Nightlord: Shadows (46 page)

I do need to pay more attention, though. I can’t let public opinion run me. I’m also going to have to listen more and see what I can learn about my kingdom. That might do some good, provided I take the time to look into what they ask for and especially why they want it.

As for kingdom-things that needed work, there was also the whole financial thing. The mountain produced gold and silver, which are good mediums of exchange, as well as copper, tin, and iron, which are good for production. This was very handy, since I planned to take over paying the military from Amber; I didn’t want any questions about who they worked for. Of course, feeding them isn’t the problem, really; making sure they’re armored, armed, and mounted
is
. We have the metal and can get the horses, but diverting those resources into that particular use eats up cash.

I was sitting down to dinner, thinking about money and chilling a cup of water with magic. As ice started to form, I had a brilliant idea. I dashed out to bother a jeweler after hours and I bought some diamond chips. These I brought home and gave to Tort, then finished dinner.

That evening, she provided me with her mental library of spells and I provided some innovation and knowledge of carbon crystallization. Between us, we put a diamond chip in a heap of powdered charcoal and left it to slowly absorb carbon, crystallizing it around the diamond seed-crystal.

It’s coming along nicely. It’s surprisingly simple when you know how a diamond is put together. It’s just a regular pattern that repeats over and over. I’m still proud of it.

This, of course, means I have to worry about having the same problem Spain had with importing silver from the New World: Inflation. Fortunately, that wasn’t an immediate problem, but one I needed to bear in mind for later.

On the other hand, I hoped I wasn’t causing immediate problems for Tort and for Thomen.

After dinner, Bronze took me to the mountain to for some quality time talking with the stone. Afterward, when we came back, we were outside Tort’s place as I was putting Bronze in her stable. There’s not a lot of care or maintenance on her; make sure she’s got a good supply of combustibles and some metallic snacks, that’s about it. I paused because I heard raised voices from inside the house. Well, I have exceptionally sharp hearing; I usually ignore conversations going on inside nearby buildings, but this was like shouting in my face.

“And he’s the King! I know!” Thomen said. It wasn’t a shout, but it was a forceful statement. Tort’s reply was less forceful, but still intense.

“Then you can understand!”

“No, I can’t! I’ve never understood! Fourteen years, Tort! Fourteen years, and you still wear a braid! If it’s not the longest braid in history, it’s only because you cut your hair!” Then, slightly more calmly, “I’ve never asked for more than you could give, you know that—”

“And I have been pleased to give you what I could,” she interrupted, “and to take what you would give. But now that is over, as you should know.”

“I don’t know it!” he said, sounding exasperated. “What is it about him? You were only a little girl when you knew him. How can you love him? How can he mean that much to you? Is it because he’s the King?”

“His station is irrelevant.”

“Then it’s his teeth? He’s older than you, while I’m too young? He won’t grow old? Or he can make you live forever? Or is it just that he’s your angel and that’s all it is?”

“He is my angel,” Tort replied, “but that, too, is irrelevant.”

“Then
what?
” Thomen demanded. “Now that he’s here, what’s changed? Why is it that he shows up and everything has to be different between us?”

“Nothing has changed between us. You mean as much to me as you ever did.”

There was a long pause.

“I see,” Thomen said. “Finally, I see.”

“Thomen, no, that is not…”

“No, don’t say it. Don’t say anything. You’ve said enough. More than enough.”

“If it matters, I do care for you, very much.”

“No, I don’t think it matters, because I don’t think you do.” A door slammed. I stayed in the stable with Bronze until the outer door slammed and the boots stomped away up the street.

Then I thought that maybe I should go back to the mountain for the rest of the evening. That way, Tort could finish crying. But, most important, I could pretend that I’d never heard a word.

Yeah, that sounded like a good idea. Bronze and I went back to the mountain. I spent the rest of the night looking over a pile of sand and making it do things.

Sand castles!

Well, sand castles and sand combatants. I used the sand as a physical medium for making play-soldiers and terrain. It moved where I wanted it to and shaped itself to my wishes. Think of it as magical doodling while thinking about things.

The things I was thinking about were not the things on my mind. Instead, I thought about the cadet knights and how they would work on a battlefield. The sand helped with that by giving me something to use as a toy battlefield.

