Chương 39: Chapter Thirty Nine

Pausing only to ensure the clearing was clear, Isabella wasted no time in dashing to the log at the centre of it and shifting it aside. A peculiar sight to be sure, if anyone were observing, given that she herself was invisible. To a casual observer, it would seem as if the log just… suddenly decided to move of its own volition. Fortunately for the palace guardswoman, her only observers were a pair of disinterested rabbits, as she dropped into the hole that had been revealed.

Pulling the cover back into place, the woman was plunged into total darkness, the tight confines of the dirt walls around her all but pinning her in place. Fortunately, dropping into a crouch provided her a little more room to maneuver, if only slightly. Ugh, I hate this bit, she thought as she resisted the faint tingles of claustrophobic dread that tried to rise up – only to be squashed through long experience.

Instead, she focused her energies on the slow, laborious process of gradually turning herself about until she was perpendicular to the ground, the tunnel leading away from the entrance right in front of her face. Sighing in relief now that the most difficult part was done, she started to crawl – though shimmying might have been a more apt descriptor. Slowly, inch by inch, she squirmed forward into the darkness. Twelve paces, she thought. Slightly downward angle.

Eventually she hit a wall, and felt with her hands how it veered off to the right – and once more down. She followed, fighting to force her body to squeeze through the tight turn. Then once more on the left. Which was when she smelled it. Food. Grinning, despite the grime sticking to her face – which didn't matter, she was invisible – she squirmed onwards, turning one final corner and catching a glimpse of her destination. An opening filled with light at the end of the tunnel.

It seemed to take forever to reach it, but when she did, she reveled in the freedom of pulling herself through it and out of the claustrophobic darkness. Which wasn't to say the room she was in now was large. The ceiling was low enough that she needed to crawl on hands and knees, and if she stretched out fully, she'd have been able to reach both walls of the circular space. Still, it was better than the tunnel – and not just because of the pot of stew bubbling merrily in one 'corner'.

"Andrea?" the woman tending to it asked without looking up. There was little point, given that Isabella's potion had yet to wear off.

"Isabella," she corrected.

"Andrea wanted to take the evening shift." Moving over to the small pile of bedding opposite the stew, the guardswoman set about pulling off her armor. Which didn't take long, given it was just a breastplate. A simple steel cuirass stained black. Satisfied, she eagerly shimmied over to the pot – though she was careful to keep her hands away from the heating-stone beneath it.

"Working on the shard again?" Narya asked quietly as she continued to stir. A small bead of sweat ran down her face as she did. The heating stone might have kept them from filling the entire cavern with smoke while she cooked, but it still put out enough heat that the tight confines of the alcove were just a step below sweltering. Fortunately, the thing only needed to be turned on long enough to ensure Isabella and her sisters-in-arms got a hot meal.

"Alchemy this time." Isabella shook her head.

"Something to do with the earthblood." Narya laughed as she scooped out a portion of the stew into a bowl.

"It's always something with him. Any idea what he's doing with it?" Isabella shook her head again as she accepted the food and dug in.

"Is it too much to ask that you use a spoon?" her friend asked.

"You just crawled through a tunnel full of dirt and you're filthy." Isabella rolled her eyes, before frowning as she noted that she still couldn't see herself, or the bowl she was eating from.

"How could you tell I was using my hands?"

"Call it an educated guess." Narya smirked as she tucked into her own food – with a spoon. Isabella scoffed, but said nothing as the two continued to eat. Truth be told, the food wasn't actually all that great, given they were limited to what supplies they'd brought with them, supplemented by what the three could pilfer or hunt without being noticed. Still, it was warm and filling.

"He's compartmentalizing," Isabella finally said as she set the bowl aside, watching with some amusement as it flared into existence the moment it left her hand.

"Just about every workshop in the province is working on something for him, but none of them know what the end result of each design is supposed to be."

"A shard, presumably," Narya said.

"Given the first thing he made was that synchronization gear." Something the Queen would be interested in. But only passingly so. Sure, it presented a powerful upgrade to front-mounted prop shard designs, but the Royal Navy didn't have many of those. Still, given the influx of Mithril the crown had just received, new airships weren't the only thing the capital was churning out.

Shards were too, and it was all too possible Redwater's synchronization gear would serve to make a new line of front-mounted shards more appealing to her lady.

"Obviously," Isabella muttered.

