Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (30 page)

“Is that mithril?”

I grinned. “Yep. This is how I built the
Intrepid
. It conjures a ten-pound bar of mithril in about half a minute, and you can leave it running continuously if you want to. Tavrin, I’m still feeling a bit peeved with the dwarves over attacking us, and I bet you are too. Storming their fortresses looking for revenge doesn’t seem like a smart idea, so instead how would you like to crash the world mithril market?”

His lips slowly curved into a cold smile. “Economic warfare? What an excellent idea. Yes, I think this will get the job done quite nicely. We’ll start by selling to the dwarves through intermediaries, at a price calculated to suggest that someone is desperately liquidating a hidden treasure reserve. Then, when they get suspicious, we suddenly flood the hidden markets with fresh lots of mithril at a third of the usual price. They’ll try to buy it all up to maintain their monopoly, but we can just keep selling more until they run out of gold.”

“There’s nothing a dwarf loves more than gold,” Sefwin said. “This is going to hit them where it hurts. Do we get a commission?”

I chuckled. “This is a joint venture, Sefwin. Nethwillin gets half the take, I get the other half, and we all end up rich while our enemies lose their shirts.”

“You are a generous man, Daniel,” Tavrin said. “You do realize we’re likely to sucker them out of twenty or thirty tons of gold before the market collapses?”

“I figured. I’ve got plenty of ways to make money, so I can afford to be generous. Just don’t crash the economy here in Kozalin when you start spending it,” I told him.

“We won’t,” he assured me. “The money will certainly make our resettlement easier, but I don’t imagine we’ll be spending much of it here.”

Well, that was one issue dealt with. Now I just had to make good on my promise of defending the island.

The air defense problem was the most critical one, but resolving it was pretty straightforward. The guns we already had were almost good enough for shooting down flying animals, they just needed a few refinements.

So I put in a few hours in my lab that morning, building a new factory stone for something that would get the job done. The heart of it was a large gun, about .75 caliber, with a four-foot barrel and an extra enchantment that made every 5th bullet come out glowing red hot. I had to put a cooling spell on the barrel to make sure that wouldn’t cause problems during sustained fire, but it was an easy way to make tracer rounds.

One round per second was a pretty low rate of fire for an antiaircraft weapon, of course. So I also came up with a frame that four guns could be mounted on, with a single trigger and a big sight in the middle. I copied that part from the design they used on naval antiaircraft guns back in WWII, which seemed simple and reasonably effective. Thinking about that led me to add a metal shield to the frame, to give the gunner some cover.

Of course, creating the mounting frame involved a bit of enchantment and a bunch of finicky metal shaping. So I followed up by building a factory stone to make those too.

With factories for both components of the system I was able to make quad-mount AA guns in whatever quantity I wanted, although I still had to assemble and install them myself. I mounted four of them around each of the mortar bunkers, on heavy iron swivel mounts sunk deep into the stone. Then I built a small bunker on top the arcology block, with four more guns. No sense in letting the enemy just land on our roof whenever they wanted.

Marcus approved of the solution, and immediately suggested putting them on skimmers as well. Not a bad idea, since they were basically machine guns. But I still didn’t have a way to mass-produce vehicles, so that would have to wait until I had a little spare time.

Oskar seemed to get the idea, and promised to find some men from the garrison to man the rooftop bunker. But then he broached an unexpected topic.

“I think it’s about time I stepped down from running the garrison, milord,” he said hesitantly.

“Really? I haven’t had any complaints about your performance, Oskar.”

“Maybe not, milord, but I’m not too proud to admit I’m out of my depth. I’m a blacksmith by trade, not a soldier. I was happy to hold things together back when Marcus was our only real officer, but things have changed. It’d be better for everyone to have a seasoned expert in charge of the island’s defense.”

“Fair enough,” I conceded. “Who are you thinking of? Demetrios?”

“He’d do,” Oskar agreed. “Or Tavrin. Hell, any of the elves could do it. Those guards Irithil left back here were happy enough to pitch in, and they know their stuff. Turns out every one of them does forty years serving the clan as a soldier and another twenty as an officer, just to make sure they can handle themselves on the battlefield.”

That did sound like Nethwillin.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I’d be happy just running the forge, milord. The way Marcus keeps bringing on more men there’s plenty of work to be done there.”

“Well, alright then. You’ve got a good point. I’ll see what I can do.”

There were several conversations like that one as the day went on. Avilla reminded me that she wanted out of the castellan job, so she could focus on magic. Cerise confided that she was having fun with the spy stuff, but she didn’t have time to keep up with it properly. Marcus mentioned the need to properly organize our growing assortment of military forces, and set up a formal chain of command. Gronir complained that his wolfen were being pulled off in too many different directions, and by the way he had a whole group of volunteers who wanted to join the pack if we ever killed some more felwolves.

I was becoming a manager. Ugh! I’d never wanted that kind of job. I’ve always preferred to spend my time actually doing things, but here I was holding meetings and dealing with personnel issues. I was sorely tempted to blow it all off in favor of spending more time in my workshop.

But no, I couldn’t do that. I’d put myself in charge of this group, and now everyone was depending on me to make things work. So instead I listened, thought, and tried to come up with solutions without letting it interfere with anything essential.

Two power amulets for Steelbinder. I needed all the alliances I could find, so getting that done on time was essential. Speaking of alliances, I really needed to have someone working on more of those. I had no idea who the noble factions in the city were, and weren’t there supposed to be embassies here? I’d never have time to look into that at this rate.

The repair job for Brand was essential, too. I couldn’t afford to make an enemy of him, so I grabbed an escort and dragged myself out to the wall at sunset despite the inconvenience. I arrived to find several hundred laborers clearing away piles of charred corpses under the gaze of a familiar wizard.

