Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (13 page)

“Is that how you ended up consulting with Hecate?” Cerise asked. “Your people don’t usually have much to do with foreign gods.”

“All dealings with the gods are fraught with danger, and we rarely have need to take such risks,” Irithil replied. “But you have the right of it. Cerise, you and Avilla have been customers of Nethwillin for some years now, but how much do you know about us?”

She shrugged. “You’ll trade anything to anyone, and you don’t get involved in local conflicts. Your trading network covers all of Midgard and a lot of the other worlds, and you’re neutral to pretty much everyone. You’re good fighters with strong magic, and you’re probably rich, but there aren’t very many of you. That’s about it, really. Avilla was always the one who talked to the trader when he came by, and he never tried to trick us with magic wine. I’m not real happy about that, by the way.”

“It would only have made you more agreeable,” Irithil said in a conciliatory tone. “Surely you’ll concede that one must bargain the hardest when there is the most at stake?”

“Caveat emptor works best when you’re making one-time deals,” I pointed out. “With repeat customers you’re better off building a relationship for trustworthiness.”

“An astute point, lord wizard. As we have now established that such a relationship is a possibility, allow me to get to the point.”

“By all means.”

Irithil took a sip of the wine, and sat back in his chair.

“Nethwillin conducts trade on every continent of Midgard, and in many other worlds as well. But outsiders rightly fear our arts, and it is rare indeed for any nation to allow us more than a tiny trading outpost within their territory. Certainly none would allow us to establish a proper settlement, and this has long been a source of difficulty for us. We are essentially exiles from Svartalfheim, due to certain ancient feuds, and have no homeland to call our own.”

Cerise frowned. “Aren’t you guys like the fey and light elves when it comes to kids? You don’t have very many, so you have to do everything you can to protect them?”

“You perceive the problem,” Irithil replied. “Our solution has been to establish hidden settlements in locations that are easily reached by the hidden ways our traders walk, but are very remote by more conventional means of travel. The challenges have been considerable, as such places are generally quite inhospitable. But we have managed until recently.”

“How do you grow crops?” Cerise asked. “I thought Midgard’s sun was too bright for you guys?”

Irithil nodded. “Indeed it is. Even here in Varmland, going outdoors during a summer day feels much like hiking across a desert would to you. But the sun is weaker at more northern latitudes, and we have found various means of recruiting long-term retainers to assist with the necessary labor. Unfortunately, that solution has proved to have a critical flaw.”

“Your settlements are going to be buried in ice in a few years, aren’t they?” I said.

He sighed.

“Our largest settlement is in the mountains of northern Scandinavia. The entire valley is covered in six feet of snow, and the cold is so bitter only the beasts of Jotunheim can survive outdoors for long. Our other holdings are hidden deep in the heart of Asia, and scarcely any better off.”

Yeah, that would not be a good place to retreat to. Siberian winters are bad enough under normal conditions. Add in the influence of Fimbulwinter and they’d be giving Antarctica competition. But there was still one thing that confused me.

“I’m surprised a clan with such wide-ranging contacts couldn’t negotiate a deal with some established ally.”

“Some of our negotiators are pursuing such options,” he replied. “But neither the men of the East nor the faerie lords across the sea will allow foreigners to settle on their lands, and virtually all the powers of the West are being drawn into this war. We have no desire to save our children from one threat only to see them used as spear fodder against another one. There are any number of minor tribes we might deal with, of course, but most of them can barely preserve their own lives against the onslaught of Gaea’s children.”

“I thought it was only humans they were going to war with,” I observed.

He shrugged. “Alas, goblins and trolls are not so discriminating. Perhaps this new army from Skogheim will focus on their crusade against humans, but perhaps not. We are reluctant to make assumptions.”

“Skogheim?” I asked. “Is that the name of this hidden world the ape men are coming from?”

“Ape men?” He slowly smiled. “How appropriate. Yes. Skogheim is a world far removed from the lands of humans. Gaea appropriated it for her favored children when Zeus banished them from Midgard early in his rule, and they have dwelt there ever since. We used to trade with them now and then, but that was before they began their rampage. Why?”

