Keiran

Once things calmed down, the pair of arguing farmers were kicked out. They protested in booming voices, somehow still caught up in their struggle to shout over each other. One of the councilmen muttered a spell under his breath, and a burst of telekinesis picked both of them up to hurl them through the open doors and into the street.

I hadn’t realized intermediate-tier spells had become common in New Alkerist, but then again, I’d paid very little attention to what was going on here. It was enough that I’d gotten things moving a few years back. I could occasionally come around to give people a push through their current bottleneck, but otherwise, I ignored their progress.

“Now then,” the councilman said, “I’m assuming you have some ideas on how to keep a hostile force of mages from showing up and taking over the town.”

“I do have a few thoughts, yes. For starters, we need to remove the teleportation platforms. All of them, I mean, from every location on the island.”

One of the other councilmen sputtered out a protest. “Too many places are relying on them! Trade would grind to a halt. Some villages would starve without food.”

I nodded. “And yet, every teleportation platform is a beacon drawing Ammun’s forces to it. Given enough time, they’ll eventually invade the entire island using our own infrastructure to move around.”

“We all got by without the platforms before,” a different councilman argued. “We can do it again.”

It wouldn’t hurt to go through the effort of learning some names here, if only to help me keep track of who was who, so I discreetly forged a telepathic connection with my father. ‘Who are these people?’

He flinched at the sudden voice in his head, but it was small enough that I didn’t think anyone else noticed. ‘Fribl is the one with the gray hair. City Maintenance,’ he sent back. That was the one on the end who’d laughed at me silencing the two farmers. ‘Verik is next to me, trade and economics; then Celd with the beard, city planning; Oramo has the braids, law enforcement; and Lishav is the one who used telekinesis, education.’

‘Thanks,’ I sent. I waited a moment to make sure there wasn’t a return message, then cut the connection.

The two arguing over my proposal to remove the teleporters were Verik—against the idea—and Celd—for it. My brief aside with Father hadn’t slowed them down in the least, but it wasn’t that hard to keep track of two conversations at once.

“We can, but a lot of towns are reliant on it now. If we could give them warning, even a month, to start adjusting, it would be hard, but they could do it. The villages that couldn’t gather enough food and supplies on their own could be helped. But to just walk up and take them now? It would be a disaster.”

“Do we have a month?” Celd asked. The whole council turned to look at me.

“I don’t know, and I doubt I’ll be able to find out. Scrying into Ammun’s territory is risky and difficult. There are thousands of square miles of land they could use as a staging ground to launch attacks from. A chain of three or four teleports at most would get them here. If they wanted to invest the resources into making their own portals, it would be even easier and quicker.”

“So they could be here tomorrow,” Oramo said. His braids had tiny rings woven into them that clinked together as he spoke.

“Theoretically? They could arrive right now. Practically speaking, I expect we have a week or two. They need to establish a new way to reach the island first, and I expect their opening strike will be against my sanctum directly. It will only be after that fails that they’ll spread across the island, looking for new ways to attack me or draw me out.”

“So you’re saying this is really all your fault,” Fribl said, jabbing his finger in my direction. “Without you, these invaders would have no reason to come here.”

“Essentially correct,” I agreed.

“Calm down,” Father said. “You all know how much good my son has done for not just this town, but the entire island.”

“All good he could have done if he’d just left well enough alone and stayed here instead of going off on a lark to stir up problems on the other side of the world,” Oramo argued.

“I’m not here to argue with you about how much I’m to blame,” I told them. “I understand that trouble followed me home. I’m here to talk about what I’m going to do about it.”

Father winced at that. None of the other councilmen seemed pleased by that statement, either, and it only took a second to figure out why. They were used to locals coming to petition for something, and they held the ultimate decision in the matter. I wasn’t asking for permission; I was informing them of what was going to happen.

I hated bureaucracy. People who had true power never bothered with the rules and regulations. They—we—did whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. It was for lesser men to get out of our way or be crushed underfoot. It looked like that was a lesson I was about to deliver yet again.

Fribl leaped from his seat, an outraged scowl on his face, only to be dragged back down by Verik. The two exchanged intense but silent glares with each other before the former subsided. No one looked too happy with me, but the rest of the council refrained from leaping over the table in a misguided attempt to throttle me.

“As I was saying, the teleportation platforms will tell the invading mages where to find people, where they can do the most damage for the least amount of work. I don’t believe that will be their first objective, but I know how Ammun thinks, and if he can’t pry me out of my demesne with force, he’ll start looking into what’s going on everywhere else.”

