The wizard in question joined them. “Excellent,” he said, offering a welcoming hand to Lucien. “I have a favor to ask of you, Master Lucien.”
The dragon stared at the hand and then at the man. “Is it not early in our relationship to be speaking of favors?”
“Oh, I hope not. We shall be fast friends, I think. Because the alternative is unthinkable.” Richard, despite the smile on his face and the warmth of his tone, managed to be twice as threatening as the dragon.
Lucien looked aside to the elf. She shrugged helplessly. “He has the backing of the Directorate. I am in no better position than you.”
“Friends, then,” Lucien said, taking Richard’s hand and squeezing it painfully. “Friends indeed.”
Richard extricated his hand. “Wonderful. Because I would like to carve a chunk out of your roof.”
The dragon smiled at the jest. “Help yourself. Take as much as you can.” Nothing could damage adamantium except adamantium.
“I’m not being fair,” Richard apologized and drew the adamantium dagger from his belt.
Lucien apparently recognized them because he glared at Alaine. She bore it stoically.
Richard ignored the social difficulty and plowed on. “I had an idea like this.” He produced a mechanical iris for a camera lens and demonstrated how it opened and closed. “You don’t actually need a solid foot of adamantium to block scrying. Just a thin layer when it’s closed will do the trick. And if you ever decide you want to leave by a door the previous owners don’t know about, you can just slide it open.”
Lucien considered the wizard and his toy. Christopher watched in fascination as the dragon’s intensely green aura flared and swirled, moving in patterns he could not grasp. Richard handed the iris to Lucien and turned his attention to Alaine.
“Up for another road trip?” He smiled with the light of the sun. The effect washed off the elf like ocean spray on a mountain.
“Now you want to get rich?” she said dryly.
“Yes, yes I do. This is all going to cost a lot, and Christopher is already broke.”
“Did you bring me another machine gun?”
“I did,” Richard said, “and more. But I’m worried about sending ordinary men over. I think the demons will vaporize them with a glance.”
“I might have some friends who would be interested,” Alaine said. “They will need to be paid, however.”
“Halfsies?”
She considered. “It is unorthodox but not unthinkable.”
The wizard turned back to the dragon.
“No,” Lucien said with a heavy sigh. “If I accompany you, the bevinget will either hide or swarm. I doubt your weapons can deal with a hundred at once.”
Richard looked like he was calculating. “Hmm . . . not yet. I was aiming for a dozen.”
“Once you do this, they may well start to rank you as a dragon.” Lucien’s warning seemed only half-serious, as if he couldn’t quite believe the wizard’s brash talk. “You may never get a second easy hunt.”
“Another price I must pay for my deal with Christopher. So many opportunities squandered because we are in a hurry.”
Lucien handed the iris back to Richard. “I accept your bargain but only because I fear you would manufacture adamantium if I denied you access to mine. You understand why civilized beings object to the substance, yes?”
“I do,” Richard agreed. “Once tael is frozen into adamantium, it is lost forever. To rob the future for a momentary advantage is a crime. Except when it is necessary. I hope you can see the distinction.”
The dragon did not look convinced, but he did not argue.
Christopher’s contribution to the raid was to open the gate. Apparently, he was no more welcome than the dragon; his divine rank meant merely stepping foot on the other side would set off alarm bells across the plane. However, he discovered that he could open the gate without a key. No one needed to die this time.
Richard and Lalania led a party of silver-clad elves over in vehicles. They came back six hours later, minus three jeeps and the bodies of four elves, although their soul-stones were recovered and they would be reborn soon. Technically, Christopher was entitled to a quarter of the wealth the expedition brought into his kingdom. He didn’t mention it because Richard was already spending it all for him.
The next day, Richard and Lalania went back to Earth again for three days, the gate closing behind them this time. They had to rely on her skills rather than magic to avoid detection and arrest, a feat made possible because the bard had already learned English. Her profession gave her an advantage with languages, and she had recently obtained a high rank. They took a sack of letters from the crew of the submarine to their families and loved ones, along with three heavy chests of gold, and came back with two large trucks full of equipment.
Now Christopher had real work to do. Richard wanted a drilling head installed on the submarine, the conning tower cut off, and tank tracks attached to the bottom. Somebody had to design it all. Fortunately, they had a mechanical engineer to hand. It was an impossible task, of course, but where technology failed magic intervened. Christopher had once repaired his armor with a spell; he could weld steel with his hands now if he wanted to. He only did the hard bits, however. Richard had found a way to create a skilled workforce out of nothing, merely by the vast expenditure of tael.
The wizard gathered a hundred volunteers and promoted them to the highest level of the craft profession. Then he walked them through training classes he had downloaded off the internet. Within a week, they were as skilled as seasoned mechanics, having mastered their new craft with help from the tael. This was normally only done with warriors; a force of knights could be raised from soldiers in a day if you could afford it. But no one had ever wanted an army of craftsmen before.
Handing out promotions made Richard quite popular. It had the opposite effect for Christopher. Johm came to court to tell him of the cost, his aura writhing in bolts of green and yellow.
