Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (19 page)

“The location of Yinthalos isn’t marked, of course,” he told me. “Occasionally one of these maps will be lost somehow, and we don’t want our enemies to find us easily. Ah, our maps depict the world based on measured distance rather than travel time…”

“Didn’t have to tell me that,” I said. “I’ve seen both kinds, and I recognize the shape of the coastlines. You said you were hidden in a mountain valley? Just how far north do we have to go, anyway?”

He took another look at the map, carefully checking landmarks, and slowly ran his finger up the line of mountains that form the spine of the Scandinavian Peninsula. And up. And further up. It finally came to rest most of the way up the Norwegian coast, well past the northernmost of the string of lakes that took the place of the Baltic Sea in this world.

“Eleven hundred miles?” I said grimly. “Fuck me. Hecate, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

The flight over Varmland was a sobering reminder of just how few people had survived the first month of Fimbulwinter.

The landscape was dotted with the remains of abandoned villages. Half of them had been burned by goblin raiders before the landscape was completely choked in snow, and the creatures seemed to be systematically demolishing the rest. Roadside inns and isolated farmhouses had likewise been overrun, and from a thousand feet up the emptiness of the landscape was almost eerie.

Here and there a town or castle still flew the arms of some local noble. Most of them were packed with refugees, and I wondered how long they could survive. A wise lord would have siege stores for at least a few months, but after that things would get dicey. The snow on the ground was deep enough to make travel on foot nearly impossible for humans, especially since the people here didn’t seem to use snowshoes.

On the good side, goblin activity also seemed to be declining. The little monsters could travel across snow a lot more easily than men, and the trolls that usually accompanied them had enough magical strength to fight their way through snowdrifts. But they weren’t immune to the cold, and with conditions slowly worsening a lot of them had apparently decided to go back to wherever they’d come from. That, or they’d joined up with the andregi.

We passed within sight of one army on our way north. A horde of tens of thousands of andregi was camped on the ruins of some hapless town, systematically tearing down the remaining buildings. I was tempted to make a few bombing passes over them, but the sight of winged creatures circling in the sky above the camp gave me second thoughts. The
Intrepid
really wasn’t designed for aerial combat, and killing a few hundred ape men wouldn’t accomplish much anyway. So instead I gave them a wide berth.

Cerise and I gave our companions a crash course in how to operate the
Intrepid
as we flew, just in case. As expected Elin quickly got the hang of the controls, although she lacked Cerise’s instinctive understanding of flight. Daria and Embla were intrigued but clueless, and I concluded that it would take a lot of practice before I’d be able to trust either of them with the controls.

To my surprise, Irithil took to it almost as easily as Cerise had.

“This is quite an interesting control scheme,” he commented as he adroitly guided the ship through a climbing turn. “Most wizards would have bound a spirit into the ship so that crewmen could give it orders, or else relied on pure intent control. This system of levers reminds me of the mechanical devices that the engineers of Rome used to build.”

“Well, yes,” I replied. “Intent control is almost as tricky to use as it is to enchant, so I tend to rely on mechanical controls for everything except my personal devices. I’ve made a lot of weapons that can be used by anyone with a minimal amount of training, although I may have been a little overoptimistic with the airship. I’d like to be able to train some crewmen to operate it so I can do other things, but it’s looking like that would take a long training program.”

“Perhaps that could be my clan’s contribution to our mutual defense, then?” He suggested. “All of us have at least a little talent with magic, and air is one of our most common affinities. I expect half the clan could learn to fly this vessel competently with a few hours of practice.”

“That would be helpful. I get the feeling I wouldn’t have to explain the hazards of flight to you the way I would with human commoners either.”

He gave the control panel a thoughtful look, and made a slight adjustment to the lift control. “Declining pressure and temperature at higher altitudes, layers of varying wind and weather, thunderstorms, ground fog and the treacherous nature of twilight landings. Yes, anyone who has worked with birds will be familiar with these things. I will, however, admit to being a bit mystified at what holds this craft aloft. Am I correct in thinking that the field of magic above us changes in size?”