"Some of the parts we can recognize as being for a shard." There was, after all, only so many ways one could create landing gear or cockpit glass.

"It's the ones I can't recognize that I'm concerned about." Nor was she alone in that. Many of the workers creating the parts were more than a little unsure about what they were doing – even as they continued to follow Redwater's absurdly precise instructions. If she were being honest, she could admire it in a way.

Even if someone were to create copies of all the parts currently being constructed, they'd still need to piece them together bit by bit – without even being sure if they had access to all the pieces they actually needed. Still, it made her job of keeping an eye on the boy's plans a lot more difficult.

"Nothing we can do about it but keep trying to find his personal notes" Narya shrugged. Isabella scowled, not least because the fact that the boy made getting into his personal workshop all but impossible. She and the others were rightly leery of stumbling across whatever trap he'd used to destroy the storehouse back at the academy last year. Sure, eventually it was claimed that the explosion was an accident borne from thieves tampering with deteriorating alchemy materials, but the Palace Guard knew the truth.

The explosion was too similar to the kraken slayer in function not to have come from William. Which is why we can't be too invasive for fear of ending up a red stain, she thought.

"Ugh," she lamented.

"I hate it when the targets know they're being watched." For one thing, they started making countermeasures – and while William's had proven a lot less lethal than the Blackstone's, they were still annoying. She certainly didn't appreciate being shooed from rooms like a housecat any time the boy felt the need to have some private time. Nor did she enjoy scrubbing pink paint off her armour, after one of his earlier attempts to counter their invisibility.

Because while the paint did seem to disappear when it struck her, that was only from the outside. Even if it turned invisible, she still had pink paint all over her that needed cleaning off the moment her invisibility wore off. Idly, she wiped at the sweat covered grime on her face, noting the outline of her hand as she did. The spell was starting to wear off now. She gave it a few more minutes before she was fully visible.

"Do you think he's harrowed?" Narya asked quietly, apropos of nothing. Isabella shrugged.

"That's the thousand gold question, isn't it."

"I mean, he has to be, right? The spell-bolt. The flashbang. The Kraken Slayer. And now this?" Isabella leaned back against the warm soil of their little den.

"Eh, the bolt-bow and flashbang, I could see them being a derivative of the same concept. It's just a 'boom' applied in different ways. The slayer's a bit more of a leap with the alchemy, but it's still just a 'boom' of a different sort." Isabella was familiar with alchemy – all of the royal guards were, they had to be to search for poisons or other threats. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. As a magic system, it wasn't all that complicated.

In short, it worked by combining two or more items with conceptually similar attributes. Healing potions for example, needed dragon scales and gazelle hearts. Two potent symbols of health and fertility. Truth be told though, the dragon scale was doing most of the heavy lifting there. The more potent the 'conceptual weight' of the items used the more effective they'd be. And thus expensive. And few things were more expensive than dragon scales.

Not least of all because they'd been driven to near extinction – along with a lot of other magically inclined beasts that made for good alchemy ingredients. Which was a large part of why alchemy had grown less popular than enchanting over the years. Yes, alchemists theoretically could churn out as many potions as there were hours in the day if they had the ingredients, but that was the rub. The ingredients. Which were expensive.

Especially when compared to enchanting, where applying the enchantment was free but for the aether spent in the attempt. She frowned. Except whatever powered the kraken slayer wasn't enchanting or alchemy as they understood it. For one thing, alchemy failed near kraken scales just like enchantments or conventional spellwork.

More to the point, of the list of ingredients William had handed to Griffith, nothing in them held the kind of conceptual weight needed to achieve the kind of explosive power the kraken slayer held. Potassium. Sulphur. Charcoal. Of the three, only the second could even be seen as explosive given their relationship to volcanoes and fires respectively. Beyond that, they were common ingredients, which lessened their conceptual weight.

"That's not alchemy," Narya muttered, unknowingly echoing her thoughts.

"As we know it." Isablla shrugged.

"Perhaps those rituals he outlined changed the conceptual properties of the ingredients." Narya stilled, before she glanced meaningfully at a crate, one containing the team's stock of invisibility potion.

"…You mean like?" Isabella shrugged. Yes, it was true that one half of the invisibility potion could be considered… a less monetarily expensive ingredient, but Isabelle would never consider it cheap. Nor did the palace alchemists who created the potion, otherwise it wouldn't work. With that said, it was only used as the binding agent, the other half of the potion was unicorn blood - which was the furthest thing from cheap one could get. Isabelle glanced down at her hands.

