Chương 225: Chapter 298 - Intelligence

Liuan Var brought herself out of the Ominian's dreamscape, her dark eyes snapping open. She raised a hand in a gesture, and let the Mask of the Fifth Prophet dissolve back into her soul. The smell of sulfur and dust lingered in the air. No matter how many spell engines they ran to scrub the air of particles, the smell returned. So it would go; her current base of operations was located deep in a section of abandoned mines on Ferramont. Soon, she would change it.

She had roughly a dozen body-doubles who she'd given masks that resembled her own, then used celestial bindings to change the bodies and faces of the doubles until they matched her. She'd even found a way to warp the soul in such a way that it looked, at a distance, like it had the distortions a temporal anchor caused. The recipients all needed an alchemical painkiller to tolerate that binding, but Liuan considered that a small price to pay. The next repositioning would be in a week.

She hoped that Mirian did come hunting for her, but she suspected she wouldn't. After all, it had been her who had pioneered the strategy of hiding to waste another Prophet's time while she progressed her own goals. Even with her starting location known and her entire list of favored contacts interrogated for multiple cycles, even with the RID and Deeps mobilized, even with wanted signs and bounty-hunting contracts, Mirian had evaded detection from herself and that fool Troytin far too easily.

Liuan had hoped Mirian would try to chase her down, allowing Gabriel to wreak havoc while she ineffectually exhausted herself. As it was, she was already needing to adjust her strategy.

"Sacred One, the marshals you requested have arrived," one of her priests said.

"Show them in." A moment later, they arrived. Since Mirian had killed both of Akana's Grand Marshals, Liuan had promoted Emera Cearsia to the rank. She wasn't happy about it. Cearsia was volatile. Liuan still remembered what a pain in the ass it had been trying to get the woman to not blow up the Torrviol Gate. However, she was far more competent than her peers who had risen in rank more from politics and connections than actual skill.

Removing her from command of the dreadnought airships also removed her from the front lines, which might help restrain her. And, of course, Liuan had the mask. It had taken her a long time to master. Being able to cordon off memories, pushing the right emotions into a person—such manipulations took a great deal of skill to get right. Marshal Cearsia stood with two more marshals behind her, not a speck of dust on any of their uniforms.

Behind them were several members of their staff, each with notebooks and pens ready.

"Sacred One," Cearsia said, saluting.

"Grand Marshal. We have a change in plans. We're calling off the strikes against the Elder Gates." Cearsia glanced down at the map of Enteria on the table and frowned. That was another of the problems with Cearsia. She'd believed the lies from the RID about how the Gates were weapons being used to create the eruptions Akana, and getting her to move on from that was a problem. The headache Mirian had caused Liuan with her little mass-murder stunt… Liuan suppressed an urge to sigh.

"Our spies have reported an Elder titan being lured through the Gate to the Jiandzhi. The False Prophet has used the Gates to deliver Jiandzhi myrvites to destroy Akanan armies before. She clearly intends to do it again. Even the archmage regiment is going to have trouble if a half dozen lesser titans and a full titan appear through one of them."

"Why not attack three of them at once? Surely, she can't defend them all."

"The Gates can have their destinations rapidly shifted. That would spread our forces too thin, while she'd be able to concentrate hers and defeat them in detail. Given the delays in mobilization—""I'm fixing them," Cearsia said, perhaps a bit too forcefully. The other marshals behind her shifted uncomfortably.

"Sacred One," she belatedly added. Liuan didn't want to discuss that again. The mobilization effort was as much a mess as their intelligence right now. The RID had relied on layers of partitions to mask operations, and enough agents and directors had died that they'd lost contact with dozens of cells across Enteria, as well as lost key operational information.

Gabriel had complained about it and kept bugging her about getting Akanan troops to Urubandar, but then again, he couldn't exactly get rid of that annoying pod of leviathans off the coast, now could he?

"The point is, if we divide our forces, that doesn't stop the False Prophet from concentrating hers. Every Gate is also either buried or can be buried so that we would need to send strike teams into narrow tunnels, which is exactly where Jiandzhi myrvites would be a nightmare to fight. Instead, I need a new naval operation planned." She handed Cearsia a piece of paper. Cearsia glanced at it, then stiffened again.

