Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) (8 page)

              “Hmm. Ships that might happen to belong to a certain harbormaster, I suppose?”

              “Oh, no,” he waved his hands in denial. “Not at all. Trade is such a complex and chancy venture, and the cost involved can be simply staggering. A man of my modest means wouldn’t know where to begin. A harbormaster’s post is more a matter of collecting fees for services rendered, if you take my meaning.
”

              So the ship captains were offering bribes to be the first out of port? Well, that was quick thinking on their part. Normally I’d be offended by that kind of thing, but I had to remind myself this wasn’t America. In most cultures collecting bribes is just a normal perk of the job for civil servants, and if I tried to complain to his superiors they probably wouldn’t care. Besides which, if I was going to start crusading for social justice here there were about a million more important issues to work on.

              “I see. Well, I suppose we could work something out,” I responded. “I don’t suppose this gratitude might include some cloth, or furniture? I’ve got a hundred-odd people to worry about, and there are a lot of things conjured stone doesn’t work for.”

              “Possibly,” he mused. “Wool and leather are in short supply now, of course. Everyone wants warmer clothes, and the few merchants who haven’t sold out their stock are hoarding it in secret. But I might know where I can lay my hands on a score of carpenters for a few weeks.”

              “That would work. Alright, show me which piers you want done first. I’ll be working close to home today, but if your pilots can get a good route worked out we can plan on leaving for the coast in the morning.”

              He nodded. “A pleasure doing business with you, sir. Will you be needing to arrange for an escort?”

              “No, I’ll just take some of my own men. I’ve been outfitting them with magic weapons, so they can handle monsters a lot better than normal troops. How far is it to the coast, anyway?”

              “Four miles to the estuary, and another six to open water. The estuary hasn’t frozen yet, so you may not have to worry about that. But the channel will need to wind a bit. I’d guess you’ve got five, maybe five and a half miles of ice ahead of you.”

              “Ouch. That’s a bit more than I was expecting.”

              He showed me the first couple of piers he wanted cleared, and suggested I look at the fishing wharfs next if I had the time. An hour later I had them well on the way to being de-iced, and was starting to get a decent feel for the process.

But the math was worrying me. Fifteen minutes to enchant an average-size stone, which would thaw an area maybe forty feet across. At that rate it would take me weeks to clear a shipping channel, and I had a long list of other projects I needed to work on. Was there a better way?

Smaller rocks took less energy to enchant, but the process wasn’t much faster. That was a losing proposition, then. Bigger rocks didn’t take much longer, but concentrating too much heat output in one spot was asking for trouble. I wasn’t sure what effect repeatedly passing over patches of boiling water would have on a wooden sailing ship, but it was bound to cause some kind of damage.

A different way to melt the ice, then? But I didn’t have any good ideas. Conjuring open flame underwater was highly inefficient, and doing it above the waterline meant most of the heat would just go up into the air and be wasted. In theory I could enchant an object to project a warmth field around itself, but that was a much more complicated effect that would end up taking even longer to make.

Maybe a growing enchantment? Make a stone rod with the heat enchantment, and just lay it out on the ice and make it grow? But there were a lot of problems to solve with that idea. It was more time efficient than building the same enchantment over and over, but the energy cost would be astronomical. The rod would quickly become far too hot to touch, and working magic from even a short distance made everything much harder. Not to mention the mechanical problems of trying to handle an incredibly heavy, unwieldy object when one end was melting through the ice and the other end was growing rapidly.

No, I needed to either drastically increase the area that I could thaw with one enchantment, or make the process of enchanting a heat stone much faster.

I headed back over to my own pier, and considered that as I dropped a few more stones in the water around it. The actual heat production was about as simple as enchantments get. No control functions or variability, just a simple conjuration effect that would run for as long as it had power. The problem was the matter to energy enchantment that powered the device. That was a complex effect, and even with all the practice I’d been getting I had doubts about my ability to build one any faster.

Not to mention that if I did it wrong it might fail prematurely, or end up leaking a form of energy other than raw magic. If I rushed this it would be all too easy to end up with a bunch of radioactive heating stones at the bottom of the river.

Could I separate the two enchantments? Make a central power source, and transmit the energy to the heating stones somehow? That seemed vaguely possible, but enchanting each heating stone to draw power at a distance probably wasn’t any easier than just making them self-powered. No, what I needed was a way to mass produce the heating stones.

Mass production. Hmm.

Spells can affect other spells. From what I’d seen so far that was an unusual type of magic here, because most wizards couldn’t perceive magic very clearly. It’s hard to make an invisible construct that precisely manipulates other invisible constructs, after all. But my mana sorcery allowed me to actually see magic if I focused on it. Could I make that work?

It would certainly take my full concentration, so the first thing I did was head back inside.

“Welcome back, milord,” one of the guards nodded to me as I entered. “Are we going to be getting gates for the keep today? Jorgen spotted a pack of goblins prowling the far shore of the river earlier.”

“Hopefully,” I told him. “I’m going to be doing some tricky spell work down in one of the empty vehicle bays for the next few hours, so pass the word not to disturb me unless there’s an emergency.”

“I’ll tell the Captain, milord.”

The transports all fit easily into one of the four vehicle bays I’d built, so there was plenty of space. I made my way into the dim recesses of one of the rear bays, conjured a light, and went to work.

This thing was going to need a massive power source, which meant a big chunk of stone with a power tap on it. So I started by making another transport sled, a bit smaller than the ones we’d been using and made of nickel-iron instead of stone. A large block of stone in the back would carry the enchantment. That started out as a power tap, a control mechanism tied to a lever on the side, and a set of earth and force enchantments to conjure a stone disk and push it out the back when the lever was pulled. Relatively easy stuff.

