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  He paused significantly and looked at Ceri, who obligingly took up the thread.

  “Unless you are employing the dark magics linked to the Abyssal Plane,” Ceri said ominously. “The Abyssal Plane wasn’t much affected. So, blood, pain, and demonic magics worked just fine. As did Elemental magic, but Elemental magic tends to be the provenance of shamans, and the High King didn’t have any, so he didn’t know that. So the reliable magic was all Abyssal stuff.”

  “As the High King soon found out.” That was Dole. “At first, it was deal-making. Then binding. To their credit, the High Kings, and later the Emperors, really did their best at first not to give in to the temptation to use the Black Arts, but—well, they are all powerful people who spend their lives trying to amass more power, and when you do that, you start to look at anything as a tool, no matter how filthy.”

  Wis sneered, “And oh, were some of the Emperors filthy tools.”

  “And that,” Ponu concluded, “is why the Court of the Emperor is a nest of scorpions, rats, and snakes—with apologies to the wiser ways of scorpions, rats, and snakes. The Black Arts corrupt everything and everyone they touch, and the Emperor and his mages have been wallowing in them for a very long time.”

  “Why wasn’t the Abyssal Plane much affected?” Kordas asked.

  “That would require a level of understanding of magic you don’t have,” said Ponu, witheringly. “But I’ll try a very simple explanation that is not the true one, but is as close to the truth as you can understand. The Aetherial Plane is ‘lighter’ than we are, and the Abyssal Plane is ‘heavier’ than we are. So just as waves in the sea move seaweed and don’t move rocks, the magic waves moved us and didn’t move them.”

  Kordas nodded, knowing that was about the best explanation he was going to get out of them. He might be a mage—but it was pretty clear to him in this moment that he didn’t know a fraction of what they did about magic.

  “And just as cheesecloth lets wind go right through it, the Aetherials were not as much troubled by the waves as we were. But it did confuse them, and blew some of them away from us. Meanwhile, those who learned stable magic had to fight as much for stability as anything else.” That was Dole, pouring himself another cup of wine. “Which, really, is only fair. We here on Velgarth were the ones that made the mess, it’s only fair that we are the most affected by it.”

  “I should make some stuffed bread,” said Sai, out of nowhere. Sai’s magic, as Kordas was actually aware, extended to baked goods, and his specialty was stuffed bread, sweet dough filled with sweet pastes like fruit or nuts, savory filled with cheese and meat. “Should I make some stuffed bread?”

  “Stuffed bread is always a good idea,” said his brother solemnly. “All for stuffed bread?” Even Hakkon raised his hand. “Ponu, give the lads some wisdom.”

  Kordas glanced over at his cousin, whose expression revealed that he was still trying to process everything he’d just been told.

  “Some people are makers, some are bakers. Some are cooks, and some are chefs. Everyone has their own recipes, and everyone wastes good ingredients into a charred mess when they overdo it. That’s spellwork. Good spellwork needs a sharp, resourceful mind, a prepared work space, the right tools, good ingredients, and a schedule. Anything else that you want to know?” asked Ponu.

  “Jonaton—” Kordas began.

  “Found a way to find a way to anchor a distant Gate last night, yes, he was loud enough about it,” said Wis. “Yes, we’ll help with the actual Gate construction, but don’t bother us with the petty details before you get to building it. Yes, between us and about half a dozen more of your tower-dwellers, we can make it reach quite a long way.”

  “Yes, he seems to be on the right track,” said Dole. “Yes, he’s probably right it will work. Yes, he’s also right that there’s a level of uncertainty, and you can thank those idiots a millennium ago for that instability.”

  “Yes, we know how to keep the Emperor from noticing it,” Ponu said. “It’s simple. Tell him ‘don’t build a Gate that pushes, build a Gate that pulls.’ He’ll know what we mean. If he does that, you can put the thing far enough away the Emperor won’t connect it with Valdemar, even when it’s active, and that will solve your problem. It’ll also get things through to the other side faster if he builds it that way.”

