Thomas gestured at the litter two of his men were carefully raising onto the dock. “He’s hurt bad, but the wizard patched him up. Says he’ll be up and around in a few days.”
“Hmm. I’d keep a guard on him if I were you. Alright, sir wizard, if you’ll follow me? You have servants? Bring’em along. We’d best get this sorted quick.”
“Alright. Let’s just tie a rope to this thing so the wind doesn’t blow it away.”
I added a couple of loops to the parapet of the hover-barge, so we could tie it off to the dock as the rest of my party unloaded. Then Avilla motioned Beri and Tina over, and we set out following the soldier who still hadn’t bothered to introduce himself. Avilla positioned herself a step behind me to my right, with the maids immediately behind her and Cerise bringing up the rear. I shot her a questioning glance as we crossed the dock and started into town, and she responded by looking nervously around and then back at me.
So, she didn’t entirely trust the situation either? Good to know.
The buildings along the river seemed mostly empty, but the reason for that became apparent when we came to a wall separating the docks from the rest of the town. Beyond that the place was packed, a bustling crowd filling the streets despite the cold. We made our way down narrow, winding cobblestone roads between two-story buildings set so close together they often shared walls. An eye-watering stench rose up around us despite the chill, and it was abundantly obvious that to the locals the streets doubled as makeshift sewers. Lovely.
A square keep stood in the middle of town, surrounded by a small plaza that was mostly full of wagons and improvised shelters. There were campfires everywhere, surrounded by clumps of half-frozen refugees. I picked out a few soldiers here and there as we walked, but no one who looked like an officer.
The main gates of the keep were closed, but a smaller door set into one of them stood open and unguarded. Inside was a small entryway, leading into a fairly large hall. Long wooden tables and chairs were stacked against the walls, but the middle of the room was currently clear and mostly empty. A few men in better armor than the regular soldiers stood clustered around a throne at the far end of the room, apparently in the middle of a discussion. A gaggle of servants surrounded them, rushing here and there on various errands or just standing ready near their masters.
There was a stir as we entered, and our escort took us right up to the throne as the men eyed us curiously.
“Milord Baron? This here’s Daniel the Black, a wandering adept. He’s responsible for the commotion down at the docks. Rode in on some kinda giant stone horse with a bunch of refugees, and some more of those cowards from the 5th Margold.”
Baron Stein was a heavyset man of middle age, with the look of a former athlete starting to go soft around the middle. He scowled at me like he’d caught me pissing in his cereal. Then his gaze wandered to the girls, and fixed covetously on Avilla.
“Damned wizards, always causing trouble,” he growled. “As if we don’t have enough mouths to feed already. I suppose you think I’m going to hire you?”
I hid my annoyance, and just raised an eyebrow. “I can do any number of useful-”
“Spare me the sales pitch. We’ll find a cot for you, but there’s no room for the baggage. Get rid of the peasants, and keep that witchy-looking bitch on a tight leash or I’ll hang you both. Erica, take the blonde upstairs and get her cleaned up. I’ll see if she’s a decent fuck tonight.”
Chapter 7
“Like hell you will,” I growled. “Avilla is mine, and I’ll kill any man who touches her. If this is how you do things in this shithole we’re leaving.”
I threw up a force wall around my whole party, not trusting these damned savages not to rush us. But the Baron just laughed.
“Finally, a man with some balls! What can you do that isn’t a parlor trick, then?”
I considered him for a long moment before answering.
“I can make heat without fuel, heal mortal wounds, raise fortifications and kill giants in single combat,” I said evenly. “What does your settlement have to offer me?”
“Food, gold and someone to stand guard while you sleep,” he answered immediately. “How long to raise the town wall enough to stand off giants?”
“Frost giants? That would take a forty foot curtain wall, minimum, with a thick earth fill or enough buttressing so they can’t just knock it over. About a week for that, and then we’d need to come up with something to kill them with.”
