And suddenly the world came back. It went from near silence, with not even the sounds of wind or trees rustling, to a loud, explosive chaos. I bellowed the release word on my own spells and sent them towards the sphere, and then followed with another as fast as I was able.
“Every ounce!” I screamed into the magical tempest. “Hold nothing back!”
“Wha--?” someone near me shouted, as – to him – a ring of Tree Folk suddenly appeared, hands outstretched, wands ready, their web in place. They started singing, a beautiful, soulful song the words of which I couldn’t make out. I fired another spell instead, the last of my prepared offensive charms. Then I shouted encouragement to the others and watched that section of space that was our getaway.
Trying to keep my eyes on three things at once was difficult, but I managed to spot the . . . call it a dull area in space, exactly where the Aronin has sketched it. The reality around the edges thinned out until they melted into a grayness – and then formed a lovely picture of a forest glen where none had a right to be.
In the meantime, the sphere was shaking and vibrating as the Tree Folk adepts spun web after web around it. Every now and then it would throw one of them off, but they soon came back and added more bonds of power. And it kept him from laying waste to us all, which was all right with me.
My people were throwing an impressive amount of magical energy at the sphere, but it was hard with so many Tree Folk in the way. One by one they fell back, and as they did so I motioned them through the portal. Penny even grabbed Traveler’s reins and took him through.
I stayed to witness the battle as long as I was able. The Aronin’s brilliant strike should be witnessed by someone, after all. The last thing I saw before I stepped through the shrinking disk was his face, focused in concentration and determination, with just a hint of laughter and desperation thrown in.
Chapter Sixteen
Escape From Boval
The only thing you could charitably say about the little village of Duprin was that it didn’t have much of a goblin population.
The Aronin did the best he could, I’m sure, under very difficult circumstances. We were well outside of the Dead God’s malevolent influence, of course, but we were also in one of the most backwoods fiefdoms in all of Alshar. Still, the local folk – all three hundred of them – and the local lord, who was a country knight, welcomed the coin we brought. We needed all sorts of supplies if we were to make the long journey towards civilization, and we probably flooded Duprin with more hard currency than they’d ever seen.
Folk were a little disconcerted, at first, by twenty-odd warmagi appearing out of nowhere. The local priestess of Trygg was called in to verify that we were not, in fact, demons of some kind, and after getting a clean bill of metaphysical health from the old biddy, we started spending like sailors. Food, horses, saddles, tack, and wains – we needed just about everything. We were almost nine-hundred leagues away from the rest of the survivors at Inarion.
We also wanted some rest. The last few days had been heady, busy, and exhausting. Doing magic at that level, even augmented by the stones, takes a lot out of you, and without a good rest we would have fallen out of our saddles. Oh, we could have re-energized ourselves magically, but that way lies madness: the likelihood that we would soon grow dependent upon the stones was too great. A couple of days taking it easy were just what we needed.
Late in the second day Penny and I met up for a late breakfast or early lunch at the tiny, nameless inn at the heart of the village. The fare was simple and rustic, a thick venison stew with tubers and grain, some passable bread and some cheese we passed up in favor of some of the last Bovali cheese that would ever be produced. But the beer was excellent, and I had several mugs. Penny ate as daintily as she would have at court, whereas I mostly just shoveled it in as fast as I could chew.
We were comparing notes about our big spell, our typical post-coital post-mortem, when she put her hand on mine, stopping me in midthought.
“Min,” she asked. “What do we do now?”
“Huh? Well, I’m thinking about a pie. I smelled blueberry pie. I love pie,” I avowed. “It’s in the blood.”
“No, you idiot! Not lunch! I mean, what do we do, now?”
“Well, after we get our supplies together and enough horses that won’t fall over dead under a saddle, we’ll take the East Road to Veronal where we hire a barge, then go south along—”
“You’re completely hopeless, you know that? I mean what do we do now, about the Dead God?”
