Stuck In Magic

by Christopher Nuttall

  As long as supplies hold out, I thought, we should be able to win.

  The spokesman greeted me when I returned to the hall. “We’ve decided to accept your offer,” he said. “If you give us the supplies, we’ll take them home.”

  “Good.” I allowed myself a moment of relief. The runaway serf community was fairly tight-knit. If they said no, the rest of the community would probably say the same. “Now, let us discuss the lay of the land.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  And so began the Phony War.

  I could not, of course, allow myself to forget that it was just a matter of time before Warlord Aldred – Warlord Asshole, as everyone was calling him now –

  resumed the offensive. I had too much to do, from training troops to little projects that might – or might not – win Rupert’s approval if he ever found out them, but the city fathers weren’t keeping themselves so busy. They seemed torn between defiance and surrender, between an awareness the citizens would no longer tolerate appeasement and a fear that trying to fight would result in utter disaster. I feared there would come a day when they revoked the triumvirate’s authority, told Rupert and Harbin to go to their rooms and sent me into exile. Again. The only thing that kept them from doing just that, from what I’d heard through Gayle, was the fear the citizens would revolt and that no amount of grovelling would save them from the warlord’s anger. His son was dead. And he knew it.

  Weeks passed, moving so quickly I could feel the warlord breathing down my neck.

  I moved from place to place, training troops, placing orders for newer and better weapons, discussing tactics with Rupert while arguing with Harbin, encouraging broadsheet writers – reporters – to write favourable stories,

  ‘composing’ songs for the barracks and taverns and recruiting runaway serfs for my long-term plans. The runaway spokesman – he finally told me his name was Boris, although I was fairly sure it was a nom de plume – worked hard to make sure I knew as much as possible about the surrounding countryside, as well as recruiting dozens of people who’d stayed behind when he’d made a break for freedom. I tried to warn him about cell structures and operational security, but the serfs already knew the concept even if they didn’t have a name for it.

  Anyone who talked to the local baron – even the village headman – was a dead man walking, the moment his peers found out. There would be no mercy.

  I – somehow – found time to start other programs. Most of my early recruits couldn’t read, not even the phonic letters the first cross-dimensional traveller had introduced. I arranged for some of the newer recruits – the ones who did know – to give lessons to the older recruits, then for the newly-taught recruits to teach their peers. I had to smile when I realised I’d effectively reinvented the Vietcong’s method of teaching their recruits to read, although I had no qualms about stealing good ideas from wherever I found them. I’d have sold my soul for a few hundred AK-47s and a handful of T-34 tanks. They’d dominate the battlefield, as long as the ammunition held out.

  Be careful what you wish for, I told myself, sharply. You might not like the people who brought them to you.

  It was my relationship – if indeed relationship was the right word – with Gayle that gave me the most headaches, although Harbin was a very close contender.

  Gayle seemed to always find a few minutes to visit me whenever I was alone, in the city palace or her family’s mansion, offering me a few useful tips on politics and insights into what the city fathers were thinking before vanishing again to avoid her brother or more distant relatives. I didn’t know what she was doing, or how much her father and brother knew of what she was doing, or anything. It was strange. I had to keep reminding myself that she was from a very different society. She might have a completely different way of thinking about things than me.

  Which is the problem with meeting people from different cultures, I reflected.

  It isn’t so easy to predict how they’ll react to well …anything.

  The other upside of my new status as a war hero, I discovered, was that it allowed me to talk to magicians as something close to an equal. Most magicians maintained a social barrier between themselves and non-magicians – they called them mundanes, which I supposed beat muggles – and rarely lowered themselves to talk to anyone, unless they were paying customers or extremely well-connected.

  It actually took some doing to convince an enchanter to talk to me, despite everything. I had the distant impression Carver and his ilk thought it didn’t matter, not to them, who won the war. They’d remain in their heaven and leave the rest of us to the seven hells.

  “It’s not easy to send a message via magic,” Carver explained, patiently. He was young for an enchanter, I’d been told, although he was probably around the same age as me. It was hard to tell with magicians. “Crystal balls require considerable effort and resources to craft, let alone emplace in the twinned locations …”

  I frowned. I’d done my best to read a handful of magical textbooks, but they’d been completely incomprehensible. I had the feeling they were trying to explain colour to a man born blind. Vast swathes of technobabble were mingled with details that made very little sense to me. I told myself it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to know the how and why. All I needed to know was how it could be put to use in my service.

  “I see, I think,” I lied. “I understand there are such things as chat parchments …”

  Carver looked irked. “You do understand how chat parchments work, don’t you?”

  “No.” I saw no point in pretending otherwise. I was fairly sure the concept had come from my mysterious counterpart – the chat parchments reminded me of cell phones, rather than anything more mystical – but I didn’t understand how they actually worked. The textbooks hadn’t even mentioned them. “Why don’t you explain it to me.”

  “It would be pointless,” Carver said. “You couldn’t even understand what I said.”

  I resisted the urge to point out he’d assumed I did understand, only a few seconds ago. “Try me.”

