Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (38 page)

“I might be able to come up with something if I could get a look at this place,” I mused.

“Daniel, are you insane?” Elin protested.

“Gaea would definitely notice the presence of a human,” Tavrin agreed.

“Yeah, she hates us,” Cerise agreed. “She’d make the tunnel walls crush you, or something.”

“Alright, so that’s a bad idea. Do they have enemies who might attack Skogheim?” I asked.

“Aside from the Aesir? They have little contact with any of the Nine Worlds, and an army trying to reach them would face the same challenges as a human. The entrances to the realm are all underground, and firmly under Gaea’s control. Artifacts like the Dark Portal are the only feasible invasion route, and such things are normally under the control of gods.”

“What about the disease idea?” Cerise asked.

Pelagia shrugged. “Get me some andregi prisoners, and I’ll see what I can do. But it sounds like they’re well versed in pestilence magic, and plagues take time to do their killing. At best we might wipe out a few settlements before they catch on and come up with a cure. Skogheim is fairly large, is it not?”

Tavrin nodded. “A bit less than two thousand miles in diameter. The poles are too cold to inhabit, of course, and there are some deserts and seas. Still, I’d say the area the andregi inhabit is as large as Europe.”

“Wait, hold on a minute,” I said. “Diameter? I thought Skogheim was like a giant cave with some kind of magical sun in the roof.”

“No, it’s an inversion of Midgard. There’s a spherical hollow space with a magical sun in the middle, and the andregi live on the inner surface of the sphere.”

“What happens if you dig into the ground?” I asked.

“You dig through a few miles of rock, and find yourself on the other side of the sphere,” Tavrin replied.

“What? No way!” Cerise exclaimed. “That’s impossible.”

“The topology is unconventional, but not particularly complex,” Elin replied, with a hint of amusement in her voice.

I leaned back in my chair, trying to figure out what was bothering me about that setup. It was a typical hollow world, right? There shouldn’t be any gravity on the inside of a sphere, but that was probably just magical bullshit.

But why would it be cold at the poles?

It shouldn’t be. Every point on the surface would be the same distance from the sun, receiving light from directly overhead. So it should all be the same temperature. For that matter, it shouldn’t even have poles. It’s not like it was spinning. Even if it was, you wouldn’t be able to tell.

Wait, if this thing was topologically closed, where did the heat from the sun go?

“Tavrin, do you know how Skogheim’s sun works? Is it some kind of giant fire spell, or what?”

“I haven’t studied it myself, but I imagine it must be a convergence zone with the realm of elemental fire,” he replied.

“Yes,” Pelagia agreed. “All the hidden worlds were built using convergences, in the days when the Titans were young.”

“Ah. So the poles must be heat sinks, then. Otherwise everything in Skogheim would be the same temperature as its sun by now.”

There were blank looks all the way around the table. Then Elin blinked, and frowned thoughtfully.

“The surface of Skogheim is more than a thousand miles from its sun, Daniel,” Tavrin said. “Simple distance is more than enough to keep it cool.”

I chuckled. “If you’re trapped in a cave that’s slowly filling up with water, will standing on the opposite side from the leak keep you from eventually drowning? Hmm, but if you guys don’t know thermodynamics there’s no way Gaea is going to get it either. How big are the frozen areas?”

Tavrin was frowning uncertainly now. “Perhaps two hundred miles across? I’m not exactly sure. The andregi don’t sell maps, or allow strangers to wander far from the trading posts.”

Damn. Too big for me to realistically sabotage, then. Too bad, the image of Gaea frantically trying to puzzle out why her toy world kept getting hotter and hotter was kind of amusing. I could imagine her trying to turn down the sun to cool things off, and throwing a fit when it just slowed down the heating.

Ah, well. I didn’t really want to kill off the dinosaurs, anyway. What else could I try?

We talked long into the afternoon, throwing ideas back and forth until our collective creativity was completely exhausted. We came up with lots of plans that could buy us a few days or weeks, although a lot of them would take days to set up. We also came up with a lot of really terrible ideas, and a few long shots that might theoretically get the andregi off our backs.

