Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (15 page)

Now all I needed was a target.

The negotiations with Irithil were still dragging on. He was determined to get the best deal he possibly could for his clan, and while their long-term situation wasn’t good they apparently felt they could afford to spend a few weeks exploring their options.

The main sticking point seemed to be the issue of fealty. The Nethwillin Company was used to having complete autonomy to run their own affairs, and they weren’t eager to give that up despite my assurances that I had no problem letting them continue to live by their own customs among themselves. For my part, I felt that letting any group on my island have too much autonomy was asking for trouble. There were inevitably going to be cases where members of different refugee groups got into arguments about whose customs should apply in some particular case, and I was damned well going to have the authority to settle such disputes.

Irithil was pretty cagey about military commitments as well. Not only did he want to limit his clan’s military obligation to just helping defend the island, but even then he wanted an agreement that their troops wouldn’t be placed under anyone else’s command. Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.

Our discussion about trade was rather enlightening on both sides. Irithil brought the issue up expecting that I’d have a long list of restrictions and tariffs, just like your typical medieval government. I just shook my head.

“I realize that in most countries merchants place somewhere between serfs and criminals in the social order, but that’s not how I do things. My island is a free trade zone. You can trade anything you want with anyone who wants to do business with you, and I’m not going tax or regulate it at all. There are only a handful of exceptions to that rule, and I’m not sure if you’d be in those businesses anyway.”

“What would these exceptions be?” He asked carefully.

“First, anything that’s a potential danger to the island. Unstable superweapons, magical plagues, bound demons, things like that. I’m not necessarily going to ban that kind of trade, but if you actually have something like that going on I want to know about it so we can work together to make sure it doesn’t cause problems.”

“Understandable,” he conceded. “Nethwillin does some trade in bound creatures, but only those that we have the strength to put down should they somehow break free. I feel confident that we can agree on suitable precautions.”

“Good. That brings me to point two, which is that I’m not a big fan of slavery.”

He frowned. “An unusual sentiment. How, exactly, do you define slavery? Nethwillin has a significant number of hereditary retainers. For that matter, what about bound creatures?”

I sighed. “Yeah, I know that gets complicated. My core principle is that I’m not going to allow anyone to force a citizen of my realm into involuntary servitude. I’ll allow demon binding, because honestly who cares what happens to demons? But in the case of other sentient races I’m a lot more likely to say no than yes. As far as your retainers, well, do they have the option to leave?”

“I don’t believe the issue has ever arisen,” he said smoothly. “We are quite thorough about raising them to take pride in their service, and of course there are several loyalty effects at work. We do treat them quite well, if that makes a difference.”

Great, ethical mind controllers. Why was I bothering to talk to these guys again? But no, I was probably being unfair. Outright mind control is hard to do, and tends to have a lot of side effects. They were probably relying on clever applications of more limited kinds of influence, just like Avilla’s little suggestions. That was a lot more of a moral gray area.

“Is there ever a point where you could reasonably say they chose to enter your service? Can they leave if they feel the terms of their service have been violated?”

“In theory they could refuse to take the oath when they reach their majority,” he replied. “Few would wish to do so, of course, and it would leave them with no means of support and a substantial debt to the clan. Your second question implies a system considerably less sophisticated than ours, however. All members of the clan are bound by their own oaths, which include among their obligations the proper treatment of our retainers.”

“Lovely. Well, as long as it’s mutual and everyone gets into it voluntarily I suppose I won’t make an issue of it. I am going to make a standing offer to buy out the debts of anyone who doesn’t want to take the oath, though.”

“Our retainers are a treasure the clan has worked for several centuries to perfect, lord wizard. To attempt to steal them so blatantly is a bit insulting.”

Oh, boy.

Fortunately, Irithil and I didn’t meet every day. He had to send messages home periodically to get instructions from his mysterious clan head, which gave me time to save who weren’t a complete pain in the ass.

My staff was apparently getting used to my penchant for magical invention, because they hardly batted an eye when I announced my plan to start airlifting in refugees. Cerise had even had the forethought to have Captain Rain’s men start assembling a list of potential targets. Coming up with eight men to crew the airship took some doing, as overstretched as we already were. But we had a slow trickle of recruits coming in from Kozalin now, thanks to Cerise’s nascent spy network. There were a few people in the city who had both useful skills and a willingness to risk working for a ‘dark wizard’, and thanks to her efforts we were starting to find some of them.

I was caught a little off guard when Oskar asked me what the new airship was named.

Cerise snickered at my expression. “You didn’t even think of that, did you? Do people not name things where you’re from?”

“He still hasn’t named the island, or the fortress,” Elin observed.

Cerise waved her off. “Obviously it’s the Black Citadel, on Black Island. So, the Black Ship? Or maybe you’ll name it after your favorite girl?”

Avilla frowned at her. “Be nice, kitten. You might not feel jealousy, but the rest of us could get hurt feelings over that.”

I cleared my throat. “The airship’s name is
Intrepid
. Now if we could get back to organizing this little trip?”

We lifted bright and early the next day. It was only the second time I’d taken the
Intrepid
up, and in any normal situation we would have spent at least a week on training flights before attempting a real mission. But there wasn’t time to do things normally. Besides, I didn’t actually know enough about running an airship to teach classes on it. So instead we were all going to have to learn on the job.

I had Cerise on the controls so I could supervise, and I let her practice maneuvering the airship for a couple of hours as we sailed around near Kozalin. A pair of Griffon Knights made a detour to check us out at one point, but they veered off once they spotted the insignia on the side of the ship. I guess that was one good thing about having a personal coat of arms.

