18. N #4
In the rank-obsessed Jeweled cities, his current state would leave him making requests to junior librarians who would gain status by ignoring him.
Armed with sufficient rank, he could blow past them, and simply instruct the Lords who kept the precious books to simply accede to his requirements.
Alliard, ever the pragmatist, should give him the rank he needed to do the king’s bidding.
I hope.
Or at the very least, the king would send a group of his strong-arm flunkies to get the documents for him. Or in the worst case, get them to someone else as adept at magic research as I am at Gates.
He used a candle flame to melt the wax, then stamped it with his seal, addressed it, and put it in the basket with the other outgoing messages meant for personal delivery.
His desk now clear, he leaned back in his chair again and considered how much time had passed, and how much there remained to do.
His recommended reforms had borne fruit, if not quite the way he intended.
Alliard had placed the burden of each family’s feeding back on the family itself, issuing algae “seeds” and stoneware pottery vats to all, so even a production of one or two bricks a day had reduced the stress on the food supply.
Anything could go into those vats to feed the algae, from inedible vegetation to fireplace ashes, to personal waste, if you weren’t squeamish.
A sufficiently mature child, while not up to the stress and hard work of the production facility, could produce a brick or half-brick a day.
Perhaps even two. And so could someone too old or injured to work in the production room.
Haldeen had to respect Alliard’s canniness.
The king had neatly finessed the issue that had boiled over in Haldeen’s production room.
Professional food makers had to craft twenty-four bricks a day if they wanted to eat.
Letting others eat who made less undercut his ability to hold his food makers to the higher number.
Placing those burdens back onto the individual families as an additional task solved that.
Other things weren’t getting done of course, as requiring each family to make its own food had proved very inefficient in the past, and required a lot more time than a professional, but the worries about food riots had faded.
And it would be up to the head of each household to cajole, scold, or bully the members of that household to contribute, so resentment would be diffused.
One problem solved. Ninety-eight to go. He exhaled heavily. If it all goes badly, I am one Gate pass away from being out of all of this. He didn’t have to stay here.
And then what? Starve to death in a cave with no exit. I don’t have a vat over there, and even if I did, how would I feed the algae, or provide it with light?
He sat back, thinking. I have to get out of that cave. I need more magic than I can call on my own. How do I get it? Use a Machina? How? He sat, humming a song he’d heard earlier, and letting his mind drift. Nothing came to mind.
He went back to first principles. Their Machinas used magic far beyond what most casters could handle, and used it well enough that a single caster could work more than one Machina at a time.
Machinas weren’t people, so didn’t draw their magic the same way.
He found a scrap of paper and doodled the water-glass …
the usual way they taught magic theory. Personal magic is the glass, the ambient is the water.
The personal glass is a small fraction of the ambient water.
He stared at the drawing a long time before he got up and got the plans for the Machina that had failed weeks previously.
The Machina from weeks ago, when … that was the day Triana arrived.
The day the Monster assaulted the Wall itself!
He looked at the date on the report. Nearly fifteen eight-days ago.
Had it been that long? A quarter turn around the star since she arrived?
He went into the outer office. Triana’s depredations had produced an unintended benefit. Relocating his Machina papers from his tower office saved him a long walk up a steep flight of stairs.
He sorted through the plans for the Machinas he’d designed, until he found the one that failed.
Most of the subassemblies came from other cities.
The Lords Technical there made what they were good at, with their kings trading those products to other cities.
He’d never cared about the details of their work.
Until today. He studied the Machina plans for a long time.
His design had saved time and resources by reusing fundamental components of other systems.
The only concern he’d had at the time was whether the systems worked, not how.
He focused on the weapons systems, tracing how the firelance charged, and how it drew magic.
The weapon-maker held his cards close … elves being elves …
and who documented what the system did while passing in silence over how the system did it.
It took him much longer than he expected to reach his answer.
How does the Machina draw magic for its weapons?
The realization hit him like a bolt. It doesn’t. The systems came with the magic already imbued, and when the system ran low, the elves who serviced the Machinas replaced the depleted jars with fresh ones, and sent the empties back to be reimbued.