Form an alliance with the faerie courts, and get them to attack our enemies. Talk one of the Great Beasts into eating them next. Trick the dwarves into thinking the andregi were the ones crashing the mithril market, and get them to fight with Gaea for control of the earth gates.

Yeah, I wasn’t going to bet on that kind of craziness. Most of those ideas would take too long to do Kozalin any good, and none of them had great odds of even working. More and more, it was looking like I was going to have to play a card I really didn’t want to. The gods were doing a great job of wrecking the world already, without me showing them fun new ways to make things even worse.

But the Aesir weren’t going to save Kozalin. In the final analysis Brand didn’t care about the fate of the city. He just wanted the garrison to sell their lives dearly, and then ascend to Valhalla and get ready to do it again. If I wanted the city to stand, I was going to have to make it happen myself.

Good thing I can heal radiation sickness.

I spent the rest of the afternoon finalizing the design of the new mortar rounds, and making a factory for them. There were a lot of subtle details I had to work through on that, like marking the shells for easy identification and making sure they’d still detonate if they didn’t hit a ward.

When I was done I took the new factory over to the military tower. Captain Rain had set up the 8th floor as a manufacturing area for military equipment, with the flamer and gun factories as well as the original mortar bomb factory. The first two saw only intermittent use, but there were crews working shifts around the clock to collect the mortar rounds as they came out of the factory and haul them off to magazines near the mortar bunkers.

I set up the new factory next to the existing one, and started it running. It was a little slower than the original, since it was making a more complicated enchantment. I figured we’d need to let it run for a day to build up our ammo reserves before we tried an attack, which was why I’d told Brand I needed two days to prepare. That meant I had a whole day to work on another project, and hopefully several more after that while the enemy was reorganizing and coming up with a new plan of attack.

What was I going to build?

After thinking it through I reluctantly concluded that making a conventional nuke wasn’t actually feasible. My earth magic couldn’t distinguish different isotopes of the same element, so conjuring enriched uranium wasn’t possible. In theory I might be able to conjure plutonium, but that stuff is so rare it makes gold look commonplace. If it worked at all a plutonium factory probably wouldn’t produce more than a few micrograms per day, and it would come out as dust. Poisonous, radioactive dust with a long litany of weird physical properties that made it even harder to work with.

Yeah, that sounded like a terrible idea. I’m a smart guy, but the group that built the first atomic bombs was the most amazing assembly of geniuses in history. I wasn’t going to be replicating their efforts on my own anytime soon. I might have a rough idea of how atomic bombs work, but I didn’t know anywhere near enough about nuclear physics to get all the math right. I could spend years working on that problem, and I’d probably just end up blowing myself up by accident.

In theory I could just take the governor off of my matter to mana spell, and modify it to convert most of an object’s mass to a mix of heat and radiation. If I remember the conversion right forty grams of matter turns into about a megaton of energy, so if I could do that to even a small object the results would be impressive.

Unfortunately the slow operation of magical effects made it impossible in practice. A matter to energy enchantment takes about a second to spin up to full power when you turn it on. A few hundred milliseconds into that startup process it would start releasing a tiny trickle of energy, which would grow exponentially until it finished activating. A device with a total conversion enchantment would release enough energy to blow itself up just a few milliseconds into that process, long before it could take full effect. It would make a nice little bomb, but I couldn’t see a way to make it hold together long enough to get a blast bigger than the lava summoning devices I was already playing with.

On reflection, that might be just as well. A nuclear explosion is pretty damned spectacular, and it would attract a lot of divine attention. Even if I could figure out a way to blow up the Halls of Slumber, that would only give me bigger problems to worry about.

What I really needed was something more subtle. A way to make all the ape men mysteriously die, in a way that Gaea wouldn’t immediately connect to me. Like, say, a radiation weapon.

I could intentionally design a matter to mana enchantment to spew lots of radiation. But my sorcery didn’t really tell me what kind of energy it was emitting, or how much. There would be a lot of guesswork involved in trying to make something that would be effective, and how would I deliver it? I certainly didn’t want to get caught trying to sneak into Skogheim, or leave a mysterious magic item behind for Gaea to potentially find and investigate. Or worse, Loki.

