Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) (27 page)

              I was pretty sure I had a workable design, and the quick field trial I ran turned up only a few minor issues. A glitch with the power flow regulator, some minor ergonomic issues with the internal layout, and a few mechanical problems with things like door latches and the turret traverse. Nothing that took more than a few minutes to fix, thanks to the convenience of magical manufacturing.

              After that it handled well enough. I took Oskar, Marcus and a couple of the sergeants out on a test run. Around the island, down the boat ramp and across the river, where we stopped to try out the cannon a bit. It was louder than the guns, but the earsplitting crack of the shells breaking the sound barrier still wasn’t nearly as bad as the thunder of a gunpowder-based weapon. I’d also rigged it to fire continuously while the trigger was held down, and the cycle time on the enchantment was about half a second.

              Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack.

              Oskar took his finger off the trigger, and eyed the shattered remnants of the boulder he’d been aiming at. “Well, sir, I reckon that will put paid to any dragons we run into.”

              “It could tear down a wall in short order,” Marcus pointed out. “You’re going to make more of these siege engines?”             

              I nodded. “Two more armored skimmers with cannons, for now. That’s enough to give us a decent reaction force, to deal with anything that comes up out of sight of our own walls. I’ve got another weapon in mind that’s more suited to dealing with masses of troops, assuming I can get it working.”

              “These are fearsome weapons, sir,” Marcus replied uncertainly. “Are you sure it’s wise to put such powers in the hands of ordinary men?”

              “This is Ragnarok, Marcus. My men are going to have as much firepower as I can give them.”

              Which was true, but it reminded me that I’d been neglecting another important area. While I certainly wanted my men as well equipped as I could manage, I also needed to come up with a major upgrade to my own gear. I’d come up badly short against Narfing, and I couldn’t afford to let that happen again. For that matter, I really ought to come up with some force multipliers for the girls too. Cerise was certain to end up in the thick of the action, and I’d feel a lot better about taking the field with her if Avilla and even Tina had better ways to defend themselves.

              So while the men were trying out their new equipment, I went back to the lab to take a swing at a more subtle problem. The last time I’d contemplated giving someone else a magic power source I’d been frustrated by the problem of regulating the energy flow, since a user who didn’t have metamagical sorcery wouldn’t be able to just reach into the enchantment and adjust its behavior like I did. But since then I’d done quite a bit of work on making enchantments that did things automatically, or in response to the movement of mechanical controls.

              Cerise was bouncing with excitement when I called her in to my lab the next morning.

              “Hey boss, what’s up? Got another sweet present for me already?”

              “Actually, yes,” I told her. “I’ve been working on how to make a power source amulet that someone else can use safely, and I think I’ve got a working model here. You and Avilla have been getting a lot of practice with your techniques for sharing magic, right?”

              She nodded. “That’s right. I recharge off Avilla all the time, now that you’ve gotten in the habit of filling her up every few days. Are you saying this thing works the same way?”

              “Exactly. If you pull on it you should get a modest trickle of power, but otherwise it doesn’t do anything. I can make a stronger one, but I want you to try out the prototype for a few days and make sure there aren’t any problems first.”

She accepted the amulet almost reverently, despite the fact that it was just a plain disk of nickel-iron. “This is like yours? It will never run out?”

“Not for hundreds of years,” I agreed.

She donned the amulet, and closed her eyes in concentration.

“It works,” she breathed. “Fuck, that’s what you call a modest trickle? I could run all my best battle magic off that. I could call down concealment and loose my shadow at the same time, and still have plenty of power to fling curses and shed fear without even touching my own reserves. Daniel, this is huge!”

“That’s the idea, Cerise. If I’m going to be fighting a demigoddess and her crew of legendary monsters I want you powered up enough to watch my back.”

“You spoil me, Daniel,” she said with a huge grin. “Is Avilla getting one of these too?”

“Of course. Once you’re done testing it I’ll make high-powered versions for both of you, and probably a weaker one for Elin. She seems pretty reliable, and healing that doesn’t run out would be a good resource to have.”

“I guess so. You really like Elin, huh?” She seemed a little bemused at that.

“I do. She’s a lot more intellectual than you’d expect from her ancestry. Smart as hell, and I think she spent half her time holed up in the Conclave library reading. It makes her interesting to talk to.”

“Huh. She’s got a good reason to be loyal, too,” Cerise mused. “Too bad she’s butt-ugly.”

“Still scouting for a fifth coven member?” I asked.

“Of course. Mara’s playing hard to get, but she was all happy to see me when I ran into her in town yesterday. We’ll tempt her into it, but that still leaves us one short.”

I sighed. “You know, I’ll grant you that Mara’s smoking hot. But she’s also pretty high strung, and she can be a complete bitch sometimes. She’s going to be a lot of hassle to deal with, and I’m really not sure it would be worth it.”

“Hence the need for a well-designed coven bond,” Cerise grinned. “Honestly, Daniel, witches have been doing this for centuries. We’ve figured out how to get it right. Besides, I’m a complete psycho bitch and look how easy you handle me. Just fuck her blind a couple of times a week, and that fire nature of hers will have her going all doe-eyed for you even if she won’t admit to it. Can you imagine how hot that would be?”

Mara, acting like a tsundere anime character? Yeah, no thanks. She’d incinerate half the staff the first time she threw a temper tantrum. Besides, I still wasn’t buying this whole ‘fire mages are repressed nymphos’ thing. It sounded too much like wishful thinking.

“Anyway, we’re going to have to meet some more of the Conclave women to pick out another prospect. I got an invite from Mara to a get-together for apprentices tomorrow night, so I’ll let you know what I find. Tova’s girls are supposed to be there, and I hear they’re not the only hot young babes in the Citadel.”