"Perhaps there's a similar cost incurred with the kraken slayer we're not aware of yet." Narya chuckled humourlessly.

"What a lovely thought."

"My point is, two novel applications for magic and a one-off bit of incredible alchemy do not require a harrowing. Just a bit of uncommon intelligence and creativity."

"Or it could just be a harrowing at work. Something to do with explosions."

"Except he's not raving mad." Narya laughed.

"Stillwater would disagree with you on that point. As would his family. And me for that matter. Plus, he's got the signs. All signs say he was a total layabout prior to attending the academy. I don't know about you, but nothing I've seen in the past few weeks screams 'layabout' to me. That kind of change in behaviour would fit a harrowing." Narya glanced up.

"It'd be easy done. Our playboys finds out he's being shipped off to the academy to straighten up and panics. So he decides to go for the easy way out." It was a common enough story. No matter how many times people were warned against it, the fact that the 'answer' to any given problem was just a question away all too often proved too much of a temptation for some. The stupid and the desperate.

"Except he's not mad," Isabella reiterated.

"He's wilful and impulsive, but that's it." She paused.

"You've… not seen a harrowed person. They're not… they're barely there. Him though, he's talking, he's lucid, he's making plans. He's aware of his surroundings. He isn't… half elsewhere." Narya eyed her.

"And the bit of nonsense he's building? It's all coming out of his head."

"Again, all within the realms of someone clever." Isabella shrugged.

"The synchronization gear is clever, but obvious in retrospect."

"I note you're making no comment on the other stuff he's having his people put together."

"Stuff that's yet to be seen that they succeed. They could be experiments on his part. He did claim that was his plan, and it would explain why he's doing it all in a billion parts. Because he's not making a single shard, just lots of… add-ons." Narya hummed in consideration.

"I still think he's harrowed." Isabella snorted as she crawled over to her bed.

"Well, I think I'm going to grab a nap." Narya scoffed, but didn't say anything else as she set about taking down her cooking equipment. For her part, Narya couldn't wait to be back to her 'official duties' as a palace guardswoman. Eating proper meals. Not skulking underground to maintain the illusion they weren't present to a man who obviously knew about them.

Tala grunted with exertion as she finished pushing yet another orc corpse over the railing. Idly, she watched the body fall, twirling about as it fell, before hitting the forest below and disappearing out of sight beneath the treeline. Soon enough, it'd be a feast for the creatures within. Though it might take them a while to get around to it, Tala thought with grim satisfaction. After all, there's plenty to go around today.

As if to punctuate her thoughts, she glanced up to see other members of the crew leveraging a wyvern overboard, the massive batlike lizard's corpse proving difficult to shift due to its weight. Well, that and the sheer amount of blood staining the Judgement's deck. Even as she watched, one of the sailors started to slip in a puddle of the red fluid, before catching herself at the last second. All around her, sailors and marines were at work shifting the many bodies strewn about.

Mostly orcs and their mounts, but a few blackstone marines and sailors were present too. Naturally, the latter were being treated with the respect they reserved, the honored dead laid out in neat lines on one side, rather than being cast overboard. No, they'd take the human dead with them when they returned home, to be buried with honour as they deserved. … In graveyards already overflush with the dead of the north, Tala thought venomously.

"Ack!" Glancing over, she allowed herself some quiet satisfaction to soothe her soul as she watched a pair of prisoners being lead below deck in shackles. The pairs green skin was mottled black and blue where they'd been beaten into submission during the melee, but they'd look worse before the night was through. That there were only two wasn't ideal, but it was enough for the brig mistress to work with. Tala knew from experience that the pair would be separated and each used to confirm the answers of the other.

That would hopefully be enough to get an answer on where the nearest orc base was. Though if they expire before then, there's likely more prisoners on the other ships in the fleet, Tala thought carelessly. She was just about to set about shifting another corpse when the sound of someone moving up behind her had her turn.

"Some part of me still can't believe it worked," Captain Hayfield said without preamble.

"Normally getting the greenskins to commit to a real fight against anything other than lone ships is like pulling teeth." Under normal circumstances the woman wouldn't have been talking to her given that Tala was supposed to be 'just another member of the crew' as per her mother's instructions. Hence why Tala was shifting corpses along with the menials, while the other marine-knights were toasting a well-earned victory.

