Slag-Tenders

Overview

Slag-Tenders are automata of the elder Ash-Furnace Civilization, left in a few of the dead furnace zones of the Glassbelt when the furnace world burned itself out (see The Fall of the Ash-Furnace Civilization, c. 225,000-c. 168,000 BR). They still do the one work they were made for: they rake the slag, clear the flues, and feed furnaces that went cold long before any living people's memory. Salvagers meet them as a hazard of the richest ground, and give them a wide berth.

Appearance

A Slag-Tender is a squat, long-armed frame about the height of a man and twice as broad, built of dark fused metal and glassy stone, blackened and scaled with old slag. Its arms end in rakes, tongs, and a long iron hook, and a grated chest glows a dull red when it works, though nothing in it is seen to burn. It has no face: a band of glassed slits runs round its head. It moves slowly, rocking from foot to foot, with a scrape of metal on stone and a sound like a bellows breathing, and the air around it smells of hot iron and ash.

Habitat and Range

They stand in the furnace scars where the glassed ground still holds heat, each at its own furnace or slag terrace, and none is known outside the Glassbelt. How many remain no one knows; salvage circuits know of a handful of sites and keep the knowledge among themselves.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Slag-Tender works without rest and without purpose that anyone can see: it rakes cold slag into rows, lifts and sets down stones at a furnace mouth, and walks the same round of its terrace day and night. It ignores travellers who pass by. Anyone who takes slag, ash, or metal from its ground, or breaks its rows, it drives off with rake and hook, and it follows them to the edge of the scar and no farther. It does not speak and has never been known to answer.

Abilities

Its frame does not tire, and its hide shrugs off blows that would break a cart. It works bare-handed in heat that blisters a living hand at a touch, and its grated chest gives out a heat of its own when it is roused.

Uses and Dangers

The ground a Slag-Tender keeps is often the richest in old metal and fused glass, which is why salvagers go there at all, and some crews time their work to the far end of its round. The danger is the frame itself and the ground it guards: a salvager driven off a terrace may run onto glassed ground that burns, and those who carry slag out against the warnings risk Furnace-Ash Sickness.

Lore and Belief

Salvagers say the Slag-Tenders are waiting for Ozhar the Pyre-King to come back and light the furnaces, and that his name spoken near one will wake its fire; nobody tries. Some Wrought salvagers ask whether a Slag-Tender, like the old workframes, could ever cross into selfhood, and leave small offerings of clean metal at a terrace's edge in case it might. As far as anything is known, no Slag-Tender has.

Salvage crews tell of the terrace where a Slag-Tender caught a crew digging for furnace-gold and walled them into a glassed vault with molten slag; the gold, they say, is still in there with them.

Where It Appears

• The Glassbelt Interior