by Garon Whited
“All right. Kammen? Thomen is dead—thoroughly and definitely dead, right?”
“Yes.”
I admit I was less than happy about it. I wanted to quiz Thomen about his activities before I killed him. I’ve been trying so hard to give him the benefit of the doubt and come up with ways to explain his actions, but underneath it all, I’ve been looking forward to ripping him to pieces with my bare hands. I didn’t realize how much I was looking forward to it until Kammen reported Thomen’s demise.
I had a really weird feeling of hope. I hoped Johann was alive and well and staying that way, because I wanted to kill him. Contradictory and strange. It was an interesting sensation.
“We’ll give Carrillon a couple of days to sort out,” I decided. “Like I said, from the description of Thomen’s activities, whatever he was doing to Lissette needed a lot of maintenance and supervision. Call someone in Carrillon and keep abreast of the situation.”
“I’ve got someone in mind, Sire.”
“Good man. Seldar, do you recall telling people I’d want my armor?”
“Yes, Sire. An insurrection is taking place in your city. You will want to put it down.” He smiled, perhaps a trifle ruefully. “I would stop you if I could, but I feel such efforts would be wasted. But you have demonstrated remarkable self-control and a kingly aspect in your choice of strategy, Wise One.”
“Oh, I don’t know. What I want to do is gallop down there, bash through everything I see, and let Bronze trample Lotar until he’s a greasy sizzle under her hooves.”
“I thought as much.”
“But it’s not what I’m going to do. Lotar has already tried to turn some of his own sub-priests into martyrs for his cause. I don’t want him winding up as a martyr and inspiring people to do the same.”
“I have your instructions and have made all the arrangements, Sire. You need not concern yourself with this matter, I assure you.”
Kammen looked surprised.
“Wait. You’re not going to go crashing through everything and burn it all?” he asked.
“No, I’m not. Seldar has most of the plan sorted out already.”
“Most of it?” Seldar asked, suspiciously.
“What is the plan?” Kammen asked.
“Same as before, but I’m going to eradicate their mobile walls before we really start to squeeze. Without them, they’ll think twice about trying to advance. Then we’re going to move in, house by house, block by block, and take back the city. Anyone who throws down arms and surrenders is to be taken captive and sorted out in the Hall of Justice.”
“What if they don’t surrender?”
“What do we usually do when faced with armed opponents who won’t back down?”
“Kill them,” Kammen said, without hesitation. Seldar gave him a dirty look, but nodded.
“Then kill the ones you have to, capture the ones you can. Remember, I want people to see you making the attempt to subdue and capture people. I want our side shouting about how those who surrender will not be harmed. I do not want wholesale slaughter. This isn’t a war, it’s a… a police action. Every one of them who dies for the greater glory of their holy cause is a martyr, and we want to minimize that.
“When we have them, we’ll try them for crimes against the kingdom and sort out the ones who instigated it from the ones who only followed orders. Then we’ll imprison the ringleaders and find lesser punishments based on individual culpability. Now, Kammen, do you feel up to smashing a mobile wall?”
“Any day, any night, any where.”
“Good, because I feel like blowing some stuff up. Let’s sort out our assaults. And have someone find my bow.”
Saturday, February 28th
Luckily, the Demon King didn’t care to shoot anyone; my composite-metal bow was still in Karvalen. I twanged the bowstring cable a few times and liked the high-pitched note. Very nice.
Most of last night was an exercise in preparation. Seldar set up assaults. Kammen went to bed. Well, he’d had a busy day dodging guards. I put spells on arrows.
I’ve noted this before and I’ll probably note it again: It’s a pain to put a lot of spells on anything. You can pour arrowheads from a mold, have apprentices carve shafts, send kids to pluck feathers for fletching, and so on. Arrows themselves can be produced by the hundreds or thousands. But it takes one person, focused intently, to craft one spell at a time. Depending on the spell, it may take two or three or thirty people, all tied up and focused on a single project, to produce one spell.