In the time since her banishment though, they'd managed to build up something of a rapport with the older woman – owed in no small part to the fact that Tala had never once complained or shied away from her reduced duties - and as such the captain often took a few moments here and there to confer with her future liege lady.

"They don't normally have three airships to call upon," she said as she glanced meaningfully at the two downed and smoking hulls that had crashed into the forest and a mountainside respectfully. Already gliders were floating down to recover the cores within – and likely the hulls as well given time. The third was still in the wind, but it wouldn't get far before they chased it down. And hopefully in the process they'd discover how the orcs had managed to keep the three ships hidden for so long.

Certainly, the Snowback mountains weren't small, but neither were three airships. Yet of the three sorties House Blackstone made into 'orc territory', not one managed to find even a hint of the stolen vessels. Until now, but that was because the orcs chose to come to them this time.

"Nor as tempting a target as we provided," Haysmith allowed.

"I'll admit part of me was worried when your mother presented her strategy. I'm no coward, but the thought of entering the Snowbacks with just three ships certainly had me feeling uneasy. Especially with one of the craft untested. Even if he is a big bastard." Tala glanced up towards the massive Brimstone overhead, the thing's bulk dwarfing his two escorts.

"Mother's always been audacious," Tala allowed. And using their newly constructed carrier as bait to lure the orcs into a real confrontation was certainly nothing if not audacious. It had worked though. Oh, how it had worked.

"That she has," Hayfield laughed.

"That she has. Though I can't say it hasn't paid off. I can't say I'm a woman unaccustomed to seeing the skies turn black with flyers, but I can say with surety that this is the first time I've ever been happy to see it happen." Tala smiled in turn.

"I can't imagine the orcs expected their little swarm strategy to be turned back on them." True, it wasn't quite the same, given that the Brimstone's twenty shard complement was still outnumbered by the thirty or so wyverns the orcs had sortied, but that hadn't availed the brutes any. A shard was normally a match for any five wyverns, given their improved speed, armament and armour. The only area a wyvern could be said to have an advantage was in agility, and even then, only in low speed turns or deceleration.

If one of the massive lizards wanted to catch a shard that was banking away, they needed to be in a dive – which severely limited their ability to turn. That combined with the fact that their only weapon of worth being a short ranged spurt of natural napalm meant they were only really dangerous when they had an overwhelming numbers advantage and the ability to force a shard into a turn fight. … For example, by threatening the airship said shard was expected to escort.

Tala glanced over to where a small patch of sticky liquid fire was still burning merrily against the metal outer plating of the hull. Positioned where it was, it wasn't actually a threat to anything, and as such was being ignored in favour of other tasks. It'd burn out by itself soon enough. Still, the sight of one of those batlike head sticking its way through a gunport and bathing an entire gunnery crew in flames was one that all too many Blackstone's sailors was familiar with.

Along with the sight of some leather clad greenskinned barbarian diving through said porthole a moment after to lay into what was left of the crew with her wicked hooked blades. That was how the orcs had managed to take three ships. Ambushes involving massive swarms of wyvern-riders. The wyvern would swoop in, strafe the deck a few times with fire to thin out the external defenders, before landing just long enough to allow their riders to dismount.

Then the wyvern would return to the fight, the trained beast relying on instinct more than the directions of their riders to chase down the remaining shard escorts. Meanwhile, the boarding orcs would set about butchering the crew, their shamans proving an annoyingly able peer to whatever marine knights happened to be aboard. It was an effective, if crude strategy. One that had worked for the orcs for years. Until now.

The Brimstone's twenty shard complement had cut a swathe through the beasts before they even got close to the carrier or her escorts. What few of the drakes did manage to land, were cut down with their riders in short order, while the shards moved on to savage the orc's stolen ships with aid from Blackstone-Marine Knight boarders.

"Turnabout is fair play," Tala said finally.

"And while I don't doubt the wily beasts might be able to create a counter to our new carrier doctrine, we're not about to give them the time to let that happen." No, a storm was coming to the Snowbacks – and with the orcs now missing two of their stolen ships and a significant swathe of their drake population, the greenskins were in no position to resist. For the next few years at least, the orcish 'rebellion' had been neutered. This is the end of the greenskin threat to my people and our lands, Tala thought.

And as soon as we're done here, we can turn our attention to the elvish threat. … And William Redwater.