One thing I didn’t have to worry too much about was the cavalry aspect of being a knight. We had horses, but they were the lighter, faster horses usually found in the plains, not the brutes needed for big men in steel plate wielding twenty-foot poles.

Oddly enough, cavalry, in the traditional knightly sense of lowered lances and shining full plate armor, was pretty much unused in Rethven and completely unknown in the Sea of Grass east of the Eastrange. Their ideas of combat riders were a bit different.

Most of the grassmen, or the people of the plains, were horse archers. That’s how they hunt, and they’re very good at it. They never need to close with their targets and go hand-to-hand. Even when they attacked and harassed invaders from Rethven, it was always a case of putting arrows into people and then vanishing.

On the other side of the Eastrange (or, The Teeth of the World’s Edge), in Rethven, cavalry was much less common. Horses are expensive targets, and by the time you spend the money to breed something big enough to carry all that armor, train it, and actually buy armor for both man and beast you’ve spent a small fortune. Plus, it needed all that armor; it was easy to hit. Worst of all, any hedge-wizard could do horrible things to your horse, armor or not, and that made things very expensive very quickly.

Second, all that armor meant they were slow. Compared to a running infantryman, a fully-armored knight and horse was a two-ton juggernaut that would run him down if he was lucky, or put a lance through him and let him die later if he wasn’t. The problem for the knight, however, was surviving to get to the infantry so they would run. It took forever to charge across open ground, especially while attracting every arrow, quarrel, sling stone, and thrown rock in range. Even if the knight did make it—and groups of them certainly could—the infantry tended to scatter left and right instead of running directly away. This presented a problem, since two tons of horse, rider, and armor don’t turn worth a damn at speed.

Actual infantry in melee tended to use long-hafted weapons and adopt pack tactics; the people behind and to the sides did the attacking—usually at the lightly-armored legs of the horse—while the people in front packed themselves together and presented a bristling porcupine of spears. Shortly after that, the guy in the really heavy armor, now on foot, tended to get mobbed.

At least, that was the case with disciplined troops; militia and peasant levies, on the other hand, were ideal targets for this kind of cavalry. They didn’t have the discipline to stand there and face the juggernaut, so they ran and got cut down from horseback. That was the bread-and-butter of armored cavalry—shattering superior numbers of low-quality troops.

The last of the major problems for heavy cavalry was that they tended to bog down in anything but flat, solid terrain. Going downhill wasn’t so bad; going uphill just made things worse. Rocky terrain was awful for the horses, and anyone who prepared the ground against cavalry simply dug holes about knee-deep. And as for rainy weather… anyone who thinks horses in armor can go through mud better than a four-wheel drive should consider Agincourt before getting too cocky.

The net result was that after all the time, effort, and money invested in training, armoring, breeding, and so on, the “traditional” knight was somewhat limited in application—rather like a tank, in some respects. This led to them being somewhat rare, and thus made hard to train them together to fight as units; they tended to go off and be heroes on their own. Dead heroes. They just weren’t worth the expense when a nobleman could spend the same amount and get fifty or a hundred times as many regular infantry. You just don’t build a high-cost unit like that and send it out to get slaughtered. Like most specialized units, it desperately needs to be supported by other types of units—infantry, archers, siege engineers, the works.

As for me, personally, I’m kind of an exception, as my survivability is much higher. That’s Bronze’s fault.

So, while heavily-armored knights on horseback had certain definite advantages in specific circumstances, Rethven never really relied much on them. They were a specialized unit, mostly used when the terrain was flat, mobility was important, and brute striking power was required. Crag Keep was a good example; charging across that bridge to attack or counterattack—just to help clear the bridge—was typical. Opening the gates to let Rethven infantry face
viksagi
infantry wasn’t a good idea.

Rethven’s usual “cavalry” was something more like “mounted infantry.” They were men in light to medium armor who rode up to battle, dismounted, and formed into standard infantry units. This let them cross open ground quickly, or reach an unexpected position, or exploit a sudden vulnerability much more quickly than a standard infantry unit. It was also a lot cheaper in terms of horse breeding and training.