Mass production it ain’t.
Although, sitting there, putting spell after spell on arrow after arrow, it did occur to me I might be able to partly industrialize the process. If all you want is the same spell on the same object every time, it might be possible to enchant a sort of meta-spell. A spell to build a spell, if you like. Stick an arrow in the Enchanted Quiver of Magic and wait until it goes ding! Then take it out and put another one in. The power requirements would be prohibitive—it would have to supply its own enchantment as well as put power in the spell it cast. Maybe with a monitoring gauge of some sort, it could take in an arrow, cast the spell on it, keep putting power in over time until it was fully charged—or charged to the required level—then actually make some sort of light and sound to let you know it was done. It might only work for one arrow an hour, but it could be left without supervision between changes and would require no real skill in the operator…
Later. Someday. Always someday.
I did take a bit of a break from arrow manufacture to remove some crystals—quartz, I think—from the wall of the gate room. The mountain grew them for me; it seemed impolite to let them sit there. Since I already had a new gate spell set up, it wasn’t too hard to wire them in, so to speak, as power containers.
Looking at the quartz and the diamonds, side by side, I discovered something. Putting a power matrix in each of them was an identical process. Oh, there were crystalline differences, but those didn’t matter too much. The spell for storing power in a crystal varies a little to take into account the type of crystal, but all it does is resonate properly with the lattice. All that really mattered was the regularity of the structure. As far as I could tell, they held the same amount of power.
Well. That’s good news. I don’t need ultra-valuable diamonds for magical batteries; I can use cheaper crystals. Not that it seems to matter much to the mountain, but I presume quartz is easier for it to… does it “make” crystals? Or does it move crystals from elsewhere in its structure? One more thing I’d like to know and probably never will. Geological biology is strange.
So I went back to putting spells on arrows.
Bronze and I went down to town before the dawn. I hid from the sunrise in a handy building, sweating in my armor. I had my helmet off so the cleaning spell had somewhere to move the goo.
As a note, never do this. Imagine a hard day’s work of shoveling out a chicken house. Now imagine the stink of it crawling out over your collar before crawling away. On second thought, don’t imagine it. It’s disgusting.
Once the day officially broke, Kammen and I did some breakage of our own. On one side of the occupied area, Kammen led an assault on a mobile barricade. Oil, spells, and a monatomic-edge blade go a long way toward turning one into flaming pieces. He and his unit killed one of the machines and moved along the perimeter to the next street and the next mobile wall. I’m sure they also killed people in the process, but that’s only because they didn’t have the good sense to get out of the way.
Is it wrong of me to have no sympathy at all for anyone trying to stop a seven-foot-tall, four hundred pound, heavily armed and armored legendary warrior? I mean, if you stand in the middle of the road and wait for the truck to hit you, whose fault is it, really? Is that a reasonable way to look at it, or am I getting calluses on my soul?
Seldar kept watch over it all. He coordinated our work. Kammen got the enemy attention and drew their reserves to his side of the area. Several of our blocking units
in the middle started putting fire-arrows onto the other mobile walls. This gave an even greater impression of a full-on assault. In less than an hour, it practically emptied their troop reserves from the middle of their territory, around the buildings they used as a church and headquarters.
I wasn’t best pleased by the idea Kammen and the troops were bait. Seldar insisted they were a diversionary assault. I did my best not to argue, lest he tell me I was a bad king and to go to my room.
I would have led the direct, hand-to-hand assaults, but Seldar put his foot down again. Kammen agreed with him, the traitor. The King can be accommodated in his desire to come to grips with the enemy, but only after they’ve done everything they can to minimize the risk.
Bronze carried me along the other side of the occupied area, opposite Kammen’s assault. I fired two arrows at the wall-things. The first shot always had a magic-breaker spell on it. It acted like an explosion on a magical level, attempting to shatter the spell structure of anything nearby. They launched a lot of these from Mochara, trying to take down the shields of the ships, but the wizard-heavy navy kept reinforcing the shields. They didn’t have a dedicated corps of wizards here, so my arrows took down what little magical defense they had.
