18. N #2
Even if all the sick were gathered into large rooms, that would still tie up a considerable number of others as care-givers.
And those carers would have to be able-bodied, which took them out of fighting or support pools.
The king would want more than that, of course, but it was a start.
How to frame this, so that he could own the moment, show he’d solved the king’s problem … perhaps not the way the king had intended, but effective nonetheless? He thought through several scenarios, framing opening lines, before settling on the idea that the simplest story would serve best.
He tried out his summation. “My king, after further perusal of my notes, due consideration of the options, and given our limited time, I recommend we disable their spell-casting by introducing a communicable disease as part of our invasion.
The goal of this admittedly unorthodox tactic will be to reduce the number of enemy wizards through illness, and ideally, death. This may achieve benevolent secondary effects of reducing their conventional fighting forces and forcing them to divert resources to care for their sick as we begin our
attack. A useful third order effect may be to reduce the population that they would otherwise need to assimilate once the assault forces completed the invasion. The disease should not be something particularly deadly, but certainly should be contagious,
and the more inconvenient or debilitating it is, the better.”
He thought for a second. It needed a better ending.
“Few might be killed outright, but those sickened would draw resources and attention away from the fight.”
He felt rather proud of that. Turning a problem into a perk.
Still King Alliard was no fool. He’s going to ask where I got the idea …. Triana is supposed to be dead.
He sat down in his chair and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling while he worked through that bit.
I can use the breakbone that showed up here, of course …
a run of breakbone here is making people sick and creating patients that others have to care for.
Who’s to say what breakbone might do over there, to an unprotected population.
He started to smile. In the speech he’d started composing, he’d downplay the disease …
lots of people sick, many resources needed to treat, but few outright dead.
He paused, and laughed to himself. It might even be true.
The elves there … correction, elven lords there, have human beasts to do all of their work.
They live in fortified manors, most of the elven population all in a single structure, their manor, in each domain.
What would happen if breakbone got amongst them?
Well at best, it would infect their humans they depend on too.
At worst, their humans would desert them the moment they began falling too sick to enforce the slavery; a collar does nothing if there is no one there to trigger the punishments.
The manors would immediately isolate each other.
Vulnerable populations packed in tightly and malnourished …
it would be Amber … that was its name! It would be Amber all over again!
He sifted through the stack of transcripts that the translator had left …
Nora … that was her name. Attractive, in a thin sort of way.
He found the document he was looking for and reread it.
The rebellion by these hooman slaves. Human slaves.
It’s happening “now.” He reread Nora’s summary.
Triana’s derision and disdain for the rebels came through clearly.
Still, for as much as Triana despised these hu-mans as weak and pathetic, the elven lords had failed to close the books on them. Hooman. However it was pronounced.
So, either the rebels were more skilled than Triana’s contempt warranted, or the elven lords were that inept. Possibly both things could be true …. Triana could not acknowledge the humans as a threat, so perhaps the elven lords wouldn’t take them seriously, and the rebellion flourished.
Still, for this rebellion and these human slaves—there was no telling what a solid round of breakbone might do to them.
They were already in revolt. If it didn’t touch them, they’d see weakness in their overlords and strike.
If it did sicken or even kill them, the elven lords, accustomed to having their every need tended by them—accustomed to using them as their fighting forces—would be rendered even more helpless.
In his mind’s eye, he saw herds of shaggy, two-legged beasts piled like windrows as breakbone cut them down dead where they stood.
Many of their elven lord masters lying sick, if not dying.
The soldiers of his own good king thrusting swords into the infirm and mopping up those not slain by the disease.
A simple solution, and elegant as hell. He let the fantasy spin out, enjoying the moment.
A small concern wormed its way up from the recesses of his mind, and he sat up.
He scanned each line in the document carefully.
Can humans do magic? Nora hadn’t asked, and Triana hadn’t suggested anything in their answer that said that they could.
This could be important. Looks like she might yet be of some small use.
