by Garon Whited
Frustrated, I raised my point of view and looked at the big picture, hoping to see something indicative of why the wagons turned back. This succeeded admirably. Looking down, I clearly saw the log roadblock in the middle of an armed camp.
Puzzled, I lowered my scrying sensor, getting a better look. At about treetop level, the camp winked out, leaving only the road and the forest.
I explored the perimeter of the effect, observing how the camp vanished and reappeared, mapping the area of the spell. It was a spell, and a good one, too. It couldn’t block the ability to see, but it could interfere with the image of a scrying spell, replacing the current situation with an illusion recorded earlier. I’ve used a similar thing, myself. If the sensor is inside the area, it shows what the spell is programmed to send. If it’s outside, looking in, it isn’t affected. They were set up at a curve, so if someone was walking a scrying sensor down the road, it would enter the cloaked area before it saw anything out of the ordinary.
Hovering up high, I used a telescopic zoom to look more closely. The camp was no more than a dozen tents, but it was laid out well and had sentries posted even during the day. The banners—long, silky pennons, really—fluttered in the breeze, but they were only half-familiar to me from previous dinners. One glowed with a magical aura, probably the enchanted object maintaining the camp’s cloaking spell. They had fifty men parked on the road, blockading us. I didn’t recognize the man in the plate armor, but he was clearly the leader of the task force. They were set up to use the log roadblock in either direction, to defend their position from anyone marching along the road.
I gave serious consideration to approaching through the trees and burning a new clearing, but it was my temper talking. I dismissed the idea and gave the problem further thought. Clearly, this was another move by House Sarcana. By blockading the only real access to the valley, they could deprive us of vital supplies—mostly food—and force a surrender. In chess, it was the equivalent of a Fool’s Mate, provided it worked.
On the other hand, I was playing with squares not on their board.
Two things leaped immediately to mind. One would have to wait until nightfall, because I’m against being mobbed, skewered, and chopped into small pieces. Safety is job one. The other I could tackle more immediately, but I wanted to wait until my weather system plans were done.
Leisel reported to me in my workroom and I showed her the sand table, explaining what she was seeing. He expression was grim.
“I’ve sent scouts,” she told me, “but they haven’t come back.”
I clicked air-refraction effects into place, making the scrying sensor look through a telescope again.
“I don’t see them in the camp,” I offered. “Could they be sneaking around in the forest?”
“They’re mounted, so I doubt it.”
“Send a line of riders out, keeping line-of-sight on each other. See if we can find out what happened.”
“I’ll take care of it. What do we do about the blockade?”
“I like it.”
“Like it?”
“Mostly. What I want to do is go out there and set half the mountain on fire while the Sarcana troops scream in the flames, roast in their armor, and eventually sizzle in the embers.”
“That’s ‘mostly’ liking it?” she asked, hesitantly.
“I’m not doing it,” I pointed out. “I can be rational. Ish. See, having a blockade implies they’re prepared to play a waiting game. We’re besieged, but gently. When we don’t have anything to eat, we’ll surrender. That’s what they expect, right?”
“Of course.”
“So I won’t burn them all to ashes as part of a childish urge to crush them under the iron heel for daring to try and challenge my power. Instead, we’ll get food from elsewhere and continue to raise crops, mine ore, clear land, and build houses while they do nothing to stop us. Their move is to sit and wait, which hands us the initiative.”
“Have I mentioned you frighten me?”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“You’re still here, which means you’re also brave.”
“How so?”
“If you don’t feel fear, you can’t have courage. Courage overcomes fear. It can’t exist without it.”
“Can we get off the philosophy and back to how we’re going to feed people?” she asked. She was pleased at the compliment, though.
“I’ll take care of it.”
Leisel sighed.
“I don’t understand. I want to understand—” she broke off, holding up a hand to keep me from answering. “The thing is, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with what understanding entails. You’re going to do something weird, aren’t you?”
“It doesn’t seem weird to me.”
“It wouldn’t. All right. Aside from the line of scouts, what do you need me to do?”
“I’ll probably need a building.”
People dug holes, put up tree-trunk poles, and did some good, old-fashioned barn-raising for me. They really jumped on it, too. There was no standing around, no waiting for orders. People actively sought out something to do, as though they were afraid to look like shirkers in front of the boss.
I’m not sure if that’s Leisel or me, but either way, it works.
While they threw up a building, I did some work on my sand table, adding a bit of functionality to it. Given time, it would be as good as the old one, but it would take quite a lot of time. I sorted it out enough to do what I wanted for the day.
In the afternoon, the rain finished in Sarashda. The sun came out to dry things in the cooler, post-rain weather. It was a nice afternoon, fresh and clean and somewhat cool. People went out a lot, enjoyed the sunshine, and threw open windows and shutters.