  Carver snorted and sat back in his chair, trying to come up with a simplistic explanation that would actually worked. I forced myself to wait, my eyes wandering around his shop. It looked like a weird cross between a standard carpenter’s workshop and something right out of Harry Potter, piles of wood, metal and mundane tools contrasting oddly with magic wands, potion jars and

  devices I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Rupert had warned me to be polite, when he’d arranged the meeting. A magician’s home was his castle. A man who entered without permission, or a visitor who acted as if he owned the place, would be lucky if he was simply kicked back onto the streets. I felt a twinge of envy, despite everything. Magic was the key to a better life, here. Even mundane-born students had a chance to make something of themselves.

  “Magical artefacts are designed to either carry a magical charge, which severely limits their lifespan, or draw their power directly from their owner,” Carver said, finally. “It’s possible to design something that draws power from background magic, stockpiling the charge within the spellwork until it is finally used up, but there are very clear limits on how much you can actually do. A trunk might last for years, perhaps even decades; a wand designed to allow the wielder to cast a handful of basic spells, even without magic of their own, won’t last very long at all.”

  He paused, considering his next words. “Magic runs through a person’s blood, which makes blood one of the most versatile and yet dangerous magical substances in the world. It is linked so closely to the donor that even non-magical blood has its uses, although most of them are linked closely to the dark arts. I could use a drop of your blood, for example, to locate you, or influence you, or simply kill you at a distance. It is different, but it can be done.”

  I shuddered. I’d seen how the locals were careful with their blood, but I’d never heard the reasoning stated so bluntly. “Is there any way to block such spells?”

  “Yes.” Carve
r smiled, suddenly. “I’ve crafted artefacts designed to protect mundanes against such attacks, although they have their limits. The blood link is hard to cut completely, particularly if the blood is stolen before the ritual is completed. It is relatively easy to stop something lethal, but a more subtle suggestion can get through even the toughest defences.”

  “I might have to buy one of those,” I commented.

  “I’ll be happy to sell you one,” Carver said. “If they don’t work, you’re welcome to come and complain to me.”

  I snorted. If he was telling the truth, if someone could kill me from a distance, I wouldn’t be around to complain. “What does this have to do with chat parchments?”

  Carver brightened. “Put simply, chat parchments are bonded to their users, who donated blood to the spell that linked the parchments into one. Once the first spell is in place, and the overall link is set up, the chat parchments draw their power from whichever user writes on them. That’s why the chat parchments are so difficult to hack, let alone block. The spells that power them are very advanced, but also very subtle. Even modified wards have trouble keeping them out. They are so closely linked to their users that they seem to be part of their users.”

  “So the spell can’t tell the difference between a chat parchment and someone’s hand,” I mused. “Why can’t I use them?”

  “Because the chat parchments draw their power from the user,” Carver said, bluntly. “And you have none.”

  I cursed under my breath. “Is there no way to send messages through chat parchments without a magician?”

  “Not easily,” Carver said. “The spellwork is very delicate. It isn’t easy to craft something that’ll carry a message, not without magicians at both ends of the link. Crystal balls are fantastically expensive because they’re so complex

  and even they have magicians to fine-tune the spellwork every so often.”

  “I see.” I’d wondered why the Allied Lands had a Pony Express-style messenger service, when they had something akin to a magical internet, but I understood now. Their ‘internet’ wasn’t anything of the sort. “How powerful do the magicians need to be to power and operate a chat parchment?”

  “Not that powerful,” Carver assured me. “A newborn magician could handle the task, if an older and more experienced magician did the hard work. You’d just need to ensure they could read and write.”

  I nodded. “And if we were to recruit a handful of newborns, could you help them set up chat parchments?”

  Carver grimaced. “You’d need to recruit the ones who didn’t get invited to a school,” he said. “And that could lead to all sorts of problems.”

  “So could an enemy army ransacking the city,” I pointed out. “Could you be sure your shop would remain untouched?”

  “My wards are strong,” Carver pointed out. “And the Compact remains in force.”

  I heard a hint of doubt in his tone. I didn’t pretend to understand the Compact

  – reading between the lines, I had a feeling that both magicians and mundanes didn’t understand it either – but it was clear the barriers between magical and mundane society were weakening rapidly. Magic was just too common, and magicians too numerous, for any form of segregation to take hold. And if the city was attacked, the magicians would be caught in the fighting too. Their wards might not stand against cannonballs and catapulted rocks.

  “I’m not asking for much,” I said. “I just need a way to coordinate my forces from a central location.”

  Carver nodded, although I wasn’t sure he understood. It wasn’t easy to command a sizable army, one so large it had to be broken into several detachments.

  Battles tended to turn into melees because the commanding officers lost control of their troops. The set-piece battle I’d fought, earlier, had only worked because the enemy force hadn’t realised it was about to ride straight into a meatgrinder. The larger army I’d been putting together, over the last few weeks, was going to be cumbersome as hell. I didn’t know how Grant and Lee had managed during the War between the States. They’d clearly had one hell of a lot of trust in their subordinates.

  They didn’t have much choice, I reminded myself. They had to trust that their juniors knew what to do.

