Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (40 page)

He walked over to the exposed face of the wall, and laid his hand on it. His eyes closed in concentration for a moment. Then he nodded approvingly, and turned to face me.

“That enchantment would resist even the greatest of blows. No beast is going to break those walls, and every time I look you’ve raised another ward. You’ve clearly been planning this move for a long time, Daniel. I think your citadel will actually stand, as long as the enemy makes no great effort to strike at you.”

“That’s my intention,” I replied. “Where are you going with this?”

“I’m just letting you know I’m not going to stop you, Daniel. Recruit a few hundred men, if you need them. We can spare that many from Valhalla, and the ones who would join you won’t be the best warriors anyway. Take what farmers and craftsmen you need, and complete your citadel. The prince is already loath to ask you for more miracles, so I expect you’ll have a week or more to work undisturbed.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ here.”

He smiled. “Yes, but it isn’t an onerous one. Take in more women. At least two for every man. Three or four if you can feed them. By the time we kill the mad god and his allies there will be few men left in Europe. Repopulating will be an enormous project, and saving a few thousand extra women could make a difference.”

“Do you really think there will be enough Aesir left to end the ice age?” I asked.

“Who can say? Perhaps we are all doomed, and the monsters will be cracking our bones one day soon. Perhaps the prophecy will not be denied, and all the gods and monsters will fall. Or perhaps our victory will be a pyrrhic one, leaving a scant few survivors to eke out a pathetic existence among the ruins of a lost world.

“But I chose to have faith in the Allfather’s wisdom, and in the strong sword arms of my brothers. I believe we will overcome this trial, put down the monsters that howl for our blood, and go on to build a new age of glory for Asgard.

“And if I am wrong? Well, what does it matter? There will be no one left to tell me so.”

Gates are traditionally a weak spot in the defenses of a castle. Good designs compensate for that with various defensive measures, and if you have enough of them the gates can actually become harder to attack than the walls. I had no intention of leaving weak spots in the defenses that were going to protect my family, so of course I set out to achieve that.

The gatehouse that replaced the old keep was a blocky structure a hundred and forty feet on a side, and the whole thing was a solid mass of iron beams and stone up to the level above the gates. The entryway was a tunnel through that mass, twenty feet wide and twenty feet tall. I figured that was big enough for anything we were ever likely to move, and small enough that the really huge monsters wouldn’t fit through it.

When we were under serious attack the mouth of the tunnel would be filled by a block of conjured stone twenty feet thick. The enchantment that conjured and banished the plug was on an iron spike driven into the roof of the tunnel, where it was unlikely to be noticed by anyone passing by. The plug would just be normal stone, of course, so it wouldn’t be terribly resistant to magic. But it only took a few minutes to banish and re-conjure it, so trying to break through with siege engines would be an exercise in futility.

Behind that was a portcullis made of heavy nickel-iron bars, with a good structural reinforcement spell and an enchantment that would form a force field to protect it when it was down. The whole thing weighed several tons, enough that I had to add an enchantment to raise it out of the way instead of relying on the usual winch arrangement. But the purpose of a portcullis is to give you a solid barrier you can close quickly to block a surprise attack, and I figured it would serve that purpose admirably.

Behind the portcullis was the actual gate. That was even more of an engineering challenge, since there are serious mechanical problems with trying to make a door more than a few inches thick. I wanted something that could stand up to serious attack spells, and the more massive it was the easier that would be. So I ended up going with a sliding door design, instead of traditional hinges.

Of course, in this case each of the two panels was a wall of solid nickel-iron three feet thick. I made them five feet taller than the passage they blocked, set into deep grooves in the floor and ceiling. An extra ten feet of width ensured that the passage would be solidly blocked when they closed, and the edges where they met were designed to mesh together. Three giant steel latches mounted on the inner face of the left door would drop into sockets on the right door when the gates were locked, just to ensure no one could pry them apart.

With structural reinforcement spells, a force field protecting the outer surface and various wards to protect against the obvious forms of magical attack the gates were just about indestructible. Unfortunately they were also immensely heavy, to the point where moving them without magic would probably have been impossible. I had to add in a powerful force enchantment to levitate them a hair’s breadth above the surface of the stone they rested on, and move them back and forth. Even then they moved pretty slowly, and it took several minutes to open or close them.