I peeped like Tom and got a pretty good look inside the main house of the Sarcana estate. It was a large, open structure with wide halls and interconnected rooms. The rooms were organized into clusters, but within the clusters it was a fairly open floor plan. A bedroom might have several satellite rooms for closets, breakfast rooms, bathing rooms, and servant chambers, for example. One living area had a lounging room, a pool room, a dining room, and some other attachments I couldn’t readily identify. I managed a fairly complete map of the main house without much trouble.
The sections not visible through a window, a bird’s-eye view, and a telescope were more difficult to map, but the rest of the house was so easy, inferring things by their absence wasn’t too hard. The main anti-scrying device was in the southeastern corner of the house—the center of the grounds, rather than the center of the house—and the room had no windows. I saw how to get into it, though, from another room. Likewise, the main vault wasn’t on any of the aboveground floors, but neither were any stairs down… unless they were in a hard-to-see area along the southwestern wall.
Putting a spectrum-shifter and reflector on one side of the house reflected sunlight toward the building—as x-rays. A similar shifter on the other side turned it back into visible light. By moving them in tandem—basically, by keeping the target area in the center of the see-saw between the two spells—I built a dim, three-dimensional shadow-picture of both absent areas.
Yep. A large, cut-crystal shape topped a pedestal in one, a heavy door and downward stairs were in the other.
Taking an x-ray picture of the bottom of the stairs was trickier. The ground absorbs x-rays something fierce and the scryguard was a sphere. It also prevented most other spells from entering easily, or would at least sound an alarm, so moving my x-ray technique closer was out of the question. Still, by phasing the receptor spells down through the ground and using a focusing array on the x-ray converter spell above, I could increase the intensity of the x-ray beam at the expense of narrowing it… If I moved it in a grid pattern, taking individual snapshots, I could assemble them into a pixelated top-down view. And, since ground-penetrating radar is a thing, how about I use that instead of x-rays? How about I try a variety of wavelengths and see what works best?
Now all I needed was a crossbow.
The crossbow is not a Tautan invention. They’ve never heard of it. Well, I guess it’s not too surprising. Hunters use slings or shortbows. Horse archers use shortbows in harassing attacks. Their style of “war” doesn’t encompass the idea of pursuing a defeated enemy to destruction. They don’t have whole units of archers to rain arrows down. They don’t have wars of attrition, so they don’t put a premium on killing the other guy. War is a chess match, with occasional battles where there is no clear advantage—or where someone is either stubborn, holding out for reinforcements, or really pissed off. Regardless, their battles are settled by two mobs charging at each other with swords and spears, not a hail of arrows.
I’m thinking this will change.
In the meantime, I have other, more poetic options. First things first, however.
Since my magical gates seem to only attract attention when they terminate inside a chaos beast—or in the infinite void of chaos outside the universes—travel to the Earth timelines isn’t necessarily dangerous in celestial terms. I don’t want to do anything truly attention-grabbing, naturally, but simply hanging around and being mundane ought to be off the celestial radar.
What I would like to do is steal all the gold from the vault of House Sarcana and use it to pay for things. It seems—I don’t know—fitting, somehow? Sadly, my schedule doesn’t allow for it. I’ll use my own stolen gold and steal theirs later. Not quite the same, but it’ll do.
I sent for Renata and had a talk with her. She’s up on the current situation—meaning the roadblock—so explaining why I wanted her out of the reach of any kidnappers wasn’t hard. She was somewhat more receptive, this time, to the idea of an extended reassignment elsewhere. It’s one thing to be kidnapped when your kidnappers have a three-day ride back to someplace. It’s quite another when a kidnapper only needs to go a little way down the road to have you thoroughly in the clutches of a sizable fighting force. Renata isn’t a coward, but she recognizes danger when she sees it.
“Don’t think I plan for you to simply go away and waste your time waiting,” I cautioned. “I have work for you to do.”
“Oh?” she asked, brightening. “Real work?”
“I’d say so. More in the nature of responsibilities than of fighting, though. Some messenger work, some deliveries, possibly supervising payments. I’ll also want you to test some weapons when they’re delivered.”
“I can do that.”
“Good. This may take a while, so you may wind up with a baby rather than a belly by the time you get back.”
“I understand, sir,” she answered, lips pressing into a thin line.
“You seem upset.”
“No, sir.”
“Yes, sir,” I corrected. “Don’t think I’m dumping you somewhere. Someone has to do this. It can’t be me; I have too much to do here. I could send Leisel, but I need her as my vidat to keep things running. Who would you choose to send as my agent?”
Renata’s mouth worked for a moment as she chewed her words before speaking.
“Yes, sir. I was upset. I am upset. Since I won’t be much use as a fighter for much longer, I’d choose me. It’s the right choice.” She smiled grimly, but it still made her face even more beautiful. “I don’t have to like it, but I do have to do it.”
“I’m glad we got that sorted out,” I agreed, and turned. She caught my sleeve.
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“Before you go, I’d like to clarify something.”
“Sure.”
“I’m upset at me, not you. Me and Palan and Naskarl and this baby. At this situation. I don’t want—I didn’t want to—I’m upset at being trapped into…”
“Stop talking. I understand. I may not be able to fully empathize with your situation, but I do understand the feeling of frustration in being trapped into a sequence of events made inevitable through no fault of your own.”