“I’ve been looking for a source of intelligence on them,” I explained. “No one around here seems to know anything about them, aside from a few brief mentions in ancient documents. But let’s not get off track. You’re looking for a safe place for your people to evacuate to. That’s what this island is for, so I’d think we can come to an arrangement. How many people are we talking about?”

“That will depend on the logistical situation,” he replied. “Which is the one glaring deficiency I can see in your position. The defenses you’ve built are quite formidable, and living inside this mountain of stone would be the next best thing to being back in Svartalfheim. But the humans trapped in Kozalin will quickly strip bare every source of food in the region, and smuggling provisions past them would be a challenge even with our resources.”

I smiled. “That won’t be a problem. Come, I’ve got something to show you.”

I led him downstairs and over to the agricultural complex, where we took an elevator back up into one of the levels that was currently being worked. We stepped out of the elevator into warm sunlight, with neat rows of knee-high plants stretching off all around us.

Irithil controlled his expression well, but his guards looked around in shock.

“This is quite remarkable,” he admitted.

Ilona rose from between two rows of plants, stepping out of a patch of earth I was sure had been empty a moment ago.

“Oh, dark elves,” she observed. “This could get interesting. Are they going to be staying, my lord?”

“That’s what we’re discussing,” I told her.

The guards were staring again.

“You have dryads here? Unbound dryads, at that? How did you manage such a feat?” Irithil asked.

“They picked up their groves and came looking for shelter,” I told him. “We worked out a deal. So you see, I don’t think we’ll have a problem with food supplies.”

“You have more surprises up your sleeve than I would have guessed, Adept Black. It seems that your fortress is deceptively well situated to survive this apocalypse. So, what would the presence of a hundred or so highly capable dark elves be worth to you?”

Somehow, I resisted the urge to facepalm. I had a feeling this was going to be a long talk.

To my relief no new crisis appeared the next day. Rumor had it that Brand and Prince Caspar were busy jaunting all over Europe fighting ape men and recruiting famous knights, while the Conclave’s leaders were no doubt busy putting their new power sources to use. So I finally had time to return to one of my more challenging projects.

Hovering a few feet off the ground was easy if you had enough magic. Stable, powered flight wasn’t.

Moving things around with my force magic was easy enough, but Newtonian physics still applied. If I wanted to put a spell on something to push it up hard enough to keep it in the air, I had to apply an equal amount of force pushing something else down. With the skimmers that was easy, since the ground was always close enough for my magic to reach. But at higher altitudes there was nothing for my magic to interact with but the air. A vehicle built on that principle would be like a magic helicopter, held aloft on a hurricane-force wind that would create all sorts of noise and turbulence.

That last part was a real concern, because my force magic didn’t have any inherent ability to detect which way was down. A vehicle that was being held up by magic pushing against the bottom of the hull would flip over pretty easily, and then the spell that was supposed to hold it up would just drive it into the ground. Not ideal at all.

I’d originally had the idea of using multiple lift enchantments for better stability, but even then they really needed to have some way to detect when the vehicle was tilting and adjust their thrust to compensate. That was tricky enough that there was no way I was going to pull it off quickly, so I’d decided to set it aside and make do with the skimmer effect instead. But I’d had other ideas since then.

My first flight experiment involved conjuring a simple basket of very thin iron, with a long rod tipped with a force field spell projecting from the top. When I triggered the spell a spherical force field a few inches across appeared at the end of the rod, and began to grow. That left a soft vacuum inside the force field, but my spells could easily handle a measly 14 PSI of air pressure.

Nothing happened for a minute, while the force field grew into a ball ten feet across. But as it continued to expand the breeze caught it, and the basket I was standing in shifted slightly. Then again, a little further this time.

I grinned madly as my improvised magical balloon lifted off, and rose silently into the sky.

I spent maybe an hour aloft, testing out various ideas for steering the contraption with magic. The best option seemed to be a simple tube with an adjustable force push spell on the inside, which behaved a lot like a jet engine aside from being considerably quieter. Hanging one of them off the side of the basket set it spinning madly, which nearly broke the force bubble free from its single point of connection. But once I modified the basket to connect with the force bubble at four distinct points the whole arrangement became a lot more stable, and hanging low-powered thrusters off both sides of the basket allowed me to steer.

