Chương 297: Fuel

As it turned out I was wrong to worry so much about Belisa fitting back in after her ordeal. Since her memories of school were still fresh for her, she just kept going on like everything was normal and instinct took care of most of the rest. Since nobody suspected something might be out of place, there was never even a question to answer. The main thing that was affected was her sudden jump from a middle-B student to a low-A student.

She may have missed a year of classes but she acquired all the education and development of a few centuries of lichdom. She did not need to engage with those gross, malicious memories directly, but all the trained-in knowledge of mathematics, history and grammar were transferred over directly. So now I'm not the only one with cheat codes for good grades. The weather is starting to warm up. Three weeks until Fashion Week and the declaration of the coalition.

On the tenth of Summerhigh, the Rapier Revolt begins in earnest. Ten weeks from the first words to the first swords. We're counting down now, things are getting tense. Me, I just came down off of a really tough week. Killing Meadwhite, Yheta, and that other guy all in the same week, and dealing with all the fallout and consequences. Long conversations with Bruce and Petty, difficult conversations with Belisa Roadaway, knowing glances from Elica.

She still has not heard that her crush Yheta has disappeared without a trace. Snairlin is keeping it quiet, they're trying to work out the succession before they let anyone know that their whole merchant branch has been beheaded twice. I should be looking forward to taking three weeks of relaxation and recuperation before I have to take up my new duties as the leader of the Rapier Revolt.

After all, I am elected as a figurehead for form's sake, but then after that I intend to prove my value and usefulness over and over until they accept me as their leader in fact. That's a big deal, and I should be making myself ready to step into those big shoes. But instead I'm preparing for something entirely different because my lich issues and Yheta issues and Belisa issues have been overshadowing another piece of very big news.

Honestly, if it was not for all the other crises crashing around me, I'd be obsessing about this other thing. The day that I've been waiting for for years now is almost on us. Months ago, Coppor Cseyz walked up to me like it was no big deal and just casually mentioned that my appointment for the fire temple had finally been set. Springhigh. For weeks I've been getting steadily more hyped for this, with occasional bursts of giddy anticipation or groaning anxiety.

Part of me wanted to go all "this is the only thing I'm gonna talk about all month"... until I got bombed by all this other crap. I might be really bad at scheduling events. Still, it could be worse. I'm confident that Belisa's got her feet and is starting to make friends on her own. This weekend I'll be introducing her to the rest of my love interests, and hopefully she won't make that confab even more tense. I've also got a meet with Pynut and his people, getting down to serious business.

I'm just involved in too many projects, it's foolish for me to think I'm going to get any real rest before something major goes down. Especially since I'm the kind of schemer that stays up all night revising and reviewing my plans right up until the last minute. And that's where Fiveday morning finds me. One of my most important assets is that I can maintain awareness and keep working even while I sleep.

So my urge to stay up all night eliminating possible points of failure does not interfere with my healthy circadian rhythms. I've got itineraries, notes, charts, journals, scratch paper, schedules, maps... and I've even got my traveling clothes put on already, everything but my shoes. When first bell sounds, I am pulling myself into place, seating the soul back where it belongs, battening down the billows to occupy just my own body and my own thoughts.

By the time the echo dies down, I am sitting upright and reaching for my shoes. Elica was still groggy, and she's a natural early-riser. She blinked at me in surprise.

"Wh?" she mumbled, blinking. She recovered quickly, in seconds she was sharp again.

"What are you doing now? You've got the whole day."

"Well, I only asked for a few hours in the afternoon, but the school excused me the whole day anyway," I said.

"But, if I've got a whole day off of classes, I'd be a fool to squander it, wouldn't I?" Any break of my schedule is an opportunity to do things I never have the chance to do.

"You could sleep in," she pointed out, like a hypocrite since she never sleeps in.

"Or go do something fun. I can see your notes over there. You're working already. Those are not the notes of someone who is going to enjoy her day off."

"On the contrary," I insisted.

"I intend to have a wonderful day. I've been waiting so long for this! Today, I get my turn with the very best toy ever." Her forehead wrinkled in confusion. I grinned widely." Fire." She rolled her eyes. But there was hesitation. I think everyone understands the appeal of fire, even someone like Elica. Sigil candles just are not the same. I've seen the way she stares at a good roaring fireplace, just as captivated as anyone else.

Normally I would not brag like this, I would not poke Elica to see if jealousy rears its head. But I'm too excited to hold back right now. This is a day I've waited for since I was less than a year old, since the first day I spoke to my father. Dad! Magic!

Since the day I saw a troupe of hired sorcerers showing off geysers and rockets of flame. Since I was ten years old and a sorceress in my own right, learning every essence I wanted... except for fire. I'm stubborn, I know that. I tend to push against opposition until I win, no matter what. I double-down, I escalate, I dig in. But there is no wall that I've beat my head against more than this. There is no limit I've struggled against more, and no failure I've lamented more.

So I'm not going to stay in bed for even one more minute. Elica headed for the shower to get ready for school, and I opened a portal. Things to do. Preparations to make. Not all my work today is in service to the essence of fire, not directly. I've got other tasks I've added to my day off. And it's frustrating. It feels like I should be rushing straight to the temple but there's things to do and what was Past Me thinking by assigning myself stupid tasks when I should be learning fire and...

well, most of my thought processes are not helpful. First, to Byeview. Three jobs to do here. I want to pull a side trip and screw with Kralcit. It's really tempting. This late at night, I could crash some of her businesses, bust down some buildings, expose their evidence and ledgers to the guards... and ruin her entirely. Too many losses, too many debts, too many risks, too much exposure. I could set off the chain reaction that destroys her entire empire.