For that matter, was I right in assuming the gods here didn’t know about nuclear physics? Or would I be violating some divine arms control agreement if I went down this road? I decided I’d better think this through carefully, while I spent the day dealing with more immediate problems.

Hecate had chided me about trusting the people she sent me, and the way things were going I didn’t have the luxury of continuing to be paranoid about them in any event. So I spent most of the morning building a power amulet factory.

Like the gun factory it had a slot to insert the power stone the amulets would draw on, and the amulets it made were simple models like the ones I’d sold the Red Conclave. Their maximum power draw would barely be a tenth of what the ones I’d made for my coven could provide, and they didn’t have any other enchantments. That was still far more power than most mages could muster, so I figured they’d be well received.

Since I wasn’t planning to make huge numbers of these things I decided to experiment a little with alternate materials, and made the factory conjure silver amulets instead of the cheap nickel-iron all my military equipment used. That took a lot of power, but I found that the metal held the enchantment a lot better. As a result the amulets ended up being tiny little things, and I suspected the magic on them would last far longer than the power stones they were tied to. I made a note to remember that if I ever found myself working on something where size and longevity were going to be important issues.

That tied up my last unused power stone, so I left it running while I sat down to make another one. None of the power stones I’d made were running at anywhere near maximum load, of course. But I felt it was important to keep different functions segregated. One stone to run all the weapons used by the island’s garrison. Another for the expeditionary force, so they could take it with them if I sent them somewhere. A third for my coven’s private use, and a fourth one for the amulets I was about to give out. That way if I had to I could turn off one group without affecting the others.

The factory only took ten minutes to make an amulet, so I had a dozen of them to hand out at the staff meeting that day.

“Distribute them to whoever you think can make the best use of them,” I told Tavrin as I handed them over. “They’ll stop working if you take them more than a few miles from the island, but I’m sure you can still find a lot of uses for them.”

He looked pretty impressed. “Nethwillin’s mages will put them to good use, my lord. One power source of this magnitude would be a priceless treasure. Twelve of them will allow us to work major enchantments with ease. Although there’s going to be quite an argument between the different teams as to who has the greatest need for them.”

I shrugged. “How many do you want? I can give you one for every elf in the clan, if that’s useful.”

He stared at me in shock for a moment, before he got his features back under control. “So many? Well, yes, every member of my clan is versed in some sort of magic. But how?”

“You made one of those factory things, didn’t you?” Cerise asked.

“Yes. I know a technique for duplicating magic items, Tavrin. It doesn’t work on everything, but these amulets aren’t too hard to do.”

“Will anyone else be receiving a share of these wonders?” Pelagia asked hopefully.

“Sure, I’ll make you one,” I told her. “But I had another idea for empowering your grove. Your nymphs and dryads all draw strength from the earth, right? So what if I enchanted the land your trees are on to hold a pool of mana you can all draw on, and set up a link to keep it filled from one of the power stones? That would make all your members stronger, wouldn’t it?”

“Not the naiads,” Elin pointed out. “We would have to work a similar enchantment on their pool, but I believe I see how to make that work.”

Pelagia smiled. “So you’ve finally relented, and decided to stop keeping us at arm’s length? I’m glad to hear it. Yes, that sounds like a marvelous plan. It would almost be like becoming part of a divine court again. Perhaps even better, depending on how much power you intend to give us.”

“Well, it’s not like I have a shortage of mana. Is there anything interesting you could do with a big feed?”

Pelagia gave me a heated look.

“Many things, my lord. The Bloody Thorns have wielded power before, in the old days when we served in the courts of the gods. But the ages of exile since Olympus fell have sapped our strength, and most of us still bear wounds from the loss of our old masters. Giving us a true place of power will allow us to finally heal, and we shall become again what we once were. My dryads will be strong enough to battle felwolves. My nymphs will have such beauty as to strike blind any enemy who gazes upon them. We shall make of our refuge a little faerie realm sculpted to serve our will.”