  “I can’t think of anything else at the moment, and thank you very much, honored elders,” Kordas said, after a long moment.

  Ponu cackled at that. “Honored elders! Did you hear that?” He laughed again.

  “Toddle along, you two,” said Dole, dismissively. Then—“Oh, wait!” He pointed a finger at Hakkon. “Tell your pretty boy that the next time he punches a Portal into my space and sticks his hand in it to help himself to my things, he’ll be drawing back a stump. I’ll even cauterize it for him!”

  “Really? Isn’t that overreacting? You had over a hundred firebird feathers,” said Ceri.

  “And if I want a hundred and one, what business is it of yours?” Dole snapped, and threw something—it looked like a small cheese-crumb from his breakfast—at his fellow mage. It fell short, but the point was made.

  That started them off, bickering and calling each other names. This was why their seats were positioned out of hitting range of each other.

  Kordas grabbed Hakkon by the elbow and pulled him out before cups started flying.

  Hakkon scratched his head as they emerged into the short hallway that led back into the rest of the manor. “Are they always like that?”

  Kordas snickered. “Sometimes they’re worse. But, I’ll also say that despite the wardings in there, and with us—” he tapped the Crest of Valdemar on his baldric, then flipped it over a bit to show the layers of metal, lace, and wood hidden under it—“they still speak in code and implication. It might have sounded like pointless banter, but in truth, they were telling us valuable hints about what to think and how to do things just then. It’s a sort of game they play. Still, if I were you, I would warn Jonaton about the fact that his thievery is not a secret to the Circle. I’m pretty sure Dole was serious.”

  “Oh.” Hakkon looked back at the closed door. “Right.”

  “Come on, I need your calculating brain,” Kordas said, tugging at his elbow. “There are many steps in making perfect stuffed bread.”

  Hakkon looked deeply baffled for six seconds more, then understanding dawned on his face. “They—oh. I only listened to the words, not what they could have meant,” Hakkon replied, actually blushing. “It was like those weird story problems I read to you when you were first learning magic.”

  “A truth of magic is that we never stop learning, or the magic fades. New spellwork is invigorated by new knowledge, while if a mage stops new learning, they stagnate away into dull despondency,” Kordas said as the pair headed through alabaster-columned and wood-paneled halls, toward one of the lesser stable complexes. “That’s mostly what the Emperor has now, in the City. Mages that are decadent but dull. They learned the official methods to have power enough, then just stopped there.”

  Hakkon looked even more enthused, and even younger, when he replied, “And they don’t have Circles in the City, do they?”

  Kordas just grinned back, holding the door open with a flourish for his friend.

  For what they needed to inspect, they needed horses. Kordas was certainly not going to take a nursing mare away from her new foal, and he didn’t particularly want to draw attention to the fact that Duke Valdemar was going out for a ride, either. So once outside in the sweet air of Valdemar, he sent the stableboy for two of the Sweetfoot palfreys, a pair of geldings named Penta and Kery, both ordinary-looking bays—or at least, as ordinary as horses in the Valdemar stables ever got.

  It was a good morning for riding; the rain had cleared away every hint of dust, flowers were in bloom in all the meadows, and even in the worst of situations, riding a Sweetfoot palfrey was
always a pleasure. Kordas liked to boast that you could put a baby in a Sweetfoot’s saddle and it wouldn’t fall off, and he’d come very close to proving that with his insistence that the children of the household learn to ride as soon as they could toddle. So the ride to a peculiar yet nondescript building at the edge of the manor’s grounds brought him a feeling of vast content, even if his mind was still racing.

  They dismounted and tied up their horses at rings on the side of the building and went in.

  It was a vast storage building, with a workshop attached. And it was here that the other main cash “crop” of the Duchy was produced.

  The forests of the Duchy were too valuable to squander as a crop for export. The fields produced mostly hay and grass—every bit of grain stayed right here, and so did the produce. But a clever discovery here had given them something else that was even more valuable to the Empire.