“He has stolen all of my apprentices and most of my smiths. Your factories are shuttered. Not that it matters. We have seen the new weapons. All the skills we have mastered are dust now. You will import what we can never match. Everything I have built is cast aside, mere toys for children. I have wasted my time and my life.”
Johm had just built his first steam engine that lasted more than three days without exploding. Now he was competing with automobile engines.
Christopher found words he hadn’t used in a while. “I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it.
“It was always going to be thus, wasn’t it? You were always going to leave me behind.” Johm stood in front of him with empty hands and a broken heart.
“No,” Christopher said. “That’s not what I planned. That thing”— he waved at the river, where the submarine sat in the dry dock they had constructed, diverting the river around it—“Is never what I planned. So much of this is not what I had expected. If I had known this was the end, I would never have begun.” If he had known the god of death would cheat him twice and Marcius would play the martyr, he would have gone home three years ago.
“Their skills are hollow. They can do what your mage wants of them, but afterward they will struggle to earn a living. Magic cannot replace hard work. What will you do with them then?”
Christopher had already paved roads for wagons. Now he had trucks. Richard and Lalania kept bringing them over from Earth full of supplies but never took one back. They were starting to stack up around the training yard. If he put them to work, the price of bread could go down again. “We’ve got all those vehicles. Somebody has to take care of them.” He’d have to find a way to make his own gasoline, though. Importing basic energy resources was not a sound basis for an economy.
The smith’s grief drowned his anger, and Johm spoke like a defeated prisoner. “I wanted to build. I wanted to design. I wanted to discover. But it all has been done before, and there is nothing new for me to invent. So you will make me handmaiden to so
meone else’s genius.” Christopher found a smile. “Spoken like a first-year university student. Yes, all the easy discoveries have been made. But there’s still work to be done. I have to turn a submarine into a drilling machine. Richard very helpfully gave me adamantium blades for the cutting part but never once considered where the cut rock would go. Something has to move it behind the sub so the sub can move forward.”
Johm looked around the hall and for the first time seemed to notice how empty it was. They were the only two people there. Christopher, so long flanked by advisors and guards, was alone.
“We are fellows in exile, then,” the smith muttered. “It does not leaven my heart, and yet I find I cannot hate you.”
Having his company made Christopher feel better, though.
They pulled the same trick for the submarine crew. Christopher called for volunteers from his army, stressing the danger of the mission. He got a hundred men standing at attention the next morning waiting for orders. Of his original little troop from the village, only Major Kennet was among them. He was surprised and tried to make a joke of it.
“Charles wasn’t interested in learning to swim?” he said to Kennet.
“Oh, no, sir,” the soldier replied. “We drew lots, and his did not come up.”
“I asked for volunteers,” Christopher said, frowning.
“Yes, sir,” Kennet replied. “We drew lots to see who got to volunteer.”
All of them were promoted as craftsmen, which would conflict with their future career as knights, except none of them ever expected to be a knight. Kennet, who had already spurned any talk of promotion from the Hel trip since he had been rescued rather than rescuer, accepted this one, eager to take his place as a deck officer. Captain Robert was as impressed with the young man as everyone else always was.
Sacks of gold induced the submarine’s original crew to teach the men the basics of maintaining and operating the ship. Much to Christopher’s surprise, two dozen mariners asked to go along.
Captain Robert was not happy, but he did not say no. Instead, he assigned a condition: he had to go as well. “As if I would let you take my ship into uncharted waters without me.” Then he convinced the chief engineer to join them with a simple argument. “Richard thinks he knows how to operate a nuclear reactor because he read a book about it.”
The chief spat in disgust. “There will be more gold?”
“Sure,” Christopher said. Gold was the least of the expenses he was incurring.
Richard left in the middle of the preparations, going with Argeous back to the time-dilated plane. He did not get to take Lalania, which clearly grieved him. She was traveling back and forth from Earth every few days, trading gold for the technological supplies they needed and staying one step ahead of the authorities. It wasn’t as dangerous as it sounded. They were unlikely to shoot her on sight, and if they put her in prison, Christopher could just pull her out again.
Christopher got three wizards back the next week. All of them were Richard.
“There was too much work to do,” Richard said. “I copied myself. They’re only simulacrums; they have half my rank and cannot progress further. But for code-breaking, that was good enough.”
The moral dimensions of this were staggering. None of the Richards seemed to care. All of them asked where Lalania was. For her part, the bard took the duplication of her paramour in stride, although for the next few days, Christopher saw little of her, and she always seemed to be exhausted.
Soon enough he had other problems to solve. The Lady Kalani showed up in his throne hall, doing her level best to connive her way onto his ship. Alaine, who was still unaccountably hanging around, flatly said no. Christopher, as usual, managed to make a bad situation vastly worse.
“Your mother said you would be impatient,” he said with a smile. Whatever the punch line was supposed to be died forgotten when he saw the rage that flooded the girl’s face.
“How dare you!” Kalani shrieked at her mother. Alaine weathered it like a boulder, but Christopher could see her pain reflected in the roiling of her flat, white aura. “You . . . you slattern!”
This seemed an odd choice of insult, given that Kalani had tried to seduce him within hours of their first meeting.