“You have a seriously one-track mind, Cerise. Well, have fun. But I’m probably going to be too busy to give much attention to this girl hunt of yours for a few days. We’ve got a possible army on the way, remember?”

Yes, getting access to the royal war room had paid off. The Gryphon Knights were making good use of their flight time to maintain a watch on the area, and track the movements of any group of monsters big enough to be visible from the air. Their coverage was a bit spotty after the attack on the stables, but they could hardly miss an army of goblins assembling barely three days’ march from Kozalin.

So far there were a couple thousand goblins and a few dozen trolls in the encampment, which wasn’t nearly enough to threaten the city. But the force was growing quickly as raiding bands streamed in from all over the area, and there were reports of other creatures joining them in the last few days. Hairy things a little bigger than men, who wore strange red armor and carried huge axes.

Prince Caspar’s advisors had tentatively identified them as the semi-mythical andregi, a race of savage ape-men descended from Gaea herself who supposedly lived in some remote underground realm plotting the destruction of human civilization. No one seemed to know much about them, aside from the fact that they were bigger than humans and tended to have supernatural powers. Joy.

But if they were still gathering their forces I had some time to work.

My own equipment was next in line for an upgrade. I definitely wanted something to keep my own amulet from getting knocked off me if I got caught in another big explosion, but I wasn’t happy with the obvious solution of just wearing a steel breastplate. The weight and restriction of my movement were both annoying, and I’d run into all too many monsters who could shred steel. With my luck the first time I went out in armor something would put a big dent in it, and then the deformed metal would prevent me from healing the wound.

My second thought was to simply enchant my clothes with a spell to dissipate the kinetic energy of anything that struck them. But that was essentially what my force field did, and I’d already seen that one of the standard ways to penetrate warding spells in this world was to enchant your weapon to resist magic. A sword like the one Baron Stein had used was pretty much immune to magic, so my kinetic redirection effects wouldn’t be able to touch it.

So what if the magic was affecting my armor instead of the projectile?

A little experimentation showed that I could easily put a spell on a piece of cloth that pushed back with equal force against any impact. That readily prevented anything from penetrating it, and rendered explosions and blunt weapons completely ineffective. Edged weapons still did damage to the cloth itself, as it was sandwiched between the conflicting forces. But a good defense should have multiple layers anyway, so I decided that would make a good incremental improvement.

I had Avilla procure a long coat made of leather, and enchanted it with the kinetic resistance effect along with fire resistance and a nice big energy reserve. Under that I’d wear a breastplate with a decent structural reinforcement enchantment like the one I’d put on my fortifications, although its small size meant the enchantment’s power would be a lot easier to deplete. Still, the combination would easily protect me from attacks that would have knocked me out of the fight before.

For a bit of improved battlefield control, I enchanted another chunk of nickel-iron with the earth-conjuring spells I’d used to raise my fortifications. But this time I also added spells for banishing earth and stone, plus the levitation and force push effects I’d used on the skimmers. I set up a control link between that and a ring, and suddenly I had a tool that could fly around a battlefield at high speeds throwing up barriers wherever I wanted them. It took a few seconds to make anything especially durable, but I could work with that.

What about offense? Being hard to kill is nice, but a key part of any defense is killing your attacker before he has time to puzzle out how to hurt you. Grinder was a good close-in weapon and an awesome intimidation tool, but I desperately needed a decent way to kill things at a distance.

That was deceptively hard to do with my sorcery, since working magic became exponentially harder at any distance. I pretty much had to create an offensive effect and then throw it at my target, and so far my attempts to duplicate the sort of attack spells you see in computer games hadn’t worked out very well.

But it occurred to me that a gun is a highly effective means of delivering a package to a distant target. Maybe I’d been letting the fact that I was using magic influence my thinking a bit too much?

Thus was born my second personal weapon.

I’d been having some success with simplifying complex enchantments by building them in pieces, so this weapon was assembled out of distinct components. A power source enchantment on a slug of nickel-iron that fit into the hilt. A frame the general size and shape of a sawed-off shotgun, with a tricky bit of force magic to help stabilize its aim on whatever target I designated. A six-chambered cylinder like the one from a revolver only shorter, intended to hold thick metal disks instead of bullets. A prototype disk with a basic bullet-conjuration enchantment, and the standard bullet-launching enchantment on the weapon. Making it so I could have a different bullet-conjuring slug in each chamber and only the one that was currently lined up would activate when I pulled the trigger was a little tricky, but worth it.

The prototype disk just gave me a gun that fired 0.50 rounds, in a form factor that was a bit handier than what I was giving my men. But making the ammunition factory removable meant I could experiment with different ammunition types, and I had lots of ideas.

My second ammo type was based on that bouncing force grenade I’d improvised back in the temple at Lanrest. The bullet was enchanted with a little force spike on the front and a strong repulsive effect along the sides, and would sprout a set of foot-long force blades while in flight. These were very thin, almost one-dimensional, to minimize the air resistance they created. But between the spin of the bullet and the tendency to bounce around after hitting a target the net result was an unpredictable whirlwind of destruction that would run for several seconds before its power ran out.

That should do gruesome things to goblins, or massed troops. But I knew from experience that the force blades wouldn’t work well against really tough monsters. So for more armored targets I added a third ammo type, which would conjure several pounds of pressurized liquid nickel-iron when it struck a target. That produced an impressive explosion and a high-velocity spray of molten metal that left deep gouges in stone, so I expected it would get the job done against anything short of Narfing.