I think heavily-armored knights might be more useful than the standard Rethven school of military thought may believe. Mobility like that is a major asset on a battlefield—not so much in urban fighting, maybe, but definitely on more open ground. The armor is still the problem, partly in the expense but mostly in the weight. If there’s a way to get the weight down without sacrificing protection, maybe a horse wouldn’t need to be specially bred for size to carry it all. A unit of such knights could exploit breaches in the enemy line and wreak havoc. Or just flank the enemy unexpectedly quickly. Or… well, there are lots of possibilities.

The key to mobility is the lightness of their gear. Steel isn’t ideal for that. Titanium, maybe? Or aluminum? If we could make the armor light enough, I
would
have to worry about the cavalry aspects of knights.

So, while my soon-to-be knights are trained to ride and fight from horseback whenever possible and practical, they are really best at getting into a pitched melee on foot and hammering the other guys. They regard horses as expendable accessories to battle: Ride up and either create a breach until your supporting infantry can arrive, or exploit a breach to move past the enemy to a vital target—an enemy commander, for example. In doing so, kill everything you can until your horse goes down, then start killing things while on foot. Since they don’t have to charge into battle under their own steam, they can wear heavier armor, et cetera, et cetera.

Fair enough, for now. Kelvin is making them as deadly as possible from a martial skills standpoint. Tort is helping them learn to be specialist wizards—battle wizards, if you like. Seldar and I are making them physically impressive. We’ve come a long way, and there’s room for improvement, especially as battle-wizards.

It’s amazing how much magic they do know, though. Show them how to punch a man across a room and they’ll punch anything they can. Punch them from across the room and they start getting good at blocking them. True, this is still new to them, but they’ve been practicing. They stand a good chance of deflecting anything they see coming. I’m quite pleased.

Wednesday, May 5
th

When I came back to Mochara, Tort was all smiles and sunshine, glad to see me. She was dressed very nicely; the outfit hugged her hips and her long braid was wrapped around her head, held in place with a jeweled, silver chain. She would not have been out of place in an old Robin Hood movie, apart from the staff.

I made no mention of coming back the night before and she didn’t mention Thomen. Instead, we had a discussion about magical gateways. We talked about how to open a portal between two places.

We’re good at not talking about things.

Tort, as it turns out, is not much help on gates. She hasn’t really studied them; apparently, they aren’t a major topic in Arondael and T’yl wasn’t an expert, either. While magical gateways can be convenient, they’re also kind of dangerous. Most magicians strongly prefer to use space-bending spells, like the League Step, or magical transportation devices, like flying chairs or saddles that generate giant birds of smoke. You know, mundane methods of travel.

On the other hand, she did confirm what I thought I knew about gates. Basically, there are three main factors to opening a magical doorway: Distance, size, and similarity. The farther away they are, the more power it takes.

If you’re not interested in gate mechanics, you can skip this with no loss.

So, we want to go from Point A to Point B. The farther apart they are, the more space we have to fold to get the two points to be congruent. Once we have them overlapping, it’s just a matter of deciding which side you want to be on. (That’s not actually how it works, but it’s a convenient lie. It seems to work
like
that, which is close enough.) The farther away it is, the more power it will take; crossing from one universe to another is, of course, the farthest distance you’re going to find.

Now, how big an opening do you want? Something you can send columns of sixteen through for an invasion? Or something a little less overwhelming—say, a window you can dive through to escape the angry nightlord you’ve just failed to assassinate? I don’t know for certain, but I suspect the power requirements go up directly with the surface area of the interface. Let’s say that magical units are MUs. If you have a gate opening one meter on each side, you have one square meter. If it takes, say, a million MUs to open that gate, it will take
four
million to open a gate two meters on a side—the surface area of the opening is four square meters. And if you want a gate three meters on a side, that’s
nine
million. Four meters is
sixteen
million MUs, and so on.

I can’t prove it, but it
feels
right, based on the effort I’ve gone to in the past. Heck, I can’t even tell you what one MU is; I just made it up for the example. For now, let’s say one MU is the minimum power it takes to have a spell exist at all, even if it doesn’t do anything.

Let’s not get into whether or not magical power comes in photons or elementary particles. Most people can’t even manage to wrap their heads around light being a particle and a wave.

