Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (2 page)

“Daniel! I didn’t mean for you to carry me!”

“I like carrying you,” I told her. “It’s not like you weigh anything. You just relax, and let me know when you can wiggle your toes again.”

She giggled, and leaned against me. “Oh, you! Fine, carry me then. You’re probably cheating with force magic, anyway.”

She relaxed against me, and started kissing my neck as I carried her out of the dryad habitat. That was one of her little signals that she was feeling amorous, and I reflected that it was too bad we didn’t have more time. But if we delayed any longer we’d end up being late, and I wasn’t going to be the asshole boss who made everyone else sit around waiting for him.

Elin settled against me with a little happy sound, and her eyes drifted closed again. I took the chance to surreptitiously study her as I walked. She was still in the form she’d discovered just after Mara’s half-hearted assassination attempt, which was a lot more appealing than the hybrid shape she’d been stuck in for most of her life. But some of the changes she’d had me make were reverting.

Her mother was an undine, and the water faeries are a bit uncanny to human eyes. Her faerie shape’s natural appearance was painfully thin, with pale blue-white skin and a host of other non-human features. I’d turned her scraggly hair into a thick, lustrous mane of deep green silk, and that change was holding fine. The same went for her teeth, which had been rather unpleasantly shark-like before I changed them.

But now her pale white skin had regained a subtle tinge of blue, and her eyes were a little bigger than normal. The little fins on her elbows were coming back, along with the webbing between her fingers. She still had the womanly curves I’d shaped with my flesh sorcery, but she’d definitely lost a few pounds somewhere.

“Any luck with Pelagia?” I asked.

The ancient nymph seemed to be quite powerful in her own style of magic, and her grove was full of exotic magical beings. Elin had hoped one of them would be able to teach her how to control her fledgling shapeshifting abilities.

She sighed. “Bad news, I’m afraid. She said shapeshifters normally have only two forms, and it’s quite important that they learn to control the change when their abilities first develop. Otherwise they often have difficulties such as becoming trapped in a transitional form, or having the attributes of their various forms mix uncontrollably. The fact that I was able to find my separate forms after being stuck for so long is a good sign, but there’s no one in any of the groves who can properly teach me.”

“So it’s faerie or nothing, then?”

“I’m afraid so,” she admitted. “I think we could manage on our own, as long as you’re willing to keep changing me back when my form drifts. But I can’t shake the feeling that there’s some important principle of my power that I’m missing. I don’t understand why some changes stick while others don’t, and I don’t know if I can find the answer on my own. Perhaps the Conclave’s library will hold some clues.”

“Or perhaps we should talk to a faerie?” I suggested.

“How could I ever trust them?” She countered. “They tricked me into locking myself in that disgusting shape, and left me to be raised by those cold-blooded bastards in the Conclave. Considering what the faerie think of humans, that would be like you leaving a child with a pack of wild dogs. At best they’ll feed me half-truths meant to trick me into crippling myself. At worst they might try to kill me now that I’m not a child, and we have enough enemies as it is.”

“What about your mother?” I asked.

She went quiet.

“I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her,” she finally said. “Being kidnapped by a monster, and forced to bear its children? I never really blamed her, when I thought she’d wanted to be rid of me.”

“And now that you remember what really happened?” I prompted.

She clenched her fists. “In the Summer Court everything is about appearance. Keeping the child of her rapist to raise would have destroyed her, and I don’t know that having her monstrous daughter show up on her doorstep a decade latter is any improvement. I’m glad that the coven binding broke the glamour her brothers used to cloud my memory, but I don’t think I can bring my troubles to her.”

“If appearances are what matter, you don’t exactly look like a monster,” I pointed out.

She chewed her lip thoughtfully. “That’s a fair point. If I could appear at her door with a fair face and the power of a worthy heir, it might actually bolster her reputation. Her blood overcoming the taint of a monster, you see. But I’d have to be confident in my control of my form to pull that off, so it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Besides, if I go there I might encounter one of her brothers, and then I’d have to kill him.”