It was slow, but not nearly as conspicuous as a normal balloon. The force field was nearly invisible, aside from the occasional faint glimmer of blue light. So even a really big model shouldn’t attract too much attention. If I patterned my designs after dirigibles I ought to be able to get some decent speed, and a lot of cargo capacity.

I landed, and went back to my new workshop to run some calculations. I hadn’t been sure how much lift I’d actually get with an arrangement like that, but based on the weight of the basket and the size of the force bubble I could now say it was somewhere in the neighborhood of one pound of lift per twenty cubic feet of force bubble. That doesn’t sound like much, until you do the math. A fifty foot bubble would easily lift several tons, and that was still on the small side compared to the big dirigibles that were built on Earth.

I’d barely started roughing out some ideas for a second prototype when Cerise caught up to me.

“You were flying!” She exclaimed as she entered my workshop.

“Yep.” I have to admit, I may have been a little smug.

“You didn’t invite me!” She went on.

I laughed. “I’m still testing out ideas, Cerise. I’m not ready to take anyone along with me yet. That thing could easily have failed while I was a thousand feet up, and my safe fall enchantment was really only designed for one person.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not helpless, Daniel. Why do you think I kept my wings?”

“Your what?”

“Oh. Um, I never actually told you, did I? Damn. Okay, well now you know. Check this out.”

She closed her eyes in concentration for a moment, and a pair of leathery wings sprouted from her back.

“Neat,” I said. “How do you do that without ripping a hole in the back of your dress?”

“Avilla figured out how to make my clothes shift with me,” she confided. “Don’t tell anyone, though. She wants to surprise Elin with it. Anyway, I can’t actually get off the ground with these but I can jump off a building and glide down just fine. So next time you’re going flying, take me with you!”

I held up my hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, you win. I know how much you want to fly, Cerise. I just want to be sure you’ll get to enjoy the experience more than once. My people learned to fly a hundred years ago, but it took an awful lot of dead inventors before we figured out how to do it safely. This shit’s a lot more dangerous than it looks.”

She huffed. “I know! Seriously, it’s the same here. Lots of wizards have died trying to fly, and even the ones who figure it out don’t do it very often. But you’re not leaving me out of this.”

I couldn’t really blame her. But I had some serious issues to solve before I could turn my little test balloon into something useful. I had real concerns about how well a lighter than air craft would handle weather, which was a big deal with the constant storms we were getting. Not that a magical helicopter would be much better, but at least it would be able to set down quickly.

Weight was another major concern. With my magical resources the most obvious choice of structural material was nickel-iron, but that had serious problems. The stuff is extremely heavy, and not nearly as strong as proper steel. Combine that with the fact that I didn’t have a degree in aircraft engineering, and I could see that I’d end up using the majority of my lifting capacity just on a hull and internal bracing. Since the whole point of this exercise was to move large numbers of people around, that was a problem.

Maybe I could just make a bigger dirigible? But that would also make it harder to maneuver, and the bigger the force bubble got the more power it would take to maintain it. If I made one big enough I’d eventually run into power issues, and I didn’t have a good feel for where the limit would be.

What I really needed was something like aluminum, but of course that was practically nonexistent in a medieval world. I vaguely remembered that it had been discovered some centuries ago, but for a long time it had been more valuable than gold just because it’s so hard to refine. Kind of ironic, considering that aluminum ores are actually pretty common.

How hard would it be to summon?

Harder than pure iron, as it turned out. But a lot easier than copper, let alone silver or gold. Apparently it was the abundance of the element that determined how hard it was to summon, not the difficulty of refining ore. Of course, I could only summon a few ounces at a time with the power feed from my amulet, and producing enough to build anything would be tedious at that rate. But I already knew how to solve that problem.

So I set up one of the empty rooms near my workshop as an aluminum factory. I enchanted a fresh power stone just for that purpose, and hooked it up to a factory enchantment designed to use its whole energy output to conjure up ingots of aluminum. A little tinkering with chutes and force magic ensured that the ingots would end up in a large bin, and the factory would shut down if it overflowed.

It worked out even better than I’d hoped. The setup produced about a hundred pounds of aluminum per minute, which was far more than I was likely to need. That success motivated me to spend a couple of hours making a gold factory tied to the same power stone, and give it a test run.

Gold is a lot rarer than aluminum, and the results were disappointing at first glance. Tiny grains and flecks of gold formed in the summoning compartment, and trickled down the chute into the bin. Just a few grams per minute, if that.