“We are in public,” Alaine said, her voice held mild by the weight of centuries of self-discipline. The only people present were the two elves and Christopher, but then again, he was not family.
“That did not stop you from maligning me!” The girl was leaking tears.
“She didn’t actually say that,” Christopher said hastily. “I misquoted her. Please stop screaming.”
“Understand I spoke in human terms,” Alaine said.
“You do that a little too much, don’t you think?” Kalani aimed to wound. Christopher winced but not for Alaine’s sake. The woman was as tough as adamantium. The attempt to hurt her mother was tearing Kalani apart, though.
Alaine answered with measured words, fury buried in content rather than tone. “I have been awake for thirty thousand years. You do not get to tell me what is too much.”
“Have you? How would you even know? You have thrown away so many things.”
Alaine narrowed her eyes in confusion.
Christopher, in his infinite wisdom, tried to help. “I don’t think you can complain. You weren’t exactly a blushing rose when I met you.”
This was a huge mistake. Kalani turned her contempt on him. “That was duty. It would have meant nothing to me; I would have forgotten it as quickly as I have forgotten that you declined. What she and that dragon do is different. They take animal form and they . . . they do it for pleasure.” The girl shuddered, embarrassed to the core, and covered her face with her hands.
Alaine sighed, deeply unwilling to explain but compelled to. “We elves do not feel lust as other races do. When Aelph bought our immortality, he feared we would misuse it. He calculated the size of Aelfhiem and how many elves it could support, and he found the number wanting. Thus, we no longer seek out reproduction; the act means less to us than shaving does to you. He feared we would overrun our world and so put a leash on our desires. Instead, we have rather the opposite problem.”
“That’s stupid,” Christopher said, outraged on behalf of all elves, everywhere. “There are far better ways to manage population growth. Sure, it’s a problem, but it’s a problem that can be solved without cutting things out of your brain.”
“Aelph was a demigod, but he was not omniscient. He could not foresee all the consequences of his actions. As I am sure you understand.”
Christopher couldn’t even foresee the consequences of his conversations. “Is there some way to fix it?”
“Not without surrendering our immortality. Every few millennia, the question comes up for debate. The decision is always to leave things as they are. Kalani will eventually have to participate in that decision; she may find a way to forgive her morally corrupted mother then.”
“Not that. I don’t care about that,” the girl whimpered, despite having done nothing but complain about it since Christopher had met her. The truth finally leaked out, borne on a whisper. “You had a son.”
Alaine snapped her head around, a deadly adder ready to strike.
Kalani faltered under that feral gaze but could not stop. “You purged him. He died here, the true death, and you purged him from your memories. You chose to forget him.” Her voice weakened with every word.
In a moment of insight, Christopher understood. He reached out to comfort Kalani. “She won’t forget you. I won’t let her.”
The girl moaned from the bottom of her soul and ran from the room, weeping. It had the sound of a wound being drained, so he let her slip from his grasp and go.
“You make many promises,” Alaine said flatly.
“I’ll be around to keep them,” he said. “I’m one of you now. An immortal.”
“Tell me that again in ten thousand years.”
He bowed his head in humility. “I agree. The onl
y notion more fantastic than my living forever is imagining that someone as clumsy as I am could survive that long. There are still things that can kill me. Lucien, for instance. Or I suspect you, if you tried hard enough. I would ask your advice. Tell me how you made it so far.”
She sighed again, this time in despair instead of dismay. “Your flattery is clumsy and yet more than my daughter offered. I have made compromises. I seek pleasure where I can. How many sunsets over the ocean have I seen? I do not know. I forget them, so that I may be surprised by their beauty all over again. Every thousand years or so, elves seek out seclusion for a period of days or years. We review our memories. We choose which ones to discard, which ones to keep. Our minds are not infinite; we cannot keep every moment alive. Nor need we; the knowledge of what I had for breakfast an eon ago is of no interest to anyone, least of all myself.”
Her hands fidgeted with her sword belt. He would have thought her ashamed if he could assign that emotion to the obdurate woman.
“I can only assume I feared the effect of losing a child. It would have weighed on my heart; it would have made me hate this place. It would have dragged me from my duty. So I purged him, and his life, and his loss. In truth I often wondered why the Directorate had never before assigned me a mate. Yet I did not question because it was not my place to question and because I did not want to know.”
She looked at him sharply. “Understand, few of us can indefinitely bear the eternal war; the death and destruction, the risks for so little reward, the inching of progress to a goal that is after all merely a cataclysmic battle for the right to commit genocide. Ten thousand years is considered fair duty for a field agent such as myself; then we can retire to the Stone Legion. To do so early is to risk being labeled impatient. the single worst word one can apply to an elf. We are transformed to statues to wait for the final conflict, when we will take flesh again to fight one last time. Aelfhiem is like a sculptor’s studio, littered with statues of elves and dragons and other allies who wait for the call to arms. I am somewhat of a celebrity by virtue of my longevity. Both in choosing to stay awake and failing to be murdered. Now, perhaps, I perceive why so few are willing to match my record.”
World of Prime 05: Black Harvest Page 31