B3Ch91-Reports (Patreon)

Harold ducked back under the lintel of the assay room with one hand braced on the stone, and the cold air of the loading hall hit the left side of his face and went straight through to his teeth.

His hair stood up off his scalp in a stiff, scorched tangle, a side effect of his lack of control. His sleeves were burned through to the elbow. He walked slowly and kept his free hand close to the wall.

Carter came off the folded crane where he’d been leaning, opened his mouth to complain about the time, and stopped.

Ren and Corwin were on a crate by the rails with a pair of dice between them. Corwin had been mid-throw when the die slipped from his fingers and clattered across the stone and into the dark under the rails; they had both turned to stop and stare.

Harold’s left cheek was gone from the bone to the hinge of the jaw. It had been eaten down to the gum line, and his back teeth showed through the hole. The edges had gone black and glassy, and a thin, sour green haze still curled off them in the lantern light.

“Holy shit, Harold,” Carter said. “Your face.”

“I can see your teeth, sir,” Corwin said. “From the side.”

Harold grimaced, which pulled at what was left of the cheek and hurt like hell, and he tapped two fingers hard against his breastbone where the nail sat.

“Wake up, you.” He tapped again. “Time to do your job. You’ve drank plenty out here.”

Heat rose slowly and sullenly under his sternum. He felt the nail wake, take stock of him, then find the cheek and grow hot with annoyance. Warmth climbed up his neck and into his jaw. The black edges of the wound cracked and flaked off onto his collar, and raw pink flesh crawled in from the sides and knit across his teeth. It took about four breaths. Then the heat sank back into his chest with one final sour throb, and the nail went back to sleep.

Harold rolled his eyes. “How can you be annoyed at me? It’s literally your job.”

Corwin leaned in and peered at the new skin. He leaned back. Then he leaned in and looked at it again.

“Well,” he said, “that’s not natural.”

“Nothing about him is natural,” Ren said. “I’ll never forget fighting him on the roof.”

Harold worked his jaw side to side and ran his tongue over the inside of his cheek, then turned to Carter. “We good?”

“Legion’s in place. Lady Maren’s got them bedded down in the side tunnels, and the pickets are out.” Carter pulled a battered ledger out from under his arm. “But I’ve got reports you need to look at.”

Harold looked at the ledger, sighed through his nose, and held out his hand. “Coffee first.”

Ren already had a tin cup off the edge of the cookfire in the tool room and pushed it into his other hand. Harold took a swallow that burned his tongue, nodded at him, and opened the ledger against his forearm.

He read the first page. Halfway down it, he started to giggle.

Carter closed his eyes. “So it was you.”

The report came from the south, mostly through her loose network and the forum. A region boss had come up out of the wetlands near the dragonkin border and rampaged north. It had flattened two towns and a string of villages, and every one of them belonged to the same southern faction. Their lords had pulled their soldiers back to protect a few key towns, and the forum down there was in a full panic about it.

That faction had sat in the far gallery at the auction and bid against Harold on every lot of human captives, just to run the price up on him.

“How?” Carter said. “Seriously. How in the hell did you pull that off from here?”

Harold looked up at him, delighted. “That region boss is a slime, Carter. A big one. It can take on the properties of any liquid that’s saturated with mana.”

Carter stared at him. Then it reached his face slowly, and his eyes narrowed.

“So, basically,” he said, “potions.”

Harold snorted into his coffee. “Yep!”

“Still. How does that mean you lured that boss into that faction?”

“I released the healing potion recipe for everyone, out of the goodness of my heart.” Harold turned the cup in his hand. “And I knew sooner or later every caravan and every adventurer’s belt down there would be carrying them. Once that slime got a taste, it’d go looking for more.”

Carter waved angrily. “So you lured a region boss across half the south because those bastards annoyed you at an auction.”

“Yep,” Harold said happily. “Screw ’em. They shouldn’t have bid against me for the slaves.”

“Gods, you’re petty.”

Harold turned the page happily.

His eyebrows went up, then stayed up.

“‘The Excited States,’” he read slowly, “‘approached Lady Aiko.’”

“I thought I’d copied that one down wrong when I wrote it,” Carter said. “Who the hell are they?”

Harold rubbed his short beard and looked at the page a long moment before he answered.

“Scientists,” he said. “From the States, last time around. A whole pack of them, physicists and chemists and a couple of engineers. They are all Earth-born, and somehow they found each other in this mess.” He tapped the name. “Their name started as a physics joke. They tried to build a college of science on an island off the western coast. It got raided sometime around the tenth year. I think. Maybe the eleventh.”

“Raided by who?”

“Never found out. Doesn’t matter now.” Harold shrugged. “They were fairly famous for trying to classify this place, to measure it and write it down properly, and they made real progress. We were all hoping they’d crack gunpowder. Most of their effort went into it.”

“So why’d they come here?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t even know they had found each other yet,” Harold murmured.

Carter waited.

“I don’t want to turn them away, though.” Harold closed the ledger on one finger. “If they settle with us, they’ll pull every other scientist on this continent in after them. Those are the people we need to raise our industrial base and convert it over to mana. That’s years of work we wouldn’t have to wait for.”