"If we take pressure off Cairnmouth and the coast near Palendurio—""I understand the opportunity cost," Liuan said, voice icy.

"Yes, Sacred One," Cearsia said, but the woman couldn't hide her true feelings to save her life.

"That will keep the pressure on the False Prophet while mobilization and production continues. Then, when we do invade, it will be with such overwhelming force that we can split our forces and still outnumber them." One of the other marshals cleared his throat. The newly promoted one. She couldn't remember his name for the life of her.

"Ah, there's the issue of fossilized myrvite, Sacred One. Our reserve is already dropping with shipping cut from Urubandar. We can easily sustain our current operations, but we simply don't have enough for the larger operations, especially with the added ships and how much is being used in current production." When Liuan met his eyes, he started fidgeting.

"Ah, of course, Sacred One, you have no doubt foreseen this." The lack of respect rankled her, but she didn't let it show.

"I have," she said, standing.

"Come." They made their way through a tunnel. A few geomancers had done their best to raise the ceiling a bit and smooth the edges so that it didn't so obviously look like a derelict mine, but they could only do so much and Liuan wasn't going to waste valuable talent on useless superficial changes for a base she would be abandoning soon anyways. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. A priest bowed and opened a door to a larger chamber.

Jherica had recently finished their prototype device, then had it replicated and sent over demonstration copies to the various cities where it would be produced. It was five meters long and two meters tall and resembled an oven with a door on the top. Next to the device were several cages holding myrvites: an unconscious razor lizard in one, and a small chimera in another.

"Observe," she said and gestured to the priest and artificer in running the device. Four laborers winched a cage over to the device, then opened up the bottom to dump the razor lizard into the device's cavity. They slammed and locked the steel door. The priest activated a rune on the device, while the arcanist activated a glyph.

"Right now, factories across Akana are being retooled to produce this device. Each one is blessed by priests of the Ominian. I call it the soul furnace," Liuan said. The soul furnace started radiating heat. Inside the device, force barriers were compressing the beast. It was unfortunate that the myrvites had to be alive when they were put in the machine, but it was necessary that their souls still be in place when the machine was turned on.

Steam hissed from a pipe at the top of the device, smelling much like the mine did. Cearsia frowned contemplatively. After a few minutes, the artificer triggered another glyph on the soul furnace and another hatch opened. With lift object, he presented the result. It was a dark, rectangular block resembling coal. Liuan could feel the low-grade mana prickling uncomfortably at the edges of her aura.

"It's not exactly the same as fossilized myrvite," Liuan said.

"In fact, with the Ominian's blessing, it's more energy dense. However, there are simple ways to quickly retrofit simple spell engines so that the extra energy density won't cause any issues. Most modern spell engines, including the Tyrcast engines used by the army, automatically adjust to changes in fuel density. The naval vessels and army engines currently in production are already designed to use this fuel. Myrvite hunters out west are currently being instructed on their new tasks.

There will be no fuel shortages."

"Astounding," one of the marshals gasped. Cearsia said nothing. Liuan gestured at one of her secretaries.

"He has notes on the expected fuel production timeline you can expect. I won't keep you longer. You have three major operations to plan. For God and country. Dismissed."

"God and country," murmured the marshals. They saluted and left.

Idras sat in a cafe outside one of the RID safe houses in Arborholm, sipping tea. He'd picked up the gruesome habit to better blend in to Baracueli culture. It was a useful hobby to cultivate over there, since it gave you a good excuse to sit in one place for a long time and watch things. Here, it made him stick out like a sore thumb; people in Akana were always in a hurry. Also, Akana was in dire need of better tea. For what was probably the twentieth time, he considered reporting into the safe house.

Maybe not even giving them a full report, but a fragmented one, and then seeing how the pieces were moving. Problem was, he never had much sway in things. There'd be a lot of questions asked that he didn't want to answer. And there was his family to think about. He still hadn't written to them or even passed near them. Maybe that would save them from getting caught up in the fighting. Maybe it wouldn't. Mirian had known half the damn people in Torrviol.

