Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2)

by E. William Brown

“This thing is awesome! Everyone else is scared shitless of it, but I think it’s perfect.”

  Since it was just a stone platform with a guard rail around the outside I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Cerise was a total an adrenaline junkie.

  “Did you come up with it just for me?” She asked slyly.

  “I’m afraid it’s just a quick and dirty version of something from back home. We call them elevators. But normally they have glass walls around the outside so you can’t fall off, and doors that close when they’re moving.”

  “That’s no fun,” she pouted. “The breeze on my face is the best part. It’s almost like flying.”

  “Imagine if it was on the outside of the building, and it went up forty or fifty floors.”

  She goggled at me. “Seriously? That sounds amazing. I wish I could see it sometime.”

  “Sure, I’ll just call up Hecate and ask if she’s giving tours,” I said dryly.

  “Hah. I could sacrifice a whole town and not have the cred for that kind of boon,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  “A town?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Just an example,” she clarified. “Things are different now, but back when there were still rebel groups worshipping the Olympians some of us did things like that. Old One-Eye’s people didn’t think twice about burning whole villages, and we were pretty nasty about fighting back. After the Aesir sacked Olympus the covens were really hot for revenge.”

  I nodded. “I can imagine. I take it the other Olympian gods are all dead?”

  “Mostly. Poseidon still rules the deep, but Hel and her brothers deposed Hades back before Loki was imprisoned. Gaea is still around, and considering how many goblins and trolls we’ve killed she must be siding with Loki. Oh, and they say Aphrodite is a thrall in Asgard.”

  I sighed. “A thrall. That’s a nice way of saying they’re keeping her as a sex slave, isn’t it?”

  Cerise shrugged. “Yeah. They caught a bunch of the hamadryads and demigoddesses too, and passed them out to the younger gods as spoils. Typical thing. Kind of ironic, though, since Aphrodite started the whole feud when she ran off to be with Loki and her husband got pissed about it.”

  “I have to say, the more I hear about the Aesir the less impressed I am. I’ll have to get the whole story from you sometime.”

  Our conversation was interrupted when we arrived at our destination, and Avilla threw herself into my arms and kissed me.

  “Thank you for the bathhouse!” She exclaimed happily. “That was wonderful! It’s so good to be clean again.”

  “You’re welcome,” I told her. “You look like you’re feeling better today.”

  “Much better, thank you. I’m still a little weak, but I think I’ll be back to normal soon. Come see what we’ve been doing.”

  She led me around by the hand, chattering excitedly about her plans while her assistants converged on us and interjected their own comments. All the women seemed pretty worked up about being able to design their own living space, which was nice to see. It made it hard to follow the conversation, but all I really had to do was conjure walls where they’d marked them.

  I was making the interior walls pretty thin, since even an inch of stone is more than enough for a privacy barrier. So it hardly took any work at all to put in walls along the lines they’d marked out, although doors would be a lot more trouble when I got around to them. Anything that involved moving parts tended to be problematic, since I had to make all the pieces individually and then try to fit them together. It’s amazing how the tiniest imprecision can make a door hang wrong or a window stick.

  When we got to the space Avilla wanted to use as her kitchen I stopped and considered for a moment.

  “Is it too big?” She asked nervously.

  I laughed. “Avilla, you could take twice this much space and I wouldn’t care. I know how important this is to you. I was just thinking about a feature you might like. Here, let me show you and then you can decide if you want it.”

  I put the other walls where she’d indicated, but instead of a wall between the kitchen and what she’d described as a ‘private dining room’ I built a breakfast bar with a nice polished granite countertop.

  “The idea is that if you’re hosting an informal meal people can sit out here and chat without being in your way, but you can still be part of the conversation. So you don’t have to choose between letting people into your kitchen, or being off by yourself working while everyone else is socializing.”

  She beamed at me. “That’s a wonderful idea, Daniel! You’re always so thoughtful. Hmm, but that means I can’t have cabinets there, so I’d have to rearrange things a bit…”

  She trailed off, her eyes darting from one part of the rectangular space to another.