  It took a little more arguing, and the promise of a hefty bribe, but Carver agreed to start recruiting young magicians and teaching them how to create and operate chat parchments. I made a mental note to keep an eye on them, watching for newborns who could pretend to be serfs long enough to get into the villages and send information back to us. I just hoped they’d be ready in time. Carver had made it clear the vast majority of trained magicians wouldn’t take part in the war. I found it incomprehensible, although I suspected the city fathers would be relieved. The stories of sorcerous warfare were terrifying.

  I kept working, training the raw recruits, supervising the new sergeants, silently noting who might have officer potential … and studying maps, considering the possibilities. The warlords didn’t seem to have banded together against us, although combining their forces offered them the best chance of outright victory. They hated and feared each other more than they disliked us.

  I guessed the other warlords, the ones further away, suspected the stories of our victory were grossly exaggerated. They had a point. I’d heard tales of the engagement that claimed we’d slaughtered millions. The warlords knew perfectly well those stories couldn’t possibly be true.

  And then, all of a sudden, the Phony War came to an end.

  I was asleep – of course – when the messenger arrived, summoning me to an urgent meeting with the military council. I jumped out of bed, dressed hastily and mounted my horse for the ride back to the city. The gatehouses were heavily defended – I’d urged the triumvirate to make sure the warlords didn’t have a chance to slip a small army through the gates, taking the gatehouses and bypassing the walls – but the streets beyond were quiet. The parties were over now. I wondered, as I cantered towards City Hall, if the locals were starting to think the war was over too. It wasn’t as if any of the warlords had done anything more than shake their fists and promise bloody revenge.

  “We’ve just had a message from Warlord Aldred,” Rupert said, when I joined the military triumvirate. He held out a scroll. “The message is long and flowery, but” – his lips quirked – “it basically says give me what I want or else.”

  “Bend over and take it, more like,” Harbin growled. He looked to have been roused from his beauty sleep too. I rather wished he’d been allowed to stay in his bed. Lord Winter was an amiable buffoon; Harbin was actively poisonous to everyone unlucky enough to encounter him. “His troops are finally mobilising.”

  I rolled my eyes. Warlord Aldred had – had had – a small body of trained and experienced troops, a cadre he could use to lead raw recruits drafted from the farms and villages. The battle had shattered them, killing dozens and leaving the remainder deeply pessimistic about their future. I’d heard from my spies that the warlord was having problems recruiting mercenaries to fill the gaps in his forces, let alone take the lead as he advanced towards the city. They wouldn’t be able to spend whatever he was paying them unless they survived and …

  I smiled. Mercenaries were generally realists. They knew a lost cause when they saw one.

  “Took him long enough,” I commented, lightly. “He should have been moving a great deal quicker.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Harbin said. “He doesn’t have to take the walls to beat us. If he cuts us off from the farms, we’re going to starve.”

  “Yes,” I said. It was hard to keep the surprise off my face. Harbin had veered between insane optimism and complete depression, coming up with wild schemes that would get us all killed and then deciding we were going to be killed anyway. It was the first piece of awareness he’d shown that military realities were actually a thing. “So we have to get there first.”

  I traced a line on the map. “He’ll be bringing a large body of troops towards us,” I mused,
“which means he’ll have to mass them here, at Furness. The town is close enough to the border to serve as a base and yet far away enough to give him some plausible deniability, if things go badly wrong.”

  “Or let him get his troops back to his heartlands if one of his rivals puts a knife in his back,” Rupert said, thoughtfully. The lessons I’d been giving him on long-term thinking were starting to pay off. “We’re not his only enemy.”

  Harbin looked unconvinced. “And what do you suggest we do?”

  I smiled. “We take the offensive,” I said. “He expects us to just sit still and wait to be hit. Again. It’s time we hit him first.”

  “But …” Harbin swallowed, hard. “If we lose, we lose everything.”

  “You said it yourself,” I reminded him. “If we let the bastard lay siege to us, we lose. We have to take the offensive. We punch our way into Furness, we beat his army in the field, we take the war as far as we can, right into the core of his heartland. We take his lands, tear down his castles, free his serfs and

  make it impossible for him to wage war on us – on anyone – ever again.”

  “The king will not be happy,” Lord Winter said. “If we strike outside our borders …”

  “And what,” Rupert demanded, “has the king ever done for us?”

  And, on that note, the decision was made.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Two days later, the army – two-thirds of the force I’d built up over the past few months – marched out of the city and headed into enemy territory.

  I sat on my horse, riding up and down as the men tramped down the road, pretending not to hear the grumblings from the more experienced soldiers. The last two days had been a nightmare as we’d rushed to get everything we needed, from dried meat and purified water for the troops to entire cartloads of gunpowder, ammunition and medical supplies. The local chirurgeons might be butchers, or at least staggeringly ignorant of even the basics I’d been taught in boot camp, but at least they were better than nothing. I’d spent a few days, during the Phony War, writing down everything I could remember about basic medical care. The wounded might survive and recover, if the chirurgeons actually took care of them.