Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) Read online

  “It’s unnatural,” Beri grumbled. “Not to mention rude. They could at least have let us eat first.”

  “One night without won’t kill us,” Tina protested.

  “I suppose,” Beri conceded. “But it’s going to be a cold night out here, even with the heaters.”

  “That’s why I’m still out here working, and not in there fooling around,” I told them. “I’m hoping to have a roof over our heads in a few hours. Tell you what, why don’t you girls get with Elder Hrodir, and see if you can get everyone a hot meal from that inn over there. I’ll pay, and I’m sure they won’t turn away the extra business.”

  “Oh! Um, yes milord. That’s very kind of you,” she said uncertainly.

  “Thank you, milord!” Tina said sweetly. “Hey, I wonder what kind of food they have at a big city inn? I bet the stew even has meat in it!”

  I laughed. “It’s probably not anything fancy, Tina. They’re in the docks, so their main customers are going to be sailors. Make sure whoever goes up there has three or four armed men with them, so there isn’t any trouble.”

  I left Beri to organize that, and went back to work.

  Throwing up walls was easy, but putting a roof over the encampment took some thought. Stone has massive compressive strength, but it doesn’t have the tensile strength to hold up its own weight if you just throw up a big flat surface with no support in the middle. That’s why putting rebar in concrete was such a big innovation. Unfortunately I didn’t have any reference works I could check to find out what the limits actually were, and I certainly didn’t want to rely on my structural reinforcement spell any more than I had to.

  So that meant turning the space into a series of rectangular chambers with vaulted ceilings, a process that took quite a while and forced me to move parts of the encampment periodically to make room for new walls. I put up a big arch at the top of the ramp while I was at it, intending to come back and install a gate there when I had a chance.

  Dinner arrived when I was about half done with that, and I took a break to eat with Marcus and Oskar. The food turned out to be a sort of chicken soup thing, which wasn’t bad. Not as good as Avilla’s cooking, but that was hardly a fair comparison considering how much magic the hearth witch tended to use in the kitchen.

  “This is an odd looking building you’re putting up, milord,” Oskar commented as we ate. “What have you got in mind, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Oh, this isn’t where we’re going to be living,” I replied. “This middle room is an entrance hall and mustering area, and the side halls are for parking vehicles. I’m going to put in stairs over there, and everything else will be above us. Like a keep, only bigger.”

  He looked up, and scratched his chin. “Going to get a bit dark in here without any windows, isn’t it?”

  “I can make magic lights,” I told him. That was one of the most common applications of magic, and the books I’d stolen from Odin’s temple back in Lanrest had contained several different spells for the purpose. “The lower floors will be a little closed in, since I want a massive wall between us and anything that might be looking to eat us. But the upper floors can have lots of windows, and I’m going to put a big open space in the middle with a skylight in the roof.”

  I was actually planning something like a small office building. An atrium in the middle with living spaces around it, maybe six floors high. That should be well within the strength limits of stone construction. I’d have to use conjured ironwork to support the roof of the atrium, but heavy iron beams with slabs of quartz between them should keep out flying monsters while letting in sunlight.

  Markus eyed the dimensions of the vehicle park consideringly. “That’s going to be a lot of space. Do you plan to do more recruiting, then?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I want to have at least a company of troops to defend this place. Ideally we should also have a company-sized mobile force, and enough craftsmen to be mostly independent of the town. But that might be overambitious.”

  “Most likely,” he agreed. “Experienced soldiers are going to be in high demand right now, so I expect we’ll have trouble finding more than a few of them to hire.”

  “Do they need to be soldiers?” Oskar asked. “Anyone can learn to drive a transport, or point a flamer.”

  Markus shook his head. “That might work for defending the keep, especially if the men have family here. But for a force that can march out into the field, and assault an enemy position? No offense to your militia, Oskar, but I don’t see that happening.”

  “Learning to fight well with a sword or bow takes years, but the weapons I’m planning to make aren’t like that,” I pointed out. “My people have a lot of experience with raising armies of commoners equipped with simple weapons, and it can work surprisingly well. The trick is you have to start out with men who are motivated to fight, and put them through intensive training to instill discipline and teach them basic military skills. Ideally you’d still want a long training program, but in emergencies I’ve heard of armies turning out passable infantry in as little as six weeks.”

  Markus frowned. “I see your point about the weapons, but that still sounds risky. Training can’t cover everything.”

  “That’s why you don’t form a whole unit out of new recruits,” I pointed out. “Ideally you send a few new men at a time to join a veteran unit, so they have someone with experience keeping an eye on them. We won’t have that luxury, unfortunately.”

  “Do you have something in particular in mind, milord?” Oskar asked.

  “Just a lot of possibilities, Oskar. Things are going to keep getting worse for as long as this winter lasts, and I’m not willing to bet our lives that the powers that be will make smart decisions. I want to be able to hold out even if the rest of Kozalin falls, and I want us to have the manpower to take action if a situation comes up where we need to. That’s why I’m going to want you to focus on recruitment and training, Marcus.”