He nodded sternly. “That’ll do. I’ll pay twenty crowns for the wall, and find a room for you in the keep until it’s done. Deal?”
“Make it twenty-five. You won’t find another wizard who can do that.”
“Done. Someone find this man a room. Get started today on it – I don’t like the reports I’m getting from my scouts.”
I held my silence as we were led upstairs, and servants hurriedly removed someone’s belongings from a modest third-floor room with an arrow slit for a window. As they left I turned to the girls, noting their shocked and strained expressions.
Then I shut the heavy wooden door, and barred it.
“Avilla-” I began, only to be interrupted when she threw herself into my arms.
“Thank you, Daniel!”
Well, no need to apologize for talking about her like that, apparently. I’d been a little shocked at the surge of possessiveness the Baron’s pronouncement had evoked, but if she didn’t object I wasn’t going to worry about it right now.
“No problem, Avilla. I’m not going to let some random asshole kidnap and rape you no matter how important he thinks he is.”
She hid her face against my chest and nodded. “Thank you. What are we going to do?”
“We’re not staying here, that’s for damned sure. I don’t care if he was serious or just testing me, anyone who thinks like that can’t be trusted to lead a settlement in a crisis. But we can’t leave right away. We need money and supplies before we can move on, and I need to do a lot more enchantment work.”
“I’ll go ahead and give him his wall,” I decided. “That gives us a week to get ready, and then we can move on after I get paid. Or after I take it out of his hide if he tries to cheat me.”
Cerise nodded. “That works. But I don’t trust this place.”
“Neither do I,” I agreed. “Alright, from now on no one goes anywhere alone. Look out for each other, and get my attention if there’s a problem. Cerise, honest evaluation. How well can you fight soldiers?”
The young witch considered that. “I’m not completely sure. I can move faster than normal people, and my curses go right through armor. But those guys are a lot stronger than I am, and I don’t have anything like your wards. Best guess? As long as I take them off guard I can probably handle two or three soldiers at once, but that’s about my limit.”
“Alright, we can work with that. Beri, you said you have an uncle in the town guard? I need you to get in touch with him, find out his impression of the Baron and get an idea what’s been going on lately in town, and let him know I’m looking to hire a half-dozen good fighters. Find out where Captain Rain is set up too. It doesn’t sound like he’s going to get a good reception, so we may be able to work with him. Cerise, can you go with her?”
She looked at Avilla, who nodded. “I’ll be fine, love. I’m upset, but not hurt.”
“Alright, then. Um, Daniel, soldiers usually aren’t shy about throwing their weight around and knights are worse. If something happens, how much do I need to let them get away with?”
I sighed. This was probably inevitable.
“Handle it like you did with the deserters. Try to keep your head down and avoid trouble, and if that doesn’t work tell them you belong to a scary wizard who’ll torture them to death in front of their families and sell their souls to dark powers if they touch you. If that still isn’t enough, do whatever it takes to get yourself and Beri back to me in one piece. I’ll back you up.”
“Got it. Thanks, Daniel.”
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They left.
I went to the window, and spent a few minutes gazing out over the town as I tried to organize my thoughts. I’d been hoping to take refuge here, but that didn’t seem like a good idea now. The more I learned about this society, the less impressed I was. Maybe if we found a bigger settlement, with several different factions of nobles? Then they’d have to have some basic rules of civilized behavior, at least when it came to dealing with each other. If we could dress like nobles, and throw around some casual displays of magic… yeah, that might work.
A disgusted sound from Avilla drew my attention.
“Ew. There are lice in this bed, and bedbugs too. Don’t these people know how to wash their blankets?”
“Um, that’s a lot of work, Miss Avilla,” Tina said tentatively. “Especially in winter, when you have to build a fire and heat the water first. Besides, they’ll just hide in the mattress and come back out when we’re done.”