He made a note for the Overseer. Troniar Vaylan would enjoy the opportunity to interrogate her again.
She had badly hurt his interests with her little tantrum, and would enjoy some payback via the collar and control rod.
He scratched a comment in his journal, then went back to framing his proposal to king Alliard.
I will share the credit, of course, and consider how to bind Lord Variman to me, body and soul.
“Lord Researcher Variman is nothing if not diligent about tracing and tracking disease outbreaks. Given the people of the city live cheek by jowl, one person’s cough can spread like wildfire. It was Lord Variman who first identified the breakbone outbreak, and he who has tracked its progress.
Its source is all but unknowable. Perhaps a refugee to the city, who came in when the last of the hinterland farms fell?”
He made more notes … this time concentrating on how this outbreak had given birth to the idea he had for infecting the elven lords of the new world.
And for Variman to stress the unknown trajectory of the outbreak that they’d start, how there was no way of knowing how fast and far it would spread, and the misfortunes it would visit on the sick.
Variman would also fill this part with the estimates of the sick …
big enough to meet King Alliard’s expectations, but not so big as to overpromise success or raise the fears of their own people getting ill.
Once Variman had firmly established the random and unknown nature of the current outbreak in the city source, then Haldeen could step in with the conclusion of just how that could be used to their advantage.
A communicable disease would most assuredly undercut the locals’ ability to cast magic …
possibly not the strength and quality, but certainly the quantity of magic used against their forces.
With any luck, they depended on magical healers, and an outbreak would infect and decimate or eliminate those as well, further crippling their ability to fight back.
He went back to the transcripts, and read Triana’s description of the area around the cave.
There it is …. The land roundabouts the cave mouth lies in wasted lands, a forest of little cultivable value.
It’s hard-by, but not in, Kyrtian’s [untranslated word–demesne?]
. He is a worthless squib, inbred, sadly, as most of the lords there are, and unable to secure a decent wife.
Haldeen didn’t know how much of Triana to take at face value, but the land would be ideal to use for a foothold.
Close to the Cave, where they could build their forces, identify established estates nearby that could be conquered, then immediately place workers into food production.
The first set of people to be sent through would be farmers, who would set to work planting and harvesting as many fields of that edible leaf as they could, moving the bales back here and feeding the populace.
Allegedly the leaf would grow anywhere, so felling the forest to clear the land around the cave wouldn’t alert anyone until they had sufficient combatants in place.
That would buy them time here, and time there.
Time to move people from the cities most imperiled through the Gate.
Time to establish their beachhead. Time to release a disease or diseases and let them go to work.
He made several pages of notes on his plague proposal, then moved onto the next item that kept him from a clean desk. A disordered desk reflected a disordered mind.
King Alliard had been as good as his word, and had gotten verbal and written commitments to share wealth and resources.
Haldeen knew each king was holding back, including Alliard …
they were elves after all … and everyone kept a little to one side for number one.
Still, the level of … cooperation wasn’t quite the right word …
but something close by … where the cities competed with each other and cooperated at the same time.
The level was much more on the “cooperation” side of the ledger than the “competitive” side, and that was unprecedented.
He wondered if there was a word that conveyed both ideas at once.
Still, the road to the World Gate had begun well.
Instead of fighting their way through leagues upon leagues of hostile terrain, they had instead begun to develop a single span elevated road that stood above the trees, and which they could heavily defend and patrol.
Turrets had been placed at intervals along the edges for upgraded firelances.
Huge expenditures of treasure and the profligate use of magic had moved things forward, but the costs continued to mount.
Even with the progress so far, they still had a long way to go, and the weapons to defend the road had to come from somewhere.
Haldeen had already seen two proclamations drawing firelances from the city’s defenses.
With production diverted to connecting the city to the World Gate, there would be nothing left to manufacture more.
Unless … we start mandating that people replace personal metal objects with wood and pottery.
But that can only go so far. Still, better implement that now.
He made a note. And another to start searching empty homes and even trash piles for metals.