  “You might want an island, too. That’s better than just putting a table in the middle of the room.”

  “Island?” She asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Here, let me show you.” I stepped into the room, and started conjuring stone as I spoke. “This is something the rich people do back home. It gives you a nice big workspace in the middle of the room, just like if you put a table there, but since it’s a permanent fixture I can make it the exact right size and shape for the room. Granite is also a lot tougher and easier to clean than wood. Obviously we end up with a lot of space underneath it, so we can turn that into drawers and cabinets to give you more storage. Kitchens never seem to have enough of that. We can put a pot rack above the island, so you can hang things there and have them in easy reach. Oh, and if you want I can put a sink with running water in the island. That way the sink can be right next to the stove, but they can both have empty counter space next to them.”

  She studied the rough mock-up I’d put together with wide eyes.

  “Girls?” She said to our audience. “Everyone out. Now.”

  Then she pushed me roughly onto the counter, and unbuttoned my pants.

  “Avilla? Not that I don’t… oh, fuck! What… ah! What brought this on?”

  “Shut up and let me suck your cock, you sexy man. I need to taste you.”

  Well, I wasn’t going to argue with that.

  When she was done she climbed into my lap and curled up against me.

  “Yum,” she purred. “Tasty man stuff. You need to let me do that more often.”

  “Do I, now?” I chuckled.

  She nodded. “You know how I am about my special diet. You don’t want me to get sick again, do you?”

  “No, we certainly don’t want that,” I agreed. “I can see I’m going to have to put in some doors tonight.”

  “You certainly should. Every room in my new home is going to need a proper dedication. How does a man know so much about designing kitchens, anyway?”

  “Oh, I’m just copying ideas I’ve seen before,” I told her. “My homeland has a lot of people who have enough money for luxuries, and having the best house is a big social competition.”

  “It sounds nice. Do I get to have a magic stove?”

  “Of course. I’m thinking actual conjured flames instead of heated plates of stone. I’ve seen it done both ways, but everyone says a flame gives you better control of the heat. I’ll make you an oven too, if you want.”

  She beamed. “I do. Can we have a private bath, like we had at the tower?”

  “I was planning on it.”

  My stomach rumbled.

  Avilla giggled, and gave me a hug. “Sounds like we’d better get some food in you. Come on, I had the men move up one of the hot plates from the transports.”

  I stuck around for an hour or so to put in some more walls, roughing out future living spaces on the middle floors. Then I headed back to the harbor, leaving Avilla deep in discussion with Hrodir and Oskar about where to settle their people and how to arrange various mundane details.

  The self-heating stones I’d dropped onto the ice that morning had long since melted through, and there were now circles of open water dotted around my pier and the adja
cent boathouse. I’d been experimenting with different variations on the enchantment, since I wasn’t sure what temperature I should set them at or how big to make the rocks. So the regions of melted ice were pretty varied in size, with some of them giving off steam and a couple sporting patches of bubbling water in the middle.

  I’d also collected an audience. A few dozen sailors and a small group of armed men were standing around eying the pools and speculating with each other when I walked up, and one guy was cautiously poking at the water with a spear.

  “It isn’t monsters,” I told him. “The prince hired me to try and thaw out the harbor, so we can get these ships moving again.”

  “Oh, uh, yessir, lord wizard,” the man stammered, backing away hurriedly.

  “Then you must be Daniel the Black,” another man said. He stepped forward and offered his hand. “I’m Filip Lund, the harbormaster. I was told to expect you.”

  I shook his hand. He was a heavyset man, with a weak grip and no callouses on his hands. No weapon, either, and apparently he was a late sleeper if he’d only just gotten around to meeting me. Not a promising pattern, but sometimes appearances can be deceiving.

  “Good afternoon, Filip. Yes, I’m the new wizard in town.”

  “Good, good. So, ah, this is safe? I hope?”