That led to an explanation of atmospheric buoyancy that seemed to impress him, although I noted that he followed along easily enough. The wolfen girls obviously had no idea what I was talking about, and weren’t really interested anyway. Embla was too busy looking down at the ground passing by beneath us, and Daria seemed to be writing off the whole thing as wizard’s business.

Elin had figured it out all on her own a couple of days ago, the first time she saw one of my prototypes in action. Apparently some ancient Greek philosopher had actually written about the idea of a balloon, but no one had ever managed to make the idea practical.

Now she looked up from the book she’d brought with her to ask a question. “Daniel? How tightly woven are the barrier spells that make up the ship’s lift cells? Are they truly impenetrable, or will air slowly leak through them?”

I frowned. “You know, I haven’t actually had a chance to test that. We might get some leakage, especially if something solid hits the lift cells. Not enough to be dangerous, but we could gradually lose lift on a long flight like this. We’d all better keep an eye on that, just in case.”

“That’s easy to fix, right?” Cerise asked. “We’d just have to land and reform the lift cells.”

“Yeah, but to do that we need terrain that’s flat enough to land on and isn’t overrun with monsters. It shouldn’t be an issue as long as we’re paying attention, but it’s one more complication to keep an eye on.”

We conferred a little longer, until I felt comfortable that Cerise and Irithil were going to be able to fly the ship and navigate without my help. Then I excused myself, and went back to the hold to do some enchantment.

If we were going to fend off an army of frost monsters well enough to rescue a bunch of noncombatants we needed fire, and lots of it. So my first order of business was creating a factory enchantment for flamers. My men had gotten a lot of use out of the original batch of those weapons, but I’d never gotten around to designing a mass production version.

I was planning to make a lot of these things, so having them be self-powered wasn’t an option. But tying everything to a central power stone could also be problematic if I was going to have airships flying people around, so I decided to try a different approach. Flamers were a close combat weapon, and that kind of fighting rarely lasts more than a few minutes at a time. So I designed an enchantment that would collect and store ambient mana, with an internal battery that could hold enough power to run the flamer for twenty minutes or so.

Twenty minutes of continuous fire is a heck of a lot of ammunition for any weapon, so that should be more than enough. The recharge rate would be a little slow, maybe ten minutes of idle time for every minute of fire, and having too many of them in close proximity would slow that down further. But they’d start out being fully charged up by the factory, and once we got all the refugees on board it wouldn’t matter if it took a few hours for all the flamers to be ready for another battle.

Mindful of recent experience with my guns, I also put a force bayonet on the end of the weapon to deal with the occasional enemy that was willing to run through fire to get at you. I was tempted to add some more controls to adjust the intensity of the flame, and maybe try to get a longer range out of this model. But no, it was better to keep things simple. I needed a weapon any idiot could pick up and use with minimal instructions, not a complex work of art that would take months of training to master.

I was interrupted around sunset when the crew decided that the cargo hold was the only place for them to lay out their bedrolls. I arranged to have them take turns standing watches just in case something tried to sneak up on us, but letting them take turns getting some sleep seemed like a reasonable plan. The hold would be pretty dark with just the emergency lights marking the doors and control panel, but I didn’t need a lot of light for my work.

I briefly contemplated putting up some kind of partition, but anything I could make would end up being heavier than I’d like. Too bad I couldn’t conjure up curtains or something. In the end I decided it wasn’t worth spending time on, and just made a really dim light for my work area. Good soldiers can sleep through anything, so it wasn’t likely to cause them any problems.

It was some hours later when I finally had a design I was happy with. I turned on the flamer factory, watched the first couple of flamers roll out of it into the bin I’d set up to hold them, and nodded in satisfaction.

“Finished?” Elin asked.

I looked up to find that she was perched on a little stool nearby, with a book in her lap and a dim ball of light floating in the air above her hand.

“Finished with the flamer factory,” I said. “But I’ll need more than that before I feel ready for this fight. You didn’t go to bed?”