“Exactly! –sir.”
“So we’re going to put you on lighter duty, get you out of harm’s way, simplify my job of telling Sarcana to go screw themselves, and get through this as quickly and painlessly as possible. The only way out is through, so let’s get through it and get it over with. Are you with me?”
“With you, sir!”
“Which brings me to another question. Don’t answer it, but think about it. What do you want to do with the kid? I’m willing to make you my galvanais if it will get Sarcana off your back and mine. I’m not encouraging you to because I have no opinion either way. I have no interest in an heir, for reasons which will become clear to you in time, and this kid will do as well as any. It’s an option for you to consider and for you to decide on. I’ll back you, whatever you decide you want to do.”
“Sir?” she asked, preparatory to a question.
“No, don’t ask me anything. Assume I mean exactly what I say. And think about what you want.”
“Yes, sir,” she agreed. She seemed puzzled.
“Good. Go.”
With her sorted out, I went out, took some measurements, and sent someone to have Leisel meet me in my workroom.
“What are we doing?” Leisel asked, once we were together.
“I’m going to get some temporary rations,” I replied, still working. “After that, I hope to negotiate a more regular food supply until we can get the farms producing.”
“How?”
“That’s complicated,” I admitted, “but I’ll have to be away for a bit. This mirror,” I handed it to her, “should still be able to reach me if something unexpected happens.”
“But not the others?”
“This one has a micro-gate built into the frame and it’s tuned to aim for the one in—you know what?” I diverted, changing my mind. “It’s advanced wizardry. We’ll get to the—” I wanted to say “nuts and bolts,” but the Tassarian language doesn’t have words for those types of fasteners. “—details of how it works some other year.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know, and I’m in kind of a rush. Just… look, remember the holes I opened into rooms that weren’t there?”
“Yes.”
“I plan to go through one, but into a room where there is a lot of food to be had. I’ll negotiate for it to be delivered later and fetch it back.” I didn’t bother to tell her I’d be using my Ring of Spying to lock on to a micro-gate in the tower to maintain a stable connection. It’s too many details that confuse people, I think.
“Ah. Right. Where is this hole you plan to open?”
“I’ll put it down on the ground floor, probably.”
“And how long will this take?”
“If all goes well? A couple of days, maybe—but I’ll be back in a couple of hours, maybe a little after sunset. I’ll make another trip to collect the supplies. Why? How long do we have?”
“I can keep our situation a secret for another week, maybe. We’ll start having noticeable food shortages in four days or so. I don’t know how long after that people will start trying to leave.”
“I’m guessing they won’t have any problems leaving. Naskarl wants us to lose population and wither away. If he lets the first ones leave, then the rest will be more willing to try.”
“Or he might kill them all, on the assumption they’re spies sent outside his blockade.”
“I don’t know about that. There’s nothing stopping us from sending someone out on foot, away from the road, and circumventing the roadblock.”
“Without a formal surrender,” she pointed out, “he has to assume we’re still resisting.”
“Fair point. Let’s see if we can keep it from coming to that. Try to keep things going for the afternoon.”
“I think I can manage without you.”
I suppose I could have searched for a warehouse full of MREs and
tried to steal them all, but a large gate is hard to keep open for long. One big stack of boxes wasn’t going to help much. It was much more practical to get several tons on a truck and simply drive it all back. Of course, that meant I had to select for a world with trucks, MREs, and enough technology to make same-day delivery likely. It would also help if they valued gold and were willing to trade it for cash without too much fuss.
Some of these I can search for. Others, I have to reconnoiter on the ground. I explored four worlds before I found an Earth with everything I wanted. So, trade gold for money, find a place as a delivery drop, order a huge pile of food, and vanish until it was delivered.
The delivery drop was a house in southern Texas, near the Gulf coast. It was a wooden, one-storey little thing and sat on a dusty piece of ground along with a dilapidated barn of grey wood and corrugated tin. I didn’t actually own it, yet, but I laid down money and signed some papers. Further paperwork would follow, no doubt, but was the bank going to complain if a truck pulled up and offloaded a bunch of boxes? I doubted they would even notice, much less care. I probably could have skipped buying the place and just used it as a delivery drop, but I prefer not to take risks if I can avoid them. Someone else might have bought the place and be puzzled about why I was using their barn.
There were a couple of other possible listings in the realtor’s office, but this one’s address was on Farm-Market Road 666. I couldn’t turn it down.
Sadly, the MREs were bought in bulk, so there were quite a number of chili-with-beans in there. The company would deliver them only in variety boxes, not sort them by meal type. It was okay, though. I wouldn’t have to eat them. Other people wouldn’t be inclined to bury them in an unmarked grave without even opening them.
I wonder… in zombie world, did they sell only by meal type? Order a case of rations and pick your flavor? Could it be chili-with-beans was the cheapest, so my unknown prepper bought them by the case? Different worlds, by definition, have their differences.