Chapter 20

I spent the next day buried in the woodshop in the basement. Magic can do a lot of things, but for jobs like this, there’s no replacement for hard work and sharp tools.

Bedding the musket came first. The hinged design required a two piece construction, with a separate forend and stock. Finding the exact right point to cut took some trial and error, and a couple of destroyed blanks. Once I got it figured out, the rest of the work went smoothly.

There’s something meditative about woodwork. There’s nothing big or dramatic about it, just slow, steady, incremental improvement until you arrive at the right spot.

I knew a sculptor once who described his process as freeing the shapes trapped in a block of stone. Every stroke of the chisel brought the figure one step closer to freedom.

That’s what it felt like for me as I shaved down the blank, one stroke of the file at a time.

When it was finished, and hanging up over the furnace to let the heat cure the alchemical base that would serve as both the varnish and the foundation for later enchantments, I joined Kaze and the old man outside. It was dark out, only a glimmer of purple to the east marking the sun’s passage. The old man had his carbon torches out and burning, illuminating the training area with brilliant white light.

“Show him.”

Kaze nodded, leveled the pistol, and fired. This time, there wasn’t a wisp of smoke, only a plume of fire that faded rapidly into the night.

“That’s pretty incredible,” I said. “You did more in three days than I did in three years.”

“You’d have gotten a lot more done if you kept your pecker in your pants,” the old man grumbled. “Leaving in the morning, then?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Figures. Kaze, I hereby grant you the title of Sclopetarius.” He pinned a badge to her tunic, one I knew well. It was his crest: a crossed powder horn and pistol, and had the peculiar sheen of ancient iron well cared for. He first minted those badges over 500 years ago. It was a wonder he still had any of the originals left. “The Magus Guild doesn’t recognize this badge, but any warrior worth their salt knows it and fears it.”

“Thank you. I’m not sure that I’ve earned it, but thank you.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. Most trainees are missing at least a fingertip by now,” I said. “Not one accidental detonation. You should be proud.”

“Aye, but don’t get to thinking you’re on the same level as this fool, or your Lady,” the old man warned. “That badge will get you into outfitters so you can get supplies, and it’ll make folk who aren’t bothered by knife witches think twice about picking a fight. That’s about it. You still got a long ways to go before that carbine is more than a trinket.”

“I understand. It took nearly a decade after I flew my first knife to earn my harness.”

“Keep at it and I expect you’ll progress a lot more quickly this go round. Especially with the boy teaching you. He’s a bleeding idiot where women are concerned, but he knows his craft.”

“That almost sounded like a compliment,” I said.

He scowled and spat in the gravel again.

“Don’t let it get to your head. Now come, the both of youins. We’ve a long way to go to get to the archives.”

For safety reasons, Pesden didn’t store his records in his home. No, they were stored deep in the volcano, at the bottom of a hollowed out lava tube at the base of the caldera.

It took nearly an hour to reach the entrance. Pesden touched his fingertip to a sigil and sent a spark of mana into it. Ghostly blue lights illuminated the depths as the charge spread.

Kaze touched the wall with a fingertip.

“These are keystones,” she said, frowning.

“Nothing better for making a place magically inert,” he said.

“There must be thousands of them.”

“Exactly one hundred thousand line these walls. Any more than that, and the mana concentration would be too high to see.”

“That’s why he has to use the manalight,” I explained. “The light from a torch wouldn’t reach your eyeballs.”

He led us down, trading the slope of the caldera for stairs meant for stubby dwarven legs. I had to watch my step not to go tumbling ass over teakettle. Kaze had no such problems. She handled them with her usual grace, which is to say, she made me look like an oaf.

“Out of curiosity,” she asked, “would this crystallized mana of yours have anything to do with the bricks that make up wellsprings?”

“Shufel had too much pride to rely on my tricks,” he said. “No, that old bat worked those out on her own. Never would tell me how she did it.”

They were married, I mouthed.

Pesden shot me a glower, and Kaze covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her giggle.

He had his own reasons for hating the Wilders. Granted, he and Shufel had been on the rocks for a couple thousand years when she was assassinated, but dwarves marry for keeps.

We finally made it to the archives, some three hundred meters below the surface of the caldera. My legs were screaming at me to sit down and take a breather, or at the very least hack them off and be done with it. Alas, there was still work to be done.

The old man led us right to the appropriate bookshelf and pulled down a heavy ledger. It was coated with dust and cobwebs. He started to shoo the spider that made its home on the corner away, then thought better. It was too fat and juicy to go to waste. He pinched the abdomen between his fingertips and popped the cursed thing in his mouth like a handful of gravel.

I was used to those sorts of antics. Kaze had to turn her back to keep from vomiting all over the place. He ignored her and opened the book.

“Let’s see…Ronig ley line. Seven major anchors, twenty-one minor ones.”

“That sounds like some drow nonsense,” I said.

“Not nonsense, just a different way of understanding the world. Nearly everything boils down to threes and sevens if you cut small enough. Now hush.”

I hushed.

“If she wants to induce a resonance cascade, she needs all seven of the major keystones. She could destroy them and free the line, but with the head anchored in the capital, I doubt much would change. She’d also need at least five of the minor ones. They don’t hold it, they just smooth out the turbulence. Ideally, she’d take out those first, let it get nice and angry, then pop the major anchors. Galoch, Sprield, and Waler were all major anchors. Besa and Chater were minors. So, she needs four majors and three minors.”

I unrolled my map and laid it out on the table. Kaze weighed the corners down, once she was done dry heaving.

“I knew the major anchors. Didn’t know the minors.”

“I don’t advertise those. You could damn near do more damage futzing around with those than you would destroying the big ones. Doesn’t help that they're small enough to take out quietly. One of the big ones pops, I’ll see it from here.”

“Well that’s perfectly horrifying,” Kaze said. “Just how much energy is in crystallized mana?”

“Remember that equation? It’s a 1:1 transfer. Each one of those cubes has a gram of crystallized mana. Do the math.”

She closed her eyes and ran the numbers in her head.

“That’s…about two thousand tonnes of blasting powder, give or take.”

“You misplaced a decimal point. Twenty thousand tonnes. Upper limit of what you can dampen with the right spell framework is around sixty thousand tonnes. Not easy, but doable. Minor keystones are made with two blocks, so you’re still within the limits. Major ones have a couple hundred blocks. A prime keystone has two thousand. You’re standing in the only place with more.”

“That’s forty billion tonnes of blasting powder,” she said. “To hell with ley lines, that could destroy the whole world!”

“Gods usually step in when mortals get that feisty,” Pesden said. “They need us more than we need them. Markov is gone, though, and probably the surrounding environs.”

“Tempting a prospect as that is, we don’t want ley lines running rampant,” I said. “So, looking at the map, she can hit either Syer or Namic next, assuming she does things sequentially. Neither of them have major keystones. What about minor?”

“Namic is a tuning keystone, aye,” the old man said. “She’ll need it.”

“Then that’s where we’re headed,” I said. “Will you write down the others, just in case?”

“Only on flash paper,” he warned. “She can’t get her hands on a complete list.”

“It’ll have to do.”