Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) (19 page)

“The fact that you can’t change your mind later feels a little iffy,” I pointed out.

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I think you’re just worried that you won’t be able to keep up with us. Or maybe you don’t want to have fun playing power games with me? That part would apply to you too, you know.”

I shook my head. “Try to remember that I haven’t spent the last five years thinking through all the implications of this thing. I just want to make sure we don’t screw up something important and then get stuck not being able to fix it.”

It was terribly tempting, to just accept her reasoning and go with it. Cerise and Avilla weren’t exactly normal, but they’d grown on me. The thought of having both of them in a normal relationship was intoxicating, let alone this talk of mystic love bonds and two more witches and whatever inventive flavors of debauchery Cerise came up with.

But would it be real?

For that matter, were they really telling the truth? Maybe it was irrational, but it still bothered me that they both knew far more about this sort of thing than I did. For all I knew they’d prepared some tricky way to slip themselves free of the bond, and turn it into a subtle form of enslavement. Or they might have some other ulterior motive, something I didn’t know enough to guess.

Could I really trust them? I’d thought I could trust Amanda, until the day I caught her cheating on me. She’d managed to destroy my life with nothing but a willingness to lie loudly and often. I could barely imagine what Cerise could do to me, if she were so motivated. Let alone Avilla. If I pissed her off I’d probably wake up after my next meal to find myself transformed into a goat or something.

I thought, and I mused, and I brooded. Then I went back to work.

              The next few days passed in a blur of activity.

              Mara actually did come to visit, which Elin seemed to appreciate. She ended up staying for most of the morning, although I had to excuse myself to get some work done after the first hour or so. She seemed to be getting pretty friendly with Cerise by then, so I figured I’d give the little imp a chance to see if she was really as smooth as she thought she was. I was half expecting her to either get slapped or somehow seduce Mara, but instead I found her oddly pensive over lunch.

              “Something wrong?” I asked.

              “Yeah,” Cerise said slowly, still staring at her plate. “I think I’m going to have to move slowly on this.”

              “Really? I thought you were going to sweep her off her feet?”

              Avilla sat down next to her, and took her hand. “What was it that upset you, kitten? It looked like things were going well when I brought the cookies and tea.”

              “You wouldn’t notice it unless you spent some real time trying to work your way closer to her,” Cerise answered. “She’s trying to get past it, I think. But she’s afraid of being touched. Even if it’s gentle, she has to fight not to flinch.”

              Avilla frowned in confusion. Me, I just went cold. I’ve heard that kind of thing too many times before.

              “You think she’s been raped?” I asked.

              She shook her head uncertainly. “I don’t see how. She has so much fire magic, it’s hard to imagine anyone surviving the attempt. Besides, it’s not just men. I backed off a little once I realized, and she got a lot more relaxed when I stopped getting close to her.”

              I frowned. “How early would someone like her start manifesting her magic?”

              “The stronger you are, the earlier it happens,” Avilla said. “With her it probably started when she was an infant. But it would have started off weak, and she probably didn’t reach her full strength until the last year or two.”

              “So it was her family,” Cerise said unhappily. “When she was too young to fight back. Fire sorcery is hereditary, so they probably had some resistance too.”

              “Do people actually do that?” Avilla asked.

              “Unfortunately, yes,” I replied. “Well, whatever the story is she’s obviously gotten free of them somehow.”

              Cerise nodded. “Have you noticed how she doesn’t really look that much like Carl? She mentioned they were raised apart, too. I bet there’s a story there. Like, maybe they’re really half-siblings, and her dad was some abusive asshole from down south that ended up killing their mom before Carl was old enough to rescue them.”

              “Could be something like that,” I allowed. “But let’s not go making assumptions. I do think you’re right about going slow, though. If she has that kind of past, you don’t want to make her think you’re trying to take advantage of her.”

              “Fuck, no,” Cerise protested. “I want to help her.”

              “Me too, but that can be hard to do.” I frowned. “Although she seems awfully outgoing if you’re right. She was actually flirting with me the other day, and she’s the one who started it.”

              Cerise smiled. “That’s good. So she wants to get past it, and we just need to let her know that we’re the ones who can help her with that.”

              Avilla rolled her eyes. “You’re obsessed, kitten.”

