Book 3 Chapter 24: Reinforcing the Domain

++Even the low-level kind of conflict that my early efforts with oil invited was enough to be terribly inconvenient and force a reworking of my plans.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

Sethira and I spent several hours sequestered away working together, an experience that was illuminating for both of us. According to her, I was learning the secrets of Orapathaqi literally ten times faster than average. That still left me terribly ignorant about their wider intricacies, of course. Ten times a few hours was no substitute for a lifetime of learning.

I would have liked to turn it into a few dozen hours, or a few hundred, but there were other matters demanding my attention, as I learned the moment Sethira and I called a break. No sooner had I stepped out of the leyline cavern, the place I had habitually taken to doing all my magical studies in, than Blakely moved over to speak with me.

“I need more men,” he told me abruptly.

“You have two dozen soldiers and a quarter as many warriors.”

“I know. And I need more. You want me to hold a section of land spanning hectares. I can do that, but even with walls and fortifications I need more men or else the enemy can just attack wherever the defenders aren’t stationed.”

Life was so much easier when you were commanding undead. Undead did not get tired, they did not need breaks to sleep or eat or drink. They did not get drunk at their posts, get into fist fights, wander off, disobey orders or fail in any of the multitudinous ways living people could fall short of their jobs.

If I were using an army of undead, I would not need Blakely to manage it for me.

“What do you need?” I asked, biting back my frustration.

“Ideally? Five hundred men.”

“Five hundred!?”

“Yes,” he snapped. “Do you know how big this place is? How much area you’re asking me to have watched? People will need to take shifts, which means that however many men you have, there should be enough that they can keep watch while the bulk of their numbers are elsewhere.”

“How much would it cost to hire a man for a month?” I asked eventually.

“Two crowns, plus housing.”

“You are asking me to spend an additional quarter-thousand crowns a week?”

“Probably more like three hundred, if you feed them.”

Parting with money felt exactly like parting with power, and was therefore something that inspired instant and instinctive reluctance in me under any circumstances.

But I had no choice here. My only options were to spend more now, or allow my income to plummet again the next time a pack of morons decided to attack it directly. If anything, I was being too thrifty even with only five hundred. But then that was what my enchanted item production was for.

“Consider it done,” I sighed.

Another drain on my resources. Then again, with the refinery refining once more, and the steady influx of additional wealth from the false-leyline business, I was still making a steady gain in money. Within half a year my debts would be fully paid off, and I would be able to start accruing money at full speed. From there, more refineries would follow.

Weeks moved sluggishly by. I, for one, was more bored and irritated than worried, but I realised that most of my subordinates seemed to be living in a new state of fear.

“Normal humans don’t think the way we do,” Sethira noted. “It’s not enough for them to intellectually know that another attack is unlikely to come any time soon.”

“I am aware. It is still annoying to see it demonstrated everywhere I look.”

Apparently there were other consequences to being both a leader, and the most powerful magician present. It seemed I was constantly being bombarded by requests for reassurance that we were safe, that another attack would be turned away. Eventually it got to the point where I had started to almost hide in my own domain to avoid this.

Sethira found this extremely funny, and delighted even more in taking these chances to irritate me exactly as much as she could without becoming worse than the constant demands from my subordinates. Her sadism, I thought, surpassed even my own.

Qaigor ended up being one of my few sanctuaries from this torment. By claiming to be in the middle of educating my brother on the business, I was able to escape from my simpering employees. Qaigor himself enjoyed this too, if only because being taught how to run something so vast and profitable seemed to scratch some instinctive itch for power on his part.

“How did you set this up?” he asked me.

“A few financial risks and a lot of careful planning,” I replied.

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“Are you rich?”

“No, but I will be within two years.”

“So this is what you’re leaving our family?”

“No, this is the start of a much larger business.”

“Will I get a share in that too?”

“Probably not.”

I intended on funding my own projects from now on, and through that means being totally independent. My father was not nearly as antagonistic as he had once been, but I simply did not trust him with any influence over my plans. Earl Yilear was somehow worse, and Qaigor was young enough to be a totally unknown quantity who could prove the most disastrous business partner of all.

Slowly, week by week, the defenses continued. I was so engrossed in the preparatory work that I needed reminding of my own birthday when it came. Alira surprised me with a cake, with Qaigor there too and, of course, Sethira, all grinning, and all for different reasons.

“You’re eighteen now,” Alira smiled. “Just a few years away from adulthood.”

