Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (9 page)

It was a long time before any of us slept that night.

It was another cold, dreary day when I moved Avilla’s kitchen.

That wasn’t the first change I made to the island’s layout, of course. I didn’t want to get too carried away with throwing up giant buildings before we had people to live in them, but there were a lot of things that needed to be done before I could worry about Avilla’s desire for a fancy house.

My first project was rebuilding our connection to the city. The long, exposed pier that had originally spanned the distance between my gates and Kozalin’s harbor district had seemed like a good defensive measure, but in practice it turned out to be rather vulnerable to enemies who could just come up out of the water. So when I rebuilt it I added more stone to raise it up to the level of my gates, about twelve feet above the surface of the river. Then I enclosed it with walls and a roof, and built a gatehouse at the shoreline to guard the entrance. A ramp down to street level allowed traffic to come and go easily, but a heavy portcullis in the gatehouse would allow the troops stationed there to seal the entrance quickly in an emergency.

In a traditional castle that kind of structure would have been a weak point that enemies could use to march up to my walls under cover. But magic gave me a lot of non-traditional options. I rigged the whole causeway with hidden explosive charges, so I could blow it up again at will.

That allowed us to send the refugees we’d taken in during the battle of the docks back to their homes in the city, which eased my mind a bit on our security issues. Most of them departed immediately, although there were a couple dozen who wanted to stay. I figured those were the smart ones, so I sent them Avilla’s way. She ended up hiring a lot of them, although we had to run off a few shiftless sorts who just wanted to sit around eating my food and doing nothing for as long as they could get away with it.

With the extra people out from underfoot I could afford to rearrange some of the temporary buildings I’d thrown up, a task that was made considerably easier by the fact that the enchantments I’d grown them with were still active. But planning out a new living area on the island brought me up against the fact that most of the available space was already taken up by the farming complex and the docks. After seeing the kind of battle magic a competent army could throw around I really wanted more layers of defenses between the heart of my little realm and our outer walls, but there wasn’t a lot of room to work with.

In theory I could make the island bigger, but as Cerise had pointed out that would mean longer walls that would need a bigger garrison. Besides, my island was already a bit bigger than the ten acres the prince had theoretically deeded to me. I didn’t think he was going to be sending surveyors out to measure it anytime soon, but if I got too aggressive with my expansions it might turn into another source of friction.

I mulled it over for a while, and finally decided to go with another unconventional design. I’d never seen anything like this before, but that was probably just because the stonework involved would normally be too expensive to be practical. It certainly seemed like it would work, at any rate.

So I grew my island out a bit in all directions, expanding the whole wall as I went until it was a good sixty feet thick. I added big square projections at the corners while I was at it, to serve as the foundations for towers. I used lots of iron reinforcement in the new expansions as well, making the whole thing as absurdly strong as I could manage, and carefully smoothed the outer surface into a featureless sheet of semi-polished granite that would be impossible to climb without magic.

Granite comes in a lot of colors, and my earth sorcery was perfectly happy to supply any variation that I wanted. I’d started out with a simple gray, flecked with bits of black. But some playful impulse led me to switch to a darker color for the expanded walls. Mostly black, with some grays and very dark reds mixed in. Yeah, that came out looking about right for the abode of a ‘dark wizard’.

A forty foot wall had seemed like plenty when I first arrived in Kozalin, but I’d seen a lot more of the enemy since then. So I raised it another forty feet, high enough that even the biggest of giant monsters shouldn’t be able to reach the battlements. But a flat open space sixty feet wide along the top would be too simple. I took the inner thirty feet of that space and built another mass of iron and stone forty feet tall on top of it, so that an attacker who managed to scale the outer wall would find themselves in a confined area facing another obstacle.

I left the lower fighting deck as an open space with a simple battlement along the edge, where we could mass troops or heavy equipment wherever it might be needed. The upper deck got a thick iron roof to protect against weather and aerial attacks, and an iron wall pierced by narrow windows to allow the defenders to fight from under cover. The mortar bunkers were located on the upper platform, of course, and I put in several extra bunkers and storerooms to allow for the addition of more heavy weapons in the future.

The new towers I built at the corners of the island were as big as the original keep, but massively stronger with their iron skeletons and thick stone walls. They were actually a solid mass of stone and iron up to the original wall level, forty feet above the river. Above that they had interior rooms, just one big unfinished space on each floor for now. With a total height of a hundred and sixty feet they ended up having twelve floors of interior space, enough that each of them could eventually quarter several hundred men.

That was a defense I was confident would hold against anything I could imagine attacking us. The original keep was still a weak spot, being of much lighter construction, but I couldn’t do anything about that while it was full of people. So I did a walkthrough of the new construction with Oskar and Captain Rain, explaining my ideas for what to do with the space. Then I left them to plan out how to get their men resettled, and sat down to create a little pocket paradise for my girls.

What can I say? They made me want to spoil them.

The site I selected for this first arcology block was a rectangular plot to the west of the original keep, bounded by the island’s wall on the north and the farming complex on the south. Almost four hundred feet long and about a hundred and fifty wide, it was an absurdly huge space to use for living quarters. But I had a lot of other things in mind for it as well.