“That does sound useful,” I allowed.

“To us, and to you,” she agreed. “Restore us to our full power, and we shall happily share our strength with you. Your raw power may be limitless, but there are many subtle ways in which we can help you surpass mortal frailties.”

“She’s right about that,” Demetrios said. “I know I was practically a demigod back when my girls lived in one of Pan’s sacred groves. That was a hint, by the way.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, okay, I’ll set it up for your grove too. If it’s going to give you a power up that’s a good thing. What about Corinna, though?”

“I’ve been working things out with her,” Cerise said. “She wasn’t sure at first, but I’ve grown a lot in power since you gave me my amulet. We’re kind of working in the direction of the Fangs of the Forest becoming my personal minions. I’m all in favor of making them stronger, but maybe we can do their setup together?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, except Alanna is hoping you’ll decide you want a familiar.”

I snorted. “We’ll see what she thinks once she’s back to being herself. Next order of business?”

Pelagia’s suggestion did sound promising, and it was a relatively easy way to get another benefit out of one of the innovations I’d already developed. So I ended up spending most of the afternoon building the necessary enchantments, with Elin and Cerise both helping at various points. Designing the energy pool so that it would actually become part of the earth and available for the grove’s use turned out to be more complicated than I’d expected, but fortunately Pelagia knew how to do it.

She also kept her girls at bay so I could actually work, which would otherwise have been quite a problem. I’d thought they’d been grateful before, when I’d given them shelter from Fimbulwinter. When Pelagia explained what I was working on now Xenia actually broke down in tears. Half the dryads decided I must secretly be a god, which would have been funny except that they started puzzling over what kind of sacrifices they should offer in my name.

There was another andregi attack that day, but I didn’t even hear about it until I returned home after setting up the grove enchantments. The Conclave’s defensive spells handled it well enough, but Brand wanted confirmation that I’d be ready for a mortar attack in the morning.

That meant I had to show up for that damned planning meeting at the crack of dawn. Seriously, wouldn’t it make more sense to do the planning in the evening so people could make preparations overnight, and sleep in if they weren’t needed for anything? Stupid primitive people and their stupid habit of rising with the sun.

Alright, I was a little grouchy when I showed up at the meeting room. I wasn’t the only one, though. Brand seemed to be in good spirits, but Prince Caspar was sniping at everyone again and the wizards were looking pretty worn down.

“We’re ready to hit the camps whenever you want,” I reported. “Just let me know what order you want to target them in. I think I’ve got enough ammunition ready to wreck them all pretty thoroughly, but we’ll need to hit them one at a time to break through their wards quickly.”

“We’ll start with the main camp,” Brand decided. “If we get lucky we might catch their general napping, and take him out with an explosion. More likely he’ll escape, but it will at least make it hard for him to give orders. After that just work your way around the city clockwise, and then harry any large groups of survivors you see. How long will the bombardment last?”

Four tubes, at about fifteen rounds a minute each during sustained fire, with occasional stops to change targets. How many rounds would it take to wreck one of those encampments? Each one was basically a five hundred pound bomb with enhanced incendiary effects, and the camps weren’t all that spread out. Call it a hundred rounds each, and there were currently four camps. Plus whatever it took to bring down the wards, of course.

“Assuming the wards go down as expected, about twenty minutes. That should be enough to flatten all four camps and kill most of the enemy, although there are bound to be survivors. I’ve got spare ammunition in case the wards are tougher than expected, so if they try to regroup and come back we can just hit them again.

“That won’t be an issue,” Prince Caspar said. “Our cavalry will harry the survivors from the walls, and when the day’s reinforcements march close I shall lead a raid through the Dark Portal to scatter them. It will be days before they can assemble enough troops to invest the city again.”

“Yes, and by then we’ll have another surprise ready for them,” Brand announced. “But one step at a time. Daniel, prepare to launch your attack at the ninth bell. Our men will stand ready within the walls until the bombardment stops, and then sally forth to slaughter the survivors. Lukas, once the bombardment has come off successfully you can have your wizards stand down, but I want three squadrons of golems to remain on alert just in case.”