  “Me?” He said, surprised.

  “Yes, you. I’m not a military officer, and neither is anyone else in our group. I may have some suggestions, since I plan to try and copy some exotic weapons I’ve seen used before. But the training program is going to have to be your deal. Unless you don’t think you can do it?”

  “No, it isn’t that. I’m just surprised you want me for the job, after what happened to my last command.”

  “The 5th Margold was in an impossible situation,” I told him. “You held them together longer than most men could have, and I can’t image how you could have carried out your orders any better. If I ever give you a mission that insane I expect you to tell me I’ve gone mad.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” he replied. “Well, I’ll need to find three or four experienced sergeants if we’re going to train up new soldiers. That’s going to take some persuasion.”

  “A chance to kill monsters with magic weapons should be appealing,” I pointed out. “If that’s not enough we can also offer a home in a magic fortress for their families.”

  “I can work with that,” he agreed. “Maybe let their families stay on if they’re killed in action, as a sort of pension? But training up a whole company is going to take time.”

  “I’ll try not to call on them until you say they’re ready,” I promised. “But the gods aren’t going to arrange their plans for our convenience, so we’ll have to cope as best we can.”

  The both nodded seriously at that.

  “You’ve done right by us so far, milord,” Oskar commented. “We’ve got faith in you.”

  “Then I’d better not let you down.”

  With that I handed off my empty bowl to Tina, and went back to work. The camp settled down quickly once dinner was over, but I managed to get in a couple more wall sections before everyone but the sentries fell asleep.

  It still felt a little odd to me how abrupt that always was. But artificial light sources were expensive in this world, so practically everyone was used to rising with the sun and g
oing to bed promptly at sunset. At least the guards were reasonably alert, although the night blindness caused by a lifetime of poor nutrition meant most of them weren’t going to spot anything smaller than a giant unless it wandered into the glow of the heaters.

  Once I had the roof up I put in another arch opposite the entrance, in case we needed to expand later on. Then, with the encampment protected from wind and surrounded by self-warming stone, I got started on the main part of the construction.

  The walls I’d made to support the roof were only a couple of feet thick, which was nowhere near enough to make me feel safe. I wanted more like thirty feet, at least at ground level. Something ludicrously tough by normal standards, so that even magical siege weapons wouldn’t do much to it. But that meant expanding my artificial island substantially, and the amount of stone I’d have to conjure was huge.

  Not wanting to spend the rest of the week nursing an overcasting migraine, I worked on it in short bursts. Fifteen or twenty minutes of full-power conjuration, then an equal time on less intensive work. For a project this size I’d spend as much time measuring angles and distances as I did actually working magic, at least for the interior details. It was a good thing my earth sorcery included an innate sense for such things, since I didn’t have a tape measure with me.

  I built a fairly grand staircase leading through the roof to what I planned to where I planned to put the atrium, and started working my way up. Load-bearing walls and pillars first, since those had to be carefully laid out to make sure they had sturdy support all the way down to the foundation. I’d put in lighter privacy partitions later, but for now I just subdivided the space around the atrium into eight large sections of empty space.

  The temperature gradually fell as I worked, and by the time I had the outer wall up to the level of the atrium I was shivering despite my enchanted cloak and boots. The temperature had to be well below zero, and that was typical for nights these days. Definitely worse than when I’d first been summoned to this world.

  How cold was it going to get?

  Fimbulwinter had struck towards the end of the fall harvest, so it might just be the natural change of seasons adding to the effect of whatever magic had caused this disaster. But I was glad Kozalin was a coastal city. Another month of this and the inland areas were going to be as cold as winter in Siberia.

  I spent a break period weaving a better warmth effect around myself, and kept working.

  The next floor up from the atrium level was a good forty feet above the surface of the river, which was higher than any attack was likely to reach. So I put a narrow walkway around the outside at that point, intending to turn it into a projecting battlement when I had time, and made the wall ‘only’ ten feet thick from there on up. That made the upper floors considerably more spacious, while also speeding up my construction quite a bit.

  Putting in windows to the outside was still a pain, of course, but I figured it was necessary. The seamless, fused stone I was building with was airtight, and we could end up with a lot of people in a fairly small space. If there weren’t any openings to the outside we’d all suffocate in short order. So I made sure to build windows on the outside walls of every floor, even though this meant sinking an alcove into the wall to make a spot that was thin enough that they wouldn’t end up resembling a mine shaft.

  I stacked five more floors on top of my growing keep in the space of a few hours, accessed by a stairway zigzagging up one side of the atrium and a magically powered elevator on the other. In the interests of time I didn’t bother with doors, window panes, shutters or other such fittings. We could get by without that kind of thing for a few days, as long as I covered the essentials first.

  Then it was time for the roof. By then my head was starting to pound, and I wasn’t looking forward to conjuring several tons of metal. The less common a mineral is in nature the harder it is to conjure it, and iron that isn’t rusted to the point of uselessness is pretty damned rare. Quartz wasn’t so bad, but all in all the skylight was likely to take as much work as the foundation.

