"The planet is big, there are other big islands, and they are separated by a lot of water. But at some point, all the kingdoms are going to develop ships, and the wars will continue on the water."
"Ships?"
"You have fishing boats now?" asked Jen.
"Yes. You mean larger ones?"
"Much larger," said Lea. "Big enough for several hundred people, each one carrying mages throwing fireballs at each other."
He winced.
"And when technology starts to update mundane weapons," I added, "mages will spend most of their time defending, and people will die by the ship crew numbers, instead of individually. Mages may not even survive at all, once technology exceeds their ability to defend."
For a moment he looked as if it could never happen, but his face quickly changed to alarm.
"So what do we do?" he finally asked.
"I don’t know," I admitted. "We have to move some of the villages back home in any case. I guess I need to find somewhere to move each kingdom, and at least put off the warfare as long as possible."
"Maybe we can help with that. If we can get all of our mages working with an Oracle, we could map the planet."
"Will the new king allow it?"
"We'll have to ask. He'll be home tomorrow."
I nodded, and concentrated on eating for a while.
"Who's next?" asked Tasha.
Thirty Five
"Welcome Great One."
The king was standing alone, in the courtyard outside his palace, when I appeared. Behind him was more of a large building than a castle, although built with the same stone and style.
"Please don’t call me great one. It's not something I feel is appropriate."
He smiled.
"I don’t put much store in Oracles, but on this occasion, the information was correct. I decided not to fight your arrival, after being informed of our rival over the mountains losing his castle this morning. They tell me you want to talk. So talk we shall."
He motioned towards the door, and didn’t wait for me, entering and continuing to walk without checking if I was following or not.
He sat on a throne, and waved me into a chair which flunkeys set down behind me. I sat as well. It wasn’t comfortable, but I had the feeling changing it wouldn’t go down well here. I leaned my staff against my left shoulder.
"Nice staff," he said, in a condescending tone.
The staff left my shoulder, and stood by itself beside my chair. The king frowned.
"I've been told not to anger you, so I won't. But if you flaunt your magic at me, our talk will be over."
"You don’t like magic?"
"No. But when you're surrounded by magicians bent on conquest, it behooves you to have some of your own."
"As slaves I've been told."
"I wouldn’t use the s word myself. Let's just say I keep them on a very short leash."
"What would it take for you to remove the leash?"
"No threat requiring magic as a defense."
"What do you say stands in the way of peace?"
He went on at some length, and I listened. It was essentially a verbose version of what the Mage King had told me. And once again, the symbiotic nature of the kingdoms had failed to register with him.
"What do you want?" I finally asked him.
He told me the same as the last two had. They all wanted their own land, away from the others. What was more interesting was what he was prepared to give up to get their own land.
"You can have the mages and their families. All of them. In fact, if we get our own independent land, and you don’t take them, I'll have them all killed!"
"Do you have an heir?"
I left the threat hang there, and he look at me with speculation on his face.
"No, but I will have shortly. I'll make sure of it."
The speculation left his face, and was replaced with hatred.
"I don’t for a moment believe you can deliver on anything we’ve spoken about. But I do know you can put up a wall which will keep the other kingdoms out."
He stood, and towered over me.
"You have two days to wall off my kingdom from all the others, or I'll begin executing the families of my mages, until you do."
"I wouldn’t if I was you."
"I will, and I am me. Now get out of here!"
I took him at his word, and moved myself to the roof of the building, out of sight of anyone who might be looking upward outside. The staff stayed standing there for a full ten seconds after, but moved to my hand before he could touch it.
Several hours later, I was confident I’d found all the mages and their families, and put wards around all of them. I'd also discovered he'd lied about not having heirs. In fact, he had two generations of them, and redundant bastards to call on if the direct ones all died with him.
While I could do what he wanted straight away, I wasn’t going to. But he had given me a deadline for solving the inherent problems here.
Tasha found me down on the beach about half an hour after I jumped back. I was watching the sun going down, and listening to a pod of whales. For now, I needed to destress, and the last thing I actually wanted to do was think.
She sat next to me, and held my hand.
Thirty Six
The democracy had once had a castle, but it was little more than a ruin now.
My sight had found a twelve member council in session, while I ate breakfast the next morning. They were in a large chamber, around an oblong table, and obviously debating something quite heatedly. A young woman entered, talked briefly with the older woman in the center of one side of the table, and left. Half of the table rose, and they all settled along one side, looking across the table to the remainder of the chamber, which was chaired in a way which reminded me of the court rooms I'd been in only a few days earlier.
A shiver went down my spine, as the possibility someone had known I was sighting on them, hit me. Another Oracle I guessed.
