by M. C. Planck
It was also unusual to eat from the same dish as his men, but that was purposeful. He wanted his men to be fed decently, since his strength depended on them. For the farm boys, army food was often a step up in quality. The original reason—fear of being poisoned—had gone away, replaced by the habit of saying a blessing over his food at every meal. Magic had become so integrated into his life he didn’t even notice it half the time.
Helga kept running off every time he tried to talk to her. He would have been annoyed except he noticed she was giving Karl the same treatment. The young soldier didn’t show it, of course, but Christopher was sure he was also bothered by it. Not that he should be; Christopher was pretty sure his conduct in Helga’s absence would not meet with her approval.
Lalania was bright and cheery, steering the conversation to light laughter and easy banter, smoothing over Cannan’s silence. Though Cannan had been persuaded to take a seat and forgo taste testing every bit of Christopher’s food, he brought his sword and his surly suspicion to the table. D’Kan treated the man without any special deference, as did everyone else. Christopher was worried about the potential for conflict there, but D’Kan had made no argument or objection since the atonement.
No one had. The strength of the Saint’s reputation was so great that Cannan was accepted as a redeemed man, solely by virtue of having walked out of the Cathedral in one piece.
“I tried to talk to your armorers,” Gregor said through a mouthful of mashed yams. They were like mashed potatoes, aside from being yellow, sweet as grapes, and as stiff as meringue. “But they don’t know anything about armor.”
The men who ran his armory here in Burseberry maintained the rifles and cannons. “Sorry,” Christopher said, “we’ll have to go back to Knockford for that.”
“There are other things in Knockford you should be checking up on,” Svengusta said with a leer. That look was the one the old man used whenever he talked about Fae. Christopher sighed and wondered what trouble Tom had been up to now.
“Tomorrow, then?” Gregor seemed unusually eager to get moving again, until Christopher realized the knight wasn’t relaxing at home like he was. Then he remembered it wasn’t his home anymore, either.
He’d left the swamp fort under the command of a mercenary sergeant and a young priestess. At the time, escorting Cannan had seemed the greatest danger. Now he was having panic attacks about leaving the men so stripped of rank.
“Have we received any reports from the fort?” Christopher asked, despite the fact he’d never sent one back while he was in charge.
“It’s still there, at least as of yesterday,” Lalania assured him. No one thought to question her ability to know this. They just accepted it if Christopher accepted it. This aggravated him, but he didn’t know how to instill professional-grade skepticism into an army that depended on magic to function.
“And Disa?” Gregor asked the bard.
“Your precious flower is safe, Ser.” Lalania was more gracious than the words sounded.
“I left instructions,” Karl said. “Should the fort fall, Kennet is charged with cutting a finger from the Prelate’s hand and hiding it in a prepared safe hole in the walls. Even if the fort is destroyed, the Prelate at least should return.”
“What about Kennet?” Christopher asked. For that matter, what about the rest of the men? “Can he throw one of his own fingers in afterwards?”
“No, Vicar,” Torme corrected him. “One must already be dead before the sympathetic token is harvested. Even if he could save everyone else, he could not save himself.”
“Nor would he try,” Karl said. “Hiding a single finger has a hope of success. Hiding a bushel of them would reveal the plan to the enemy, thus negating it. Prelate Disa belongs to the Church of the Bright Lady. We have a duty to return her. The men, however, belong to the Colonel. It is their duty to die in service to his cause.”
“Wait,” Christopher said. “That means Disa would have to be dead before . . .”
Karl did not even shrug. “Kennet has a carbine. Should worst come to worst, he will do what is necessary.”
Strangely, Gregor looked relieved. Christopher shook his head in confused dismay.
“Let’s see that it doesn’t come to that,” he said. “Karl, figure out how soon we can march again.”
Karl paused, as if thinking. “Three days, without undue effort.”
Christopher realized the pause was for him to do the thinking. Karl had just explained why there was no need for haste.
“That will give us time to talk some sense into your smiths in town,” Gregor said.
“It’s not them you need to sensify,” Svengusta objected. “It’s your Vicar here. He likes wearing soft clothes. Why, it’s almost like he’s a priest instead of a warrior.”
“Plenty of priests wear armor, too,” Gregor said. “At least where I come from. And in any case, I’m not a priest.”
“Not yet,” Lalania muttered, and Gregor laughed at her.
Christopher delayed another day, sending Gregor off to harass the recruits and abandoning the paperwork to Torme. He’d had another idea.
Now Jhom stared at Christopher’s blueprints, in total silence, for a full fifteen minutes. When he finally spoke, he seemed distracted and bemused.
“Pulling wire used to be the work of apprentices. Now you will make a machine to do it?”
Christopher shrugged. “It’s not like the apprentices will complain.” Making wire was more tedious and less interesting than making nails. “It will take plenty of apprentices to run the machine, anyway.” It would also take a water mill, and rolling parts made smooth by the senior smith’s magical precision.
“What are you going to do with such a profundity of wire, my lord?”
