The goblin ward-crafters arrived the next morning. Seven of them, led by Vorzak, who wore heavy leather working gear and carried a tool belt that clinked with instruments Rowan had never seen. Two of the others hauled a portable forge on a wheeled cart, its iron body still warm. Nicholas and Perenelle met them at the door.
Vorzak greeted the Flamels in Gobbledegook before switching to English. His manner with them was looser than the Council chamber had been. He didn't bother with ceremony.
"Your foundation," he said to Rowan. "I need to see every wall that touches the ground."
He spent twenty minutes in the workshop and the shop front, running his hands along the walls, pressing his ear to the stone in three places. The other six ward-crafters set up the forge in the back yard without speaking. They looked at Rowan the way they'd look at a stain on a forge. Professional contempt kept barely in check by the obligation of the contract.
When Vorzak finished his inspection, he spoke to his team in rapid Gobbledegook and they moved without further instruction, each to an assigned task. Then he turned to Rowan.
"You study runes." He'd seen the workshop.
"I studied under the Flamels. Mostly their approach to runic geometry."
Vorzak grunted. "Then you'll want to watch. I'll permit it. But what you see today, you will not be able to reproduce. Goblin wards are forged. The magic goes into the metal during the making, and it can't be separated out again any more than you could pull the heat back out of a sword after it's been quenched." He held Rowan's gaze. "Goblin craft has survived three thousand years for a reason."
Rowan nodded. He understood the principle. He'd built the same kind of failsafes into the luminaire arrays.
Goblin magic came through their hands and through the metal itself. Vorzak began with the wardstone. He'd imagined carved granite, something resembling the rune-bearing stones in Nicholas's workshop, but Vorzak went straight to the portable forge. He took a block of raw iron from the cart and heated it until it glowed white, then began shaping it with a hammer and tongs. The hammer blows had a rhythm to them, and with each strike Rowan felt something pulse in the air beyond the physical impact. Vorzak was pushing magic into the metal with every blow, folding it into the iron the way a smith folds carbon into steel.
Rowan watched from the doorway. He could see the principles at work, and they shared distant ancestry with what Nicholas had taught him. But the execution was fundamentally different. Wizard runes were symbols inscribed on a surface, external instructions that told magic what to do. Goblin forging embedded the instructions in the metal's own structure. The ward was the wardstone, inseparable from it. A wizard trying to reverse-engineer goblin work would find only unmarked iron, because the knowledge lived in the forging process itself.
Vorzak noticed him staring and allowed himself a thin smile. "Now you see why your rune-breakers have never cracked a goblin ward."
"How do you remember the sequence? If nothing is written down."
"The same way your body remembers how to walk. We learn it young, and we never forget." He pulled the wardstone from the forge with his tongs, the metal still glowing a dull red. The block had been shaped into a dense, heavy disc about two feet across, its surface covered in the faint patterning of folded metal. A wizard would have seen unmarked iron. Rowan could see the layered structure in the grain, hundreds of folds, each one carrying its own embedded charge.
The wardstone took four hours to forge. When Vorzak finished, he set it on the workshop floor and placed both hands flat on the surface. The metal hummed. Rowan felt the vibration through the floor and up through the bones of his feet. Then the wardstone reached outward, and he could feel it learning the structure it was meant to protect.
"A wardstone is aware," Vorzak said without lifting his hands. "The first day it knows friend from enemy. After a month it'll recognise individual signatures." He lifted his hands and stepped back. "After a year it senses intent. Don't rush it."
Nicholas, who had been watching from the doorway, said something in Gobbledegook. Vorzak answered briefly. Polite, but he gave nothing away. Then he added something unprompted, and Nicholas nodded.
"He says the wardstone won't interfere with your existing runic arrays," Nicholas told Rowan. "Goblin wards operate on a different substrate entirely. They'll coexist. But if you ever modify your installations significantly, tell him first."
The outer wards went up next. Four goblins worked simultaneously, each taking a wall of the building. They drove thin iron pins into the mortar joints between bricks, each pin forged at the portable forge and carried to its position while the metal was still hot. The pins cooled in place, binding to the stone as they contracted, and the magic forged into each one connected to the wardstone through the building's own structure. No channels carved in the floor, no visible circuitry. The building itself became the circuit. By the time the last pin was driven, Rowan could feel the ward network humming through the walls.
By late afternoon, the ward-crafters were packing their tools. The ward network was invisible to the eye but tangible to anyone with magical sensitivity. Rowan could feel it from across the room, a steady ambient warmth that hadn't been there that morning.
Vorzak approached him as the others filed out.
"The blood attunement," he said. "Now."
He led Rowan to the workshop. The wardstone sat on the floor, its surface dark and faintly warm. Vorzak gestured.
Rowan pressed his palm to the metal.
The magic went in and the wardstone went through him. Casting a spell was an act of will, magic directed outward. The wardstone pulled inward. It read him deeper than Legilimency touched, learning his magical signature, the particular frequency of his core, how his magic moved when he breathed and when he held his breath. He felt it mapping the building around him, room by room, doorway by doorway.
Then it settled. The hum steadied. And Rowan understood, without being told, how to adjust the wards. The knowledge was tactile, like knowing how to move a limb. He tightened the sensitivity and felt the perimeter sharpen. He loosened it and felt the building relax.
"Adequate," Vorzak said. He paused at the workshop door, then turned back. "I have not had a project worth supervising in three years. This ward is my best work since the Gringotts high-security vaults." His eyes glinted. "Do not let anyone damage it."
The goblins left. The shop stood silent, warded in a way that nothing on Carkitt Market had been warded in centuries.
Rowan stood in the workshop with his hand on the wardstone and felt the building around him like an extension of his own body. The walls hummed. The doors breathed. The wards sang a low constant note that settled into the background of his awareness and stayed there.
Whatever came next would find something very different waiting.