As I continued to watch, another set of chairs was brought to the empty side of the table. Oddly, I thought, there were only ten this time. Why would they need ten? It took me a moment. The girls and I made five, and five master mages made ten.
This kind of thing could do your head in. I’d been planning on going alone. But someone had seen me looking in, and had obviously seen something of the near future, and suddenly I was going with nine other people.
Should I go alone anyway?
"What's up chuckles?" asked Tasha.
I hadn't realized I was chuckling.
The explanation had everyone in earshot laughing. But the girls began preparing for the visit, and the mages went off to change into more stately robes.
When everyone was ready, I lined us up so each of us would be standing behind a chair when we arrived. Checking again to make sure the move was safe, I saw the young woman whispering to the older one again.
"They will be here momentarily," said the older, as the younger one left the table, and took a seat in the main chamber seating, with others streaming in now to also take seats. Power was coming off some of them, so mages would be present.
I took that as my que, and moved us.
Several of the seated people gasped as we appeared, in spite of the forewarning, but the older woman in the center merely waved us to seats. The girls were on my left, and the mages on my right, with Tasha to my left, and the battle mage next to me on the right.
There was a healthy pause, which rapidly became awkward.
"Who do you represent?" the apparent leader asked me. "You are too young to be an emissary of any of the kingdoms. And I'm told too powerful to be any of the rulers of them."
For a moment I was confused, until I realized she was aware of exactly how powerful each ruler was, and none of them had my power or skillset.
"My name is Thorn. To my left are friends of mine from the future. To my right are the mage masters of the village I was born into. I represent no-one. But I act for all. There will
be peace."
"One would contend with an assertion of coming from the future, except I can see clearly your garments are totally different from ours. I'm also told your womenfolk wear weapons of a type never seen here before."
She looked at the girls, and Jen solemnly nodded to her. She went on.
"We too want peace. But conditions do not support it. How do you propose to bring it?"
"What do you want?"
She looked at me strangely for a moment.
"You imply we have a choice. You bring six mages and strange weapons into our council chamber, and yet you ask what we want instead of telling us what you intend to take?"
"There is always a choice," said Jen. "Thorn could rule here if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. We'd all rather find a way to make peace work, where it gives each kingdom some of what they want."
"So what do you want?" laughed Lea.
She told us.
Thirty Seven
After lunch, I went back to the beach to think.
They all wanted pretty much the same thing. Space. The land mass here was too small for five kingdoms, and while the mountains divided them up, they continually ground against each other, and had done for centuries.
The wars were not really about expansion though.
Not conquest, but population control.
Even if there were open borders, there were still too many people here. Or so they all said. But it didn’t make sense. Villages were not close to each other, but widely spaced across the lands of each kingdom.
I lay back in my beach lounge, and sent out my sight again. It took a while, but suddenly it all fell into place. There were villages, crop and grazing land, rudimentary roads between them, and nothing else. Well, there was something else, but the killing fields defined the borders, where it wasn’t impassable mountain.
It came down to food. How much food could be grown or raised defined the maximum population for each kingdom. And to a lesser degree, fresh drinking water. They were constantly challenging this maximum, and when things got bad, they sent their useless mouths out to fight. And die.
They all had mages. The mages were capable of winning a war all on their own. And yet, most of the combatants were ordinary people. The mages did enough so neither side lost, and after the slaughter, they withdrew until next time.
For a while I sat there, feeling sickened.
Whale song filled my ears again, as I sought to put reality out of mind, and I began looking much more closely at all the large land masses. There were plenty, some even big enough for centuries of expansion, but very few had everything needed by a kingdom full of people.
There were groups of islands which together provided everything, but the one thing I didn’t want to jump start, was building boats, and later ships, which would eventually lead to sea warfare.
I did identify four land masses which would work into the long term, but none of them were ideal. So I could relocate four of the kingdoms, starting with my own.
Which brought me back to why I was here in the first place.
Regardless of the other kingdoms, I needed to move at least part of my own, and while we had time, I didn’t want to stay here forever.
And while I felt better now about my second life civilization vanishing because of someone else's actions and not mine, there was still consequences to my early actions which had to be resolved. And it did mean moving people.
The thing was, I didn’t know how many.
To find out, I’d need to go forward in time, and watch what happened when all I’d sent back started arriving.
Or did I?
"Can you still hear me?" I asked the Oracle, in my mind.
"Of course."
"Are you listening in on my thoughts all the time now?"
"No. You directed the thought at me. I received it, and responded. The link will last as long as you want it to."
"So this is me sending, and not you receiving?"
"Yes."
"How did that happen?"
"How did what happen?"
"I've never done this before. How did I suddenly have the ability to talk mind to mind?"
"Could be my contacting you that way, opened a latent talent you already had. By the way, what's the noise in the background?"
"Noise? Oh, you mean the whale song?"