It was about the only thing that went smoothly.

I’d tried to solve the problem with keeping a steady altitude by building a crude altimeter, really just a mercury barometer, and tying it to an enchantment that would automatically adjust the airship’s lift. But it didn’t work quite right, and I spent half the time we were in the air trying to puzzle out what was wrong with it.

That was the most complex problem, but hardly the only one. The boarding ramp proved a little too short, and getting it extended when the ship was floating six feet off the ground was a tricky exercise that took three men. Closing the rear doors was also a problem, since they opened out instead of in. There were serious ergonomic issues with some of the gunnery positions, and the guy Cerise was trying to explain the pilot’s controls to clearly had no idea what she was talking about. If the
Intrepid
had been a conventional dirigible the whole trip would have been a disaster.

But I was able to fix the mechanical problems one by one, and of course the enchantments that moved the ship weren’t dependent on the crew. Eventually we started to get our act together, and I made the call to go ahead and set course for Varo.

According to our information Varo was a small coastal settlement forty miles north of Kozalin, basically a fishing village with a keep and a stone wall. The Griffon Knights reported that they’d fought off several assaults by bands of goblins, but suffered heavy casualties in the process. At this point their position was getting rather precarious, but evacuating them by conventional means wasn’t feasible. Between the weather and the monsters trying to march a group of refugees to safety overland would just get them all killed, and the settlement’s little harbor was too exposed to monster attacks for any merchant vessel to risk a visit.

If I were the prince I’d have commandeered a squadron of ships to sail around evacuating places like that, but he had other priorities.

The trip took barely an hour, but as I’d half expected we arrived to find the place under siege again. I had Cerise make a slow circuit of the area while I peered out the windows, studying the situation.

Half the village had been burned at some point, and the gates had been smashed and then replaced with an improvised barricade. The wall around the village wasn’t much to look at, maybe twelve or fifteen feet tall and only a few feet thick. The keep was a modest four-story affair, maybe twenty feet square. Defensible, but not big enough to house a lot of people for any length of time.

There were a few dozen men on the walls, armed with a motley assortment of bows, spears and farming implements. Facing them were half a dozen trolls and about a hundred goblins, who were peppering the defenders with arrows and thrown boulders from behind portable sections of wooden wall. Interesting. I hadn’t realized goblins were sophisticated enough to come up with something like that.

The village was so choked with snow that the inhabitants had been forced to shovel out trenches in it to get around, but at least that meant there was little chance of the goblins getting another fire started. Still, they had more than enough force to wipe out the defenders if they managed to get inside. Good thing we’d arrived when we did.

“Bring us down to about two hundred feet, and make a low pass over the goblin lines,” I told Cerise.

“Sure thing, boss. I can’t wait to see how the grenades work.”

I smiled at her enthusiasm, and bent over the chin gunner’s position. “We’re getting ready to make a pass over the goblins,” I called down. “You can open fire as soon as you have a good angle, but be careful that your shots don’t go off in the direction of the village. I don’t want us accidentally shooting the people we’re trying to rescue.”

“Aye aye, milord,” the gunner called back cheerfully.

I ducked back into the main compartment and repeated the instructions, including the emphasis on not shooting towards the village. By the time I was done with that we were swooping down towards the enemy lines.

I pulled the lever that activated the grenade factories, and immediately found myself lamenting the
Intrepid’s
lack of a bombardier position. There were no windows in the airship’s belly, so I couldn’t tell what effect we were having. A few faint sounds rose up from somewhere below, but I couldn’t tell if they were screams or war cries.

Cerise circled around for another pass, and I saw a wide furrow of churned snow crossing the enemy position. It looked like most of the grenades had missed, but here and there I saw mangled wood and red stains on the snow.

“Damn, I think the wind was blowing the grenades off course. Can you bring us by again, only a little upwind of them this time?”

“Sure,” Cerise said confidently. “Only, you sure you don’t want to just hop out and take care of them ourselves? I don’t see anything down there that could stop us.”

“No. One of us would have to stay here to fly the ship, and something could always go wrong. There’s no need to take any chances. We’re going to practice the American way of war here, and just bomb the fuck out of them until they give up.”

Our accuracy gradually improved as we got the hang of it, and more and more splashes of red dotted the snow. After three more passes the goblins broke, and tried to flee back to their camp. We followed, making a couple more bombing runs and then slowing to drop a denser shower of grenades onto their encampment. Finally they gave up, and scattered in all directions. We never came within reach of their shaman’s spells, let alone the little bows the goblins relied on.

Once the field was clear of living enemies I had Cerise land us well away from the village, and then retract the lift cells and drive up to within shouting distance of the wall. I’d added a hatch in the side of the bridge earlier, so I was able to climb out and hail the defenders without messing with the rear doors.

“That were a mighty fine sight, milord,” one of the men on the wall called as I exited the airship. “Who do we have to thank, for running off them mangy goat fuckers?”

“I’m Adept Daniel Black, a foreign wizard working with the Red Conclave. Any of you boys want a ride back to Kozalin? I’m here to evacuate the town, if you’re ready to pull out.”

“Thank the gods,” he replied. “We thought we wuz goners, lord wizard.”

Another man appeared at the wall. This one wore a battered-looking suit of plate mail, with a ripped surcoat bearing the same arms as the pennant fluttering from the keep’s flagpole.