On the good side, any attacker who got caught between the leaves of the gate when it closed was going to be crushed by four hundred tons of moving metal.

The whole set of defensive layers only took up forty feet of tunnel, which left plenty of room for the other traditional functions of a gatehouse. Twenty feet back from the gates I put in a large mustering hall, forty feet wide and sixty feet deep, which I figured was big enough to hold any sortie force we might want to send out during a siege. Then came another thirty-foot tunnel, with another portcullis and conjured stone block setup.

There was a little control room off of the mustering chamber, with a set of controls to operate the gates and a panic button that would drop the outer portcullis. With a heavy iron door and thick fused quartz windows looking out on the mustering area it was reasonably secure, but it would be pretty silly to make things so an attacker who managed to storm the gate could keep us from closing it. So the master controls were on the next floor up.

Traditionally the second floor of a gatehouse would have lots of murder holes positioned to let defenders drop nasty stuff on enemies attacking the gate. I put in a fair number of those looking down on the mustering chamber, but I didn’t want any openings connecting to the outer defensive layers. Too much chance of an enemy sending spells or insect swarms through them. Instead I put in a few viewports made of fused quartz, a few inches across and a couple of feet thick. Then I installed some more iron spikes in the ceiling of the entrance tunnel, bearing enchantments that would conjure lava on command.

That was a minor variation on the technique I’d already developed for summoning molten nickel-iron from the Earth’s core. I didn’t want explosions powerful enough to damage the stonework, but molten rock from the upper mantle was a lot less energetic. A little testing confirmed that I could get it to come out as a high-velocity spray rather than an explosion, and while it would thoroughly wreck anything caught in the tunnel it didn’t strike the walls with enough force to damage them. There was only a slight drain on the structural reinforcement spells, not nearly enough to create a vulnerability an enemy could exploit. Not that many enemies would be casting spells while they were being sprayed with molten lava anyway.

No army of ape men was going to fight through that to get at my girls. Even if there was a major attack while I was away, they’d be safe.

Now I just needed a way to take the fight to the enemy. But I still didn’t know if my idea would even work.

“Cerise, do you have a way to contact Hecate?” I asked over dinner that night.

“Well, duh. Of course I do, and so do you. You do remember she made you her champion, right? We just need to go over to the chapel and do a little sacrifice.”

“Hey, she didn’t exactly give me a long explanation of how she does things, remember? I figured it was something like that, I just don’t know the specifics. I’ve got some crazy ideas for what to do about the ape men, but I need to check with her before I do something this drastic.”

“This ought to be interesting,” Cerise chuckled. “Well, I guess we can do a midnight communion tonight and try to get her attention. She doesn’t always answer, but if it’s both of us… oh. Fuck, that’s kind of… uh, I guess we’re really at the top of her list right now. She says she’ll be there.”

“You are her high priestess,” Tina said knowingly. “Of course she keeps an eye on you. Daniel? Bast wants you to try not to kill all the dinosaurs.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” I assured her. “Dinosaurs are cool. Say, what’s it like talking to a goddess like that? Do you hear her voice in your head, or what?”

Tina shrugged. “It’s not like talking. I just know what she wants me to know, sometimes.”

“Same here,” Cerise confirmed. “I can’t just talk to her, and I don’t hear her voice. But she can see through my eyes and hear through my ears, and if she wants me to know something I just do.”

So, divine stalkers? That was actually kind of creepy. Not that I was going to come out and say that, of course.

Cerise insisted on actually teaching me the communication ritual instead of just casting it for me. I suppose that made sense, although the fact that it involved a blood sacrifice was a little off-putting. As usual, she was unfazed by that part.

“The amulets make this so much easier,” she confided. “Usually a priestess can’t do this very often, because if you don’t have an enemy to sacrifice you have to use enough blood to be dangerous. But now I can bleed forever without any risk, and the blood still carries just as much power as normal.”

“Just don’t let that lure you into getting carried away, Cerise,” Hecate said. “You know I don’t have time to chat about every little thing.”

There were no special effects. Just one moment Cerise and I were alone in the chapel, and the next there was a goddess standing next to us. Cerise started, and took a step back.

“I, um, fuck that was fast. Welcome to the Black Island shrine, my goddess. Thank you for answering our call.”

“Yeah, thanks for sparing us a few minutes, ma’am,” I said. “We know better than to bother you over little stuff.”