  But now Kordas wondered about that discovery, because it seemed so unlikely . . .

  The objects in question were stored on racks that reached all the way to the ceiling and filled the entire storage building. To the uneducated eye, there was absolutely no way of telling what they actually were. They looked like dull, brownish-gray oblongs with flat bottoms, flat tops, pointed ends, and obtusely-angled sides. They were as long as three common wagons and about an arm-length taller than a man.

  In fact, they were barge hulls.

  Valdemar had been producing them for as long as there had been a Valdemar, after the first Duke—also a mage—had discovered how to create them almost entirely by accident. As much of a botanist as he had been a mage, he had taken to experimenting with fungi he had found here.

  And were some of those out of Change-Circles? After listening to the story of the aftermath of the Mage-Wars, it seemed likely! Surely he would have been drawn to Change-Circles, and to investigate them. And I have never heard of a fungus like the one we use to make barge hulls anywhere else.

  Well, since the first Duke’s discovery, the Duchy had been making and selling the hulls at such an entirely reasonable price that there were only two other workshops in other parts of the Empire that even bothered with doing the same. Wooden barges were almost unheard of except as luxury items, but these were cheap to produce, requiring a bare minimum of magic.

  First, a mold, or bladder, made of inflated rawhide, oiled and carefully prepared, was covered in a layer of cured long-fibered vegetation. This was the only finicky part of the process: layering the vegetation for maximum strength. Here in Valdemar, they used a kind of hemp—the stems, and only the stems—the kind that was generally made into ropes. The stuff would grow anywhere, with wild enthusiasm, and quickly choke out any other crops. They got several cuttings out of every field every growing season. There was a workshop on the eastern coast in Lyranhold that used an equally fibrous seaweed. The third workshop, near the Capital, used a similar weedy relative of flax.

  The vegetation was laid on with a simple water-soluble glue, easy and cheap to make. It was allowed to dry, then a thick paste made of water, wheat chaff, sawdust, and any other kind of plant material that could be reduced to a state like coarse-ground wheat was coated on just before the spores of an extremely odd fungus got laid on with a trowel. That was kept damp and allowed to grow until the mold was about a thumb-breadth thick, which took about three days. The workers wore glass-faced hoods, aprons, and gloves, which were thoroughly bleached every day. The fungus spread fast enough that one could watch it grow into intertwining layers, pulling itself tight into a weave that was ultimately fine enough to shine like satin.

  Then, an apprentice mage applied a simple, low-power, curative spell of intensely purple light to it, until its surface fused into a single, inflexible piece. It would be tipped onto its longest side, the bladder deflated and pulled out, and there was your hull. Total cost, almost nothing, except for the spellwork, but that was kept a very dear state secret. The result was more waterproof than treated and varnished wood, light enough that two men could carry a hull with ease, tough enough to take hard collisions in the water, easy to patch if it was holed, and it could be made in any shape you liked. On the east coast, they made deeper-drafted, keeled, seagoing boats in addition to barges. In Lyranhold, they were known to make cottage roofs as well. The practical size-limit was right about the length of three wagons; after that they needed some internal ribbing and proper keels to keep from buckling over time, especially in seagoing vessels.

  The resulting forms weren’t ideal as roofs, mostly because while they kept out the weather, they did little to keep out the heat of summer nor the cold of winter. In order to be made into barges people could live comfortably in, or into roofs for more than a shepherd’s hut, they needed to be insulated, and that added considerably to the cost. One lesser mage and a crew of helpers could produce as many as four or five plain hulls a day, once the production was started.

  They had all sorts of molds here, from rowboats to living barges where entire families could make a comfortable home. Mostly, though, what they produced were cargo barges. The main difference between the cargo barges and the living barges was that no one bothered to cut too many windows into the angled sides of the cargo barges except at the end, where there would be a small cabin for the operator.