“Oh. Him. Run. Hide. Fight. What else can we do?”
“We have to raise the Duchies,” she declared quietly.
“We’ve turned some valuable military intelligence over to the proper authorities. What they do with it isn’t our concern. I’m sure they’ll think of something. Besides, we’re magi, remember? We’re prohibited by the Bans for interfering with politics.”
She shook her head and stared off into the forest. “No, all of those old rules, they’ll be thrown out over this.”
I made a face. “You can’t throw out the Bans! They’re the only magical regulation we’ve had for four hundred years!”
“Nonetheless, they are outmoded and archaic,” she quietly insisted. “They will be overturned. Between the irionite and the Dead God, the Bans aren’t going to work any more. More, we’ll have to use our influence to push the Coronet Council to take a comprehensive approach to this.”
I shrugged. “Duke Lenguin of Alshar is mobilizing his troops aqt the summer capital at Vorone. I assume the Ducal Court Mage has been informed. There will be a meeting. What more could they do?”
She rolled her eyes. “You can be so dumb, some times.”
“Yeah, barbarian peasant, remember? Dumb, ignorant and fiercely proud of it?”
“That’s part of the problem,” she said, her mouth full of apple. “You’re looking at this from a peasant’s point of view. Oh, you can see it from a professional’s standpoint, too, I suppose, but your reaction is pure peasant.”
“I like peasants,” I defended. “They’re cute. And uncomplicated.”
“Don’t we all. But a peasant looks at the world as if he has little choice, and little chance, to change anything outside of the village level. If a crisis occurs, his first inclination is to find a lord to help or blame. Looking towards the nobility for guidance and leadership.”
“Aren’t the nobility supposed to be our guides and leaders?”
“Yes. But they are such mostly because they take the initiative to lead. When an intelligent peasant takes that kind of initiative, they either kill him or raise him to the nobility. The point is peasants look to nobles for leadership, policy, and guidance. Where do you think the nobility turns?”
“The gods?” I supplied. Hells, I didn’t know.
“Thank the gods they don’t!” Penny said, rolling her eyes. “Theocracies are hell. A sign of a diseased culture. For who speaks for the gods but the temples? And the temples have their own agendas that have little to do with the gods. No, the nobles look to each other – to themselves. They agitate and conspire and plot and plan. They may have good intentions or ill, be competent or incompetent, but they have put forth an effort to use their power and resources to advance the causes they choose to serve.”
“I thought they just spent rent money and ran the courts.”
“And the military, and the bureaucracy, and a hundred other things, if they choose. Or they can sit in a castle and play checkers and wait to be bred. But if they excel, it is because they put forth the effort and forged ahead to do what needed to be done.”
“And the dirt-farmer tenant who cuts yet another acre of farmland out of the swamp, he doesn’t?”
“It’s not a matter of effort, Min. It’s a matter of resources. The nobles can make themselves rich, true, but what does that wealth represent?”
“Jeweled daggers and crystal chamber pots?”
“Those are symptoms. That wealth is power. Oh, they have
the power of their position, of course, the special considerations. But the difference between Sir Turdfoot of WhereEverTheHellsWeAre and ambitious Count Sparky, High Counselor of the Exchequer is that Sparky was able to use his estates and money to gain power, while Turdfoot scrapes by not much better off than his peasants.”
“So wealth is power. You aren’t telling me anything I don’t know. If you have the wealth, you make the laws.”
“No,” she said patiently, “if you have the power, you can make the laws. That is, you can make policy, codified into law. Money is one form of power, but there are others. And power isn’t static, it’s fluid. It changes form based on the situation. If things got dire in the Castle, under siege, which would have been more powerful: the noble with a sack of gold, or the peasant with a side of beef.”
“If the peasant could hang on to the beef,” I grumbled.
“Exactly. Military power is another kind of power, a very blatant kind. But it isn’t absolute. The realm suffers when it’s run by pure military power. What other kinds of power are there?” she asked, the patronizing tones rising in her voice.