  How had the Conclave built that citadel of theirs, anyway? There’s no way a medieval society smelted that much iron conventionally, but if they had the power to conjure it the way I was doing it they wouldn’t be so impressed with my own projects. Did they know some trick that I didn’t?

  Well, one would hope so. They did have a whole millennia-old tradition of magic to draw on, after all. But what kind of trick could it be?

  The fact that it was some kind of alloy was even stranger. Well, not wanting to build out of pure iron made sense, considering how fast the stuff will rust if you expose it to weather. But conjuring an alloy would have to be even harder than getting a pure element, unless…

  I stopped, and suppressed the momentary urge to beat my head against a wall. Yeah, unless it was an alloy that occurs in nature. Like, the one that makes up a third of the planet I’m standing on?

  I tried conjuring a lump of nickel-iron, not being too picky about the exact composition, and sure enough it was as easy as stone.

  “Well,” I said to myself. “At least that was an easy one. Let’s see now. This stuff is more or less the same thing as meteoric iron, so it should actually be stronger than pure iron. Although this makes me wonder.”

  I made a small stone bowl, set it down on the roof, and tried conjuring a little bit of the same material in its natural form. That didn’t quite work, and I groped around for a moment before realizing I needed to drop the filter that was excluding other elements.

  Then a little ball of bright orange liquid appeared, and promptly exploded. Droplets of molten nickel-iron splattered against my shield and bounced across the roof, where they sat hissing for a few moments before congealing into solid lumps.

  “Now that has some interesting potential.”

  But I was here to build a skylight, not invent new weapons. So I filed away the fact that conjuring a tiny chunk of the Earth’s core was apparently quite easy, and went back to solid materials. I’d put in a stone lip a foot tall around the edge of the huge opening where the skylight was supposed to go, and the support beams went over that. I shaped brackets of stone to hold them securely in place, mounted sheets of clear quartz between the support beams, and enchanted the whole thing with a temperature stabilization effect so I wouldn’t have to worry about thermal expansion breaking something while I wasn’t looking. That left a few inches of open space around the edges of the structure, with a stiff breeze blowing out of it.

  Well, that actually made sense. The warmth enchantment on the stone meant that the air inside the building was getting warmed to something close to room temperature, so the whole atrium must be acting like a giant chimney. Handy, since I’d been worried about air circulation. With that in mind I left the gap, and just extended the top of the skylight a bit to cover it so we wouldn’t get snow or hail blown into it during a storm.

  Then it was time for the reason I’d done all the upper floors at once instead of just going to bed once the encampment was enclosed. I put a large cistern on the roof, and dropped a pipe guarded by a heavy stone grate through the bottom. There was a space next to the elevator that I’d reserved for a plumbing stack, and now I dropped the pipe all the way down to the atrium level.

  Each floor got a faucet over a large basin, as a stopgap measure until I could figure out where the kitchens and bathrooms were going to be. But the floor immediately above the atrium got a nice little Japanese-style bathhouse, divided into men’s and women’s sides, with showers and a heated soaking pool big enough for a dozen people.

  Filling it took entirely too many trips up and down the stairs, scooping huge masses of snow off the ice that covered the river and levitating them along with force magic until I could drop them into the heated cistern. But I was looking forward to Avilla’s expression when she saw it. We hadn’t had a chance to get properly clean in weeks, and I’d seen how it wore on her. No more of that, now. We might end up being a little crowded still, but a
t least we’d be comfortable.

  I filled the cistern, tested all the outlets, filled the soaking pools, and verified that the enchantments were keeping them at a reasonable temperature. Then I had to refill the cistern again, since setting up the baths had pretty much emptied it. The sun broke over the horizon just as I dumped the last load of ice and snow onto the pile of rapidly-melting slush in the cistern, and I turned to look over my handiwork with a profound sense of satisfaction.

  “Next up,” I said to myself. “Flush toilets.”

  Chapter 4

  The next day was a busy one. Finishing the keep took endless hours of detail work, and there were a million things that needed to be organized. But at the same time thawing the harbor was a huge project, which demanded most of my efforts if I was going to finish it in the time frame I’d quoted.

  I ended up delegating more than I liked. I’d already put Marcus in charge of military recruiting, and setting up a household was obviously a job for Avilla. I put Hrodir in charge of organizing living arrangements for the main body of the refugees, since he’d been the headman of one of the rural villages half of them came from, and put Oskar to work deploying the garrison and planning our defenses. I gave them all a quick tour of the place and outlined my preliminary ideas after breakfast, and left with a promise to put up interior walls and fittings in between shifts at the harbor. But none of them had ever done the job I’d assigned them before, and I was half convinced I’d come back to a disaster.

  Fortunately Avilla stepped up like a champ. By the time I returned for lunch she’d gotten the men to park the transports in neat rows down in the vehicle park, and had a group of the younger women helping her pace off distances and mark locations for interior walls with lengths of twine. Meanwhile the men who weren’t part of our little military force were busily unpacking our supplies and carrying them up to the atrium, where Cerise waited with a wide grin to operate the elevator.