  There were molded loops at either end. Several barges could be roped together to form a train, and one or two Tow-Beasts hitched to the front loop of the front barge were sufficient to haul the entire thing along, heavily loaded.

  It probably never entered the Emperor’s mind, but those three workshops were the main reason commerce flowed so easily and cheaply, if a little slowly, within the Empire. While Imperial roads were good, the network of canals was excellent. There were Gates at intervals along every canal as well as locks to lift the barges over elevation changes. Generally, anything that needed transportation went by barge for all but the last few leagues, or within a large city.

  Anyone in the Duchy could come here and get a hull for the very special cost of about the price of two goats. Newlyweds got one free. Anyone outside the Duchy paid more than that, of course; this was a “cash crop.” In a pinch they could be used as houses on land as well as on the canals, but because they were so light, they were dangerous in a windstorm unless heavily weighted with a layer of paving stones in the bottom.

  “How many of these things are there in the Duchy, do you think?” Kordas asked Hakkon.

  “It’ll be in the records, but at a guess, I’d say three for every family,” Hakkon replied, his lips moving a little as he counted hulls under his breath. “We could ship out every grain of the emergency stores in the manor at once using about three quarters of these hulls stored here.” He turned to his cousin. “So it might be time to start the half-year plan.”

  * * *

  —

  Like all of the Dukes before him, on every fine day, Kordas rode out to some part of the Duchy to personally see that all was well. This served several purposes. It kept him in touch with almost all of his people. With thousands of them, obviously he couldn’t know them all by name, but he could ensure that they saw him, saw him as approachable, and would not hesitate to talk to him if there was something that needed his personal attention. It also drove the Imperial spies mad, because it meant that they would have to leave their comfortable little niches where they were pretending to be road workers, itinerant laborers, or some other unnoticable entity and follow him around on foot while he was on horseback. And it reinforced that image he so carefully cultivated, of a jumped-up gentleman farmer; bucolic, more concerned with drains than politics, and utterly dismissable.

  So today he was going to visit one of his very favorite people in this part of the Duchy. Squire Lesley, the pig farmer.

  Lesley was not just any old pig farmer. Half the Duchy depended on him and his herds to grub up and manure their fields every year once they were harvested. He not only had his own herds of pigs, but for a
fee he kept individual pigs for anyone who wanted one to butcher in the fall and didn’t want the trouble of tending it. Lesley was the supplier of all things pig to the manor, and he knew as much about breeding and raising them as Kordas knew about horses.

  And it drove the spies insane when Kordas went to visit.

  When they were not out running in someone else’s fields, churning up the soil with their snouts and disposing of anything not wanted by eating it, the pigs were in spacious pastures dotted with little shelters—made of the same stuff as the boat hulls—that would have served equally well for sheep. Today about half of those fields were empty, and by that, Kordas knew that the early cabbages, parsnips, broad beans, peas, and radishes had been harvested, and the pigs were out doing their duty, making the fields ready for the next round of crops. He rode up to the low, broad stone farmhouse with an eye out for Lesley’s distinctive yellow hat. Unlike most farmers, the wide-brimmed hat Lesley wore was never made of straw; after one too many incidences of his hat blowing off and a pig eating it, Lesley’s wife had made him one of yellow canvas, coated with a bitter wax that the pigs found too distasteful even to mouth.

  Kordas spotted his target at the side of a very special pen. This beautifully crafted stone pen and stone pig-house was the home of his prize sow, the Empress.

  Lesley’s prize sow was always named the Empress. If the name carved into the stone of the pig-pen was anything to go by, that had been the case for this Squire and probably his ancestors going back to when this farm had been established. The Empress was kept in conditions that matched any that Kordas provided for the Valdemar Golds. Her house had a thick bed of immaculately clean straw at all times. Her yard had a stone water trough filled with spring water, and a stone food trough filled with the best possible foods. There was both a dust-wallow and a mud-wallow, and the rest of the yard was covered in more straw. The yard was never allowed to get dirty.