“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.