She sat on the altar, looking faintly amused. “What, no kneeling abasement and declarations of abject devotion? I believe my little Cerise has finally discovered her own worth.”

Cerise flushed. “T-thank you, my goddess. Daniel kind of inspired me.”

“Then my choice is vindicated. Well met, Daniel. What question did you have that requires my counsel?”

“I need to know if the gods have banned radiological weapons,” I told her. “Or, for that matter, if a certain earth goddess is likely to recognize one for what it is.”

Hecate frowned. “Radiological? More translation, please.”

That was promising. I considered where to begin with my explanation, when I noticed the bandages on her left arm. It was partly concealed by the sleeve of her jacket, but something had chewed her arm up pretty badly.

“You’re hurt?” I said in surprise. “Um, can we help you with that?”

One eyebrow rose fractionally. “I don’t know, Daniel. Can you help me with this?”

She offered her arm. I touched it, and tried to evaluate the wound.

The intensity of the magic at work there was blinding. Healing magic of fantastic power was pouring into the wound, fighting against a malignant curse that lurked within. It was like that mage-killer bolt the dwarves had hit me with, only a thousand times more powerful. Whatever had inflicted that wound would have killed me with a scratch, amulet or no amulet.

But it was only a thousand times more powerful. Not a million, or a billion. Hecate’s magic was a vast bonfire compared to the spark of my own sorcery, but it was only a bonfire. Not a star, or some incomprehensible vastness.

She was old, and strong. But she was desperately weary, and not far from the limits of her strength.

“Well?” She asked. “Do you have a miracle for me, or are such matters beyond even a wizard such as yourself?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Cerise, bring me the spare power stone from my lab. I’ve just found a use for it.”

“If you say so, Daniel.”

Her tone said she thought I was nuts, but she hurried off to fetch it anyway. Hecate watched her go, and then turned a questioning look my way.

“You’re right, I can’t channel enough mana to make any real headway against something like this. Honestly, I’m a little afraid that if I made contact with it that curse would just eat me. But my big power stones can put out about a third as much magic as you’ve got going into that healing effect, and they never get tired. That’s enough of an advantage to let you heal yourself in an hour or two instead of having the wound linger for days, right?”

“It can produce that much power?”

Cerise hurried back in at that point, with the sixty pound rock in her hands. Hecate took it from her, and contemplated the device for a moment.

“This is a very odd enchantment, Daniel. Am I seeing this correctly? It eats the substance of the stone, and somehow turns it into magic?”

“That’s right,” I confirmed. “It should be good for something like a century or two, depending on how heavily you use it.”

“How remarkable.”

She drew on the power stone, and deftly spun together a fantastic weave of complex spells that enveloped her arm. They sank into the wound, pushing back the curse that lurked there and soothing her injured flesh.

Hecate gave a soft sigh, and some of the tension slowly bled out of her.

“Much better,” she said. “Thank you, Daniel. This will be quite useful. By the standards of the gods it is only a minor artifact, of course. But it has been more than a century since I had any tools beyond my own weapons and raiment to work with, let alone a source of power not rooted in myself. I don’t suppose you could make a greater one than this?”

“Probably not,” I admitted. “I could scale it up maybe another thirty percent before I hit the limits of what I can enchant with my own sorcery. In theory I could spend a few weeks making a device that enchants bigger power stones, but the slightest imperfection in the enchantment would probably destroy the whole city. Which actually leads back to my original question.”

“Ah, yes. Radiological? The translation I’m getting simply raises more questions.”

I gestured to the stone. “I can tinker with that enchantment to change what kind of energy it emits, and whether it eats complete atoms of the stone or just individual subatomic particles. I figure with a little experimentation I could find a version that emits lots of neutrons, which will tend to convert whatever they hit into radioactive isotopes. Use that to make a supply of radioactive dust, spread it around the Halls of Slumber, and the andregi all die of radiation poisoning.”

Cerise frowned in confusion. “You lost me completely there, Daniel.”

Hecate, however, looked impressed.

“The wisdom of philosophers,” she breathed. “What a startling vision of hidden secrets. You are certain that this actually works, Daniel? This is knowledge from your world, and not some phantasm of sorcery?”

“Yes, we have all kinds of technology based on nuclear physics. Coming up with an effective weapon is going to be tricky, but I’m sure of the underlying principles.”