“They sound helpful,” Carter said. “They also sound like they come with politics and ideas.”

“That’s what worries me.” Harold drank the last of the coffee and looked into the empty cup. “I can’t have a faction rise in the Basin that doesn’t understand what we’re actually doing here. Smart people with their own agenda are worse than stupid people with no agenda at all.”

“So what do we do with them?”

“We can’t turn them away either.” Harold handed the cup back to Ren without looking. “Let Margaret settle them. They can have space in the potion hall for now, and if they need more room, we’ll build an expansion onto it. I’d rather they’re where we can see them.”

“You’ll like the next one.”

Behind them, the assay room’s lintel scraped, and Balfiel came out of the dark with his robe rolled to the elbows and lye still steaming on his forearms. He came straight at Harold without looking at him. At the last step, he turned his shoulder and slid around him so neatly the hem of his robe never touched Harold’s boot, and he went off down the hall between the files of the sleeping Legion without a word.

Corwin watched him go, then turned to Harold. “Was it something you said, my lord?”

“Probably,” Harold said.

Lady Maren was coming the other way along the rails with her notebook under her arm. She stepped aside for Balfiel, watched him pass, and then stopped a few paces from Harold and waited with her hands folded over the notebook.

Harold opened the ledger again, read the next page, and read it a second time.

“Another dungeon totem was found?” He looked up. “Wait. Two?”

“One from each of the dungeons in the Basin,” Carter said.

“The odds of that are insane. It has to be that increased chance for loot for having the first dungeon clear.” Harold flipped back a page to check the dates, then forward again. “Evan can manage it. Gods, though. Evolving both those dungeons is only going to help us. Our adventurers had already outgrown most of what was in there. Add another floor or a new monster type with a perk they need, and they’ve got somewhere to grow again.”

“And we can build another team up to the Thornwalkers’ level,” Carter said. “Maybe one of the crews who pulled the rare perk off the Thresher King. From the reports, those teams were terrors against the orcs and the ants.”

“Mm.” Harold nodded slowly. “Evan knows what I want. I left him instructions for exactly this. He’ll handle it.”

He shut the ledger and handed it back.

“News from the army?”

“Fitch and Vayle made their exit.” Carter tucked the ledger under his arm. “Made a real show of it, too. Horns, banners, the whole column galloping off down the south road so every goblin on the ridges could count them. Then they found the passage Dorgan mapped for them, and now they’re moving through one of the biggest thoroughfares the Bronzeshoulder had.” He jerked a thumb at the floor. “They’re headed for a site Colonel Hale picked out, where they can hit back if the goblins go after Third and Fourth Corps. Those two are the most exposed, and Hale’s betting the goblins hit there.”

“And Second?”

“Moved up north of First. First’s still clearing the blockage in the narrows.”

“And the Legion here is set.”

“In place and ready to start the attack.” Carter hesitated, which wasn’t something he did often. “Are you sure about this, though? The whole plan?”

Harold had been looking off down the hall after Balfiel, and he turned back in surprise.

“Hm? Yeah.” He thought about it a second longer, and nodded. “Yeah. I think it’s what we need.”

“Then why aren’t we using the tunnels? We’re sitting right under the place.”

“Because there’ll be survivors. There always are, especially with goblins.” Harold rubbed his temple. “Somebody gets over the back wall and runs, and they tell the rest of them we came up out of the tunnels. Their lord is smart. The second he hears ‘tunnels,’ he knows the Bronzeshoulder roads are compromised, and he collapses every one of them between here and the city before we can use them for the real thing.”

“A frontal attack’s going to cost us, though,” Carter said. “A lot.”

Harold looked at Maren.

Maren opened the notebook and tilted it toward him. It held a sketch of the town in her small, square hand, with the walls, the two gates, the market square over the ore cellars, and a row of little crossed marks along the north and east walls.

“The scouts came back with a survey of the town an hour ago,” she said. “Six large catapults, here and here. Archer platforms all along the east face. The goblins know this town is critical and fortified it. A frontal attack is possible.” She put her thumb on the market square. “But only if a small team strikes from the tunnels first.”

Harold frowned.

“A small team,” Maren went on before he could open his mouth. “Small enough that it’s plausible they slipped over the walls in the dark somewhere. Nobody looks at twenty men and thinks of a dwarf road. They hit the artillery and the archer platforms from inside, and they wreck them. The Legion attacks from the front without the trolls and catapults throwing rocks down onto them.” She closed the notebook. “We bulldoze everything in the way.”

“And that team’s cut off,” Harold said. “Alone inside the walls for however long it takes us to break through and reach them.”

Maren smiled at him sweetly.

“Good thing we know a few crazy soldiers who’d volunteer for it,” she said, “just because it’ll make a good story.”

It took Harold a second, and then his face cleared.

He turned slowly and looked across the hall.

Elroy and Jenkins sat on an overturned ore cart under a lantern, each holding a troll tooth up to the light, with their heads bent together over them.

“Mine’s got a cavity, Jenkins. That’s what makes it bigger.”

“A hole doesn’t make it bigger, Elroy, that’s not how holes work—”

Harold kept looking at them, and he started to smile.