The second shot had the air-filtering spell and a delayed igniter. It pushed nitrogen away from the arrowhead in an expanding sphere, allowing pure oxygen to fill the area. This lasted for about a minute, expanding to a few yards in size, so when the igniter spell released enough stored heat to explosively turn the arrowhead into vaporized metal, everything caught fire.
It didn’t hurt that Firebrand did whatever Firebrand does with fire. From my point of view, it glared at the wall-wagons while I shot them. I’m told they actively caught fire because of Firebrand, but what do I know? I didn’t stay to watch. I just shot twice and moved on down the road to the next one until I ran out of enspelled arrows.
Tianna would have been so proud of me. She could probably see the smoke from Mochara, assuming she wasn’t too busy helping put the place back in order.
With that out of the way, Seldar coordinated our withdrawal behind our lines. Captives of several sorts were taken to the Hall of Justice. We continued preparations to push forward and take a whole row of city blocks—later, when the fires and wreckage were less of a problem.
Given the number of these street-blocking wagons, I resolved to have a word with Rendal, the Commander of the Guards. They should take note of this sort of thing. A lot of the contraptions were wagons with the equivalent of barn doors nailed on the front, but at least a dozen were more professionally built. I wouldn’t think it easy to hide something like them, especially not in those numbers. Someone should have noticed and said something.
Then again, if the people doing the noticing are all paid-up members in good standing of the Church of Light… Yeah, more weight just got piled onto Seldar’s idea about Lotar trying to counter civic duty with religion. And Karvalen isn’t exactly fully occupied, even now. It might be possible to find a few sizable buildings for use as workshops or garages, especially as one goes farther away from the more heavily-populated southwestern quarter.
Fine. Maybe Rendal wasn’t in hot water over this. He was still going to get a lecture.
I had one more thing to do while we waited for the wreckage to finish burning. Bronze took me back up to the palace level and the courtyard. From there, I could see over the city and had a direct line of sight to the occupied area.
A couple of my spells are for playing music. The first version vibrates an object like a speaker cone; the more refined version directly affects the air. Admittedly, it only plays music as well as I remember the music, but for a favorite song, that’s pretty darn realistic. But it doesn’t take a lot of energy to make sound. It’s a cheap spell, in that sense, but more than a little complicated. There are all sorts of places in the spell where it can be tweaked like an equalizer to get the sound quality you want.
On the other hand, if you want to use it as a bullhorn and don’t care about things like concert-hall acoustics, it’s easier than you’d think.
I plunked megaphone arrows into the rooftops, scattering them around the occupied area. Naturally, I cheated and used spells for guidance. My archery wasn’t up to it, especially not at that range. Still, wherever one hit, it played its announcement to everything within a hundred yards. Anyone who surrendered would be judged by the Lady of Mercy. Anyone who fought and survived would be brought before the Lord of Justice—and then me.
Propaganda is a weapon against the enemy’s will to fight. I read that somewhere.
With that done, I turned the war over to Seldar and Kammen while I called Mochara. Torvil answered the mirror.
“Greetings, Sire.”
“Hello, Torvil. How goes the day?”
“Sire, Mochara is secure. We also have quite a number of prisoners.”
“Good. March them up here. I want a word with them,” I told him. He looked troubled.
“Sire?”
“I have a tribunal—or quadunal, or pentunal, or something—to interview them and pass judgment. They can be let go, imprisoned, sent to me, all sorts of options. The ones who make it to me will stand there while I look at their souls. If they’re traitorous scum, I’ll hand them to the Lord of Justice. If they’re not, they’ll be told not to do whatever it was again and released.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Good. Thank you, Sire.”
“I’m not the Demon King,” I reminded him. “I only look like him.”
“The resemblance is uncanny,” Torvil admitted.