But enchanting the stone? That was tricky. My first attempt unravelled almost instantly, and a second try resulted in stones that were barely warm to the touch.

Well, maybe human limitations weren’t the only reason it took time to enchant an object. I tried slowing the whole process down, to give the magic time to sink into the stone and set properly. That worked out a bit better, but the resulting enchantment was still pretty distorted. Could I fix it?

I spent the rest of the afternoon tinkering with it, churning out badly enchanted heat stones and fixing their flaws one by one. It was a familiar process, actually. Build, test, fix a bug and repeat. I’d spent years doing the same thing coding web apps. Well, web apps didn’t explode or shatter or melt themselves if you made a mistake. But working on stone made it easy to just banish the results of my failed attempts, and keep going.

Finally I paused to stretch, and looked up to find that Cerise was quietly watching me.

“Hey, Cerise. What’s up?”

“Avilla wanted to know if you’re going to join us for dinner,” she told me. There was an odd note to her voice, and she was still staring at my little factory device.

“Something wrong?”

She slowly shook her head. “No. I’ve just never seen anything like that before. Am I getting this right? That thing makes enchanted rocks?”

I grinned. “Pretty neat, huh? There’s some kind of stability problem with the pattern buffer, and the part that sets the enchantment into the stone seems to wear down if I don’t reinforce it every so often. But as long as I’m keeping it tuned up I think I can turn out about one stone per minute all day long.”

“That’s incredible, Daniel,” she replied in amazement. “How does it work?”

“Come have a look. I think I can share my mana sight. Yeah, how’s that?”

She blinked, looked around the room, and then called a wisp of shadows to her hand and studied it.

“Awesome. So this is a real wizard’s magic sense? It’s a lot better than mine.”

“No, this comes from having mana sorcery,” I explained. “Remind me when I’ve got the keep set up, and I’ll see if I can make something that lets you and Avilla do this. Now, take a look at the factory enchantment. This is the power tap that runs it, this is the pattern buffer that holds a copy of the enchantment it’s going to make, and these bits here actually apply the magic…”

Spell crafting was sort of like electrical engineering, something I hadn’t studied since a few electives back in college. Complex, mind-bendingly counterintuitive, and highly mathematical if you wanted to really understand it. I probably would have been lost if not for the free insights and toolset my mana sorcery gave me. But to my surprise Cerise actually seemed to get the gist of my explanation.

“You’ve got a really weird approach to spell work,” she told me. “Some of this stuff is just impossibly complicated for any normal person. I could spend months trying to make something like that pattern buffer, and I’d make a mistake somewhere and screw it up. I guess that’s the benefit of sorcery.”

“Definitely,” I agreed. “The downside is it doesn’t come with a lot of explanations, so sometimes I have to guess at why the things I’m doing work. A lot of my healing is so complicated I might as well be using a magic item for all I understand it. But mana sorcery is kind of self-referential. It does most of the math for me, but it also lets me see what it’s doing if I look.”

“Cheater. I guess I can’t hope to do stuff like this myself, then.”

“I wouldn’t give up too easily,” I told her. “You’re not going to copy my abilities exactly, but you’ve got some impressive talents of your own. I think you can go a long way if you keep working at it.”

She smiled. “Thanks, Daniel. Hearing that from someone like you means a lot to me. Now come on, I’ve been down here long enough they’re probably getting ready to send out a search party.”

The girls seemed happy enough to have me joining them, but they weren’t thrilled to learn that I was leaving on an overnight expedition in the morning.

“But we just got here!” Avilla protested. “You haven’t even finished the tower yet, let alone gotten a decent rest. You can’t keep pushing yourself like this, Daniel.”

“I know, sweetie,” I sighed. “Believe me, I’d like nothing better than to spend the next week catching up on my sleep and strengthening our defenses here. But time waits for no man. We’ll be a lot better off in the long run if I impress the prince and the Conclave now. Not to mention that anything I can do to help the city survive will make things that much easier on us.”

“I suppose,” she pouted. “But you’re going to get a good rest tonight if I have to tie you down to do it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I agreed. “I’m just going to finish the gates downstairs, so we don’t have to worry about monsters attacking the guards in the middle of the night. After that I’m going to straight to bed.”

“Good.”

“That reminds me,” Cerise said. “Did the guys have any luck finding a place to buy furniture?”

Avilla shook her head. “Not really. The city is so big, it’s going to take days just to learn our way around.”

“Well, you’ll be happy to hear I’ve arranged to get us the services of a couple dozen carpenters for the next few weeks,” I told her. “Just a little kickback for letting the harbormaster decide what order the ships get thawed out in. I’m not sure what they’ll have on hand in the way of materials, but if we need to I’m sure the men can take a couple of transports across the river and cut down some of those trees with their force blades.”

“Oh! That’s wonderful news, Daniel. I was afraid we’d have to spend half our money on furniture, or just do without.”

“How long are you going to be gone?” Cerise asked, still sounding a bit concerned.

“Two or three days, I think. Depends on the weather, and how far out the ice turns out to go.”

Avilla frowned. “You aren’t going alone, are you?”

“Not a chance. I’m going to take a detachment with me, either Rain’s men or Gronir’s. We’ll have one of the harbor pilots with us too, to show us the way.”

“Take the wolf pack,” Cerise advised. “They can handle another run in the snow.”

“Good point,” Avilla agreed. “The rest of the men need a few days of rest before they’ll be good for much. The trip was really hard on everyone. You know, I understand your point, but I really wish you could let this wait a little. Don’t forget, you’re supposed to be at that wizards’ meeting in three days.”