“Uh, the power of . . . well, you mentioned the temples.”
“Yes, that’s right, the temples can wield great power, for they can motivate the masses to ignore self-preservation in the name of a holy cause. They have moral power, as well, ideally. But most are run by petty people with odd ideas about a civil society.”
“So . . . you said money, so I guess trade is out.”
“Nope,” she said, shaking her head. “Trade is different. Trade is money on the move. A noble can sit on his fat ass in a castle and collect rents, and accumulate power that way. But he can’t exercise that power until he spends the money. On crystal chamber pots, sometimes, but mostly on the upkeep of defenses, the maintenance of his men, buying arms, armor, horses, a thousand other things that have to go from one end of the world to the other. This wonderful, lamented cheese, for instance. In Remere it costs almost a hundred times what it cost in Boval. Who do you think took the difference?”
“The cheese merchant. And the carter.”
“Actually, about two dozen people had their hand in the transaction, I’d guess. Including all the nobles who taxed it along the way, and the people who maintain the roads.”
“So what? Cheese is power, too?”
“Trade is power. The cheese stops rolling . . . all those people loose their cut. If they lose their cut, they complain.”
“So complaining is power.”
“Yes, actually, it is. When you complain that your trade isn’t working, you motivate your nobility to do something about it. Or else the mercantile interests will arrange for there to be a noble in place who will.”
“So cheese power trumps military power?”
“You are rutting impossible, you know that? Trade is great power. All those people along that route are going to exercise their power to complain – or, in extremes, withhold taxes – until they put enough pressure to get something done. The more efficient the trade, the more money is made, the more power it exercises.”
“What about magic? You Imperial types saw it as all the rage, once.”
“Magical power is real power, too,” she admitted. “But not the way you think it is. The Magocracy ruled as an imperial power because the magical and the military made a potent combination, and allowed the mercantile interests to go pretty much where they wanted to and make a lot of money. Magic gave them an edge, of course, but it was in technological sophistication that led to a higher standard of living and afforded them such power.”
“Until we came along,” I said, proudly.
“No, actually. We were doomed before then. Magic was a potent force only if it was used, and when that idiot confiscated all of the irionite and dumped it on Lost Perwyn, he shackled the very thing that gave him power.”
“But he kept plenty of irionite for himself,” I countered.
“But the Magocracy was not designed to run on any one house’s talent – or one man’s. Magical power can only be used as a tool of real power when the situation is such that mere military or commercial means of influence are ineffective. That war in Farise you can’t shut up about, for example.”
“Wasn’t that the last remnant of the Magocracy?” I asked, teasingly.
“Shut up. Orril Pratt was the last great Imperial mage outside of the Bans. But his temporal power was entirely situational. He was the power behind the Doge, who was a merchant prince. Pratt was only able to exercise power because he had irionite and could harm the mercantile competition – the Duchies. Similarly, the Archmage only held temporal power because he could use his magic against the heathen barbarians and keep them on the steppes where they belong.”
“Yeah, how’s that coming?” I asked, innocently.
“Shut up. Magical power is situational. The problem was that the Magocracy was designed to run on several Houses competing good-naturedly for the privilege of power by virtue of what service they could perform to extend and secure trade routes.
“When the competition got too rowdy and a magewar broke out, the Archmage was supposed to intervene and use his power to compel the combatants to work for the benefit of the Magocracy. He wasn’t supposed to have all the power.
“When the Imperial house claimed a monopoly on the last few shreds of irionite, the great magical houses were all hopelessly subordinate, and so they didn’t even try to help the defense of the Magocracy the way they should have. Without the power to protect trade, or the will to use it, magical power became a weak footnote in the collapse of the Magocracy, instead of its savior.”
“Conquest of the Magocracy, you mean.”