“Everyone thinks they’re funny,” I complained. “Do they need you there?”
“No… no, I wouldn’t think so. Shall I return?”
“Seldar and Kammen would like your help. I’d like to see my granddaughter, too.”
“I will make arrangements. By gate? Or Bronze?”
“Ask Tianna.”
“If Your Majesty permits, I would be very much pleased if Bronze would consent to carry me.”
“If Tianna and Bronze agree,” I allowed. Torvil might actually look good on Bronze—proportional, anyway. He and Kammen were the only people huge enough. Seldar is pretty big, but not the giant-class size of the other two. We signed off and I went through my mental to-do list. What else? Ah, yes.
I checked in with Diogenes and wished for my skinphone. Whatever became of it? I wore it on my left wrist, so the ghostly electrical bolt didn’t fry it. Was it in the palace in Carrillon? Or did Johann remove it in the process of stripping me naked and chaining me up? Probably the latter. It wasn’t magical and it didn’t look valuable, so no one here would think to salvage it.
After a little work with a variation on my music-making spell, Diogenes had an independent voice. The spell connected to the vitality containment spell in the hard drive so he could interface with it directly instead of going through some sort of translation in the processor crystal. A reversed version turned sound into impulses so he could hear, as well. He developed a driver for it remarkably quickly.
Once he could speak, he told me he was confident about interfacing with the quantum computer core when the translation/interface spell expired.
“It also has considerable storage capacity,” he informed me. “If you wish to transfer my programs to the crystal, the solid-state drive will no longer be necessary.”
“First get everything running without a translation matrix, then we’ll see about streamlining.”
“Of course, Sire.”
“Good. I—wait a minute! ‘Sire’? Who have you been talking to?” I demanded.
“Fireband.”
I looked at the dragon’s-head hilt. It tried to look innocent and failed spectacularly.
“We’re going to discuss this,” I told it.
What? He didn’t know where he was or what was going on. I was supposed to leave him in the dark?
“You should have asked.”
You’re just upset because someon
e else is treating you like their king.
“Diogenes?”
“Yes, Your Majesty?”
“Please address me in an informal fashion.”
“You got it, jefe.”
“That’ll do for now.”
What’s a “jefe”? Firebrand wanted to know.
“It’s Spanish. I think it means ‘boss’.”
Hey!
“You brought this on yourself.”
Firebrand grumbled but subsided. I went to talk to Bronze about taxi service. She was okay with it. It meant getting out and running at full speed—of course she was okay with it. Besides, Tianna was involved. Carrying Torvil wasn’t high on her list of things to do, but letting Tianna ride was simply a given.
Now, about the crown…
Sunday, February 29th
The calendar between Earth and Rethven is a little wacky. The year has a different number of days and months, and they don’t use a seven-day week. I’m ignoring all of it in the interests of keeping myself from getting screwed up by having to convert things from calendar to calendar. I think it’s time for a leap year, so I’m using one.
Of course, I’ve assigned an arbitrary Gregorian calendar date to the Rethven year, so my consistency may be questionable.
Seldar isn’t happy about being stuck in the hall of mirrors all the time. The mountain is shifting around, slowly, making it more of an amphitheater arrangement centered on the sand table. Rings of seats for mirror operators will eventually surround it. The place is starting to look like a command center, but it has a long way to go.
Seldar’s big objection wasn’t the lack of sleep—an adjoining chamber allowed him to nap and still be available if someone screamed for him. It wasn’t the meals served while he watched the real-time movements on the sand table. It wasn’t even the constant stream of “Sir? What do you want done about…”
No, his problem was Kammen was down on the front lines while he was stuck in the Combat Information Center, responsible for how our forces deployed, what objectives they took, when they moved, who they attacked, all that. I think he was regretting his decision to quit the King’s Guard and join the clergy. If he’d remained, he might be seven feet tall and built like an armor-coated brick, too—and down where he could knock heads.