  “I’m basically just dumping hot rocks in the water to warm it up,” I explained. “There’s not a lot that can go wrong with that. The water here is all deep enough that I don’t have to worry about a ship running into one, right?”

  “Well, that depends on how big they are. The docks along this end of the harbor usually have two or three fathoms of clearance, but over by the fishing wharfs we’ve got some shallow stretches. Just how hot are these rocks? Could passing over one damage a ship?”

  “That’s what I was testing out over there,” I waved to the patches of bubbling water. “The stones are hotter than a bonfire, so there’s a patch of boiling water right around them. But it cools off pretty fast as it rises, so as long as we’ve got a few feet of water between them and any passing ship it won’t be warm enough to matter.”

  He frowned thoughtfully. “Well, it sounds like you’ll be fine around all the stone piers, then. But the fishing wharfs are wood, and the water there is barely two fathoms. You might have to do something different there, if you’re going to free up the fishing fleet.”

  “I see. Alright, I’ll have to think about that. But I know the prince’s main concern was getting the oceangoing vessels moving again. I’m not going to be able to thaw the whole river, but I think I can clear a channel out to sea.”

  He nodded. “We can work with that. I’ll get the harbor pilots to put their heads together and work out the best route. There are some tidal islands and sandbars in the river mouth, you see.”

  “That would be a big help, then,” I agreed. “I probably won’t need them for a few days, though. Thawing the harbor is going to take some time.”

  “Actually,” he said hesitantly. “Could you do it the other way around? Clear a path to the sea for one or two piers first, and then worry about the rest? That way we can start getting a few vessels in and out as soon as possible.”

  I frowned. “That’s going to involve a bit of an expedition to get to the coast. I was hoping to finish getting my people settled into the new keep before making any trips. I don’t even have a proper gate yet.”

  Filip eyed the tower I’d built overnight a little nervously.

  “Yes, well, I wouldn’t want to press you. But I imagine outfitting a place that size must be quite a task. There are a number of ships in port carrying perishable goods, and if you could speed them on their way… well, I’m sure there would be a certain amount of gratitude involved.”

  “Hmm. Ships that might happen to belong to a certain harbormaster, I suppose?”

  “Oh, no,” he waved his hands in denial. “Not at all. Trade is such a complex and chancy venture, and the cost involved can be simply staggering. A man of my modest means wouldn’t know where to begin. A harbormaster’s post is more a matter of collecting fees for services rendered, if you take my meaning.”

  So the ship captains were offering bribes to be the first out of port? Well, that was quick thinking on their part. Normally I’d be offended by that kind of thing, but I had to remind myself this wasn’t America. In most cultures collecting bribes is just a normal perk of the job for civil servants, and if I tried to complain to his superiors they probably wouldn’t care. Besides which, if I was going to start crusading for social justice here there were about a million more important issues to work on.

  “I see. Well, I suppose we could work something out,” I responded. “I don’t suppose this gratitude might include some cloth, or furniture? I’ve got a hundred-odd people to worry about, and there are a lot of things conjured stone doesn’t work for.”

  “Possibly,” he mused. “Wool and leather are in short supply now, of course. Everyone wants warmer clothes, and the few merchants who haven’t sold out their stock are hoarding it in secret. But I might know where I can lay my hands on a score of carpenters for a few weeks.”

  “That would work. Alright, show me which piers you want done first. I’ll be working close to home today, but if your pilots can get a good route worked out we can plan on leaving for the coast in the morning.”

  He nodded. “A pleasure doing business with you, sir. Will you be needing to arrange for an escort?”

  “No, I’ll just take some of my own men. I’ve been outfitting them with magic weapons, so they can handle monsters a lot better than normal troops. How far is it to the coast, anyway?”

  “Four miles to the estuary, and another six to open water. The estuary hasn’t frozen yet, so you may not have to worry about that. But the channel will need to wind a bit. I’d guess you’ve got five, maybe five and a half miles of ice ahead of you.”