              “Hey, I saw her checking you out again this morning. We just need to arrange things so she walks in on you and Daniel making out or something.”

              “Or we can just be her friend, and see what develops,” I said firmly.

              “Okaaay,” Cerise sighed theatrically.

              I chuckled, and went back to eating. I had a lot of work to do.

The weapons my men were carrying now were all rush jobs, thrown together in spare moments during our long flight from battle to battle in the ruins of civilization. Now I had a chance to learn from the experience, and do better.

Using force magic to enhance normal melee weapons had been a reasonably effective approach. Most monsters would close with you if they could, and the ability of force weapons to cut through light armor and sever limbs made a big difference. But letting monsters get in close means they have a chance to inflict casualties, and while I could heal most injuries every now and then someone would die before I could get to them.

I had grown very tired to seeing my men die. I wasn’t going to lose any more of them if I could help it.

Unfortunately, armor was a lot harder to make. Oh, I could create sheets of nickel-iron in any shape I wanted easily enough. But a suit of plate armor contains dozens of individual pieces of metal, all of which need to be precisely shaped and fitted to avoid limiting the wearer’s range of motion, and there were all kinds of non-metal parts as well. Straps and padding and oddly-shaped bits of leather, some attached to the armor and some not. I could probably come up with a workable design, but trying to outfit all my men would be a full-time job.

No, a better answer was to kill the monsters before they could get close. The flamers had been a decent stopgap measure where that was concerned, since not many creatures would voluntarily run into a wall of fire. But they were a short-ranged weapon, and the flames didn’t kill a target instantly. Against goblins and forest trolls they’d worked well, but if we were going to fight bigger monsters we’d need something with more stopping power.

For that, it was time to take a page from all those classic science fiction stories I’d read where some plucky hero gets trapped in the distant past and immediately introduces guns. Actual firearms probably weren’t feasible here given the primitive state of local metallurgy, not to mention that gathering enough saltpeter to make large amounts of gunpowder would be pretty tough if we couldn’t send men outside the walls. There were bound to be dung heaps in the city, but not that many of them.

But I had magic. A little earth magic to conjure up a nickel-iron handle and barrel, shaped to fit comfortable in my hand. A good bit more to conjure up a lead ball, and then a burst of force magic to propel it.

My first attempt just bounced off the wall of the little empty room I’d claimed as a workshop, and rattled to the floor. That got me thinking about ricochets, so I covered the walls in a thick layer of clay before I tried again. I was confident that my personal force field would stop a bullet, but if it went out the window or through the door it might hit someone else.

A couple more tries, and I had a feel for how much force magic it took to get a decent velocity out of the ball. It was actually a little tricky to apply that much magic in the brief time before the ball left the gun’s barrel, though. I’d noted before that spells generally take an appreciable amount of time to work, and the split-second duration of a force burst spell was actually rather slow compared to the motion of a bullet.

Of course, there was no reason I had to exactly copy the way firearms work. I switched to a more bullet-shaped projectile instead of a ball, and reworked the force spell to put a spin on it first and then push it down the barrel. It took a few tries to get that right, and a few more to make the whole process fast enough that the bullet would break the sound barrier while it was still in the gun’s barrel. I actually had to switch to something more the size of a rifle for that, with the extra barrel length giving the magic a few extra milliseconds to work.

But that gave me a weapon capable of blowing impressive holes in a man-sized clay target dummy, and in theory it ought to have decent accuracy. Nothing like modern forearms, probably, but it ought to be a lot more effective than a bow.

Come to think of it, was there a good reason to use lead bullets? There was no rifling in my weapon, so they didn’t need to be soft for that reason. Lead would tend to deform on impact and make a bigger wound than harder metals, but armor penetration might also be a problem. I still remembered how tough the flesh of those rock trolls had been. So, a compromise?

Conjuring matter in complex shapes was harder than simple ones, but a dual-purpose round wasn’t that difficult. I settled on a pretty big round, probably about a .50 caliber, with an outer shell of lead wrapped around a nickel-iron core. The recoil on it was pretty heavy, but not as bad as you’d expect from a round that size. Probably the lack of an explosion when the round was fired helped a lot with that, as did the more gradual acceleration and lower muzzle velocity.

