The closer they got to Scarlet Castle, the more uneasy Colonel Fraser felt.
His feelings were a tangle of anticipation, apprehension, and unease. There were several reasons for this. Aside from the surprise he had prepared for his junior, Mirian, and his hope of seeing her delighted expression, the colonel had also witnessed more unsettling sights on the way to the heart of Transia.
First, he had seen large numbers of gnoll and kobold laborers building roads across the Transian wilderness under the direction of local foremen and overseers.
The scene was truly grand.
Although there was no steam-powered equipment to help, the colonel had still been able to see the convict-clad gnoll laborers piling different materials onto an excavated roadbed according to a complicated process. Nearby, human workers used shovels to mix something he had never seen before.
At the foremen's direction, they used wooden frames to pour gray "slurry" onto the compacted roadbed. Within just a few dozen minutes, the road had taken on a peculiar charcoal-gray color.
The colonel had even sent someone to ask about it. The answer was that it was a "secret art" of the Stonemasons' Brotherhood, supposedly the brainchild of one of their alchemists. Roads built with this substance, called "cement," stayed remarkably firm and smooth.
Aside from requiring regular maintenance and the addition of "alchemical substances" during its manufacture, the stuff had almost no drawbacks.
For some time now, they had been using this quick and convenient method to build small roads between farms according to a set of plans. The road they were building now was the "North Road," which ran from Scarlet Castle to Westcoast.
According to the animated foremen, who were gathered around their boxed lunches, Master Chen of the Stonemasons' Brotherhood had already designed a major thoroughfare running