He laughed out loud … just like the food-making.
I’ll bet there is a room full of elves somewhere where they have figured out how to put magic into these jars, which they then put into the Machinas.
As long as you used those Machina weapons, you had to use their jars, and the rations coupons would fall like rain. They must be rich.
So, unless Triana’s world interfered with the storage jars somehow, imbued magic should be available.
He recalled something from Nora’s first interviews with Triana.
He quickly returned to that pile of documents and sifted through them until he found the one he wanted.
Nora had tried to take down Triana’s words as she spoke them.
I had come further down into the cave. That rat-bastard Kyrtian had led me in, tricked me, I think.
He was always a creature of low cunning.
Anyway, I was close to where he and the others had gone past the broken carriages.
Everything was covered with dust and very old.
Then, one rose up. It had great orbs, and it cast beams of light about it.
I heard the sound of metal clashing on metal … .
Haldeen felt the excitement grow as the pieces fell together. The systems used by Machinas back then relied on stored magical energy … the same as now. They worked on her world. Machinas can
not draw their own magic … so the lack of ambient magic on Triana’s world …
is irrelevant to a Machina. He felt the smile grow.
The power they store isn’t affected by her world, or even a considerable period of time.
The one that had come to life had a small amount of magical energy left in its jar after centuries at rest.
His explorations of the cavern had found the collapsed cave mouth that had sealed the World Gate from that side.
The stones had appeared much too heavy for him to shift, but perhaps a properly designed Machina might solve the problem?
Some kind of excavator or lifter. Slow perhaps, but it would get the job done.
Perhaps there is a way to speed things up? The firelances on the Machinas produce a flame that carries a good way, and burns. Not good for blasting rocks. He looked back over the Machina design. Would a copper shot furnace punch through? Ideally, without exploding in my face.
He found the shot furnace documents and started reading.
He started with the report drafted after the Machina had failed on the wall.
He read the summary, which helped jog his memory.
Details crept back in as he slogged through the mix of jargon and assumptions that made for very dry and very unclear writing.
Short version … the furnace didn’t seal properly and the molten-slug that was supposed to burn the Monster leaked out and burned the Machina instead.
There, one sentence where only four pages would do.
All right, got the “what.” Where is the “why?”
Sifting the report, he found it, neatly buried in a long table.
The previous shots had left residue behind that cooled, and the cooled copper built up enough that the furnace door didn’t seal properly.
The last slug had simply dribbled out and melted the guts of the Machina. He thought for a moment.
He read a footnote about the feedback when the controller mechanism on the Machina failed. It had melted the brain of the Manipulator controlling it. Female, he recalled, though why that stuck out to him, he didn’t know.
The furnace assembly came from Opal, as did the shot heating and lensing assemblies. Machina scaled firelances used the same basic plan as the handlances, only scaled up. They had a simple, standard, and proven design.
A full mark later he had learned that the copper shot furnaces were devilishly complex, and for military hardware, quite delicate.
Haldeen had been Gatekeeping a long time, and thought keeping the World Gate open had been complicated.
He read the design description three times, and still wound up drawing pictures before he understood what the weapons-makers in Opal had wrought.
Once he understood, he was torn between feeling impressed and appalled.
When he was done, he looked at the diagrams and the notes he had made.
He had gone from wondering why the shot furnace had failed to being impressed that the damned thing worked at all.
The amount of magic required to operate the furnace, and the long list of things that could go wrong with each shot resulted in each use being a roll of the dice.
He thought of military weapons as being as robust as copper kettles, but this system was as fragile as a clockwork.
He made himself a cup of tea. Normally, he did it the hard way, heating the kettle and placing the small “tea” wafer in the bottom of the cup to steep. Today, he used a simple incantation, and set the spoon to stirring itself while he worked.
The Opal furnace-makers had been careful to guard their secrets.
They had left out the actual numbers to make it harder to copy the device, but given time and patience he could follow the ration-crumbs.