“Daria and Embla were flirting with Irithil’s bodyguard for half the evening,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “I didn’t want to be in the loft if they succeed in luring him up there, and then I got interested in my book. Besides, I wanted to speak with you about our preparations. I don’t expect that my magic will be of much use against wraiths, and a frost giant might be a bit much for me.”

“I don’t want you involved in the fighting,” I said firmly.

“Good,” she agreed. “I want nothing to do with it. But things happen in battle. Trying to keep me out of danger didn’t work out very well last time, and I’d prefer not to face that sort of situation again. Is there anything we can do to prepare for the unexpected?”

I thought about it. “Carry one of the flamers, for starters. That will deal with any wraiths that get too close. As for the giants… hmm. You got the hang of managing the enchantments on your amulet pretty quick. Come sit with me, and let’s see if we can work something out.”

She carefully put the book away and dismissed her light, and then settled herself into my lap with a shy little smile. For a moment I just hugged her, enjoying the feel of her deceptively delicate-seeming body in my arms. Too bad we didn’t have more privacy. But she was right, I needed to do something to give her better protections if she was going to be involved in an adventure like this.

Maybe a force field? But I’d need something to put it on, and she already had an amulet. Impulsively, I took a gold coin out of my belt pouch and shaped it into a ring sized for her finger.

Her breath caught. “Daniel? Is that for me? I mean, I know we’re practically… but I wasn’t expecting… you don’t have to…”

I silenced her nervous stammering with a finger to her lips. “I love you, Elin. Give me your hand.”

She held her hand up, wordlessly. I slipped the ring onto her finger, and kissed it.

“A promise,” I said. “We’re going to make it through this thing together, and one of these days we’re going to have a proper wedding.”

“Wedding?” She squeaked. “Me? B-but, what about Tina, and Cerise?”

“Every woman deserves to have a special day,” I told her. “They’ll get one too. But you’re the one who gets a ring tonight.”

Her shy little smile was the widest one I’d ever seen her wear. “Thank you, Daniel. I never expected something like this from you. I hope you realize I shall never take it off?”

“Yes, that was my insidious plan. Now, let’s see what we can put on it to keep you safe, shall we?”

The metal accepted the enchantment I impressed on it a lot more easily than anything else I’d worked with, and I wondered for a moment if maybe I should look into that. It had never occurred to me that it might matter what material I attached an enchantment to.

But no, that was an issue for later. I merged my magic with Elin’s, and showed her what I was doing as I wove a force field enchantment much like the one on my own amulet. That was the easy part. Then I started in on an intent control mechanism to let Elin control the force field, since she couldn’t do it directly with sorcery the way I did.

“Do you think this will work?” I asked as I showed her the general layout of the control scheme I was considering.

“It’s a very odd arrangement. I think I see what you’re getting at, but we don’t need to invent a whole new paradigm. Here, let me show you how a normal wizard would do that.”

She couldn’t just throw a lasting enchantment together on the fly the way I could, but she could weave a temporary spell that I could then use as a template. We spent quite a while experimenting with it, our magic merging and separating again at intervals as we worked.

By the time we finished the intimacy of shared magic was taking its toll on both of us. I couldn’t resist kissing her when we finally came up for air. Her tongue dueled eagerly with mine for long moments, before she suddenly remembered where we were. Then she pulled away, flushed with mingled embarrassment and arousal. I pulled her back into my arms, and held her close while we both struggled to get ourselves under control.

“I should test it,” she observed, groping for a distraction.

“Go ahead,” I replied.

Elin activated the ring with a thought, and shaped the force field it projected into a simple dome enclosing us both. Then it contracted into a cylinder barely big enough to hold us, and she tried making openings of various shapes and sizes. Her control was a little rough, but as far as I could see that was just a matter of practice.

“Looks like you’ve got it,” I murmured in her ear.

She shivered, and ran her hand over my chest. “Yes. This is marvelous, Daniel. How strong is it?”