.

Nadya’s fingers stopped. Outside, the hall swallowed the line. Hammers landed. Chains dragged. Someone shouted for tongs. 

The boy looked down at the needle in his skin.

“What?”

“It’s nothing,” she lied.

The approved words returned before anyone could have pointed to where the wrong ones had been.

One song for the same.

Nadya finished the stitch.

She was tired. That was all. Seventeen days made echoes misbehave. Words bent under hammerfall. The old and new versions had always lain close together, and exhaustion had a way of laying one memory atop another until neither fit cleanly.

“Light duty for two days,” she said.

He gave her a look so plain she almost apologized.

“One day,” she corrected. “If you can keep the wrap dry.”

His mouth twitched. “That sounds like a medical order.”

“It is. I’m medical.”

He slid off the bench, cradling his hand. At the archway he paused, not quite looking back. The boy’s shoulders rose once, then fell, and he went back into the heat before Nadya could decide whether she had protected him or failed him.

By the next bell, four more workers had come through the infirmary: burns, split knuckles, a cough that would not clear, and one fall recorded as heat exposure because the woman from the quench line did not want collapse written beside her name.

The song continued between injuries. Most of it stayed approved. Most things did, if a person only read the forms. But under the hammerfall, old seams showed.

One breath for the homefire.

One hand for the old road.

One song for the names.

The changed words passed through the crews like sparks that died before they hit the floor. They were not secret. Not really. They were the words a tired mouth found when the printed ones came too late.

Nadya told herself she was hearing sleep.

Then Tovahk missed the turn. By any measure, it was not a dramatic failure. He simply held the third beat too long, the old pause opening where the approved cadence had cut it short. The west crew followed him because bodies follow what they know, and for three lines the hall breathed differently.

Not faster. Not slower.

Deeper.

The workers settled into it with an ease that made Nadya’s chest hurt. Shoulders dropped. Hands matched. The hammerline lost its imperial crispness and gained something older than obedience.

Then the superintendent’s bell struck twice from the gallery.

The sound broke the room.

Tovahk’s hand closed.

The approved cadence returned.

No one looked up.

Nadya cleaned the bench, counted linen, and stood over the injury ledger until the letters blurred. No cause she wrote stayed long enough to dry.

The forge quieted by degrees. Chains stilled as furnace doors clanged shut. Somewhere in the offices above the north gallery, boots crossed the planks with the measured pace of men whose work followed them only on paper.

Nadya listened for Tovahk’s gravel voice in the thinning noise.

She heard only the drip from the rinse basin.

His cup still sat on the shelf above the kettle.

The next shift began with a different cadence lead.

His name was Ilyr. He was young, square-shouldered, and newly shaved in the imperial style. Nadya knew him, distantly. His mother had worked quench before her lungs failed. He had quick hands and a good ear.

He sang the approved version too perfectly. The crews followed him, of course. The bell had rung, the furnaces were open, and iron did not wait. But the room no longer leaned around the work. It marched through it.

By second bell, Nadya had treated two timing injuries.

By fourth bell, a woman from the east hammer took a bad strike through her shoulder and sat white-faced on the infirmary bench while Nadya tested the joint.

“Grip,” Nadya said.

The woman gripped weakly.

“Pain?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

The woman laughed once through her nose, then closed her eyes. Nadya thought about asking about Tovahk, but decided against it. Not knowing was sometimes ignorance. Sometimes it was mercy.

Nadya wrapped the shoulder and sent her to rest behind the screen.

Before evening bell, a notice appeared beside the water station, fresh paste shining beneath an imperial seal stamped black over red.

NOTICE TO ALL CREWS

For coordination and the prevention of industrial injury, all cadence songs are to be rendered in their approved Imperial form during active production.

Local substitutions, archaic phrasing, unsanctioned pauses, and nonstandard response lines are prohibited.

Crew leads are responsible for maintaining uniform tempo and approved wording. Failure to do so will be treated as a safety violation.

No one gathered around it. That would have been foolish. They passed it one by one, reading without stopping. Nadya stood with a bundle of clean wraps under one arm and read it twice.

Safety violation.

She almost laughed, but there wasn’t enough room in her body for that much anger.

By the time the next worker came in with a torn nail and shaking hands, Nadya had been awake long enough that the letters from the notice still floated behind her eyes.

The torn nail belonged to Ilyr. He sat stiffly, jaw clenched, blood dripping from the tip of his finger into his palm. His voice was hoarse from leading.

“Caught it on the rack,” he said.

“No, you didn’t,” Nadya said as she took his hand and turned it toward the lamp. “You bit it loose.”

Ilyr’s gaze snapped to hers. His face changed, but only for a moment.

Nadya cleaned the blood away.

“You’re pushing them too fast,” she said.

“I’m keeping the approved tempo. They told me the old pauses caused drift.”

“The old pauses let people breathe.”

Nadya wrapped his finger more sharply than she needed to, just enough to remind him the hand was still attached to him.

“They say drift causes injury, but bodies are not machines,” she said.

Ilyr looked toward the archway. The hall waited for him. Without a cadence lead, the crews would return to memory, and now memory had rules wrapped around it.

“I know,” he said, almost too softly to survive the furnace noise.

Nadya tied the wrap and let him stand. For one breath she thought he might say something else. Ask where Tovahk was. Confess to knowing where Tovahk was. Instead he went back through the archway and lifted his bandaged hand where all four crews could see it.

The song began again.

One iron for the mountain.

One breath for the flame.

One hand for the Empire.

One song for the same.

The tempo held for two lines.

Then, before the west crew’s turn, Ilyr gave them half a breath. It wasn’t enough to name, but the workers breathed where the old cadence had taught them breath belonged. The hammers fell true after that.

Nadya wished they had not.

Ilyr kept his bandaged hand raised. His face did not change. The approved words went on in his cracked voice, and beneath them the forbidden pause passed through the crews like a held wound.

At shift end, Nadya opened the ledger.

There were boxes for injury type, worker name, crew, treatment, severity, return status, and contributing cause. The Empire loved a cause. A cause could be corrected, assigned, punished, sealed, transferred, and archived. A cause made suffering into a tidy thing with a handle.

Nadya reached the contributing cause column and held the pen above the page. Worker inattention would be accepted. Fatigue would be ignored. Anything else would be dangerous. Nadya listened to the last of the crews leaving the hall. Their steps dragged. Their voices stayed low. The notice’s corners had dried flat against the stone.

Nadya wrote:

Unsafe production tempo following cadence alteration. Missed rest intervals. Sustained heat exposure.

She sanded the ink before she could reconsider.

The words looked clean on the page. Almost medicinal. Something an office could carry away without ever touching the hand, the shoulder, the missing man, or the breath that had been taken from the room.

Only then did Nadya lie down on the cot behind the linen screen. Her hands smelled of smoke and soap. Her head rang with hammerfall. Sleep waited somewhere nearby, narrow and suspicious.

Beyond the infirmary wall, the approved song began again. This time, Nadya did not hear the old words. She heard where they should have been.