“Heh. Not going to forgive them?”

“They bound my glamour so I wouldn’t be able to hide my appearance!” She exclaimed. “Then they sent me to live in a castle made of cold iron, just in case the binding didn’t hold! Being a faerie child in a human citadel was bad enough, but if I’d been able to look pretty people would have overlooked it. Being a hideous beast on top of that? I’m going to kill them someday.”

“I’ll help you,” I said seriously.

We came to the double doors leading out of the habitat, and I set Elin down so I could wrestle one of the heavy sheets of iron out of the way. I’d made them sturdy enough that it would take siege engines to batter them open, just in case enemies ever got onto the island. Elin smoothed down her skirt and pulled up the hood of her warmth cloak in preparation for venturing outside.

I retrieved a heavy blanket from where I’d left it in the corner, and draped it around both of us. It had a warmth enchantment of its own, which let me put an arm around Elin without worrying about frostbite. Then I pushed the door open, and we stepped out into the teeth of a howling blizzard.

Three days ago Hel had sent an army of undead to attack Kozalin, in support of her half-sister Mara’s plan to destroy a mystic artifact hidden in the temple here. We’d smashed the army, and while Mara’s raid on the temple had succeeded she had departed immediately afterward. But the snow had started a few hours later, and it was still coming down hard. I was a bit worried about what that meant for the city, since there hadn’t been time to clean up all the enemy stragglers after we broke their last stand in the Temple District. Even subzero temperatures wouldn’t do much to an animated corpse, and there was no telling what mischief the survivors might have gotten up to with most of the city’s defenders trapped indoors. My own troops couldn’t even get into the city, since I’d been forced to blow up the causeway connecting my island to the mainland in order to keep an army away from my gates.

There wasn’t much I could do about it until the weather broke, so I’d concentrated on my own problems. I couldn’t afford to let every blizzard completely shut down my operations, especially since this sort of thing was becoming depressingly common. So I’d been forced to spend some time making another round of improvements to the island.

We had to fight against the wind as we crossed the wide gap I’d left between the dryad habitat and the nearest covered walkway. Elin stumbled and leaned against me, her slender faerie form too light to resist the buffeting. I held her up and anchored myself with force magic until we were across, wondering for the hundredth time if I should enclose that route.

But leaving it the way it was ensured that the refugees we’d taken in during the battle on the docks wouldn’t accidentally wander into the building and encounter the dryads, and that was rather important. Word of their presence would get out eventually, but I wanted to be a lot better established before anyone showed up at my gate to ask what they were doing here.

Once we were across the gap the trip was a lot more pleasant. I’d built a roof over the little street that ran between the buildings on the western side of my island, made of conjured iron with large quartz skylights at regular intervals. There were gaps here and there where snow could still get in, but they were small enough that there wasn’t much wind. The self-warming enchantments on the road and buildings actually kept the temperature a bit above freezing, and there was a steady flow of foot traffic along the road.

The buildings were all built of granite, with thick gray walls and heavy doors designed to resist being broken into by any monsters that might somehow find their way onto the island. One thing I learned from watching zombie movies is that a shell defense isn’t good enough. If you’re facing a real threat you need multiple lines of defense, so you don’t lose everything to one mistake.

The traffic increased as we approached the square tower that had been the first structure on my new island fortress, and passed inside. The keep was built like a lot of smaller office buildings, with a big open atrium in the middle and a skylight in the roof. Six floors of balconies encircled the atrium, with a stairway zig-zagging up one side and an elevator on the other. A few of my braver citizens had started to actually use the elevator, but most of them stuck to the stairs.

We took the elevator, and arrived quickly at the coven’s shared living quarters on the fourth floor. A pair of uniformed maids were waiting at the door to take the blanket, and offer us mugs of hot tea before ushering us back to the dining room where the daily staff meeting was held.