What Christopher wanted to do was find some insulating rubber and run a telegraph line across the Kingdom. But copper was too expensive to leave hanging around in trees. He could only afford steel wire right now.
“Chain mail. Apparently the army needs some.” It wasn’t just Gregor anymore. Karl had changed sides, too. Originally the young veteran had considered armor not just a waste of money, but a pernicious liability, since it meant the peasants couldn’t even run away once they started dying. But somewhere along the way Karl had noticed that Christopher’s men didn’t run.
“You would not let us put our boys in studs and leather, yet now you will coat them in mail?” Jhom stared at him.
“We couldn’t afford it then. We can only afford it now, if you can make this machine work.” It seemed absurd that it would normally take a smith an entire year to make a suit of chain mail, until you remembered the smith had to make his own steel wire. And his own steel. At that rate his troops would die of old age before his smiths could armor them all.
“And when you make machines to do the work of senior smiths, what can we afford then?” Jhom asked. “That is, if we smiths still have jobs to earn our bread with.”
“Don’t worry, Jhom. We’ll always need someone to make the machines.” Christopher tried to frame it as a joke, but the truth was that most of his apprentices would never become smiths. They would become factory workers. He wasn’t sure they would thank him for that. Did the early factories improve the lives of the common people, or make them worse? Was the squalor of the industrial revolution a result of economic necessity or merely social indifference?
“Well, my lord, I will bend my every effort to birthing your new machine. But I warn you, should you ask me to make a machine to plow our fields and our wives, I will have to rebel.”
Christopher was about to ask Jhom what he had against tractors, but decided he really didn’t want to pursue this conversation any further down the strange path it seemed to be taking.
He went off to see Fae, which, sadly, promised to be no less difficult a conversation. Once again he had to ask for her help.
Fae was dressed more modestly than he had ever seen her, which was a relief. Before he could work around to the topic at hand,
she called three young women into the office. They had a different air about them than the usual peasant women who worked for Fae as cartridge-rollers and paper-cutters. He would have thought them troubadours from their daring clothes and the sly looks they gave him, except for their poor fashion sense.
Fae spoke with prim authority. “As Flayn once held my apprenticeship, I am entitled to hold another’s. I have judged any of these three worthy, but I leave the final choice up to you.”
Christopher thought about the things Fae had been willing to do to become a wizard. That explained the girls’ rather forward demeanor. He also thought about Fae’s demeanor, and how she had gone from exploited shopgirl to town gentry in a very short amount of time. That might explain the girls’ eagerness.
“Why not hire all three?”
Fae stared at him. “I did not think I could spend your tael so freely, my lord.”
That was nonsense. She always assumed she could spend his money. Probably she had lectured the girls on how hard they would have to strive to be chosen, and she was just annoyed at him for proving her wrong.
He smiled at the girls. Annoying Fae was enough to put him in a good mood.
“I think it would be a wise investment.” Come to think of it, it would be. Having three more sources of sulfur would weaken Fae’s lock on him. He decided he needed to throw her a bone. “I’ll make them first Apprentice rank, but I’ll leave it up to you to say when they are ready for more. And I’ll promise to make them a full-fledged first-rank wizard in four years, if you say they are ready.”
“Ten years, my lord,” Fae corrected him. “If they have not been promoted in a decade, then they are surely not worthy. But any time less than that is purely up to your discretion.”
“Fair enough. Now if you ladies would excuse us, Mistress Fae and I need to talk shop.”
The girls curtsied low and swept out of the room, not without a few doe-eyed looks of gratitude. Then they were gone, and the only feminine presence in the room was Fae’s oddly muted, almost matronly air. It made him take her more seriously, which after a few minutes he realized was worse. He was starting to think of Fae as a person, not as a witch in black leather. Perversely it made her more attractive.
He set a book and a tiny wooden box on the table. Fae went for the box first.
He could not stay his hand from precaution. It strayed to his sword hilt of its own accord. But Fae set the box down again, the lid open but the contents undisturbed.
“I must warn you,” she said, “the identification of enchantments can be perilous. I would be of little value to you as a corpse, or worse.”
“I don’t want it identified. I already know what it does. I want it destroyed.”
Despite her words, she looked unhappy at this. Apparently the lure of magic was stronger than her fear.
“You must tell me what it does before I can offer advice.”
He sighed and looked out the glass-paneled door, where Cannan stood on guard. Lowering his voice, he said, “It breaks minds. It turned Cannan evil, and before him, Bart. Well, eviler, I guess. It also protects against damage. Bart was almost immune to mundane weapons.”
She looked at the ring with avarice, which was her version of respect.
“That is a rare and powerful item. Are you sure you wish to destroy it? There might be a way to avoid or reverse the undesirable effect.”
This from the woman who couldn’t say the word experiment without sniffing?
“Yes, I am sure. It is far too dangerous to fool around with.”
“As you wish. What have you tried so far?”
Now he had to blush. She knew him too well.
