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 som
e 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.
“Awesome,” she pronounced. “I want one. It’s a little bulky to carry around all the time, but it’s worth it.”
“How did you do that?” Gronir demanded.
“Magic,” she grinned.
“Figures,” he grumbled. “Cheater.”
“Hey, I can’t help it if I’m awesome. I’ll be happy to conjure up a Son of Muspel for you if you want to try to steal his weapon sense.”
“No demon summoning in the house, young lady,” I said with mock sternness. “Take it outside.”
“Aww. You’re no fun, Daniel.”
“I’ll just pass on that bit of suicide,” Gronir interjected. “I‘m just glad you’re on our side, Cerise.”
That was a good start, but better weapons for our troops wouldn’t be worth much if we didn’t have room to train them. Marcus had already come up with fifty new recruits, but using the vehicle bays as a drill field was awkward at best. The rest of the keep was filling up quickly as well, so the next problem I needed to solve was space.
We really needed something a lot bigger than the keep if I was going to provide the kind of sanctuary I’d promised Hecate. But as usual I was pressed for time, and building the kind of place I really needed with the techniques I’d been using so far could take a couple of weeks. Fortunately I had some ideas on getting around those limitations.
The enchantment on the staff that I’d used as the seed of my keep had expanded to cover all the stone I grew from it, just like I’d wanted. Subsequent experiments showed that I could do the same thing with the actual stone conjuration, making an item that would grow into any shape I desired as long as I supplied it with power. In theory I could add a self-powering enchantment and make a rock that would grow into a fortress under its own power. But that would be dangerous, because damaging an enchanted object tends to degrade any enchantments attached to it. Sooner or later someone was going to attack my stronghold, and I didn’t want to be in the same county as a damaged matter-to-mana converter.
When a device that plays with nuclear forces malfunctions, the results tend to be spectacularly bad.
So instead I spent some time following up on an idea I’d had before, of making a central power source that could supply magic to other objects. As I’d expected, that was actually harder than just making each of the linked items self-powered. But it allowed me to keep the power source in a protected location, and incidentally guard it from casual observation.
Yes, I’d come to the conclusion that I was being a little too free with my secrets. Getting a close look at those rocks in the harbor would be pretty tricky, but if I kept putting that enchantment on every serious magic item I made it wouldn’t be long before some wizard got ahold of one and started experimenting. One way or another, that would end badly.
I also discovered that while mana transmission links were complex, they didn’t require the massive internal power levels of a matter conversion spell. I was fairly optimistic about my chances of building an enchantment factory that could reproduce the effect without damaging itself, which might open the door to true mass production. But working out all the details on that would take time, so I put it on the list for later and went back to my construction problem.
I hid my new power source in a small chamber at the back of one of the empty vehicle bays. Visually it was just a big block of solid nickel-iron, probably five or six tons of it, which turned out to be near the upper limit of how big a matter conversion enchantment I could make. There were six glyphs on the front face of the device, marking the links that I could connect to the devices it would power. The first of these was just a stone sphere, with the same protective enchantments as the keep plus a set of conjuration spells for earth, nickel-iron and several varieties of stone.
I walled off the power source once I’d connected my new castle seed, and opened the gates that looked out over the river. I needed to touch the castle seed to control it, but that wasn’t a big problem. I held it out over the open water, and told it to grow a thin shaft of nickel-iron reaching down to the river bottom.
It was a completely different sensation than conjuring the material myself. Like driving a bulldozer, instead of moving dirt with a shovel. It took a little concentration, but practically no effort at all.
Like the first time I’d done this, I had to use force magic to hold the growing mass in place until it was big enough to be stable. But it went much faster than when I’d built the keep. In a matter of minutes I had a stone platform twenty feet across, pushing aside the mud of the river bottom and the heating stones around the keep as it grew.
I wrapped it around half of the keep, and then made it grow a wedge-shaped extension into the ice that covered the river beyond the influence of my heating stone. The slow-moving battering ram forced its way through the ice with a series of loud crashes and grinding sounds, sucking down a fantastic amount of power in the process. But there was still no strain at all on me, and not much of one on my new power source. It was thousands of times more massive than anything I’d used before, and the amount of energy it could produce at full power was insane.
Over the course of a long morning I expanded the extension into an oval island covering a bit under the ten acres of river that Prince Caspar had deeded to me. Most of it was solid stone, with the shores rising vertically to the same level as the entrance hall of the keep. But there was also a large square patch of dirt in the center, and several large depressions that might be filled with soil or ponds depending on how things developed.
But exploring the possibilities of indoor agriculture would have to wait. For now, I just needed a defensible area we could expand our facilities into. So I raised a wall around the edge of the island next, putting the parapet at the same level as the enclosed walkway around the keep.
In keeping with my trend towards over-engineering I made the island’s wall thirty feet thick, enough that we could easily set up cannons or siege engines on top. I ran a wide enclosed walkway along the inner side of the wall, so troops could move around the perimeter of the island under cover, with doorways leading out onto the wall every hundred feet or so. I didn’t get too fancy with the battlements, but I did put in a series of enclosed sentry posts with quartz windows so we could keep men on watch even in the worst weather.
Given all that I didn’t see much need for towers, but I threw up the shell of another keep on the far side of the island. At some point I might want to build a bridge from there to the far shore of the river, and it would make a decent gatehouse.
I also put in a river gate facing the harbor, opening onto a little enclosed anchorage with a wide ramp leading up to the surface of the island. It wasn’t big enough for real ships, but it might be convenient to be able to send out boats or hover-vehicles of some sort. Mindful of the fact that this was a potential hole in our defenses I followed up by building a wall around the anchorage, with a drawbridge at the top of that ramp and a substantial gatehouse guarding the path onto the island proper.
As I’d hoped, dropping such a huge mass of self-heating stone into the river created
a noticeable heat island effect. It was still a long way from being warm, but between that and the wall acting as a windbreak it gave us an area where the new troops could train outdoors without half of them dying of exposure.
I took the whole staff on a tour when I was done, and they immediately started suggesting more construction.
“We should block out a military district,” Marcus suggested. “Maybe that space between the keep and the anchorage? Put in some proper barracks buildings, a smithy and armory complex, maybe some warehouse space and a place to park those new vehicles you were talking about. An archery range would be good too, for practicing with the guns.”
Oskar nodded in agreement. “Put the smithy next to the gate to the anchorage, in case we start shipping goods somewhere. Maybe a warehouse, too. Are you thinking of building a town on the island, milord?”
“Yes, but not a normal one. It isn’t that big, and it’s not healthy for people to go outside too much in this kind of cold. I’m thinking lots of big stone buildings with thick walls, and covered streets between them. I’ve also got some ideas for trying to grow crops using magic, but the facilities for that will end up taking up a lot of ground in the middle of the island.”
“I’m starting to wonder if I was too quick to set up my kitchen,” Avilla commented. “You could build a palace out here if you wanted to.”
“Not really my style,” I replied. “I don’t need that much space, and when it comes to impressing visitors I think a giant fortress is more the kind of message I want to send. Besides, if I’m living in the keep it will be hard for outsiders to come up with excuses for why they’d need to visit the island. I figure people will tend to avoid the long walk across that pier into Kozalin if they can, so we should be able to keep the details of what we’re doing here from spreading too fast.”
“If you say so, Daniel. Well, we’ll certainly have room for as many refugees as you want to take in.”
“Maybe you could charge them rent?” Oskar joked.
Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) Page 17