So, the distance you want to travel and the size of your gate are obviously important. But now let’s look at the correspondence between the two points. As long as we’re using hypothetical MUs, let’s say take the cost of the size of the gate—one million—and multiply it by some factor for distance. Let’s say we divide the distance in kilometers by a thousand. So, two thousand kilometers away is a multiplier of two, so that one-meter gate going two thousand kilometers costs two million MUs.

Note that anything under—very roughly—a thousand kilometers doesn’t give you a discount. There seems to be a certain minimum threshold in required power. Like running through a rubber sheet, if you don’t break through the sheet, you don’t go anywhere. If you do break through, you’re going to go past it.

With me so far? Good.

Your job can be made a lot harder by not having a good receiving point or landing zone or whatever. Ideally, you have two identical gateways, one on each end. That way, when the gate forms, the two sort of blend in together, overlapping, temporarily becoming the
same
gateway—one at this end, one at the destination. The closer the two correspond, the less additional effort you have to expend to get them to sync up. If they’re identical, there shouldn’t be any additional power input required. If they’re not, you’re in for another multiplier—maybe a few percent, maybe twice as much, depending on how similar they are.

It is very bad to not have a gateway on both ends. If you only have one, it has to temporarily exist in two places at once. I could take a gateway, open it to the middle of a desert, and the doorway I used would be present both at home and in the desert at the same time. If you pried it out of the wall, later, you might find sand stuck in the fibers of the wooden frame. That’s not only tricky, it’s exhausting, and will cost you about three to five times as much power.

At minimum, you want at least a chalk outline, or a line in the sand, or scratches on a wall. Something. Anything. This “minimum effort” will still cost you enormously more in the gate spell, itself, but at least you’ll be able to get a connection.

Of course, there is one worse case—and this is absolutely the worst-case scenario of all—you
can
open a raw hole from one point to another. That’s not only incredibly expensive in terms of power, it’s outright dangerous. You’re basically playing with the structure of the space-time continuum
with your bare hands.
Things from outside the world can leak in around the edges, and that’s bad for your fingers, not to mention your vital organs, loved ones, and the world in general.

This, in the magical community, is generally regarded as bad form. Outside the magical community, it’s regarded as being in league with the powers of evil and will get you nailed to a cross and set on fire by any survivors of your diabolical summoning of Things from Beyond.

I don’t know how much more expensive that is, nor does Tort, and we decided not to test it. If I had to guess, I’d put the multiplier in the ballpark of somewhere around thirty to fifty or thereabouts.

Now that we know how awful it can be, there are a few ways to make the whole thing a lot cheaper. The Great Arch of Zirafel was designed to operate with its twin in Tamaril, sister-city to Zirafel, on the other edge of the world. You could use either arch as a destination point, if it wasn’t active—that is, you could go there from the Tower of Ice, the Mountains of the Sun, or anywhere in between—but if you activated the Great Arch to go elsewhere, it automatically tried to connect with its twin. It would take incoming calls from anywhere, but you can’t call out except to the other one.

They were designed and built to link specifically to each other. As a result, once the initial connection was made, the two arches formed a sort of expressway between opposite edges of the world. So efficient was this connection that they found it simplest to leave it open all the time, rather than reestablish it every day.

I think there’s a way to be even more efficient. It should be possible to create
dedicated
gateways, ones that only work when the connection is established between them and them alone. While the Great Arch in Zirafel and Tamaril could be used as target points, a dedicated arch/door/whatever would actually resist being used unless it was linking to its twin. That would be least versatile, but it would be the best possible efficiency for linking two distant points. I seem to think I might remember a hint of research from Zirafel on that subject… Obviously, such research was done by a very small minority. Say, two people, maybe three.

No wonder the Empire was huge. It effectively had one capitol city, but it existed simultaneously on opposite ends of the world. I just wonder why they didn’t build the arches as dedicated to each other. Maybe they foresaw a need to use them for other purposes, on occasion. Or maybe they were planning to include other cities with their own arches. Not enough people knew for me to have any real memories of it.

Of course, that was also still connecting two points in the same universe. Getting me home is kind of like upping the maximum distance cost by an order of magnitude. It’s hard to get much farther apart than other universes.

(As an aside… How many universes are there? Could I wind up in one by accident? Or are there only two? Theory says that there should be several, possibly an infinite number of universes. If I considered the conditions I wanted to find, could I scan through the multiverse and pick out a universe that I liked?