Maybe Liuan already knew what he was up to and already had his family hostage. Maybe he'd been manipulated because of a dozen conversations he had that he'd never remember. But the thing that made him hesitate to report in was the verifiable lies. Akana Praediar was still pushing the idea that Baracuel was using Elder artifacts to blow things up over here. Except, Idras had seen the Gate. It wasn't a weapon.

And if Mirian really could explode something a continent away, why wouldn't she just kill Liuan, or blow up the military bases directly? Which Liuan had to know. Which meant, if Mirian wasn't lying about the whole "apocalypse" thing, that it didn't matter what happened to his family if he failed. The whole thing made his damn head hurt. He'd joined the RID because he was a patriot. He believed in Akana. Still did. Just… things were more complicated than he'd realized.

Idras left a few coral beadcoins as a tip and left, walking by the safe house without even a passing glance. Two days ago, he'd picked up on a lot of deliveries of steel and myrvite wood being shipped over to the old Arborholm base where those dreadnought airships were currently parked. He couldn't get eyes on the location, but he could infer they were building a third airship. Meant they'd found more of whatever special thing it was that made them float.

He'd also started seeing a bunch of bronze moving around, delivered to churches. He knew what that was for. Specter couldn't help but wear her damn jewelry all the time. Her paranoia was excessive; it exposed an asset that should have stayed hidden. Idras first paid a kid a silver sigil to capture a bone rat for him, then got out his wand. Specter was the one who was good at necromancy, but it just wasn't that hard to siphon himself for a single binding onto the myrvite and then funnel its soul through a wand.

Getting the wand had been a pain in his ass, but the RID hadn't changed any of their security procedures and a few code phrases got him what he needed without too many questions. It was becoming clear to him that the RID was still reeling from the blow they'd been dealt by having half the directors smote by God. Yeah, hard to recover from that, he supposed. There was a vein you could push on a bone rat that limited the blood flow to their head.

If he kept one hand in his pocket with the rat and kept a finger on that vein, the little myrvite would stay unconscious but alive. Then, Idras wandered over to the church. The building was "closed" for "renovations" which helped excuse the construction going on. But temples didn't use that many bronze ingots. The wand he'd pilfered was used to detect illicit orichalcum production, and sure enough, when he killed the bone rat in his pocket and cast, he felt the feedback of a positive hit.

Next he headed over to one of the factories where the ingots had come from, pretending like he was interested in buying some custom cast bronze brackets for his spellcart business. Sure enough, the factory was waiting for some deliveries from Ferrabridge before they could fill the order, and prices had gone up. He buttered up the man, and the manager in charge of the sale couldn't help but brag about the sales he'd made and the commission he'd be getting. Idras asked how much, and the man grinned and told him.

Well, he knew what kind of percentages were typical for a businessman to make on a sale like that, which told him how big the sale was. He knew the price of bronze ingots, which told him how many they'd just shipped. Weren't a lot of businesses working with bronze, and fewer that had the arcanists needed to adjust the precise alloy a priest would need to make orichalcum, so that gave him a damn good estimate of how much orichalcum was being produced in Arborholm. The answer was: a lot.

He sat down in another cafe with some paper and did a few rough calculations. The next few days, he used a divination wand that picked up metal to check for orichalcum shipments. Any time his spell fizzled completely on spell resistance of metal shipments, he knew that was orichalcum. Some of it was being forged into torqs, belt buckles, and bracers, which meant they were outfitting the soldiers.

Some of it was being shipped as huge curved plates on the same kind of specialized spellcarts that moved ship hulls around, which meant it was being used to reinforce the hulls of those airships. Others were being moved over to the military base's garages, which meant they were retrofitting the spellcarts too. Idras contemplated that all over pulled pork sandwich and the worst black tea he'd ever tasted.

When he was done, he sat there for about an hour, much to the annoyance of the waiter who kept giving him hints that he wanted him to leave his table so more customers could sit down. He left, and he didn't leave a tip. Back in his hotel room, Idras got out his pen and ink set and a sheaf of papers and started to write a report.