But in the first week of Summerhigh, I need her agents to deliver the wardbreakers that are going to let us into the royal palace and the entire royal-government complex. She's going to pay for those, if I ruin her now then those wardbreakers don't get crafted. On the other hand, if I ruin her after they're crafted, then my allies don't have to pay her back. Pure profit. Instead I stay focused.

I head to the foundry and give the manikins orders, loading all the rails they can for shipping, and then burying themselves in the clay beneath the building. They shut down the crucibles and molds, they start hauling finished iron into place, along with barrels and barrels of finished spikes. They got everything ready for receiving and shipping, while I moved to the next objective.

A series of dispatch agencies and minor banks all got packages and parcels dropped off, thick folios of pages with specific instructions. I wanted these to be on top of everything else that was slid through the mail drop so that these would be the first things opened and dealt with when the businesses opened. I needed these accounts shut down and those records purged before anyone else's orders came in. it is time to finish untangling Princess Natalie's finances from those of the smugglers and sneaks.

With a few accounts canceled and a few addresses rerouted, there was nothing on paper to connect my criminal network to my railroad enterprise. This was not just so I would not run into legal troubles, because I am quickly reaching the point that I just do not worry about legal consequences. But also the larger business network. While it is brilliant business strategy to build your power base around the inevitable criminal involvement, it is not brilliant business strategy to publicize that fact.

As soon as this project starts making headlines, and more importantly as soon as it starts costing the wrong people money, it's going to be extensively investigated. I'm going to have agents, reporters, cops, spies, forensic accountants and auditors tearing through every sheet of paper to try to find some gap or loophole so that their employers can justify stealing a piece of the pie. And if they can't find one, they'll forge one.

If and only if they can find a single crooked clerk anywhere in the western provinces who's willing to put themselves in the crosshairs for my extremely well-funded, well-organized and well-motivated criminal network. I did not used to be this paranoid. This is my brother's doing. But it serves me in good stead. By the time I'm done dropping off the papers that are going to clear my name and wash my hands, it's nearly the breakfast hour.

I travel to a badly-decorated inn that is inconveniently far from the main roads, and put in a reservation for myself and my associates. When the out-of-town gangsters came downstairs from their rooms, they found me and an entire continental breakfast waiting for them. They had no idea how I could even figure out which hotel they had stayed in. I decided not to rub their noses in it.

We had a big conference over fruits and pastries and warm fresh savory bread, while I handed out last minute instructions, including where to go for the rails and hardware. That address had been the last big secret, the last major control on our timeline. As soon as they sent their messengers out with the news, wheels started turning that could not ever be stopped. It was time.

I buttered a dark bread while riders streamed out into the near-dawn, rounding up wagons and carts, ready to take the shipments of ready-made rails and the work crews that were going to train themselves to lay the track. I gave instructions, handed them diagrams. The wooden ties were already cut, seasoned, stacked and cached, waiting to be picked up and laid out in order. And the last component: spools of wire, big spindles of it the size of millstones.

Copper insulated in fiberglass, ready to stretch out from one end of the kingdom to the other. The construction itself should be a piece of cake, Hearstwhile is eroded almost entirely flat. There are no mountain ranges to summit or tunnel through, and damn few hills to steer around. The only serious incline to worry about is the Fissuring, and I've already leveled that as best I can, and arranged a cleft set aside just for our use with the train.

Skyback's surveyor had warned me about the only real geological obstacle that I had overlooked: sinkholes and cavern systems. Fortunately, with her help I had re-drawn our plans, and now there was no worries about our trains caving in some underground gallery and dumping itself into the abyss. Not only to lose the train, but to break the tracks and the wiring that goes with them.

My agents and sources had been buying up so much copper in this part of the protectorate that it had caused some market fluctuations, the Houses had shipped copper coins here from other regions to offset how much I had melted down to ingots and then drawn into wire. This was part that I needed to keep secret- if the general public had learned that there were storehouses for a hundred tons of copper, I'd have had someone breaking into the warehouses every night.

I can't let anyone know what those wires are made of, because all the best conductive ductile metals are are being used for fucking currency around here. I probably won't be able to get a decent public telegraph system stretched across this kingdom until I've instated paper currency and controls of precious metal trading. Copper wiring on telephone poles right now would just be money for the taking to anyone who can climb a tree. Or cut one down.

So the trick, now is to wrap it in a coating that is unpleasant to the touch, discourage investigation, have the whole process overseen by cutthroat criminals, and hide the wiring along the inner seam of railroad tracks, which are going to be regularly patrolled by thousand-ton locomotives armed with machine guns. The railways are going to make a scandalous amount of money to be sure, and I'll make my investment back several times over.

But the real benefit that is going to shift the whole world is that we're going to start transmitting and receiving messages all along two duchies and a protectorate, dozens of cities and hundreds of depots, all received within minutes. Not weeks or months. No expensive horse-relays or sorcerer-messengers. When the world gets a taste of telecommunications, they'll never be able to turn away from it. We're changing the world.

But over this breakfast, my associates are backslapping and congratulating each other for having the foresight and discernment to recognize the value of my offer and reap the huge financial rewards that soon would be theirs. I just made sure they had the information they were going to need, enjoyed my breakfast, wished them all well, and then walked outdoors to a quiet alley with no witnesses, and took a portal to Pierazard, the town of Kindlestop. The fire temple awaits.