  “Ouch. That’s a bit more than I was expecting.”

  He showed me the first couple of piers he wanted cleared, and suggested I look at the fishing wharfs next if I had the time. An hour later I had them well on the way to being de-iced, and was starting to get a decent feel for the process.

  But the math was worrying me. Fifteen minutes to enchant an average-size stone, which would thaw an area maybe forty feet across. At that rate it would take me weeks to clear a shipping channel, and I had a long list of other projects I needed to work on. Was there a better way?

  Smaller rocks took less energy to enchant, but the process wasn’t much faster. That was a losing proposition, then. Bigger rocks didn’t take much longer, but concentrating too much heat output in one spot was asking for trouble. I wasn’t sure what effect repeatedly passing over patches of boiling water would have on a wooden sailing ship, but it was bound to cause some kind of damage.

  A different way to melt the ice, then? But I didn’t have any good ideas. Conjuring open flame underwater was highly inefficient, and doing it above the waterline meant most of the heat would just go up into the air and be wasted. In theory I could enchant an object to project a warmth field around itself, but that was a much more complicated effect that would end up taking even longer to make.

  Maybe a growing enchantment? Make a stone rod with the heat enchantment, and just lay it out on the ice and make it grow? But there were a lot of problems to solve with that idea. It was more time efficient than building the same enchantment over and over, but the energy cost would be astronomical. The rod would quickly become far too hot to touch, and working magic from even a short distance made everything much harder. Not to mention the mechanical problems of trying to handle an incredibly heavy, unwieldy object when one end was melting through the ice and the other end was growing rapidly.

  No, I needed to either drastically increase the area that I could thaw with one enchantment, or make the process of enchanting a heat stone much faster.

  I headed back over to my own pier, and considered that as I dropped a few more stones in the water around it. The actu
al heat production was about as simple as enchantments get. No control functions or variability, just a simple conjuration effect that would run for as long as it had power. The problem was the matter to energy enchantment that powered the device. That was a complex effect, and even with all the practice I’d been getting I had doubts about my ability to build one any faster.

  Not to mention that if I did it wrong it might fail prematurely, or end up leaking a form of energy other than raw magic. If I rushed this it would be all too easy to end up with a bunch of radioactive heating stones at the bottom of the river.

  Could I separate the two enchantments? Make a central power source, and transmit the energy to the heating stones somehow? That seemed vaguely possible, but enchanting each heating stone to draw power at a distance probably wasn’t any easier than just making them self-powered. No, what I needed was a way to mass produce the heating stones.

  Mass production. Hmm.

  Spells can affect other spells. From what I’d seen so far that was an unusual type of magic here, because most wizards couldn’t perceive magic very clearly. It’s hard to make an invisible construct that precisely manipulates other invisible constructs, after all. But my mana sorcery allowed me to actually see magic if I focused on it. Could I make that work?

  It would certainly take my full concentration, so the first thing I did was head back inside.

  “Welcome back, milord,” one of the guards nodded to me as I entered. “Are we going to be getting gates for the keep today? Jorgen spotted a pack of goblins prowling the far shore of the river earlier.”

  “Hopefully,” I told him. “I’m going to be doing some tricky spell work down in one of the empty vehicle bays for the next few hours, so pass the word not to disturb me unless there’s an emergency.”

  “I’ll tell the Captain, milord.”

  The transports all fit easily into one of the four vehicle bays I’d built, so there was plenty of space. I made my way into the dim recesses of one of the rear bays, conjured a light, and went to work.

  This thing was going to need a massive power source, which meant a big chunk of stone with a power tap on it. So I started by making another transport sled, a bit smaller than the ones we’d been using and made of nickel-iron instead of stone. A large block of stone in the back would carry the enchantment. That started out as a power tap, a control mechanism tied to a lever on the side, and a set of earth and force enchantments to conjure a stone disk and push it out the back when the lever was pulled. Relatively easy stuff.