It used to be every other day, but there were too many things going on these days. I made a mental note that I needed to figure out a way to delegate more, but it wasn’t the first time I’d had that thought.

Avilla and Cerise were already there, of course, and the rest of the group wasn’t long in arriving. One amusing side effect of the fact that we met over lunch, and no one wanted to miss out on Avilla’s cooking.

Oskar and Gronir arrived together, already discussing something about sentry schedules. Oskar was a huge man, a blacksmith I’d recruited back in Lanrest after he threw together a spontaneous militia force to resist a goblin attack. He was still the leader of the island’s garrison, which I hoped to turn into a more professional force sometime soon. Gronir was almost as tall, with a runner’s build and a perpetual sly grin. Originally a poacher who’d been with a group of peasants I rescued, these days he was the leader of the little band of refugees who’d used Avilla’s magic to turn themselves into wolf people. The wolfen, as they’d decided to call themselves, had proved themselves amazingly useful in the days since then.

Next was Captain Marcus Rain, the leader of my actual military forces. Which currently amounted to the survivors of his original infantry company, a couple dozen professional soldiers we’d recruited since then, and a hundred or so recruits currently undergoing training. Not the most impressive force around, but the armored vehicles and magic weapons I’d been making gave them a lot more punch than any normal unit.

Elin still wasn’t used to being included in these meetings, but since she was more or less recovered from her recent ordeals I’d offloaded some work by putting her in charge of our people’s medical care. Her healing magic wasn’t quite as universally effective as mine, but there was simply no way I could make time to treat any significant number of people.

“So, Marcus, how are the new guns working out?” I asked as Avilla took her seat.

“Well enough, I suppose. The force blades will come in handy when our lines get overrun, that’s for certain. But I’d advise against adding anything else to the standard model. A trigger, a safety and the bayonet switch makes for about as many complications as some of our recruits can handle.”

“Fair enough,” I allowed. “We can always make anything else I come up with a separate piece of equipment, and that way you can control who gets it.”

Replacing all the guns I’d already issued had been a bit painful, but it was a necessary evil. The old version was powered by an enchantment that converted the matter of the gun’s stock directly to mana, and that wasn’t something I wanted too many people to get a good look at. If all my men carried one it would only be a matter of time before my enemies started getting samples. I wasn’t sure if it was possible to reverse-engineer the enchantment without at least a basic understanding of nuclear physics, but I didn’t want to take chances.

Besides which, it was also very difficult to build. I’d been experimenting with enchantments that made magic items recently, but that sort of thing worked best for low-powered items. Doing it with the matter to mana effect was only barely possible, and it resulted in a temperamental enchantment factory that needed constant maintenance to function. My prototype could turn out a few dozen guns in an afternoon, but only if I was there to run it.

To improve on that I’d taken the opportunity of being snowed in to sit down and work out a better process for making power sources. It turned out that iron was actually about the worst possible material to put the matter conversion enchantment on, which made sense when I thought about it. Iron atoms have the highest binding energy per nucleon of any atom, so of course they’d have the lowest energy yield. My new standard was to put the enchantment on a sixty-pound cylinder of granite, which produce five times as much energy as the same mass of iron. Not only was this a superior energy source, it was also big enough to be hard to steal.

Then I’d built an enchantment factory with a socket for the power source, and designed it to link the guns it made to the power source that was slotted into it instead of making them self-powered. The power links would stretch for several miles, which ought to be more than enough for operations in and around the island. So I could keep the power source under lock and key most of the time, and if I ever needed to send troops into the field we could load their power source into one of the armored skimmers to keep it nearby. While I was reworking the enchantments I’d also added a force bayonet to the design of the guns, with a switch to turn the blade on and off. Unlike my own force constructs, I’d designed the blade to glow slightly, so that it would be obvious if it was turned on.