"What's a whale?"
"Sort of like a giant fish, only bigger. They swim in the oceans. I spent a long time watching them with remote sight, before I figured out how to hear them as well."
"How did you know there was something to hear?"
"Time I spent in the civilization you said wasn’t me destroying it."
"How did they know?"
"They had the ability to stick something in the water, and record sounds."
"I'll take your word for it, but it sounds crazy to me. Mind you, it is rather soothing. Will you teach me how to do it?"
"Sure. I did have something I wanted to ask you, so it’s a part payment on that."
"Only part?"
"It’s a big ask, and I'm not sure you can do it."
"Do what?"
"Look two years into the future, and show me what happens over the next few weeks."
"Oh."
She went quiet for a whole minute.
"I'll try. Any particular place you want me to look at?"
"The hills beyond the castle in my kingdom."
"And I'm looking for?"
"You'll know it when you see it. If you can, look two years from now, and keep looking for four weeks after. If nothing happens, there won't be any point in looking further."
"Can I speed it along? I can't spend weeks on one skrying."
"If you can do that, sure."
"I'll try it. I'll let you know if I find anything worth you seeing."
I felt something change, and assumed she'd dropped the connection at her end, and I did the same.
Until Tasha joined me a few hours later, I pondered how to teach her to hear whale song, and kept on analyzing where I could send people.
Thirty Eight
"What's on your mind Thorn?"
I looked up from where I’d been pushing my food around my plate, and looked at Jen.
"What makes you think there's anything on my mind?"
She indicated my food. It resembled the shape of the main, almost, continent.
"He's worrying about the mage slaves and their families," said Tasha.
"Yeah," I said. "I need to move them somewhere tomorrow."
"Why?" asked Lea.
"The threat to kill them all," responded Jess.
"Surely Thorn just puts up a wall as the king asked."
"Which means he won't need mages anymore," said Jen.
"Oh," said Lea. "Move them then."
"To where?" I asked.
No-one had an answer. I could move them to another island, but only for a short time. And I didn’t want to move them more than once if I could help it. On the other hand though, I had no doubts they were in imminent danger, regardless of if I put the wall up or not.
"Pity we can't fit them all on the ship," mused Jen.
"How many are there?" asked Lea.
"Several thousand," I answered, "by the time you include extended families, who produce a mage every few generations."
I'd managed to not only sight the mages, but magically tag everyone in their families. Including distant cousins. Whatever I did, I needed to make sure no more mages were born where that king controlled. I also tried looking for families where magical descendants might appear in the future, and found there were none. Although I wasn’t at all sure I’d set up the intent correctly.
"Why not build a bigger ship?" suggested Lea, almost absently.
They all looked at me. Building a ship was out of the question, for me at least. Copying was easy, but there was no way I could build one from scratch. And realistically, the warships I’d copied so far, were not appropriate, or big enough. Jess saw my doubts.
&nb
sp; "Leave it with us. When do you need a design?"
"As soon as possible. Depending on how complex it is, it'll take at least a few hours to build."
"Anything we need to take into consideration?" asked Jen.
"This one needs to house thousands, possibly for some time, and without freaking them out. So living areas have to be low tech. But at the same time, design it so it can be scaled up easily. We may need to move all of my people at once, and a ship for a few thousand won't do. We'd need too many of them. And many would take longer to build than one really large one. Better make it waterproof too, as I might need to hide it in the ocean for a while."
"Space worthy?" asked Jess.
"I can't see needing it to actually fly anywhere, but putting it in orbit for a while could be useful. So yes."
"What about possessions?" asked Lea.
"Ideally, they might need a new house on another island, so yes, we need to take everything they own with them. I don’t know about the houses themselves though. Mages can probably rebuild them. I could, but I really don’t want to be here that long."
"We'll need a shuttle Thorn," said Jen.
I concentrated for a moment, and one of the ship's shuttles appeared down by the creek. I waved them that way.
"Let's go girls," commanded Jen, and the three of them left.
I returned to eating, and after, let Tasha lead me to my family, where we spent the next few hours sharing memories, and telling stories.
I felt like an intruder the whole time. I still couldn’t remember their names, although I remembered a lot of things when mentioned. But the biggest problem was I no longer had any common frame of reference with them. They were primitives, to my technological age, and Tasha's space age.
I mean, I loved them, but…
I could no longer relate to them. I wondered if this was normal for kids returning to the family home after years out on their own. Or just me and my special circumstances.
Too many I's in my thinking, I mused. This wasn’t all about me. It was also about them reconnecting to me. So I made an effort.
The girls returned long after my sisters were in bed, and just as my parents were heading off as well.
Tomorrow's Spacemage (The Spacemage Chronicle Book 3) Page 11