“Shut up. The point is, you take away the barbarians on the steppes and the pirates that threaten shipping, and the Magocracy ceases to have power based on magic. Unless you count the magic of bureaucracy.”
“A dark and evil force if there ever was one,” I added helpfully.
“And that is my point. The game has shifted, and suddenly some idiot peasant spellmonger has been given a tremendous amount of power. And because the Dead God has entered the picture, your magical power suddenly means something: the ability to protect trade routes and suppliers.”
“I thought we were saving the world from ancient evil goblins?” I asked, confused.
“We are,” she agreed. “For the mercantile interests.”
“Oh. Is that good? And how do I have all this power again?”
“Okay, I’ll try to use small words. Look at it this way: with the troops the Dead God has on hand right at the moment he can easily assault Alshar. By this time next year he’ll control at least half of the Duchy, probably more. And even with every sword in the realm riding at his bidding, the Duke will still lose in nearly every battle – every battle where there isn’t an augmented warmage or six. You have the irionite. That’s power.”
“ ‘Pol-i-tics,’” I sang, reminding her of the Bans against such things.
“You want to know about politics? Here’s a lesson: when Sir Cei and the rest of the survivors are able to finally present their case to the Duke and his council, there will be days and days of discussion in court about how reliable the accounts of such traumatized backwoods nobility and rustic peasants are.
“Obviously, it will be said, they are over-stating the matter, embellishing on the truth in order to advance their own goals. Never mind that all those people just lost their homes and appeared at Inarion out of thin air – that won’t matter. What will matter is that the Ducal bureaucracy, which creaks along like frozen honey in the best of circumstances, will dig in its heels and do everything it can to ignore the truth in favor of the status quo.”
“Penny, they aren’t that stupid,” I said, shaking my head.
“Wanna bet? Min, the only difference between the Ducal Council – or the Coronet Council, for that matter – and a shoemakers’ guild is that the shoemakers will probably have a better organization and less political considera
tion on their side. Other than that, you have the same issues you have in any organization: everyone trying to protect their piece of the pie at the expense of everyone else.”
“So it all comes back to pie . . .” I said, sagely.
“Pay attention!” she demanded. “The Ducal Council will hem and haw while the local and regional lords in the West get slaughtered, as they try to take on the goblins piecemeal. By the time the hordes are at the Riminine they will slooooowly start realizing that they are in trouble, mostly because their tax revenues are down over last year. Then they will start to creak into action, but not very efficiently. They will argue and debate and compromise for political expediency, when by all rights they should appoint a war leader and get to business. Else there will be Four Duchies next year.”
“That seems overly pessimistic,” I noted.
“It’s overly realistic, actually,” she sighed. “This is simple. If you had any familiarity with Remeran politics . . .”
“Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say you are correct, and the Duke’s people won’t be able to get their heads out of their asses. What the hells can we do?”
“We can take our case to them. Convince them. First the Duke of Alshar, then the entire Coronet Council. Or better yet, the Duke of Castal, Rard.”
“Because I’m so damn cute and persuasive . . .”
“No, because you are in charge of the most powerful magical strike team ever assembled. That gives you a certain degree of leverage. You have the only stone that can break the Dead God’s influence. That gives you more. How many stones do you have left, unclaimed?”
“Um, about nine,” I admitted.
“That gives you significantly more leverage. Each one is worth about a barony. You’ll give those stones to magi who can make a difference, won’t you,” she said – a statement, not a question. I answered anyway.
“Well, yeah, I suppose. I’m sure the Duke can find—”
“Screw the Duke!” she said, bitterly. “You don’t understand how power works – political power. The Duke sets policy. He approves laws. He sets style. He hires other people to enforce his decisions. He keeps the realm safe. That is the sum total of his power. To set policy he listens to advisors. He must have laws proposed if he is to approve them. He needs direction before he can appoint the proper people to execute them. That includes the Censor General and all the other Ducal posts.
The Spellmonger Series: Book 01 - Spellmonger Page 40