Drawing on my experience with the dryad habitats, I started by throwing up a massively overbuilt framework of nickel-iron beams to support the structure. It completely filled the gap between the two existing structures, turning that whole part of the island into a single giant mass of stone and iron. Where it didn’t abut existing construction I put in an outer wall of iron two feet thick, encased in ten feet of stone. The steeply sloped roof was also of thick iron, and matching the height of the dryad habitat put it a bit over two hundred feet up. The side of the upper floors that overlooked the island’s walls was mostly just blank iron faced with more black granite, but I left a few windows and some larger openings up near the top. The very top floor of the building contained large cisterns enchanted to keep themselves full of hot or cold water, as well as lots of empty space set aside for whatever other magical infrastructure I might come up with in the future.

Not wanting to cut off foot traffic I ran a wide road right through the middle of the building’s ground floor, with magical lighting and heavy iron gates at each end that we could close if an enemy somehow got onto the island. Lining the road were empty spaces two stories tall that could be turned into shops or businesses, in various shapes and sizes. I figured there were a lot of craftsmen and merchants in Kozalin who’d jump at the chance to move their business someplace safer once we started advertising, especially if the city kept coming under attack.

I was tempted to use marble for the street-level construction, just to make it look nice. But no, keeping it clean would probably be a nightmare. So simple gray stone for the street, and the walls between the empty shop spaces.

At the back of one of the larger spaces was a door into the farming complex, so I designated that one as a future produce market and brought Hrodir down to consult on how to finish it out. We put in some storerooms and a small granary in addition to a roomy display area, and big glass windows at the front. Hrodir made plans to recruit extra men to run the store once they had something to sell, and I made sure he understood that keeping people from randomly wandering through the back door into the farming complex would be part of their job. I didn’t need random townspeople discovering the dryads, and spreading rumors that would get back to Prince Caspar.

Then it was time for the upper floors. I wanted to be able to control who got access to those areas, just in case the street level started to see a lot of shoppers coming in from Kozalin at some point. I also had in mind that we might need to impress official visitors at some point without letting them get near anything sensitive. So I turned one shop space into a fairly fancy entrance area, with a wide marble staircase leading up to the third floor.

There I roughed out a grand hall where we could hold formal events if we ever needed to, along with a complex of fancy meeting rooms for receiving official visitors. Another checkpoint with heavy iron doors separated this diplomatic area from the elevators that gave access to the upper floors. By this point I’d figured out how to enchant a proper system of call buttons, and I was able to set those up like the elevators in a modern office building in instead of the exposed platform design in the original keep. Much less scary for medieval townspeople to use, although I took a page from modern fire safety codes and build a set of stairs as well.

Most of the rest of the building I left unfinished, since we didn’t have a use for the space yet. But the fifth through seventh floors I set aside as a private space for my coven.

I’d thought about using the top floors at first, but in a world with flying monsters that wasn’t safe enough for my taste. The levels I’d picked instead were low enough to be behind the full thickness of the island’s outer wall, protected against any bombardment that might be aimed our way. An invader would have to fight their way up from the street level or down from the walls to get in, through multiple checkpoints and armored doors. No surprise attack would have a chance to get that far before we could respond.

The floor and roof of the area were even more heavily armored than the rest, just to make sure no enemy would be able to break in by tunneling through them, and the elevator stop on the fifth floor was a killing field. To get into the living area you had to pass through two sets of heavy iron doors, and the passage between them had walls lined with arrow slits and murder holes in the ceiling. The barracks and guard posts surrounding that had room for a platoon of troops to live in full time, with their own mess area and rec room, although I doubted we’d actually have that kind of manpower available anytime soon.

Inside this protected space I laid out a large garden area three floors high, with artificial sunlight and a sprinkler system just like the farming areas. The rooms of our living quarters would surround that, so they could have windows and balconies facing the garden to give them a pleasant outdoor feel. That filled about half the space, and I figured we could use the other half as our coven’s official workspace and a secure storage area for dangerous magical projects.

But first I had to move Avilla’s kitchen. That was how I found myself standing on a narrow iron bridge entirely too many floors above the ground, trying to levitate a whole frickin’ room.

It had seemed like such a clever idea three days ago. The old keep was a single huge mass of stone, with thick floors and fairly solid interior walls. So why not just cut Avilla’s kitchen free of the surrounding stonework, and move it? It was probably solid enough to survive being picked up and moved around, but I could wrap some iron bands around it to make sure. Shaping a hole in the side of the keep big enough to get it out would be a pain, but I could do it.

I’d neglected to consider how heavy the damned thing would be. Not to mention that it was a long way off the ground, and so was the spot I was trying to move it to. I’d turned my earth talisman into an iron bridge between the two points, but it was a long way down.

The worst of it was that Avilla had insisted that she needed to be inside her kitchen when it was moved, to stabilize the enchantments. So there she was inside the giant stone box that was floating along next to me, leaning over the breakfast bar to watch me with wide eyes.

“I still can’t believe you can lift my whole kitchen,” she said excitedly. “It must weigh a ton.”

“Closer to… ten,” I replied through clenched teeth. I took another step, and the bridge creaked ominously beneath me. Was it thick enough to handle this much weight? A foot of solid iron supported by narrowly-spaced pillars had seemed like plenty when I was planning this, especially since my force magic spread the weight out quite a bit. But I wasn’t a civil engineer. I checked the structural reinforcement spell, to make sure it wasn’t drawing mana. Crap, it was. Not much, but apparently I’d been a little too optimistic with the bridge design. I’d better get this done quick, then.

“Ten tons? Oh, my! I knew you were strong, Daniel, but I didn’t know you were that strong.”

I took a few more steps. The wind caught the big, flat side of the stone box and tried to push it off the bridge, but fortunately it was too heavy to move very fast. It tilted and swayed sideways a few inches, before I shifted my force magic’s grip and got it back under control.