“The Saint used a spell on it. Captain Steuben used a chisel. Neither of them worked.” The chisel hadn’t even scratched the ring before breaking.
“Of course the chisel failed. If it protects flesh from harm, how much more so would it protect itself? You cannot defeat it by attacking its strength.”
He started to speak, but she held up her finger imperiously. She did not hesitate to boss him around when she thought she could get away with it. It would have been refreshing if it wasn’t so aggravating.
Casting her detection spell, she studied the ring carefully through her circled thumb and finger.
“What is the weakness of gold?” she asked him, like a lecturer examining a pupil.
“Other than its softness, you mean? Um. Low melting point?”
She pinched her lips together, a tiny sign of disappointment. “I was going to say aqua regia, but yes, I suppose heat as well.”
He didn’t know what aqua regia was, but it sounded expensive. Heat, on the other hand, he manufactured on an industrial scale.
“It won’t . . . explode? Or release some kind of curse?”
She shook her head, her superiority restored. “If it were powerful enough to do that, it wouldn’t melt in the first place.”
After closing the lid, he put the box back in his pocket, and found himself breathing normally again. Fae picked up the book, a dubious second prize, and leafed through it.
“That stuff will explode,” he said, “so be careful. And worse, I have to show you how to handle quicksilver. If you touch it, or even merely heat it up in an enclosed room, it will make you sick.” Mercury was nasty stuff, the origin of the phrase, “mad as a hatter.”
“Could you not undo that sickness?” she asked. “Nonetheless, I will abide by your restrictions, and I appreciate your concern.”
He was pretty sure it wouldn’t have been her getting sick anyway. That was what apprentices were for.
At the end of the day Christopher stood in front of a hot forge, flanked by the members of his retinue. Dereth had stoked the forge high before sensibly fleeing, and waves of heat beat at him. The forge contained only slag, having done its productive work for the day. It still retained the power to destroy, which suited his purpose now.
He stepped forward and took the tiny wooden box out of his pocket. Briefly he considered how to best empty it over the glowing crucible without frying himself. Then he just tossed the box, unopened, into the crucible.
The wood flared into a jet of flame three feet high, consumed by the intense heat. The walls of the box turned to ash, which took flight on a wing of convection, leaving the bright gold ring lying on boiling gray slag in the crucible. For a moment it sat there, defiant, the black stones fantastically dark against the incandescence. Then the ring lost its shape, all in an instant, and gold puddled across the surface of the slag before sinking out of sight. The stones, freed from their golden bezels, cracked and turned gray. Christopher dipped a ladle into the thick liquid and lifted it a few inches. When he tipped the ladle and let the liquid spill back into the crucible, streaks of purple ran with it.
With his other hand he cast an orison. The purple streamed to his grasp, forming a pellet between his fingers.
“So little reward for such potent evil,” Lalania said, frowning at the pellet. Her definition of little was relative; the tael was easily worth a hundred pounds of gold.
On the other hand, the damage it had wrought was vastly greater, so perhaps her evaluation was accurate.
“This is why artifacts are not normally reduced,” Fae said, apparently not having heard the last word. “It is no better reward than from a moderately ranked noble, and yet the artifact would have cast its power across the ages, undiminished by the passage of time.”
“Then why aren’t we drowning in the things?” Christopher asked. “If they’re permanent, and each generation makes a few, then after enough time the place should be littered with magic doodads.”
Everyone looked at him.
“I presume,” Lalania said, “that every generation makes the same decision we just made. Power we can use today, however small, is worth more than power that will only aid some distant future.”
Christopher could tell she didn’t believe that. She was just covering up one of his gaffes again. The Skald had given him a perfectly goo
d reason why they weren’t drowning in historical artifacts: they didn’t have countless generations behind them.
“This was a power we did not want cast across the ages,” Torme said. “Although I wonder at its wisdom. Could the White make such a ring that improved minds? Could we recruit to our color through sheer artifice?”
“When you put it like that,” Christopher said, “I think the answer is obvious.”
Strolling back through the darkening town, the path illuminated by flickering light-stones, he considered his advantages. Magic required tael, which was always in short supply. No matter how much the enemy had, they were unlikely to get more anytime soon. But technology just required labor, and ironically it increased the productivity of labor. If he could get an industrial revolution started, maybe he could grow it faster than the enemy could adapt. He resolved to keep his head down, stay out of trouble, fan the flames of change from his forges, and let the politics take care of itself.
12
A SOCIAL CALL
The politics came in search of him the very next day. He would have thought it a consequence of breaking the ring, some latent curse leaking out, but it was too soon. The Gold Curate Joadan had to have been already on the road from the day before.
Christopher stood on his chapel steps, looking out over the field where Joadan sat astride a beautiful bay stallion. The horse was armored in the same elaborate gold filigree style as the Curate. Twenty more horsemen followed. Although their armor was plain, it was no less serviceable. The yellow tabards and cloaks marked them as Joadan’s men; the discipline with which they held their places and their mounts marked them as professionals.
