by Garon Whited
The tunnel spiraled down until it reached what I can only describe as the heart of the mountain.
Well, maybe I can do a little better than that.
When I started pushing open the final pivot-door, air surged forward around me, whistling through the narrow opening, rising to a roar as it widened. Even so, I felt a wave of heat radiating through the open door like the open door of a furnace. The room beyond was hidden by a wall of stone, but something illuminated the chamber. Between that blocking wall and the door, a narrow balcony ran left and right.
I stepped onto the balcony and felt the heat even more. I peered cautiously around the balcony wall, careful not to touch it. The room was enormous, even—dare I say it?—cavernous. Air roared upward through scores of holes in the floor, each the size of a sewer lid. There was a much larger hole in the center of the room, maybe ten or twelve feet across, holding a black sphere of force.
I swung the door shut behind me. Without that blast of air to cool me, the heat started baking me from all directions. My feet started to complain about the heat. I wrapped myself in a spell to reflect heat and felt much better about being in here. Well, physically more comfortable. Emotionally, I was still on edge and unhappy.
A sphere of blackness hovered in the center of the chamber, half above the floor, half below. The whole ceiling was a wide, giant, inverted cone of rock, peppered with thousands of small holes. It narrowed downward toward a glaring blaze of white light, there in the center of the black sphere. It was a bare pinprick of intolerable brightness, shining white and hot and harsh, glaring more painfully than an electric welder, yet too small even to see the source. The light was a needle driven into the eyes, even through layer after layer of dark globes. It was like nothing I had ever seen before.
Except… except… I think I have.
It was familiar, as though I dreamed of it… or dreamed it…
Yes. I dreamed this. Now, what is it?
I looked at it carefully, passively examining what looked like my handiwork without ever touching it. Whatever I had done, it represented enormous power, and I didn’t want to accidentally discover that it was also fragile!
It wasn’t fragile. The spells weren’t spells, but enchantments. In my dreams, I constructed these in a style I can only describe as “ruggedized industrial.” When people say “They don’t build ’em like the used to,” well, this is how they used to build ’em when they meant it to last.
Everything else about it was more frightening.
The mountain was alive, all right. It had a heart, it had circulation, it even breathed. It was a living thing on an inhuman scale.
I crept closer to one of the lesser openings in the floor and peered down into the hot rush of air. Yes, as I thought, the room continued below; the floor was merely a divider, running around the distorted torus of the open space in the cavern—a mammoth heat-transfer device, warming air as it rushed up through the holes. This was the central furnace for the mountain.
From below, the floor was a reverse of the ceiling. A giant, cone came up and the point disappeared into the black globe of force, toward that microscopic inferno. Thousands of small holes let air from the outside into the lower room, heated somewhat as it moved through the lower cone, warmed even more through the “floor” of large holes, and heated further in the small holes in the upper cone as it rose rapidly throughout the undercity.
This air and heat circulation was important, but it was just a byproduct of the reaction. Or, I should say, reactor.
The spells involved were mostly containment, conversion, and conduction spells. Huge amounts of energy were produced in there, which was a good thing; the conversion spells turned most of it into that vital energy, that vitality, the mountain needed to sustain its mineral life. Not a soul, nothing like that; but energy of movement, of quickening—the stuff that makes you feel alive and energetic, bright-eyed and alert, bushy-tailed and ready to go. That stuff.
Again, that conversion isn’t something wizards can do. Even magicians might not be able to do it; I don’t think they have spells for it. It’s like telling someone to mix their paints to produce a color they can’t even see. They would have to put on special goggles just to see that color.
I can see it, and I can use it. That’s one reason I’m pretty sure I did this.
Anyway, the conversion from electromagnetic to vital energy is also woefully wasteful; it hurt to see just how much energy was wasted. I suspect most of that wastage is because I’ve never sat down and worked with that spell to refine it. It seems to relate to the quantities involved; the more you try to convert at once, the less efficient it is. In tiny amounts, my spell works very well. It just doesn’t scale up worth a damn. Maybe there’s a better way to do it, and I haven’t taken the time to examine the fundamental principles involved.
This thing, on the other hand, represented a workaround and a way to handle the enormous output. Instead of one conversion spell enchantment, there were hundreds, all placed concentrically around the reactor spells, absorbing almost everything. What penetrated the first, innermost converter-globe hit the second, and what got past that hit the third, and so on. This vital energy, along with leftover heat, was then transferred into the cones and the floor, moving vitality through the mountain as through a silicate circulatory system.
Even after all those hundreds of layers of absorption and conversion, there was still an enormous amount of energy. The outermost spells acted as a wavelength shifters, moving all the high and low-frequency stuff toward the infrared range, the better to heat the surrounding rock and air—which was a great relief to me; I have no desire to find out what ionizing radiation does to vampire tissue.
Inside the rock, itself, lines of magical conduction spread the heat evenly through the cones and the middle section, including the holes, causing the flow of air to pick up much more heat than it normally would. Which, incidentally, effectively cooled this central region. Without them, the point of reaction would first melt, then boil the stone.