Right. The joys of medieval life. Though it was interesting that Avilla felt the same way I did about it. I suppose being a hearth witch living in a magic house made it easy to have higher standards.
“Hmph. I can drive them out, but they’ll just go into the walls if I can’t get the rooms around us as well. I suppose we have to use chamber pots too, and I can’t imagine how horrible the food will be. Daniel, are you sure we can’t just camp out somewhere?”
I started to tell her no and paused, with a glimmer of an idea building. I’d already seen that working with stone could be amazingly fast, and it was still early afternoon. I just might be able to swing this.
“I’ve got a better idea,” I told her. “Both of you bring your things, and follow me.”
I threw the door open and headed back downstairs, headed for the great hall. I found Sergeant Thomas and Captain Rain there, the latter still in a stretcher, being chewed out by an irate baron.
“-have known better than to waste good coin on mercenaries.” Baron Stein was saying. “A useless bunch of shopkeepers and tradesmen. If we weren’t besieged I’d send you all packing… what?”
He rounded angrily on me.
“I’m going to get started on the wall,” I said blandly. “I’ll need a squad of men to watch my back while I’m distracted with magic, since I’ll have to stand outside the wall for most of this.”
He put his hands on his hips. “What, you think I have nothing better for my men to do than babysit you?”
I shrugged. “How about the useless shopkeepers and tradesmen? All they need to do is keep watch and sound an alarm if something tries to sneak up on me.”
“Fine,” he growled. “Keep them out of my sight, and maybe I’ll forget to wonder why I’m paying them.”
“Very well, Baron. By your leave, then.”
I nodded, and turned to go. The little group of soldiers followed, and I paused in the courtyard outside the keep.
“I don’t suppose you’re interested in a more reasonable employer?” I asked.
“I don’t think that would go over well,” Captain Rain replied glumly. “Besides, I didn’t see any bags full of gold in your luggage.”
“A few days of selling magic items will change that,” I pointed out. “Just think about it. If you want to make it home I’m probably your best bet. In the meantime I’ve got a construction project to start on.”
I had him send a man back to my room to wait on Beri and Cerise, to let them know where to find me. Then I took four more as guards, and headed back to the docks.
I’d noticed before that the town wall didn’t actually go all the way down to the waterline. Instead the low mound most of the town was built on ended about twenty yards from the river, and the wall followed the top of the mound. I figured that was probably because the architects had wanted the wall to completely enclose the town, but had to leave the actual shoreline clear for docks and what looked like a small boatyard. The gap was small enough that archers on the wall could cover the whole area during the day, but it would be easy enough for monsters to slip in at night and attack the dockside district.
It also left me a conveniently situated stretch of unclaimed land.
I paced off the distance from the corner of the wall to the river, thinking it through. Upgrading the existing defenses would actually be more trouble than working from scratch, so I started my work fifteen paces out from the line of the town wall.
First I dug a hole down to bedrock, which turned out to be about twenty feet down here. Then I started conjuring stone at the bottom of the hole. I had to be careful not to do too much at once, but I found that a steady flow of a couple dozen cubic feet per second was just within the power budget of my new amulet. Hard-packed earth was several times easier, which was a simple way to fill the space that wasn’t going to be load-bearing. Soon I was back above ground level, and working my way out toward the river.
Things got tricky there, since I wanted my work to project well out into the water but I needed to be fairly close to the section I was working on. I solved that by dropping rocks and dirt through the ice and fusing it together to make a cofferdam, then scooping the water out with telekinesis. That took most of an hour, but gave me a relatively dry hole where I could excavate and then build back up with stone.
I built up a solid circular foundation forty feet across, about half of it projecting into the river. Ten feet above the waterline I turned that into a tower instead of just a solid mass of rock and earth, which got a little tricky. Stone was my only construction material, and it doesn’t have the tensile strength to support long horizontal surfaces. I ended up putting a big stone column with a spiral staircase around it at the middle of the tower, and each floor was basically one big doughnut-shaped room with an arched ceiling. After some thought I added four internal walls, each a good four feet thick, to break up the space and provide extra bracing.