“Why, though? Other than being connected by your teleportation network, the rest of the island has nothing to do with you. Your family is here, but as far as I’m aware, you don’t have any real interaction with anyone else,” Celd pointed out.

“True, but they don’t know that. I doubt Ammun will expect me to have a family at all, but he’ll be looking for towns that supply me with food and other necessities, anywhere with a connection for me. If he razes a few dozen to the ground in pursuit of that knowledge, I doubt he’ll lose any sleep over it. This is the man who broke the world’s mana core in an attempt to hold onto his own power and status during the Age of Wonders.”

“Can we even fight against someone like that?” Oramo asked.

By ‘we,’ he meant ‘me.’ Everyone in the room knew that the whole town combined couldn’t fight off a single mage capable of casting master-tier spells, let alone an entire army led by a two-thousand-year-old lich. The lich himself probably wouldn’t be here, not unless he got his little project fixed far quicker than I expected, but he’d hardly be necessary to devastate the island.

“Yes,” I said. “We need to make a lot of preparations in a very short amount of time, and that includes limiting where the invaders are likely to strike so that we can build ways to counter their assaults. I can’t protect every village and town on the island personally. All I can do is take away the platforms so they’re less likely to be targeted.”

“For how long?” Verik asked. “Tell me you don’t mean permanently.”

I shook my head. “It might be a few years, but eventually we should be able to reestablish the network.”

“A few years might as well be permanent for a lot of those places. Everyone there will starve to death before help can arrive.”

“We could send some overland caravans,” Father offered. “The wastelands are dangerous, but with so many mages among our numbers now, it’s not impossible to reach other towns.”

That idea seemed to calm Verik down. “That’s… certainly a possibility.”

“I’ll leave you guys to coordinate that later,” I said. “In addition to ripping out all the teleportation platforms, I’m also going to be adding some automated defenses here. Your ward stones are going to be completely overhauled and will alert me directly if and when they detect any attacks. If needed, the ward stones will draw on the mana stored in your homes’ batteries to power the defenses until I can arrive to manually take control of the situation.”

“Wait, what? That’s our own personal mana we’ve put into those batteries. You can’t just take it!” Fribl snarled, half-rising out of his chair again before Verik clamped a hand on his arm.

“Control yourself, man,” the councilman hissed.

“I’m prioritizing protecting the town over air cooling, running water, and lights,” I said.

I understood that as the man in charge of keeping New Alkerist in working order, I was creating a massive headache for him to deal with if I had to drain the town’s mana supply. I’d just thought that he would understand that if a master-tier spell hit the town uncontested, there’d be no buildings left to maintain. Maybe my problem was that I was talking to a bunch of idiots who didn’t understand what kind of damage magic that powerful could do.

“Let me show you something,” I said. I cast an illusory map of the town with the adjoining fields into the air between us. “This is New Alkerist, agreed?”

The councilmen leaned forward to study the map before nodding to each other. “It looks accurate to me,” Celd said.

I waved a hand at the map, purely for the theatrics of it, and a massive orb of fire descended on the town, engulfing two thirds of it before it detonated. Stone and debris went up, then rained down on what was left, leaving thousands of craters in the field and destroying the crops as well as most of what was still standing in the town itself.

“This is what would happen if a single master-tier spell hit the town,” I told them. All six, Father included, stared down at the illusory wreckage in horror. “I will be hooking your home batteries to the ward stones because if someone starts hurling master-tier magic at you, that extra mana might stop one or two of them, which might give me an extra minute to find whoever is casting those spells and murder them.”

I waited a moment to let them finish absorbing that demonstration, then I dismissed the illusion. “I will also personally be donating as much mana as this entire town makes in a week to the defenses, and I have ten transmission stones that can send messages to me directly as long as I’m within a thousand miles to distribute to people who need them, just in case the attackers manage to disable my divination wards without me noticing.”

There were no arguments at this point. Good. My little demonstration had done exactly what I needed. The only response I got was from Verik. “How long can you give us to get our traders back from whatever villages they’re currently in and help prepare the smaller ones to survive without us selling them food?”

“How long do you need?” I asked.

“At minimum… three days?”

That was a risk, but if I was right, I’d have the early warning of an attack on my own demesne to let me know Ammun’s people were back. I’d have to move quickly to collect all the platforms at that point. Actually, it would be faster to have the villagers pull the emitters out of them and take hammers to the stone.

“We can try, but if the invaders show up before then, we’ll have to destroy the platforms instead of collecting them,” I warned. When no one objected, I continued. “In addition to the enhanced wards, I’ll also be setting up some offensive measures throughout the town…”