The Garamon age of maturity was far older than most I had seen in previous cultures, which tended to fall somewhere from fifteen to eighteen. I assumed this had something to do with the dominance of warriors, Godtouched and Demigods among them, beings who did not come into their full power until they were somewhere past twenty.

In my case it was thoroughly inconvenient. I could own property, that was something, but was still ultimately beholden to my family for another three years. This little reminder of that only soured my mood, and I saw that Alira noticed.

“Oh stop complaining,” she sighed. “How many eighteen year-old oil barons have you heard of? Actual oil barons, even! You’re a baron who owns an oil refinery.”

“I am not a baron,” I grumbled. “Nor even a baroness.”

“I’m going to be the baron,” Qaigor grinned.

That surprised me.

“What makes you say that?” I asked him. Agrian was our father’s oldest son, by all rights he should be the one to inherit the lands and titles, granted modern Garamon tended to be less mercenary about such arrangements than the feudalistic nation it had long since evolved from.

But still, Qaigor should not have been labouring under this impression.

“Father always says it,” he replied chirpily. “I’m going to be the strongest warrior in history, and his heir.”

I felt a stab of fury at that. So our father wanted to cut Agrian out of his inheritance? Or perhaps leave it managed by Qaigor?

“We will see about that,” I said after a moment.

For once, the continued advancement of my magical abilities was one of the least significant things I was doing. This was in spite of the fact that, by the time my defensive structures had finally been erected, I was able to muster a peak output of over twenty five thousand vis.

An arbitrary number under most circumstances, but under Garamon it made all the difference in the world. Twenty five thousand vis—twenty five thousand, six hundred to be precise—meant that I now met the minimum power requirement to be officially recognised as a Highmage of the second Class.

The next milestone was quite far away, a hundred thousand. I was still years away from that, at this rate, but I hoped to hit it early into my twenties. By thirty, I fully intended to be an Archmage.

Another smile cracked my features. Such trivial little bursts of power I was planning my life around. To Lord Dread, the difference between a Highmage and an Archmage was hard to even notice. His mana output dealt strictly in mega-vis.

Still, I at least controlled that power again, with the only limitation being discretion. And I was working to improve even that, too.

Plans and backup plans, an endless arsenal of schemes. That is what a lich is made of.

Blakely managed to find the five hundred men he had asked for, and it did not take long for him to begin drilling them.

They were not especially impressive, which was unsurprising given what they charged. Like most mercenaries, these men were former military. They had clearly retained much of the training that came with that, but Garamon’s training had never been terribly useful. Blakely showed me that they could load and fire fast, that they knew how to cover various directions from a fortification, and that they had some impressive-looking wounds among them. They also brought their own armament, which went some way to reassuring me about their use.

Though I would have preferred a few cannons, they only had rifles.

All in all it was a start. If we were to suffer the same attack we had last time again, this force alone would greatly reduce the damage. We would have advance warning, and many of the mundane shooters who had tangled up our magicians would be taken out early by gunfire. But against the magicians our enemies had sent, these men would be of limited use. And if they sent something even more powerful, something that could threaten Sethira or myself, they would be close to useless.

That, and the next attack may come at a far less opportune time. I had been lucky to be present at the refinery during the last, but I was forced to travel far and often. If I was in Garamon when the next one came, the damage would be multiplied exponentially.

No, we needed a higher quality of guard protecting us.

Sethira’s cultists saw to that, partly. By the time Blakely’s new guard was situated, she had a dozen new battlemages heading over to settle in as well. I did not like that, it made the connection between Sakhent and me that much stronger if anyone happened to know their affiliation, but right now we had no choice.

And it was still inefficient.

Sethira and I took one another aside one evening to address the problem directly.

“You were…correct,” I said at last. “I have been soft and complacent in setting this up. We need magical allies as well as funding. We need to start building them sooner rather than later.”

It would be impossible to work with certain creatures, ones unable to hide themselves from Garamon’s gaze, but the world was wide, and some of its monsters could be…subtle.

“I have a few ideas,” Sethira said quickly. “But I get the feeling you have one of your own, too.”

“It is partly related to this,” I said. “And partly tied to my new experiments with the prisoner. I need materials, rare and powerful ones, that can only be found in one place as far as I know. What is quite possibly the most dangerous place in the world.”

She looked excited rather than scared. “Where?” she asked.

“...My old laboratory.”