I spent a few hours tinkering around with other small but important issues. Adding a safety to reduce the risk of accidental discharge, and basic iron sights to improve accuracy. Shaping the stock to fit comfortably against the shoulder, and adjusting the thickness of all the various parts of the weapon to make it strong but not unnecessarily heavy. I had just enough experience with firearms back on Earth to know that small details can make a big difference in the field.

Then I had to tackle the hard part. Equipping my men with guns wouldn’t make much sense if I had to personally make all the ammo one round at a time, so the next afternoon I sat down to build a factory enchantment. After my experiment with the heating stones I was expecting that to be a tough project. But it turned out that most of the problem there had been the massive energy output of the items I’d been trying to mass produce. Enchanting a gun to conjure a bullet whenever the trigger was pulled was almost trivial in comparison. Unlike my first factory enchantment this one seemed to be rock-solid, turning out dozens of rounds as fast as I could pull the trigger without any sign of wear and tear.

Encouraged, I decided to try something more ambitious. Why not an enchantment that builds magic guns? If I could mass produce complete weapons I could give them to everyone, and breathe a lot easier.

Sadly, that brought me right back into problem territory again. After struggling with it for a few hours I finally realized that it was the power enchantment on the guns that was the problem. That matter to energy conversion was an intricate piece of spellwork that channeled huge amounts of magic to do its work, and shaping such a high-performance spell rapidly created some serious wear and tear on the factory enchantment. I tried reinforcing it to compensate, but I couldn’t quite get the intensity high enough. The most concentrated enchantment I could make was still too soft, metaphorically speaking.

Well, fine. It was still stable enough to run off small batches, as long as I monitored it carefully and stopped to repair the damage periodically. Building five or six guns an hour wasn’t true mass production, but it was enough for my group’s needs.

So three days after the Conclave meeting I set up a firing range in one of the empty vehicle bays, and gathered the men for a demonstration. Cerise tagged along out of curiosity, wanting to see what I’d been up to.

I showed them the guns I’d brought down, explained the basic concept behind their operation, and then pointed one downrange and fired several shots at the clay dummies I’d set up there. I hadn’t been much of a marksman back home, but my force sorcery had given me an instinctive grasp of motion that made it easy to play sniper. Every shot I fired struck exactly where I wanted it to, punching big holes in the target’s chests one after another.

Gronir grinned. “That’ll slow down a troll, I wager. Kinda loud, but never running out of ammunition would be nice. How heavy is it?”

It was actually a lot quieter than a firearm. The bullets made a sharp, whip-like crack when they broke the sound barrier, but there was no bang of an explosive charge going off on top of that. So not  a stealth weapon, but at least it wasn’t as likely to damage your hearing if you used one a lot.

“About six pounds,” I answered. “I could have made it lighter, but I want them rugged enough to survive rough handling.”

“It seems effective enough at close quarters,” Captain Rain observed. “But what kind of range can we expect?”

“The bullets will probably travel a thousand yards or more,” I told him. “But no one could hit anything at that range. The bullet is smaller than a crossbow bolt, and moves a lot faster, so I expect it won’t be affected by wind or rain nearly as much. The speed should make them good at punching through armor, too. I’m guessing they’ll be reasonably effective out to a hundred yards or so, but we’ll have to verify that. Maybe get someone who’s handy with a crossbow to put in a few days getting a feel for it.”

He nodded. “That’s an impressive weapon, sir. We can make good use of them.”

“Will you have some for the militia, too?” Oskar asked. “That seems like just the thing for defending our walls.”

“Gentlemen, you can have as many guns as you want,” I told them. “I’ve built some special tools that will let me make them with no more effort than a warmth cloak. I have six more already made, and I can turn out another thirty or so in an afternoon.”

I think that impressed them more than the guns themselves.

They all took turns trying out the new weapons, while I explained about recoil and ricochets and other basic shooting lore. Gronir seemed to think the safety was a silly idea, but it earned a thoughtful look and nod of approval from Captain Rain.

As expected, Gronir was a decent shot even with minimal practice. Oskar was terrible, while Captain Rain and Sergeant Thomas were somewhere in between. Then Cerise stepped up and casually blew the heads off of all four dummies in as many shots, firing as fast as the weapon could operate.