“Good evening, Leo. Looks like you’ve had a busy day here.”

His visor was up, so I could see his grim smile. “Yes, we gave those apes a nasty surprise today. They thought this breach would be our downfall, but the Conclave is more than a match for a bunch of unwashed animals. They overran the barricades three times today, but each time we lured them into a trap and burned them down.”

The breach in the wall was easily a hundred feet wide, with an improvised barricade of timber and broken rubble stretched across it. Not exactly the stoutest fortification, especially against dinosaur cavalry.

“Yeah, I hear you’ve got fire breathing golems now. Why not just put them on the barricade, though?”

“That would expose the golem handlers to attack,” he explained. “The enemy is determined to kill every spellcaster they can spot, and most of our golem handlers are only apprentices. They don’t have a lot of defense against enemy spells, and we can’t afford to lose any more of them. Better to let the garrison hold their attention, and wipe them out whenever they think they’re making progress.”

Oh. Right. Why would the wizards care how many normal men die on the barricades?

“I hear you’re going to repair the wall?” He went on. “We’ve almost got the bodies cleared away, and then you can get started.”

“Good. What about the wards?”

He waved to a stack of crates between a pair of especially big golems. “The Conclave keeps a reserve supply of wardstones. I’ll need to place two of them in the foundation of the new wall, and another pair at the level of the parapets. Beyond that it’s your show, just don’t put any enchantments on your stonework that could affect the spread of the wards.”

“I’m not putting any enchantments at all on this,” I told him.

I didn’t do anything too fancy with it, but in light of Brand’s suggestion I did make the new section of wall a bit more imposing than the original. I dug a hole down to bedrock for the foundation, and built up a wall twenty feet thick. The outer surface was polished granite, like most of my fortifications, and I made it fifty feet tall instead of forty. Stairs at each end led down to the old wall on either side, and the extra thickness gave me room to put a roofed shelter behind the parapet.

The whole job took a couple of hours, so everyone was long since asleep by the time I got home. Then I had to be up at the crack of dawn for Brand’s daily meeting. That was going to get old fast.

But a couple more private meetings when I got back gave me the information I needed to finish planning my reorg. So I told Avilla to move our own daily meeting to lunch, and invite a few extra people. Avilla frowned and fretted over the disruption, but she made it happen.

The dining room was crowded with practically everyone I knew by name on the island in attendance, but if my plans worked this would be the last time we had to do this. I let everyone enjoy their food for a bit while they reported on progress in their various departments. Then I made my announcement.

“I said a couple of days ago that I was going to be making some changes. We’ve grown quite a bit since we first arrived in Kozalin, and that’s a good thing in most respects. But an organization that was thrown together on the fly to manage a hundred people doesn’t work for five hundred, and we’re well past that mark now. It’s about time we adopted an organizational structure that can handle our current needs. We also have a lot of new people with skills we critically need, so we’re going to put them to work.

“First off, Avilla is going to be stepping down as castellan so that she can focus on her work as part of the coven. Avilla has done a great job of holding things together, and I don’t want anyone to think this is a slight against her abilities. She just has too many jobs right now, and this is the one that it made the most sense to hand off to someone else.

“The new castellan of Black Island will be Tavrin, the head of Clan Nethwillin. Tavrin has about a bazillion years of experience as a manager, merchant, accountant and everything else involved in this job, so I’m sure he won’t have any trouble with it.”

I’d spoken with him in advance, of course, so the announcement didn’t take him by surprise.

“Only three centuries, actually,” Tavrin said. “But yes, I feel confident that I can handle it. I take it this is a civilian office?”

“Yes, you’re going to be far too busy to worry about running the garrison on top of everything else. As castellan you’ll be responsible for purchasing and stockpiling supplies, renting out space in the street levels to suitable tenants, managing the farming operations, recruiting craftsmen and other personnel for our internal operations, and managing the treasury. Feel free to hire people to supervise parts of that for you as necessary. I’m also going to need you to organize our handling of the refugees our rescue operations bring in, once we get the
Intrepid
flying again and finish collecting your own people.”

“Very well. Avilla, I’d like to speak with you after the meeting if you have time.”

“Of course,” Avilla said with a relieved smile.

“Next,” I said, “A proper military organization. As our most experienced officer, I’m placing Demetrios in overall command of all of our forces. Demetrios, it looks like Varmland doesn’t really use any ranks above captain aside from general, and your responsibilities are going to extend to more than just command of troops anyway. So it may sound a little pretentious, but your title is going to be Minister of War.”

“Our troops are worth a couple thousand of anyone else’s, easy,” Cerise pointed out. “I think it fits.”

“Fair enough. Demetrios, one of the first things I want you to do is figure out how to turn this random mishmash of little fighting bands we’ve accumulated into some kind of regular military structure. At this point we’ve got humans, wolfen, dryads, dark elves and a whole bunch of individuals with various unique abilities, but hardly any of us have any practice working together. We need to sort out our forces into a permanent garrison, a substantial expeditionary force, and an air force to operate the
Intrepid
and any other airships I end up building. We also need to keep running the training program that Marcus started, and if possible expand it. We’re going to continue recruiting new troops from a number of sources, but once we have them we’ll need to get them up to speed on our weapons and doctrine.”

“Sounds like I’m going to be busy,” Demetrios observed. “Who are my officers?”

“Oskar has decided to step down from his post as garrison commander to take over running the forge,” I said. “Marcus will remain in command of the expeditionary force. I think you’ll find that the elves are our best option for crewing the
Intrepid
, and I suspect Tavrin can suggest a captain for the ship.”