When I’d thrown up three floors like that I went back down to the bottom, and put in a stairway on the side of the wall facing the town that led up to a stone door on the first floor. It was heavy stone, and its position well off the ground would make it hard to bring any sort of siege engine to bear on it.
Then I led the girls in. Tina stared at everything with wide eyes, and looked at me like she thought I might be a god in disguise or something. But Avilla got the idea.
“Is this for us?” She asked eagerly.
“That’s right. I’ll put a cistern on the roof and drop a couple of pipes to the kitchen and bath, maybe put in a magic stove and some eternal torches for light. Look around and think about how to arrange things, would you? I want to finish the tower before dark, but then I can come back and spend an hour or two making the place comfortable before bed.”
“This is wonderful, Daniel!” She smiled. “Thank you! Could you make us a stove first, and put a warmth spell on Tina’s cloak? Then we can make some progress on settling in while you work.”
I blinked, and noticed for the first time the way Tina was huddling against Avilla and shivering. Poor girl.
“Oh, damn. Sorry about that, Tina. It’s easy to forget how cold it is out here when I don’t feel most of it myself. Come here.”
She obediently hurried over, and I threw my cloak open and wrapped it around her. She stiffened for a moment, and then relaxed against me.
“Warm. Thank you, sir.”
“No problem. Hold still for a few minutes, and I’ll make yours do the same thing.”
It was getting easier with practice, but it still took a good fifteen minutes of intense concentration to set the enchantment. When I finished I found that Tina had her face buried against my chest, and my shirt was a little damp.
“Tina? You alright?”
She shook herself. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, I’m just so scared all the time. This is the first time I’ve felt safe in days.”
I hugged her gently. “I can imagine. This is hard enough for me, and I can fight.”
Avilla moved in to pat her on the back. “It’s alright, Tina. Did you s
ee how thick the walls on this tower are? Even a giant couldn’t break in.”
“Yeah, and that’s just the start,” I said reassuringly. “When we leave we’re going to be a lot better protected than before. But I need to get back to work now.”
Tina reluctantly let me go, and wiped her face. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry, sir. I’m ready to work now.”
It was another hour or so before Cerise and Beri showed up. By then I’d put in a little stub of curtain wall, a mass of packed earth faced with stone twenty feet thick and twice that high, and was working on finishing up the tower roof. Being a bit of a military history buff I was tempted to get elaborate there, but since we were mainly worried about giants an overhanging battlement with murder holes would probably just be a liability. Instead I settled for simple crenellations, the classic pattern you see on most pictures of European castles, but about a foot thicker than normal. I was putting in the last stretch when Cerise popped her head out of the stairwell.
“Daniel? Wow, this place is huge. Did you decide to stay in Lanrest after all?”
I shook my head. “No, this is just what it takes to stand up to twenty-foot giants. It’s actually a little on the small side still, but I think it’ll get the job done. How did things go?”
She grimaced. “This place really is a shithole. The Baron lets his knights do whatever they want to people, and there’s no town watch or anything. Warning them off is working so far, but I swear if one more guy grabs my ass I’m going to knife him.”
I could imagine. From what I’d seen the local women tended to be stooped and worn-looking, and covered themselves from head to toe in shapeless dresses and shawls of rough cloth. Cerise was pretty enough to be a model back home, and the way she carried herself screamed ‘hot babe on the prowl’. She’d stand out like a beacon here.
“I couldn’t blame you,” I replied. “Maybe having an armed escort will convince people to keep their distance?”
“I hope so. Anyway, recruiting here should be easy. They closed the granary this morning, and there’s a group of knights shutting down food vendors in the market and taking their stock right now. The smart people are all worried about what they’re going to eat once their pantries run bare.”
Fimbulwinter (Daniel Black) Page 11