(If there are an infinite number of universes, does that mean that
any
universe I can imagine is out there, somewhere?

(The implications are staggering.

(No. Focus. Where was I? Getting home. Right.)

To get me home, we were going to need a massive charge just to bridge the reality gap, to say nothing of establishing a gateway on the other side. It can be done; I’ve done it. Magicians in Rethven did it; it involved the accumulated effort of decades of work and some extremely powerful enchantments by magicians in service to the Hand of Light, but it can be done.

So, some quick math. A small gate—one square meter?—is a million. The distance is astronomical, so let’s say it’s a multiplier of a hundred. We’re up to a hundred million. Now, if I have to open a gate with only the gate on this end and no destination gate, it’ll go up to about three hundred million of those hypothetical MUs just to make the connection

How many MUs in a herd of cattle? I don’t know. I connected a whirlpool to a doorway, which isn’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing. Plus, the door was heavily enchanted to be a gate, anyway, so it provided some unknown amount of charge once the connection was established.

As for maintaining the gate, it takes about as much power to keep it going as it does to start it. That’s a good reason to not keep it open.

Anyway, that’s the short version of Gate Metaphysics 101.

On a more personal note, I am definitely planning to go home. I’m just not sure for how long. Tianna is very pleased to have a grandfather. I suspect Amber is often busy with her duties as a priestess and as the head of state for Mochara. I haven’t had a chance to gauge Amber’s feeling about me being the ruler
de jure
, and maybe
de facto
, and probably some other Latin words I don’t know.

We haven’t even had a political discussion, yet. I wonder if I can ignore all that and let it continue to be a non-issue? If I continue to ignore it, will it continue to be a non-issue? Or will it just wait to jump me in a dark alley and mug me for my political aspirations?

At least Tianna likes me. Again, I blame my horse. Tianna is delighted to ride anytime Amber will let her, and I am delighted to take her for rides. Tianna also remembered my promise to show her the basics of swords, and I have. She’s very quick, both in the sense of learning quickly and in being very fast. She’s not going to be a female warrior, but she might surprise the hell out of someone who expects her to rely solely on setting her assailant on fire. Amber doesn’t like it at all, but simply gives me that thin-lipped look that means she disapproves but will tolerate it until it interferes with something more important—i.e., anything.

I’ve also encouraged Tianna to spend more time with her letters and numbers. She can read, but she’s not very good at it. Her math skills are atrocious. Teaching her that sort of thing doesn’t earn me Significant Looks from her mother, though. I think Amber is secretly pleased about that, at least.

Bronze is still forming new lumps and dents. She’s starting to look as though she has a saddle and stirrups. She looks as though the sculptor wasn’t finished with them, obviously, but they become more pronounced by the day. I suspect all the bareback riding as we gallop back and forth from the mountain is helping. The contours fit me just fine; Tianna still needs someone to help hold her on.

At least, I think she does. Bronze can certainly hold on to her with the wire of her mane, but I’m not sure how that would work out in an accident at any speed over a fast walk. What she needs is a seat belt and a crash helmet, which I do not have for her. On the other hand, if Bronze steps in a hole at sixty miles an hour while I’m taking Tianna for a ride, I’ll be the airbag. As long as we can avoid being killed outright, I feel confident we’ll get better.

We stay on the canal road, just to be safe. Bronze
has
stepped in a hole before. I’m very pleased I was already dead. The crash was not pleasant.

Oh! Rather startlingly quickly, I have a boat for the canal. I keep forgetting everyone here knows some magic, usually something to help them with their trade. Cobblers, bakers, masons, boatwrights, everyone. Kavel sings to the metal he works—family tradition, apparently—and Timon’s wife talks to the seedling plants to help them grow.

It’s not really much of a boat, as such, but it floats, it’s long, and it’s narrow enough to have two of them go opposite directions in the canal. I accepted it as a rough draft to be refined and have the boatwrights working on a new one with improvements. They’re starting to warm up to the challenge, I think. Clinking money seems to help. They really are quite good at fishing boats; this is stretching their skills a bit, though. They’re learning things as they go, making these canal boats, so I can’t complain.