These “leftovers,” after the transformation of electromagnetic energy into vital essence, still produced more than enough heat to act as the central furnace for an entire city.
And the white light? That shining, intolerable pinpoint of light? That was the miniscule remnant, even after all that absorption, conduction, and conversion. That unholy blaze of eye-searing, blinding radiance was the leakage. That was the waste product. That was the fraction of a percent of the total output that wasn’t worth the effort to convert into something useful.
In the center of all that energy absorption and conversion, the heart of the mountain, that infinitesimal pinprick of unbearable light… that was a matter breakdown. The spells in there defined a microscopic locus of space smaller than a pinprick, narrower than a hair, narrower than a single cell. Magical walls of force formed channels, allowing only a microscopic stream of superheated air to rise through the central portion.
Think of an almost-blocked funnel, sucking in a stream of air all around the outer edge, narrowing to a point where only the faintest stream of gas might squeeze through. In that miniscule area, everything in any atom, every minute particle, broke down into wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Direct conversion of matter to energy.
I looked beyond the light and the past the other spells to the heart of the reactor. A single enchantment continuously broke down the fundamental nature of the matter flowing through it. It turned mass into energy. A tiny amount of matter, to be sure, constantly fed into the locus of effect, but it was enough power, properly applied, to burn a hole in the world.
At least now I know how the mountain gets hot water. It could have hot anything, if it wanted.
The main reason I know this is my handiwork is because no one else would ever think of matter as sticky energy. It was amazingly simple and beautiful; it was so simple it scared me. If it’s that easy to unzip the fundamental fabric of matter and turn it into energy…
Oh, yes; I can mo
ve mountains. With this sort of setup, I can make mountains fly. Or disappear in enormous mushroom-shaped clouds.
This spell is dangerous. It’s not like a vitality spell—that’s my trick, and only I can do it well. But this was simpler than building a nuclear device back home, without the need for nuclear material. Any physics graduate with a machine shop and materials can build you a nuclear bomb. The hard part is getting the plutonium or uranium. This thing just needed matter. You could use lead, or gold, a bucket of water. It powers a mountain with air.
Imagine a world where anybody could construct their own, personal, nuclear weapons, as often and as many and as big as they liked. That’s what this spell was. It could be taught in half an hour, cast in a few minutes—a few seconds, if you were in a hurry—and potentially destroy the world.
Not just kill everyone on it, mind you. Destroy it. Leave an asteroid belt where a planet once swung along its orbit.
I didn’t dream this. I nightmared this.
I’m very pleased that the mountain has a heart; truly, I am. I want it to live!
And now I plan to hide the mountain’s heart, keep it a secret, and seal it off so that no one ever finds out about it. We’ll find some other way to illuminate the corridors. We’ll make candles out of dazhu fat. We’ll use torches and oil lamps by their thousands if that’s the way it has to be. But the heart of the mountain is officially a State Secret as of eighty-seven years ago. This scares me about as much as the idea of turning people into vampires and letting them loose on the world.
I got the impression that the mountain was very forthcoming with me, but also very nervous. It didn’t like showing me its naked heart, and that made me feel both very privileged and moderately safer. If it was barely willing to show me, it would never show anyone else—and I made it a point to mention this to the mountain the moment I finished fleeing that chamber.
It sealed all the doors behind me as I went back up. The doors just started merging with the rock of the walls. I knew the mountain was closing the tunnel, as well, shrinking it down to nothing, burying its heart in a mile or more of granite.
That isn’t deep enough, but I guess it will have to do.
Wait. Is there anything deep enough? The world is flat. It’s a plate. If the mountain suffers a heartbreak, will the world shatter like… well, like a dropped plate?
I invented exactly the right word: I nightmared this. Now I know how Oppie felt at Trinity.
It still didn’t solve my illumination problem, though. Aside from raw, magic-turns-to-light spells, I’ve got nothing. There’s a magician-refined light spell that’s very good at making light, but I wonder how much magic it uses. Using thousands, maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of them worries me a little, but I’m not sure why.
Still, it’s the best we’ve got. I think I’m going to go with the idea of several major light spells—variations on my line-of-light-along-the-ceiling trick. With those providing the major illumination in corridors and other public areas, we can then add some point-sources to brighten intersections and larger chambers. Maybe a few dormant light spells that only activate if it gets dark… emergency lighting? Hmm.
Cities are more complicated than I thought. They’re really machines for living in, not just collections of buildings. This is going to take some planning and work—make that “more planning and work.” All this, I apparently managed in my sleep. Now I’m awake and the puzzle I assembled in my sleep has some issues that need to be addressed.
Well, I wasn’t at my sharpest.
I’m working on it. At night, I walk through the mountain, learning more about its layout and finding my way around. What corridors need constant lighting? Which ones are more business-hours-only things?
Tort spoke with her wizards—well, my wizards. Mochara’s wizards. The wizards she helped to train—about it. She’s taught them the best lighting spell she knows, of course, but an actual enchantment is something they don’t do all that much. Now they’re practicing their enchanting skills and we’re gradually building up a stock of various objects that will shine brightly in the dark. Oil lamps, seashells, colored pebbles, one sleep mask—it might be a blindfold; either way, I suspect whoever did that one has a sense of humor—and other miscellaneous doodads we can mount in hallway niches.