But a few grams of gold is real money. I left it running overnight, and when I checked back in the morning the bin held a couple of pounds of gold. Yeah, just one gold factory would make enough money to fund my whole operation. At least, as long as I didn’t conjure enough of it to inflate its value away.

That was one load off my mind.

My second prototype was about the size and shape of one of the armored skimmers. I built it out of aluminum, with a much thinner hull than the armored vehicles and no turret. Four short rods projected from the top, bearing enchantments that would create a force bubble to provided lift. It also had the same levitation and movement enchantments as a skimmer, in order to cushion landings and allow it to maneuver on the ground when the force bubble was collapsed. For propulsion in the air I mounted two force thrusters on pylons along the sides, controlled by a couple of levers.

Cerise was positively gleeful when she joined me for a test flight the morning after I finished it. I took us out over the river and a couple of miles upstream, beyond easy reach of anyone who might be watching my island from the city. Then I took hold of the lever that controlled the lift cell, and slowly eased it up. A translucent force bubble formed overhead, barely visible through the panels of clear quartz I’d positioned directly above the pilot and copilot seats. For a long moment nothing visible happened, and Cerise started to fidget in her seat.

Then the river started to fall away below us. Cerise jumped up, and peered out the window with a wide grin.

“Awesome!” She declared. “This thing is so smooth, you can hardly feel it move.”

We watched the ground fall away below us. When we’d risen a few hundred feet I eased off on the lift, and found myself wishing I had an altimeter.

“Do we have to have a windshield?” Cerise asked. “It would be great to feel the wind on my face.”

“We do if we’re going to carry a compartment full of people in this thing,” I replied. “Remember how nervous the refugees were when I made that hover-barge to carry us all to Lanrest? That was only a couple of feet off the ground. If I made something like this open to the surrounding air even our own troops would probably panic.”

“I guess,” she grumbled.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” I told her. “Once I’m sure I know what I’m doing I’ll make something fun for you. Maybe a flying version of your bike? Or better yet, I bet we can figure out a way to give you enough lift to fly using your wings.”

“That would be awesome,” she agreed, mollified for now. “How does this thing work, anyway? I don’t see a spell holding us up.”

“It works just like a boat. You know why ships float, right? A block of wood weighs less than the same amount of water, so it floats on top of it?”

“Ooh, natural philosophy. Yes, I read my Archimedes. But what does that have to do with anything?”

“Air has weight too,” I told her. “Not very much, obviously, but a little. That’s why a strong wind can push things around, just like a strong current in a river.”

She gave the force bubble above us a speculative look. “What’s inside that?”

I grinned. “Nothing. I start out with a tiny little force bubble, and make it grow without letting any more air into the space inside. So how much does that giant force ball weigh?”

“Nothing?” She ventured.

“Close enough,” I agreed. “And how much would the same amount of air weigh?”

She looked around at the bare metal walls of the cabin, and chewed her lip thoughtfully. “About the same as this flying skimmer thing?”

“Exactly. It’s called an airship, by the way. Because it works like a regular ship, only in air instead of water.”

She mulled that over for a moment, and looked out the window again. “Is there a top of the air, like there’s a top of the sea?”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. “Yeah, actually there is. But we don’t want to go that high. The higher you go the thinner the air is, and it gets too thin for humans to breath long before you reach the edge of the atmosphere. Why?”

“We’re still rising,” she pointed out.

“Oh, crap.”

Achieving neutral buoyancy was a lot harder than I’d expected. We drifted gradually up and down through the air for the rest of the morning, while I experimented with the controls. The thrusters could move my prototype at a pretty decent clip despite the drag of the lift cell above us, but the steering was sluggish at best. I rearranged the control panel several times, looking for an arrangement that was easy to use, and fiddled repeatedly with the placement of the thrusters.

Cerise eagerly tried out the controls when I gave her the chance, and before long she was piloting the prototype better than I could. Considering that she’d presumably never heard about things like updrafts that surprised me.

“I can sort of feel what the wind around us is doing,” she explained when I asked. “It’s part of the magic I took from that dragon. Good thing, too, because this thing is really sluggish. I don’t suppose that’s something you can fix?”