I haven’t seen Thomen since I overheard the argument. I don’t know if he’s still running the guild of wizards or if Tort has taken charge of it. I’m tempted to find out, but I also don’t feel right about sticking my nose into their personal affairs. I’m supposed to be the King and keep the good of the kingdom in mind. A major player like a wizards’ guildmaster isn’t someone I can ignore, especially when he has feelings for the kingdom’s chief magician. I can rationalize it easily, but I really don’t want to.
I’m just not cut out for the Kinging business.
On a lighter note—ha, ha—we’ve confirmed that we can, in fact, make a diamond grow. Tort is, I think, legitimately impressed. I get the feeling she sometimes pretends to be more impressed or amused or whatever, just to please me, but not this time. I gave her a diamond the size of the first joint of her little finger, and she seemed impressed. I’m pleased.
It isn’t fast with the experimental spells I’m using, but it works. I’ve played with it and have a dozen slightly different techniques; those are running now. I’ll see which ones are working the fastest in another week or so. When I have a winner, I plan to enchant a box and put it on a shelf in a chimney. The smoke will provide carbon, the heat will provide binding energy, and the spell itself will catalyze crystal growth. At least, that’s how I think it works. It seems to.
This makes me wonder. Starting with a seed crystal, I can grow a diamond. If I had other examples, could I grow, say, carbon nanotubes? I don’t have any to copy, but if I can grow them, can I make carbon fiber armor? It would be a lot lighter and could be even tougher than the stuff we’re using. I don’t have details on the structure of that sort of material, but I guess I could lay out different patterns and try to grow some, see which ones stand up under stress… kind of like making molecular building blocks, I suppose.
That’s another reason to go home, at least briefly. I need reference manuals; I teach computer science and elementary physics, not chemistry and metallurgy! What alloys do I need for better swords? How do I make these alloys? Do we have to do it with magical forges, or do I just need advanced tools? By the way, how well does modern body armor stand up against medieval weapons? Are the police using knife-proof full-body armor? How about sports players? Is there martial arts armor made from modern materials that would actually stand up to sharp threats?
Speaking of threats…
In the evenings, Tort hosts us to dinner; that is, my knights, Kelvin, and I. It’s turned into a sort of informal cabinet meeting. Tort tells us about the magical goings-on, Kelvin reports on the progress of the trainees, and my personal guard individually report on their progress. It’s an almost-formal occasion. Tort dresses up for it, which made me feel that I ought to, which convinced everyone that it was required.
I’m wondering if I can alter the fashions of Karvalen just by wearing different clothes. If I started wearing a top hat, would everyone else take it as a fashion statement? I don’t really want to find out.
Dinnertime also gives me a chance to stick in my two cents about what I expect from knights. I’m drawing heavily on the Boy Scouts, King Arthur, and Virgil Samms. Torvil, Kammen, and Seldar listen intently and try to understand. Kelvin tends more to ponder what I’ve said and consider how to encourage the correct line of thinking in everyone else.
Kelvin is a leader. I’d nominate him for King if I thought I could get away with it.
Anyway, Kelvin was talking about getting a horse killed out from under himself when a wizardly type did something to it during a raid or invasion or whatever by one of the coastal cities.
“You know,” I said, “everyone in Mochara is a sort-of wizard.”
“T
rue, Sire. But that’s no help to the horse.”
I munched on something—I forget what—and considered that.
(As an aside, I bit my tongue rather frequently, at first. On the plus side, my teeth make shredding something I’m chewing very easy. I don’t have to chew nearly as much as I used to, which, statistically, should lower my chance of biting my tongue. On the other hand, sharp teeth. Biting my tongue is still painful and extremely annoying. I try not to talk with my mouth full, and not just for reasons of etiquette.)
“It should be,” I mused. “Can you deflect or disrupt a spell coming at you?”
“I can,” Seldar offered. The rest shook their heads. Tort didn’t bother to answer that.
“Maybe we need a new practice drill,” I offered. “Tort, is there something relatively simple for defensive purposes? Not just our usual blocking spell, but something that will work on, say, something that’s trying to freeze my heart?” Happened once; that’s why it sprang to mind.
“Their defensive block will already do that,” she pointed out. “It is a simplified version of Daeron’s Shield. We could call it ‘Karvalen’s Parry,’ if you like. The difficulty is in remaining alert to the magical forces so one can see the attack coming. It is difficult to focus on the material and immaterial worlds at the same time.”
“What can we do about that?”
“Use the original Daeron’s Shield, not the simplified version,” she said, seriously. “The Parry is a direct attack on the incoming spell. Daeron’s Shield takes longer to cast, but it protects the wearer by reacting violently to incoming spells.”
“How does that work?” Seldar asked.
“The power in the Shield attacks the spell as it crosses the Shield’s protective layer, disrupting it. You do not have to see it coming; the Shield simply reacts when struck. At least,” she added, “until it is struck enough times to expend all its energies.”